TWO PATRIARCHAL COMMUNITIES.
WE have the Colonies very much and very agreeably in evidence at present. Great Britain swims, in the eye of the world, like a mother duck on the Round Pond with her handsome allowance of ducklings, admired of many beholders. This, perhaps, then, is a good time to call attention to the very smallest of her brood—two microscopic ducklings who are not even big enough to furnish specimens of a picturesque police—and so, lest they should be forgotten in this year of reunion, the Colonial Office publish Blue-books about them. The curious and significant fact about these two isolated com- munities is that neither of them wants a police, picturesque or otherwise. One is the island of Tristan d'Acunha, which rises about half way between the Cape and South America. It is not wholly off the lines of ocean traffic, and about a dozen vessels pass in sight of it in the year. It used to be a place of call for whalers, and when the British flag was hoisted there in 1816 two men were living on the island. The object of occupation was to prevent it being used as a base of operations for rescuing Napoleon from St. Helena ; our settlement on Ascension has the same origin. But the first eagerness of apprehension soon passed, and in a year or two the little garrison was with- drawn. William Glass, a Marine, petitioned for leave to stay with his wife and two children, and two other men. Presumably there were crops in the ground, and cattle and sheep, which thrive there, had been introduced. Glass acted as head of the community, and their way of life was sufficiently attractive to draw other settlers from among the crews of whalers or shipwrecked sailors. Women were brought in from the Cape or St. Helena, and the population had increased to one hundred and nine in 1880. The Rev. Mr. Dodgson was then chaplain and headman of the island, and his influence seems to have been used to make the islanders discontented with their condition of stagnant prosperity. Their flocks and herds and potatoes kept them so well supplied with food that they scarcely troubled to catch the fish which abound off their shores, but there was no means of education. Mr. Dodgson was a strong advocate for their removal in a body to some other habitation. In 1884 the population was severely reduced by the loss of a, boat with fifteen men in her ; and the crops were devastated by a plague of rats escaped from a wreck. (The same nuisance exists in the Cocos settlement, and in both places cats when introduced ran wild, and only did other damage.) A considerable exodus began, and in 1889 Mr. Dodgson, with ten of the inhabitants, departed. His place as headman was taken by Peter Green, the oldest inhabitant, who had been strong against the policy of migration, and the disturbing element of education was removed. These people, of whom there were sixty-four in 1895, seem to lead a happy bovine existence. The men till the ground and attend to their cattle, the women spin. Once a year a gunboat visits them and brings them mails, but it is said that they show not the least interest in news of the outer world. Private property exists, and they prefer money to stores in exchange for their goods, but whatever is brought into the island must be divided equally among the families. Want is unknown, and they have been uniformly hospitable to shipwrecked sailors. The crew of the Allanshaw ' were entertained there in 1893 for three months, and one of the mates decided to become a resident, but they are said not to welcome new inmates. Navy doctors report that the race is perishing from inbreeding, but things seem, by the last reports, a little better. Mr. Peter Green, who, if he still lives, is ninety, received last December a portrait of her Majesty, presented by herself. Let us hope that doe honour was paid to it last week. The one desire of the islanders seems to be, not education, with which outsiders are anxious to endow them, but a chaplain. They are a highly moral race, using neither spirits nor tobacco, and if contentment is the sum of human felicity, then felices ter at amplius are the inhabitants of Tristan d'Acunha under the mild rule of Peter Green, who has no power to enforce discipline and no occasion to do so.
A very different community inhabits the Cocos-Keeling Islands, famous as the base of Darwin's great study of coral reefs. Tristan d'Acunha has no history ; its annals are rather null than dull. The record of the Cocos settlement, if it could be written, would describe as instructive an experiment in governing and as remarkable a display of human ability as was ever seen on a small scale. In 1825 a Mr. Clunies-Ross visited the atoll or ring of small islands, which lies seven or eight hundred miles south-west of Java. They were then uninhabited. He went home to Scotland, got together a company of some twenty Europeans, including his wife and a family of six children, and went out to occupy the spot. In the meantime, however, an Englishman named Hare had settled there with a large harem and a miscellaneous following of some two hundred Malays. Most of Ross's people went home, but for several years the rival and hostile colonies occupied the islands together. In presence of Hare's disorderly troop, Ross was obliged to import as labourers the only coolies then available, convicts from the Dutch settlements. All this dangerous force was kept under by military discipline. A system of patrols was instituted which still obtains. Four watches divide the night, and a member of the Ross family goes rounds as officer of each watch. The chief produce of the island being cocoa-nut fibre, which accumulates a mass of combustibles, incendiarism was dreaded, and a. curfew established, which is still rigorously enforced. All fires must be out by nightfall. Naturally, the men who had the resolution and energy to frame and work such a. system were the men who succeeded. Hare's following came over largely to Ross, and finally Hare himself left. But there was still the element of danger in the hired labourers, and the Rosses—for the son, J. G. Ross, soon became the real head—set themselves to develop a Cocos- born population who should be a privileged class. A village was built for them apart from the habitation of the Bantamese coolies, and they were free citizens living only under a compulsion to work. In 1857 the island was annexed by Great Britain, and granted in fee to Mr. J. G. Ross, who was appointed Magistrate ; but this merely gave a legal recognition to the patriarchal powers which the head of the family had already exercised. In 1862 a desperate cyclone left the Cocos wrecked and battered. The present owner, Mr. George Clunies - Ross, was then studying engineering in Scotland. He was hastily summoned to remedy the devastation, and thus began his life-work. His personality has impressed to an extraordinary degree all observers, and he more than any other man has directed the surprising achievement of his family in these islands.
