Category Archives: migration

by | 12 February 2026 · 3:06 am

Sugihara’s List and Tadeusz Romer

A few months ago, my wife found an interesting book in a Polish bookstore here. It is titled Lista Sugihary (Sugihara’s List), by Zofia Hartman, a graduate student from Krakow, the site of Schindler’s List, which is now well-known throughout Poland, while Chiune Sugihara remains almost entirely unknown. The Polish edition of her book was published in 2024 by Austeria Press. An English edition titled Sugihara’s List, published in 2025, can be ordered from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.

In looking for the English edition, I found a Youtube video of a book talk featuring Zofia Hartman in October 2025 at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City, sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. Hartman’s presentation was followed by a talk by Jolanta Nitoslawska, granddaughter of Polish diplomat Tadeusz Romer, Polish Ambassador in Japan 1937-1941. Romer and most of the refugees ended up in the stateless Shanghai Ghetto until Romer was included in the 1942 prisoner exchange off Africa via MS Gripsholm. He and most of his descendants ended up in Canada. Several others who attended the talk were descendants of the refugees.

Another diplomat who facilitated the exodus of so many Jewish refugees through the USSR to Japan was the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, who was director of the Philips factories there. Sugihara granted transit visas via Japan, while Zwartendijk granted official permission for the refugees to settle in Curaçao and the Dutch West Indies, if they should ever manage to get there.

One facet of Sugihara that I had not been aware of was his role as a spy for Japan, cooperating with Poland, sharing military intelligence among other areas. There was no Japanese community in Kaunas, where he served as consul. Japan and Poland both feared the USSR, and Japan was eager for evidence that the USSR might transfer troops west to fight the Germans, allowing Japan to transfer some of its troops from Manchuria to the South Pacific. Japan had helped earlier Poles exiled to Siberia and hosted a sizable number of Polish exiles in Karafuto (southern Sakhalin). Even though Poland declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, Poles and Japanese continued to cooperate.

In the summer of 2011, we visited the Sugihara Port of Humanity Museum in Tsuruga, Japan, and in the spring of 2025 we visited the Shanghai Ghetto Museum in China. I’m not sure we’ll get a chance to visit the Sugihara House Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania.

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Filed under Germany, Japan, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, Poland, religion, USSR, war

by | 7 February 2026 · 4:18 am

Displaced Poles in World War 2

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Juliette Bretan on Polish refugees abroad during World War 2. Here are some excerpts.

Britain proved an early home for thousands of Poles following the invasion of Poland by Nazi and Soviet forces in September 1939. Polish civilians, and those in the armed forces, fled over the Carpathian mountains to Romania and Hungary, with around 90,000 military personnel known to have escaped by the end of September. Many of those in the armed forces reached France via then Yugoslavia and Italy, where new divisions were organised.

After France fell, thousands of Poles in the armed forces, and the Polish government-in-exile, transferred to London. In August 1940, an Anglo-Polish agreement allowed for the Polish land sea and air forces to be organised and employed under British command. Polish fighter and bomber squadrons were created, with Polish pilots destroying nearly 1000 enemy aircraft and dropping nearly 15,000 bombs and mines during the course of the war.

Persia

Following the Nazi invasion of Russia 1941, a treaty – the Sikorski-Mayski agreement – was signed between Poland and the Soviet Union, which included an ‘amnesty’ allowing for the release of many of the Poles who had been deported east. However, many Poles in labour camps were unaware of the development, and even those who were had only limited assistance from the Soviet authorities. Thousands of Poles, however, did manage to move south, joining Władysław Anders’s army as they moved through Russia and central Asia. In 1942, General Sikorski received permission to evacuate Poles into Persia (now Iran), across the Caspian Sea.

