ABSTRACT
This will largely be a study of human effort on tropical soil, of man's struggles to draw his sustenance from the earth in one part of the exotic world, in the Trobriand Islands off the east end of New Guinea. Nothing is perhaps more impressive to an ethnographer on his first pilgrimage to the field than the overwhelming force of vegetable life and the apparent futility of man's efforts to control it. This contrast is brought home with great force when, on your first voyage along the south coast of New Guinea or through the archipelagoes in the east, you are surveying almost at a glance the character of this enormous expanse of tropical country. Chains of hills succeeding each other; deep transversal valleys which often afford a glimpse right into the heart of the country; the foreground, at times rising in an almost vertical wall of vegetation or again sloping down and extending into alluvial flats—all these reveal the strength of tropical jungle, the tenacity of lalang steppe, the impressive solidity of the undergrowth and tangled creepers. But to perceive man or even traces of him and his works you have to be a trained ethnographer. To the experienced eye the blot of withered vegetation on the waves of living green is a little village, with huts built of sere wicker work, thatched with bronzed palm-leaves, palisaded with dried timber. Here and there on the slope of a hill a geometrical patch, brown at harvest-time with the foliage of ripe vines or earlier in the year covered with the lighter green of sprouting crops, is a village plantation. If you are lucky you might even pass at night a constellation of smouldering fires where the bush has been cleared and the trees and brush are being burnt down. But the more you concentrate your attention on such almost imperceptible symptoms and strain your imagination to interpret them, the more you realise what little imprint man has made as yet on this soil, how easily his efforts are obliterated, how everything which he has made his own comes directly as a gift of spontaneous growth. Nature here seems not yet to have been subdued by man and fashioned to serve his purposes. Man, on the contrary, is but a part of her scheme sheltering precariously under what the jungle has yielded, clad in dried leaves, subsisting on that which, year after year, he wrests from the virgin forest and which, after a few years, returns to it again.
