Eastern Pacific lands ; Tahiti and the Marquesas islands . erse prettyfreely, although some few of the words were differentand the intonation or pitch of voice was not thesame. I have since fancied that I noticed the samething in speaking to countrymen in Devonshire,Yorkshire, Hampshire and Dorset, where one hassometimes to speak twice over, not because, in thesedays of board schools and cheap newspapers, thewords are unfamiliar, but because the intonation isstrange to them. During my stay in these islands I was often struckby a curious phenomenon of Marquesan phonesis—the way they seem to sin
Eastern Pacific lands ; Tahiti and the Marquesas islands . erse prettyfreely, although some few of the words were differentand the intonation or pitch of voice was not thesame. I have since fancied that I noticed the samething in speaking to countrymen in Devonshire,Yorkshire, Hampshire and Dorset, where one hassometimes to speak twice over, not because, in thesedays of board schools and cheap newspapers, thewords are unfamiliar, but because the intonation isstrange to them. During my stay in these islands I was often struckby a curious phenomenon of Marquesan phonesis—the way they seem to sing, chant, or intone theirwords, in a sort of rude musical scale, which, so oldresidents tell me, varies even in different settlementsof the same island. Unfortunately at this time and,as I am sorry to say, on later and perhaps moreimportant explorations, I had no gramophone orphonograph with me—an instrument as valuable tothe ethnologist as the barometer to the surveyor, ora watch or whistle to a policeman. Here in Hanavave, as everywhere else in the. Fatu-Hiva 145 Marquesas, I found the natives most kindly disposed,which makes one deeply regret that an amiable racelike this should first have been corroded by the dry-rot of centuries of long isolation, saturated, I fear,through and through by cruel superstitions flowingfrom the Upas-tree of Indian Siva-worship, plantedin the national life by Malayo-Javanese marinersfrom the great traditional migration outwards fromthe Moluccas through the Carolines into the centraland eastern Pacific area, during the twelfth andthirteenth centuries of our era. Then came thewhite mans civilization, a mixed inheritance of goodand evil, as it came to the worn-out red races ofAmerica, as Kingsley says, too late to save, but nottoo late to hasten their decay. The next week was spent in introductions to othersof the old men, in visiting the French mission-schooldown on the beach, and in expeditions up the valley,which lies in two strikingly well-
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