Africa

As Zdzisława Wójcik notes, more than half of the 37,000 Polish civilians who left the USSR with the Polish army found new homes in Africa, in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa. Some arrived by sea between 1942-43, and were housed in former POW camps or new settlements, whilst others were transported from refugee camps across the world:

The settlements […] operated their own businesses: farms, canteens, butcher shops, bakeries, and fabric–weaving, sewing and shoemaking shops […] the population in the Polish settlements had a specific demographic profile: about 47 percent were women, over 41.5 percent were teenagers and children, and only 11.5 percent were men. (Wójcik, in The Polish Deportees of World War II)

According to Wójcik, the Catholic Church played a prominent role in structuring Polish communities in Africa, although the number of priests varied by settlement. Support for the refugees was also provided by the Polish Red Cross and bureaus in Nairobi, with schools and orphanages established for children. However, the food available in these orphanages often left much to be desired, as Vala Lewicki – who was based in Uganda – remembers:

Meals were never elaborate affairs. The quick breakfast varied only between a plate of baked beans and a slice of bread with tea and coffee one day, and two slices of sparingly-buttered bread with cocoa or tea the next day. Occasionally we had powdered eggs which tasted like…powder. We had sandwiches for lunch, while dinner consisted of bean soup, a slice of meat and baked beans. Always baked beans! (Vala Lewicki, in The Polish Deportees of World War II)

New Zealand & Mexico

Just under 1000 Poles – 733 children and 105 adults – also found a new home in New Zealand during the war, after Prime Minister of the country accepted the refugees.

Arriving in Wellington in 1944, the refugees were settled in a Polish Children’s Camp in the town of Pahiatua, where Catholic services and Polish schooling and scouting trips were provided. Many of the Polish refugees also chose to settle in New Zealand after the war, finding ample opportunities for work as mining and logging industries expanded.

Meanwhile, a community of 1400 Poles also settled in Santa Rosa in Mexico, where they were welcomed by an orchestra playing the Polish national anthem. The settlement in Santa Rosa included living quarters and a school, where a Polish curriculum was used, as well as gardens and playing areas.

India

It is estimated that around 5000 Poles also found safe haven in India, after the wife of the Polish Consul General to Bombay, Kira Banasińska, petitioned the Maharaja of Nawanagar. The Maharaja had longstanding links to Poland – his father had been friends with pianist Ignacy Paderewski – and said that he was ‘trying to do whatever [he] can to save the children.’

Refugees settled in several camps in and around Bombay, as well as in a settlement built at the Maharaja’s summer palace. Polish culture remained an integral part of life, with Catholic teaching organised, Polish books provided, and the children also encouraged to give performances featuring traditional Polish dances and music. Sport was also encouraged: following the arrival of pre-war Lvovian footballer Antoni Maniak, a stadium and running track was built, and regular training sessions established to improve the children’s health and wellbeing. The Maharaja donated money to purchase sporting equipment – and the children proved themselves worthy foes against local teams.

The refugees dubbed the settlement camps ‘Little Poland’.

The Polish Red Cross supported the orphans who were being settled in India, although Ordonówna accompanied the first transport of children out of the Middle East, despite battling the symptoms of tuberculosis, which would later kill her.

Post-war resettlement

At the end of the war, many Poles were unable to return to their homeland. The British government recognised the contribution of Poles in the Allied forces, and established the Polish Resettlement Act, the first mass immigration legislation, in 1947, which offered British citizenship and support for hundreds of thousands of Poles. Following the act, transports were provided to enable their relatives to also reach the UK. Four thousand Poles arrived in overland transports from Italy by rail, whilst several ships carrying hundreds of displaced Poles arrived in ports in Southampton, Liverpool, Hull, London and Glasgow in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This included a transport of 66 Poles from Santa Rosa in Mexico, who travelled aboard the Empire Windrush in its historic passage to London in 1948; around 400 Poles – including many orphans – from Kilindini Mombasa in Kenya on the SS Scythia, which docked in Liverpool; and 600 displaced women, children and elderly Poles from Cape Town on the RMS Arundel Castle, which arrived in Southampton.

On board one transport from Lebanon in 1950, on the SS Oxfordshire, were also several unexpected passengers – two hives of bees, brought by one man in his 60s. The man was allowed to keep the bees, which he took to Haydon Park resettlement camp. By the early 1950s, over 100,000 Poles were registered in Great Britain. Among them were pre-war cultural figures, including Polish poet and songwriter Marian Hemar, and singers Adam Aston, Zofia Terné and Włada Majewska; as well as artists, including the Themersons and Stanisław Frenkiel. Many of these figures played a significant role in forming Polish communities in the UK post-war.

