PARENTAGE OF THE JARGON. 9 
large areas for which no data are as yet accessible. I should not be 
surprised if future research should disclose 250 languages in that 
island area. Day may utter speech unto day, but not island to 
island in Melanesia. Even so tiny an islet as Three Hills—it is but 
six miles long—has two distinet and severally incomprehensible lan- 
guages; one finds its affiliations with the remote Polynesian family, 
the other avoids all coordination with any known speech. There was 
no common tongue for the islands which lie between New Caledonia 
and New Guinea, interpreters there were none. The Melanesian 
Mission has been forced to set aside the language of Mota in the New 
Hebrides, to train its indigenous deacons and priests in that language 
in order that when well instructed in the faith and theology they may 
serve as messengers in their home villages. Yet the law, the weapon 
forged by those sage parliaments and orders in council for the pur- 
pose of varnishing the semblance of humanity upon slave hunting, 
prescribed that the slaver must explain to the intended slave the full 
meaning of his engagement and that the slave’s answers must satisfy 
the Government labor agent that he comprehended what he was 
about to do when he gave up his home and idleness to go to an 
unknown country to toil in the canebrakes. The consideration for 
thus going into exile was some ridiculously disproportionate matter 
of trumpery—a hatchet of soft iron, a handful of beads—and it 
was colorably into hand paid, but as a matter of custom it always 
went into the wrong hands, it was given to those who remained 
ashore. No act of any parliament, no regulation emanating from 
the High Commissioner of the Western Pacific could avail to gloss 
over such transactions to the savage; he is far too elemental to 
consider fact less fact when treacledin words. A theoretical captain 
of a registered recruiting vessel, and there was never such an one 
in the labor trade, may have been courteous enough and sufficiently 
law-regardful to inquire of the expected slave if it were his pleasure 
to enter into an engagement to till the cane in a far land. The 
slave’s chief who wished to sell him asked bluntly “You wantum 
buy boy?” 
It was the labor trade which made Beach-la-mar a jargon and 
extended its currency. It gathered material from every source, it 
fused them all and created a language which yet remains the only 
means of intercommunication in the Western Pacific. 
In this summary of the causes of the Beach-la-mar I have hitherto 
omitted dates, and that of design. While events in divers parts 
of the Pacific were moving along these lines the motion was not 
synchronous in all parts alike. Some of the islanders had a worse 
reputation for inhospitality manifested in general devilishness than 
others, just as soot may be smudged on charcoal. Adventurous 
as the first voyagers in Melanesia were, there was instinct within 
