8 BEACH-LA-MAR. 
white ribbons of cascades that look forever cool and reposeful. In the 
slow, scented drift of the night air comes the mingled perfume of 
heavy odors, the rhythmic clapping of hands as the sensuous charm 
of the dance intermixes in posturings and swayings, the cheer of 
happy laughter, the swell of the music of song. Small wonder that 
tide and beach attract; another sailor has “‘just jumped his ship’; 
one more beachcomber settles down to the comfort of savage life 
where duty is a thing unkown. 
Such and of such sort have been the men who were the active 
agency in creating the Beach-la-mar. Being men they must talk, 
even among alien folk. It is not that they had anything much worth 
the saying; of men much better placed that may not always be 
postulated. This record of the language which they have created 
will show the paucity of their essential ideas and their scanty import- 
ance. If we are to seek to comprehend the jargon the time will not 
have been wasted in the presentation of these brief sketches of the 
manner of men out of whose needs its creation arose and the condi- 
tions under which that need became manifest. 
It will be apparent that so far we have accounted for no more than 
sporadic foci of evolution of some mongrel dialects, each narrowly 
restricted in essential conditions to one or at most to two white men, 
and the few communities of islanders with which they were in inti- 
mate contact. Being sedentary in their employment, the white men, 
as the principal actuating cause, were not in a position to become 
agents in disseminating their particular mongrel speech beyond the 
narrow limits of their influence, and, in the habitual hostility of the 
savage communities, this influence could never extend beyond the 
island upon which they were domiciled and seldom (save only in the 
case of the very smallest) attained to the whole of that island. 
But the island world of the Pacific was yet anew to be exploited. 
The sandalwood had become extinct, the béche-de-mer had been 
fished out. There remained a third natural product which had value 
in lands beyond, the manhood of the islands. The labor trade arose, 
slave hunting perfumed by euphemisms. Blackbirding was the term 
cynically affected by its practitioners; at the behest of its benefi- 
ciaries, recruiting of Polynesian labor was the designation in acts of 
Colonial parliaments and Queen’s orders in council which named an 
infamy into respectability on paper and ordered its methods. It was 
the blackbirding which assumed the mongrel tongues wherever found, 
bore them to the remotest parts of the Pacific, established them in the 
Queensland plantations on the Australian coast, and fused them all 
into a common speech and thereby created the Beach-la-mar. 
Melanesia is a tangle of severally incomprehensible languages. In 
my studies of the philology of that major division of the Pacific I have 
made use of more than a hundred distinct tongues, yet there are 