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Filed under Britain, France, Germany, India, Iran, Kenya, Mediterranean, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, South Africa, USSR, war

by | 1 February 2026 · 9:46 am

Bengal Famine, 1943

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Most Bengalis lived an extremely precarious existence. Some ten million were utterly dependent on agriculture, but of these more than half held less than 2 acres of land and many none at all. There was charity and relief but no social welfare; they had to fend for themselves. Through the first half of 1943 food prices had increased dramatically. … This was due in part to the shortages in Bengal but also to increased demand for the feeding of troops in India, as well as demand from around the world. It was artisans who suffered first, because as poverty increased so the money available for goods dried up. Then the shortages hit the wider Bengali population, many of whom left the country for the cities. By the time Tom Grounds was on leave in Calcutta, the city was bursting with the influx of impoverished families searching for food.

Yet while the cost of food was certainly a factor, the biggest problem now facing the authorities was how to get food to Bengal and urgently. The state had already been an importer of food for over a decade and most of it had come from Burma, now closed to India. The loss of Burma had been disastrous for Bengal’s fragile economy and the subsequent cyclone had made it catastrophic. Where else could it be sourced? North America and South America were the obvious places, but the amount needed was enormous and would have required a major diversion of shipping at a time when the demands on such seaborne transport had never been greater.

That August, Churchill was not prepared suddenly to release shipping to take food to Bengal; however draconian that may seem, far away in Britain the problems of the Bengalis seemed less pressing than the urgent need to maintain supplies at a crucial moment in the war. Britain and America were fighting in Sicily – an island that could be supplied effectively only by ship; they were about to invade mainland Italy, which also required an amphibious operation and supply; they were preparing for the invasion of north-west Europe; and they were fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific. Was Churchill really expected to interrupt the war effort, and current operations, with millions of lives at stake in theatres of war around the world? Who was to say what effect such a diversion of shipping would have on the eventual length of the war, with its implications for further loss of life? In any case, ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat. Churchill was not to blame.

Not all India was facing famine – only Bengal and the north-east. One problem was that in 1935 the government had ceded considerable central power to the provinces, where the regional governments were all democratically elected. The previous year, 1942, these had all agreed to introduce trade barriers between one another. The central government of India now announced there should be free trade in grain, but plans to send relief to Bengal had been obstructed by local government officers, police and other officials who feared their own provinces risked suffering a similar fate to that of Bengal. Wavell, in one of his first acts as Viceroy-Designate, had forced the issue by threatening legal and even military action, and by August substantial amounts of grain had finally begun to arrive in Bengal. It was, however, too little too late to bring a swift end to the humanitarian disaster rising horrifically throughout the region. Relief kitchens hastily set up in Calcutta and elsewhere were simply not enough. With malnutrition came disease; those not dying of starvation were just as likely to succumb to typhus, malaria or cholera, and there were not enough hospitals or medical care to cope.

The famine had certainly been exacerbated by the war and by the fact that the Indian government had prioritized combatting the Japanese above all other matters. Yet the authorities, although slow to react, were certainly not immune to the horrors unfolding and, of course, while the tragedy of human suffering was truly appalling, the famine was yet another massive problem for the Allied command to overcome. It stretched already overstretched lines of supply, pushed the limited medical services to breaking point, affected food supplies to the troops, further sapped the morale of those who witnessed the starving, dying and dead throughout Bengal, and damaged the reputation of the British even more, and all at a time when there was a new Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief.

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, disease, food, Italy, Japan, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 17 January 2026 · 8:46 am

Polish Diaspora in France

My latest compilation from Culture.pl has an article on the Polish diaspora in France. Here are some excerpts:

When we think of the Polish diaspora, France is rarely the first place that comes to mind – often overshadowed by the UK, the US or Germany. Yet the Polish presence in France is older, more complex and more deeply woven into the country’s cultural fabric than most realise.

Through interviews with contemporary Polish migrants and archival research into historical communities, a layered story emerges – one as much about shared histories as it is about work, struggle and identity. Beginning with 19th-century exile, expanding through interwar labour migration, and continuing into today’s cosmopolitan realities, Poles have long helped shape the life of their adopted country. And France, in turn, has shaped them.

