OCR Text |
Show 118 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION AND [Ch. VII. by various arguments, all of which were, perha~s, superfluou~, for if a philosopher is pleased to indulge m ~o~Jectures on this subject, why should he not assign, as the origi~al sea.t of man, some one of those lar(J'e islands within the tropics, whiCh are as free from wild beasts :S Van Diemen's Land or Australia ? Here man may have remained for a period peculiar to ~ single isle, just as some of the large anthropomor.phous species are.now limited to one island within the trop1cs. In such a situation, the new-born race might have lived in security, tho~gh far more helpless than the New Holland savag~s, and might have found abundance of vegetable food. Colomes may afterwards have been sent forth from this mother country, and then the peopling of the earth may have proceeded according to the hypothesis before alluded to. . . In an early stage of society the necessity of huntl~g acts as a principle of repulsion, causing men to spread w1th the greatest rapidity over a country, until the whole is covered with scattered settlements. It has been calculated that eight hundred acres of hunting-ground only produce as much food as half an acre of arable land. When the game has been in a great measure exhausted, and a state of pasturage succe~ds, the several hunter tribes, being already scattered, may multiply in a short time into the greatest number which the pastoral state is capable of sustaining. The necessity •. says Brand, thus imposed upon the two savage states, of dispersing themselves far and wide over the country, affords a reason why, at a very early period, the worst parts of the earth may have become inhabited. But this reason it may be said is only applicable in as far as regards the peopling of a continuous continent; whereas the smallest islands, however remote from continents, have almost invariably been found inhabited by man. St. Helena, it is true, afforded an exception ; for when that island was discovered in 1501, it was only inhabited by sea-fowl, and occasionally by seals and turtles, and was covered with a forest of trees and shrubs, all of species peculiar, as we before observed, Ch. VII.] DIFFUSION OF MAN. 119 with one or two exceptions, and which seem to have been expressly created for this remote and insulated spot. But very .few of the numerous coral islets and volcanos of the vast Pacific, capable of sustaining a few families of men, have been found untenanted, and we have, therefore, to inquire whence and by what means, if all the members of the great human family have had one common source, could those savages have migrated. Cook, Forster, and others have remarked that parties of savages in their canoes must often have lost their way and must have been driven on distant shores, where they were forced to remain, deprived both of the means and of the requisite intelligence for returning to their own country. Thus Captain Cook found on the island W ateoo, three inhabitants of Otaheite, who had been drifted thither in a canoe, although the distance between the two isles is five hundred and fifty miles. In 1696, two canoes containing thirty persons, who had left Ancorso, were thrown by contrary winds and storms on the island of Samar, one of the Philippines, at a distance of eight hundred miles. In 17~1, two canoes, one of which contained twenty .. four, and the other six persons, men, women, and children, were drifted from an island called Baroilep, to the island of Guam, one of the Marians *. Kotzebue, when investigating the Coral isles of Radack, at the eastern extremity of the Caroline isles, became acquainted with a person of the name of Kadu, who was a native of Ulea, an isle fifteen hundred miles distant, from which he had been drifted with a party. Kadu and three of his countrymen, one day, left Ulea in a sailing boat, when a violent storm arose, and drove them out of their course; they drifted about the open sea f~r eight months, according to their reckoning by the moon, makmg a knot on a cord at every new moon. Being expert fishermen they subsisted entirely on the produce of the sea; and when the rain fell, laid in as much fresh-water as they had vessels to contain it. '' Kadu," says Kotzebue, '' who was the • Malte-Brun's Geogra.phyrvol, iii. p. 419, |