Word: melanesia
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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "The Voyage of the Brigantine Yankee,'" narrated by Orson Welles, is about 19 young Americans on an 18-month windjammer cruise from Gloucester, Mass., to the Galapagos, Pitcairn, Melanesia, Bali and beyond...
...racial kinship to the Indonesians. Their skins are darker, their languages totally different. Furthermore, the Papuans have no desire to trade Dutch colonialism for Indonesian colonialism, want to join together instead with Australian New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in a union to be called the United States of Melanesia...
Died. Walter Hubert Baddeley, 65, Anglican Bishop of Blackburn, who as a missionary in the South Seas (Bishop of Melanesia) during World War II bundled his charges on Florida Island (in the Solomons) off to the hills when the Japanese arrived, set up a leaf hut as his episcopal seat and ran a hospital and leper colony until the Americans landed; in Clayton-le-Dale, England...
This was no isolated phenomenon. "Cargo cults" ("cargo" is pidgin English for trade goods) have been observed repeatedly in the islands of Melanesia (including New Guinea, the Solomons and the New Hebrides). All of them share the belief that black men will acquire the white man's magic to materialize goods from overseas without doing a lick of work. British Sociologist Peter M. Worsley writes of the cargo cults in the May issue of the Scientific American, and lists and locates 72 of them...
...never comes. Then, instead of abandoning the cult, they tend to form splinter groups, organized around a "purer" faith. As long as the islanders' social situation remains unchanged, says Worsley. the cargo cults persist, but with the development of modern political forms, they begin to wither away. "In Melanesia, ordinary political bodies, trade unions, and native councils are becoming the normal media through which the islanders express their aspirations ... It now seems unlikely that any major movement along cargo-cult lines will recur...