The earliest sustained Polish presence in France took shape in the 19th century, following the failed November Uprising of 1830-1831. Thousands of officers, intellectuals and activists fled the Russian-controlled partition and sought refuge in France, launching what became known as the ‘Great Emigration’. This wave of political exiles – over 5,000 by 1833 – formed one of the most enduring diasporic communities of the era. Unlike other groups who returned after political amnesties, most remained as long as Poland’s partitioned status endured.

One bold but ultimately unsuccessful plan – to form a Polish legion to fight in Portugal’s Liberal Wars in 1833 – was led by General Józef Bem and reflected the enduring ideal of transnational solidarity. It gave lasting currency to the phrase ‘For our freedom and yours’ (‘Za wolność naszą i waszą’), which became a defining expression of Poland’s internationalist military ethos throughout the 19th century.

Polish émigrés built schools, charitable institutions and political societies. Some were initially settled in places like Belle-Île-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany, while growing numbers made their way to Paris, which would soon become a central hub of Polish cultural and political life in exile.

…

Building on these early foundations, Paris evolved into what some would later call ‘Poland’s second capital’. Throughout the 19th century, the city became a vibrant centre where Polish political elites, artists and intellectuals gathered, united by a commitment to preserving national identity in exile.

Nowhere was this more visible than at the prestigious Collège de France, where Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz was appointed the first Chair of Slavic Literature in Western Europe in 1840. His lectures, a blend of cultural commentary and political advocacy, attracted wide audiences – including figures like George Sand – and reflected diasporic longing for unity and liberation. Though ultimately dismissed for the political intensity of his teachings, Mickiewicz remained an emblematic figure in Franco-Polish cultural relations.

That same spirit of cultural continuity shaped another enduring institution: the Polish School in Paris, founded in 1842 by General Józef Dwernicki and fellow émigrés. The school aimed to raise children in Polish language and tradition, even as they grew up on foreign soil. With Mickiewicz himself serving as vice-president of its council, the institution embodied how deeply intertwined education, culture and politics were in émigré life – a place where Polish identity could be preserved and transmitted across generations born in exile.

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Filed under economics, education, France, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Portugal, Russia

by | 15 January 2026 · 10:12 pm

Cold, Cold Heart in Palau

I just discovered that I had missed the last two posts to Jim Geselbracht’s wonderfully nostalgic (for me) Palauan Music blog. I heard lots of Palauan renditions of Japanese enka and American country and western music during my earliest fieldwork in Micronesia in the 1970s. In his latest post, Jim looks at the antecedents of the Palauan song Aggie Chiang from the 1980s, whose melody goes back at least to 1951 recordings by Hank Williams, Dinah Washington, and Tony Bennett. Hank Williams may have adapted it in turn from You’ll Still Be in My Heart (1945) by “T” Texas Tyler and his Oklahoma Melody Boys. Jim posts links to all those renditions.

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Filed under Japan, language, Micronesia, migration, music, U.S.

by | 31 December 2025 · 11:13 pm

Some Early Polish Ethnographers

My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to profiles of early Polish ethnographers, More Than Malinowski, by cultural anthropologist Patryk Zakrzewski. Here are some excerpts:

The beginnings of ethnology are intertwined with those of colonialism, as they developed simultaneously. In a Poland under occupation, however, this was primarily an internal colonialism – a nobleman examining the culture of its own servants. In places where the European imperialism was growing, the need for the ethnographer, arose, one who would study the ‘indigenes’.

Before the expeditions of Malinowski, ‘desk’ anthropology was the most popular method of study. Those working in it did no field research at all; instead, they analysed information supplied by merchants, seamen or missionaries….

Malinowski was destined to become a hero for students of the social sciences worldwide, as he developed a code of conduct for fieldwork – one which, in principle, has remained unchanged to our times. Long story short, it was based on ‘participant observation’, i.e. a long and intensive stay among the studied community (‘a tent put up in the middle of a village’). A researcher was also to avoid thinking in categories and stereotypes originating from one’s own culture, instead tasked with capturing another’s way of looking at things.

Ethnology in Exile

It’s possible that two eminent Polish researchers – Wacław Sieroszewski and Bronisław Piłsudski – would never have become ethnographers had they not been political prisoners….

