PEARL FISHING AND ' BEACHCOMBERS: 261 



have devoted themselves more or less to the pearl-fisheries. 

 They are hardy, healthy, powerful, and bronzed. They have 

 the strength to lift a kedge-anchor, and to carry a load of 

 perhaps 200 cocoa-nuts out of the forest in the heat of a 

 noonday sun, they climb trees like apes, and can dive almost 

 as well as the natives with whom they live, they wear no 

 shoes, but go at all times barefooted on beaches of sharp 

 gravel and reefs of prickly coraL Some of these men have as 

 many as twenty children with huge frames and gipsy counte- 

 nances. Their intellect is of a low order, and their morals 

 very lax ; but it is quite possible they may improve as they 

 multiply, and they are multiplying very rapidly. At any rate 

 the developement of Polynesia will have to deal sooner or later 

 with these men, and a powerful controlling influence of a high 

 order once established in the Pacific, the beachcombers would 

 either act as very useful pioneers (under rigid discipline) or be 

 soon improved off the face of the earth. I confess I have 

 little sympathy with many of these gentry, however romantic 

 may be their, histories or Crusoe-like their lives. The future 

 of Polynesia, in a moral and commercial sense, seems to me to 

 be a very important business problem with which sentiment 

 has little or nothing to do. 



'Pretty writing,' comparing beachcombers to lotus-eaters, 

 or dwelling as some people have done exclusively on the 

 poetical side that does unquestionably attach to their exist- 

 ence, is, to my mind, beside the mark. The civilisation 

 they introduce is usually of the square-gin and musket order, 

 which tends to destroy fine races of savages instead of assisting 

 them to approach our leveL There are, as I know, some 

 noble exceptions, but I have a very shrewd opinion that the 

 majority of these 'traders' have views as to the deplorable 

 results, from a ' business ' point of view, of the introduction of 



