essness and endurance born
of long and enforced intimacy with the deep. Driven by the frozen
deserts of his home to seek his food chiefly in the water, the Eskimo,
nevertheless, finds his access to the sea barred for long months of
winter by the jagged ice-pack along the shore.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions in Polynesia.]

The highest degree of intimacy is developed in that vast island-strewn
stretch of the Pacific constituting Oceanica.[550] Here where a mild
climate enables the boatman race to make a companion of the deep, where
every landscape is a seascape, where every diplomatic visit or war
campaign, every trading journey or search for new coco-palm plantation
means a voyage beyond the narrow confines of the home island, there
dwells a race whose splendid chest and arm muscles were developed in the
gymnasium of the sea; who, living on a paltry 515,000 square miles
(1,320,300 square kilometers) of scattered fragments of land, but
roaming over an ocean area of twenty-five million square miles, are not
more at home in their palm-wreathed islets than on the encompassing
deep. Migrations, voluntary and involuntary, make up their history.
Their trained sense of locality, enabling them to make voyages several
hundred miles from home, has been mentioned by various explorers in
Polynesia. The Marshall Islanders set down their geographical knowledge
in maps which are fairly correct as to bearings but not as to distances.
The Ralick Islanders of this group make charts which include islands,
routes and currents.[551] Captain Cook was impressed by the geographical
knowledge of the people of the South Seas. A native Tahitian made for
him a chart containing seventy-four islands, and gave an account of
nearly sixty more.[552] Information and directions supplied by natives
have aided white explorers to many discoveries in these waters. Quiros,
visiting the Duff Islands in 1606, learned the location of Ticopia, one
of the New Hebrides group, three hundred miles away. Not only the
excellent seamanship and the related pelagic fishing of the Polynesians
bear the stamp of their predominant water environment; their mythology,
their conception of a future state, the germs of their astronomical
science, are all born of the sea.

Though the people living on the uttermost boundaries of this island
world are 6,000 miles (or 10,000 kilometers) apart, and might be
expected to be differentiated by the isolation of their island
habitats,