Wacław Sieroszewski (1858-1945) didn’t have the easiest life: His mother died early, and his father received a long prison sentence after the January Uprising. Sieroszewski himself was expelled from high school – for participating in clandestine patriotic meetings and for brazenly speaking the Polish language, which was banned. He also joined a socialist movement, for which, as a 20-year-old, he was sentenced to serve time at the infamous 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Not for long, however. After participating in a riot, during which he attacked an imperial general, and for circulating a prison bulletin, Sieroszewski was expelled to Siberia.

In 1880, he arrived at Verkhoyansk, where he married a young Yakut woman named Arina Czełba-Kysa. Twice, Sieroszewski tried to escape with other fellow prisoners, aided by his wife. But he was caught and sentenced for life as the leader of these deserters. This time, he was sentenced to a settlement ‘a hundred viorsts away from a trade road, river and town’.

Sieroszewski’s life among the autochthonous people resulted in his fundamental work Dwanaście Lat w Kraju Jakutów (Twelve Years in the Country of the Yakuts). A friendship with a Yakut shaman enabled Sieroszewski to describe local beliefs in detail….

As a law student in St. Petersburg, Bronisław Piłsudski (1866 – 1918), the Marshal’s elder brother, became acquainted with the circle of revolutionists gathered around an organisation called Narodnaja Wola (Nation’s Will). Piłsudski participated in a plot to assassinate emperor Alexander II. The traitors were discovered, and some of them were hanged (i.e. Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother), while the rest were sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia.

Sentenced to 15 years of hard labour, Piłsudski was sent to Sakhalin Island. First, he worked in the woods logging trees, then as a carpenter on a church construction project. There were few educated people in Sakhalin, so in time, Piłsudski was assigned various other tasks. He worked as a teacher and at an office, and was tasked with establishing a meteorological station.

Leo Sternberg, a well-known ethnographer also emprisoned in Siberia, inspired Piłsudski to study the culture of the Ainu people, who inhabited Sakhalin and the islands of Northern Japan. In 1902, Piłsudski married their leader’s wife, bearing two children and ultimately staying with the Ainus. This story, however, came to a sad end: In 1906, Piłsudski left the island illegally, but the tribe’s leader forbid his wife from joining the Pole….

Piłsudski was a pioneer in using multimedia methods in ethnography. He kept photographic documentation and recorded Ainu songs and rites on Edison’s discs, or prototypes of the vinyl record. (Today, these are housed at the Museum of Japanese Art and Technology ‘Manggha’ in Krakow.) In the 20th century, the Ainus were forcefully assimilated by the Japanese. After many years, they managed to reconstruct their ethnic difference, thanks to the research material collected by the ethnographer.

In 1903, Piłsudski and Sieroszewski traveled to the Japanese island of Hokkaido together, in order to continue their studies on the Ainus’ culture. Their contribution into the research of the Russian Far East and Japan cannot be overestimated, and they ultimately received numerous awards and invitations to prestigious associations. Today, their works are canonical for specialists in the cultures of this part of the world….

An ‘Outcast’ in Oceania

Imperial prison was also a part of life for Jan Kubary (1846-1896). At 17 years old, he participated in the January Uprising. When the rebellion was suppressed, he left for Dresden, where he agreed to collaborate with the police in exchange for the chance to return home. Kubary didn’t make the best spy, however – for warning young revolutionaries of their impending arrests, he was arrested himself and sentenced to exile. The sentence was annulled when he agreed once more to work with the police.

Such a life wasn’t for him, however, so Kubary escaped on foot from Warsaw to Berlin. In Germany, he worked as a collector of items for a natural history museum to be established in Hamburg. According to the prevailing trend, the museum offered German visitors the opportunity to view various marvels from exotic lands. Of Kubary, the newspapers wrote: ‘He travels across far seas and collects all the ethnographic and zoological peculiarities for one of the German tycoons.‘…

Living in the Pacific, he still had troubles in his private life. His employer went bankrupt, which left Kubary with no means. When he settled on the island of Ponape and established a plantation, it was destroyed during a riot by the local people, and post-revolutionary authorities expropriated him. ‘I am a poor outcast’, Kubary wrote in a letter to his mother.

