Ethnographische Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Karolinen Archipels.

Abstract

SINCE 1868, when Herr Kubary first entered upon a course of inquiry among the Polynesians, which he had undertaken for the Godeffroy Museum in Hamburg, to which institution he was then officially attached, he has made the archipelago of the Carolines the chief seat and object of his observations. These islands, lying between 5° and 10° N. lat., midway between the Ladrones and New Guinea, and stretching from 138°–160° E. long., have been visited by few white men excepting the traders who occasionally touch there for purposes of barter, or with the object of securing workmen for some more or less remote labour-market on terms of hire which are usually misunderstood by the natives themselves. To this drain on the numbers of able-bodied men, and to continual tribal wars among the different members of the group, the rapid diminution of the population of the Carolines is probably mainly due. In some of the islands the author found that the once numerous families of the kings or chiefs had either wholly died out in recent years, or were only represented by a single male descendant, who, in the absence of any other woman of pure native race, would have to take a half-sister for his wife, if he would avoid the alternative of making a prohibited exogamic marriage.

Ethnographische Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Karolinen Archipels.

Von J. S. Kubary. 1 Heft, mit 15 Tafeln. (Leyden: P. W. M. Trap, 1889.)