Paul Gauguin by John Gould Fletcher — Read

Tahiti, the largest of the French Society Islands, lies in the South Pacific Ocean. That is about the limit of the average person's knowledge. Many perhaps understand vaguely that the climate is tropical but modified by sea breezes, the scenery wonderful, the people famous for beauty and licentiousness. Nevertheless, a more thorough knowledge of the island's mysterious racial story could not fail to interest. Tahiti, Samoa (known to us through Stevenson), Hawaii, New Zealand and the Marquesas (familiar to readers of Melville's "Omoo"), which are the chief links in that story, were all, at the time the islands were discovered, inhabited by the same people and a people utterly different in appearance from the woolly-haired Papuans of New Guinea and Fiji, or from the straight-haired Malays of the peninsula, made familiar to us through the stories of Joseph Conrad. These island people, the Polynesians, were found speaking all the same tongue, though in different dialects; they had, for the most part, the same social organization and their religion, manners and customs were very similar; they had, in many cases, traditions pointing to a common place of origin in the island of Samoa. And yet from Samoa they lived separated by thousands of miles of intervening ocean, still imperfectly known, abounding in coral reefs, liable to dangerous storms, full of shifting currents. How then had they reached Tahiti?

The anthropologists assure us that the race is physically a branch of the Caucasian or Indo-European. Though their skin is dark, it is for the most part less dark than that of the natives of India. Set a Maori soldier from New Zealand beside an Indian cavalryman and note the difference between the clear yellow skin of the former, which seems to give out light and the swarthy, somber brown of the latter. In other characteristics too the Polynesians are essentially Caucasian. They are a tall, well built, massive race, contrasting favorably with the Malay. Their hair is black -- or in some cases copper brown -- and wavy, again contrasting with the straight hair of the Malay or the fuzzy mop of the Papuan. Finally, the cast of face is purely Caucasian and in many cases very beautiful. Only the nose appears abnormally broad and flat, due to artificial flattening in infancy.