Today, Kubary remains somewhat forgotten, if unjustly so. His research in Oceania was unprecedented, although he was self-taught, having left Europe equipped with no background in ethnography whatsoever. In his 28 years among the Papuan people, he integrated with local communities gained competence in their languages. Apart from ethnographic works, Kubary left behind many geographical and natural reports, as well as an impressive collection of items, which are now housed in European museums.

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Filed under education, Germany, Japan, language, migration, nationalism, Pacific, Poland, Russia, scholarship

by | 20 December 2025 · 6:25 am

W. E. Clarke’s Misspent Sunday

From The Misspent Sunday, by W. E. Clarke, in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by R. C. Terry (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164-169:

Abstract: From ‘Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa’, Yale Review, X (Jan 1921) 275–96. The Reverend William Edward Clarke (1854–1922) was the London Missionary Society’s representative in Samoa. About as knowledgeable a mentor as Louis could have hoped to meet, Clarke knew the people and their customs well, and took the new arrival around schools and communities on the island. A simple, devout man, Clarke had to keep Stevenson up to the mark where Sunday worship was concerned. For his part Stevenson, the one-time agnostic, probably benefited from Clarke’s practical Christianity. Louis wrote of Clarke: ‘A man … I esteem and like to the sole of his boots. I prefer him to anyone in Samoa, and to most people in the world’ (quoted in Field, This Life, 332). When Louis lay dying, Clarke was at his side. He accompanied the cortège to the burial place on Mount Vaea and recited Louis’s own prayer at the interment, part of which reads: Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts — eager to labour — eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion — and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

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Filed under Britain, education, literature, migration, philosophy, religion, Samoa

by | 19 December 2025 · 11:53 pm

RLS, Missionaries, and Chiefs

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 625-628:

Westerners took pride in bringing faith to the heathen in the Pacific; that was often invoked as their principal justification for being there. By the Stevensons’ time, missionaries were ubiquitous, distributed variously by denomination depending on the region. Maps were published that indicated the predominant territories of Catholics, Congregationalists, United Presbyterians, Free Church of Scotland, Wesleyans, Baptists, and Mormons. In Samoa a minority were Catholics, but the dominant group was the “L.M.S,” the interdenominational London Missionary Society.

During the cruises on the Casco, Equator, and Janet Nicholl, Louis had formed a negative view of missionaries as moralistic bullies, but in Samoa he got to know a number of them well and gained great respect. They were less dogmatic theologically than he had been led to expect, and in fact took a deep interest in native beliefs and did pioneering work in ethnography. They knew and understood the people much better than foreign bureaucrats did, who didn’t bother to learn the language and were regularly rotated in and out of Samoa.

In 1892 Louis told a journalist, “Missions in the South Seas generally are far the most pleasing result of the presence of white men; and those in Samoa are the best I have ever seen.” He especially admired William Clarke, who had mistaken the family for traveling entertainers when he first saw them on the Apia beach. Louis wrote to Colvin, “The excellent Clarke was up here almost all day yesterday, a man I esteem and like to the soles of his boots; indeed, I prefer him to any man in Samoa and to most people in the world.”

Many of the missionaries were fluent in Samoan, and one of them, who gave Louis regular lessons, recalled that Louis “thought the language was wonderful. The extent of the vocabulary, the delicate differences of form and expressive shades of meaning, the wonderful varieties of the pronouns and particles astonished him.” The point is striking: he liked language to be complex.

The division between Catholics and Protestants was evident but not hostile, and there were adherents of both at Vailima (the Catholics were known as Popies). Louis’s closest missionary friends were Protestants, but he was fond of Catholic priests as well. “He had a special admiration,” Graham Balfour said, “for the way in which they identified themselves with the natives and encouraged all native habits and traditions at all compatible with Christianity.” Also, he enjoyed speaking French with them.

At one point Louis’s friend Adelaide Boodle wrote from Bournemouth to say that she was considering a trip to Samoa but had been urged to avoid places that had no Anglican clergy, presumably because she wouldn’t be able to take Communion in the authorized way. Louis replied, “Christ himself and the twelve apostles seem to me to have gone through this rough world without the support of the Anglican communion. I am pained that a friend of mine should conceive life so smally as to think she leaves the hand of her God because she leaves a certain clique of clergymen and a certain scattered handful of stone buildings, some of them with pointed windows, most with belfries, and a few with an illumination of the Ten Commandments on the wall.”

