Читать книгу Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land. A story of old Fiji онлайн

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When I took my lonely bird’s-eye views of what was visible of this small island-world, it often occurred to me that I was looking upon fragments which were but remnants of a vast continent in past times—rafts with men upon them anchored out at sea, to tell us where the giant forces of Nature tore asunder great countries, now broken into a thousand pieces. The knowledge acquired in subsequent years confirmed my first impressions.

A glance at the map of Polynesia is enough to show the fitness of the name given to the myriad islands and islets that stud the whole western half of the vast Pacific. Group after group, island after island, reef everywhere stretching out to embrace reef, north and south of the line for thousands of miles, keeping the mariner ever anxious by day and sleepless by night, seem to tell us, in language that cannot well be mistaken, of mighty continents that once were, and, for anything we know to the contrary, are again to be.

Who could look down as from a bird’s eyrie on this great island-world, and still adhere to some of the old theories which profess to deal with the question of how these homes became inhabited. Turn again to the map. Beginning at Behring’s Strait, across which the old and new worlds might almost shake hands, we pass southward to the Aleutian islands, which form a well-nigh unbroken semi-circular chain from the Kamschatkan to the Alaskan Peninsula. With the help of a body of fabled giants these islands might easily be changed into a substantial bar which should at once block up the “North-West Passage,” and provide the foundations for a road over which the engines of Russia and America might rush to and fro, between the two worlds. From Cape Lopatka to the southernmost point of Japan, a similar highway would be possible to like able workmen. Thus on, preceded by these god-like navvies, filling up comparatively narrow spaces between countless islands and reefs, we might travel from Japan to the Loochoos, from the Loochoos to Formosa, from Formosa to the Philippines, from these to the massive island of New Guinea, southerly to Australia; thence easterly to New Britain, to the Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Fijis, the Friendlies, the Navigators, and out beyond mid-ocean to the Society Islands, the Low Archipelago and the Marquesas.