He is the eldest of seven brothers, five of whom at least have intermarried with the Cocos people. His nephews and nieces are brought up to speak Malay, his wife never learnt to speak English. Yet all these Rosses have been educated in Scotland to different pro- fessions ; one a doctor, one a sailor, and so forth. All appear to be skilled mechanics, and every male born in the islands enters at fourteen on an apprenticeship to carpentry and smith-work. Steam-power and steel tramways are established among them. They are all skilled sailors, and many of them shipwrights. Mr. Ross sailed an island- built schooner home with most of his family aboard, and she was classed " Al " for eighteen years at Lloyd's. Two schooners are kept up which ply monthly to Batavia for the necessaries and luxuries of life, which Mr. Ross sells at his store. Thus for a population of six hundred souls he controls the going and coming, he is the sole supplier of wants. There is no coined money on the island, but notes upon him, which are exchangeable for coin at his agents in Batavia. All inhabitants have a right to such cocoa-nuts as they need for food, and to the fish which they take in the lagoon. They have to import sickness, for there is none except when the schooner brings malarial germs from Java. The rate of wages is high, very high for the East, as a man can easily earn a rupee a day, and a skilled mechanic can double that. School is kept by a Cocos- born, who was educated at Singapore, and is paid by Mr. Ross ; but the inhabitants take more kindly to the chisel than the pen. The Cocos people keep apart from the Bantamese, and live like Europeans. They sit on chairs at meals, use knives and forks, wear a semi-European dress, and look down from a height on the Bantamese. They are Mahommedans, and the Rosses make it a principle not to interfere in matters of religion ; yet the English law of marriage and divorce has come into full play, an extra- ordinary testimony to European example. Wife-beating was put down, and is partly regretted, for the women now regard themselves as superior to the men, and no one is master in his own house. If a lady feels indisposed to cook, she orders her husband to go and ask for dinner from another woman, and by island etiquette the other woman is bound to cook it for him. But she doubtless can be relied upon to give him an indigestion that will make him sorry for himself. There are no written laws, no police force, no immorality, no crime, no venereal disease in the islands. Gambling is only allowed on three days in the year. It cannot well exist on other days, as the Rosses can control all affairs through their note system. Why does A transfer this order made out in his name to B, if he has not sold him something ? This Arcadia exists in an island which, sixty or seventy years ago, was broken up by convict-labour. And yet there is another side to the picture.
Clear-headed observers in their annual Reports to the Governor of the Straits Settlement speak of the dull and listless air which prevails in Arcadia. Men may amass a zredit, but they cannot hoard shining coins. Their wealth
• is all in another's keeping. Neither will wealth bring them freedom : work they must, at their master's bidding, carry cocoa-nuts and husk them, or go out of the island. They cannot gamble. They can buy nothing except articles of adornment for themselves and their houses. They can only get drunk on surreptitiously concocted toddy. Life loses its zest ; even the women neglect their infants, till the percentage of infant mortality is appalling ; and the children, it is said, do not care for their parents ; in short, the family tie is relaxed ; the result of education, Mr. Ross says, and he is probably right. He has done what he could, and what few men could have done. He has lived down a time when his life was never safe for an hour ; when he caught a man stealing into his room with a knife, and let him go unpunished (a singular but successful method of re- pression). Be has been the chief of his people, first in all their trials of skill, the best shot, sailor, and fisher, in his island. He has taught them the white men's skill, he has made them cleanly and industrious ; he has almost stamped out beri-beri by sanitation and by the dis- couraging of toddy. Yet for all that human nature has been too strong for him : by taking away temptation he has taken away energy. What will come of his other experi- ment, who can say ? Will this strong stock, crossed with the listless Malay blood, make Europeans, or will the children be Malays in temper as some of them are in speech ? Mr. Ross resented bitterly an admonition from Lord Knutsford on the duty of keeping the superior race distinct, and he has gone his own way ; yet we cannot but -doubt his wisdom, while admiring his thoroughness.
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