As Louis had discovered in Tahiti, islanders might embrace conversion but continue to hold on quietly to their old beliefs. “We may see the difficulty in its highest terms,” he wrote in his notebook, “when a missionary asks a savage if he believes it is the virtuous who are to be happiest in a future state, and receives an affirmative reply. The good man is much pleased with such incipient orthodoxy, while all the time they have been juggling with each other with misunderstood symbols. The missionary had Christian virtue in his mind, while the Tupinamba [an Amazon tribe] means by the virtuous ‘those who have well revenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies.’”

One of Louis’s unpublished fables, “Something in It,” explores the mutual incomprehension of belief systems. A missionary violates a native taboo and is carried off by a spirit to be baked and devoured. As a preliminary step he is required to drink ritual kava, which he refuses on the grounds that it is intoxicating and therefore forbidden. He is asked, “Are you going to respect a taboo at a time like this? And you were always so opposed to taboos when you were alive!” He replies, “To other people’s. Never to my own.” He is thereupon sent back to the world of the living, as unqualified to enter the spirit world. “‘I seem to have been misinformed upon some points,’ said he. ‘Perhaps there is not much in it, as I supposed; but there is something in it after all. Let me be glad of that.’” The taboo and the missionary’s rules, Roslyn Jolly says, “are utterly alien to each other, equally valid, with neither able to command universal authority.”

Well-meaning and sympathetic though individual missionaries might be, they were still complicit in the deployment of Christianity as an agent of imperialism. Louis would probably have appreciated Jomo Kenyatta’s comment in twentieth-century Kenya: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

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Filed under anglosphere, education, France, Germany, language, migration, nationalism, Pacific, religion, travel

by | 19 December 2025 · 8:05 am

RLS First Encounters Polynesia

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 534-537:

Continuing in a southwesterly direction, the Casco made its first landfall after three weeks at the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas, thirty-five hundred miles from Hawaii. Melville had lived there in 1842, and made it the setting for the semi-fictionalized memoir Typee, to which Louis had been introduced by Stoddard. Melville’s other South Seas book was Omoo, a Marquesan word meaning someone who wanders from one island to another. Louis was an Omoo now.

In the travel book he did eventually write, In the South Seas, he described this moment: “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.” When the Casco dropped anchor “it was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up.”

This was Louis’s first encounter with Polynesian culture, and the beginning of his sympathy with the islanders at a time when that culture was being destroyed; the Marquesas were nominally independent but by now controlled by France. He recorded a conversation with a teenage mother nursing her little baby. When she questioned him about England he described, “as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the overpopulation, the hunger, and the perpetual toil.” She sat for a time silent, “gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.” And then,

It struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom, and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. “Ici pas de kanaques [there are no kanakas here],” said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands. “Tenez—a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more.” The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.

Foreigners sometimes used the term kanaka as a racist put-down, but it wasn’t originally negative. In the Polynesian languages [via Hawaiian—J] it simply meant “people,” and Richard Henry Dana had observed in Two Years before the Mast that islanders everywhere called themselves by that name—“they were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with.”

Louis was struck by the matter-of-fact way in which the islanders referred to cannibalism, which had been practiced until very recently. He was introduced to a chief who was notable as “the last eater of long pig in Nukuhiva.”

Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder. “So does Kooamua to his enemies!” he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s—only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief’s tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue.

Kooamua enjoyed a tour of the Casco, and commented that as a chief he had to observe exact sobriety, but a few days later they encountered him hopelessly drunk “in a state of smiling and lopsided imbecility.”

Margaret was open-minded about everything she was seeing, including the exposed skin and tattoos that missionaries denounced. “Two most respectable-looking old gentlemen wore nothing but small red and yellow loincloths and very cutty sarks [short skirts] on top. There were even some who wore less! The display of legs was something we were not accustomed to; but as they were all tattooed in most wonderful patterns, it really looked quite as if they were wearing openwork silk tights. . . . Fanny and I feel very naked with our own plain white legs when we are bathing.” Margaret had no prejudice concerning skin color, either. She mentioned one man who wore a garment “leaving an ample stretch of brown satin skin exposed to view. What wonderful skins they all have, by the way!”

It amused her that the Marquesans invented new names for the visitors.

Louis was at first “the old man,” much to his distress; but now they call him “Ona,” meaning owner of the yacht, a name he greatly prefers to the first. Fanny is Vahine, or wife; I am the old woman, and Lloyd rejoices in the name of Maté Karahi, the young man with glass eyes (spectacles). Perhaps it is a compliment here to call one old, as it is in China. At any rate, one native told Louis that he himself was old, but his mother was not!

The name “Ona” was important. That implied that Louis was a rich man traveling solely for pleasure, as contrasted with the unscrupulous traders who were constantly trying to cheat the Polynesians.

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by | 5 December 2025 · 4:18 pm

Kashubian vs. Polish

My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to several observations by Janusz R. Kowalczyk about linguistic variation within Poland. Here are some extracts from his coverage of Kashubian.

There are two official languages ​​in our country: Polish and Kashubian. In addition, we have dialects: Masovian, Lesser Poland dialect, Greater Poland dialect, Silesian, mixed ones in the east of the country and new mixed dialects in the west and north. These are divided into several dozen regionalisms; some of them occur in only a few towns, so they even more so deserve tender care.

…

In the north of Poland, students learn Kashubian in school. They can take the secondary school exit exam in this language. Official signs of the region’s institutions and local information have versions in the two languages.

Why did Kashubians specifically get the privilege of having their speech recognized as a separate language? Mainly because it is much less understandable than others. Hardworking Kashubians have created a grammar of their language, published literary works as well as textbooks and dictionaries in it.

The dialects used by the inhabitants in a given area formed over many centuries. They contain phrases characteristic of the lands from which their ancestors came. Their neighbours also undoubtedly had an influence on the shape of their speech – hence, for example, loanwords from German in Greater Poland and, accompanied by Czech, in Silesia.

The sentence ‘There is a glass of tea on the cupboard in the hall’ is ‘W antryju na byfyju stoi szolka tyju’ in Silesian and ‘W przedpokoju na kredensie stoi szklanka herbaty’ in Polish. In turn, the nursery rhyme from Greater Poland, ‘W antrejce na ryczce stały pyry w tytce, przyszła niuda, spucła pyry, a w wymborku myła giry’ (In the hall, on a stool, there were potatoes in a paper bag; a pig came, ate the potatoes and washed her feet in the bucket), in standard Polish would read, ‘W przedpokoju na stołku stały ziemniaki w papierowej torebce, przyszła świnia, zjadła ziemniaki, a w wiadrze myła nogi’.

Certain words sound different in different dialects, such as the mentioned potatoes. In Greater Poland they are ‘pyry’; among the Kashubians, ‘bulwy’; in Podhale, ‘grule’; for the inhabitants of Kresy (eastern borderlands), ‘barabole’; for the people of Kurpie and Silesia, ‘kartofle’. In turn, other foreign phrases, such as those taken from Wallachian and characteristic of the highlander dialect, ‘bryndza’ and ‘bundz’, have long become established in the colloquial language.

Time will tell whether this will also be true of the following words, which are for now properly understood only locally:

  • Kashubia: apfelzyna (orange), cedelk (card), chùtkò (fast), darżëszcze (road), grónk (jug), szãtopiérz (bat);
  • Podlasie (so-called speaking ‘po prostu’ [simply], ‘po swojemu’ [in your own way]): cieper (now), czyżyk (boy), klekotun (stork), mączka (sugar), poklikać (call), ślozy (tears), zieziulka (cuckoo);
  • Silesia: bajtel (child), binder (tie), kusik (kiss), szmaterlok (butterfly), śtrasbanka (tram);
  • Greater Poland: bejmy (money), chabas (meat), glazejki (gloves), gzik (cottage cheese), kejter (dog), szneka z glancem (yeast bun with icing);
  • Lesser Poland: andrut (waffle), bańka (Christmas tree bauble), chochla (spoon), cwibak (fruit cake), miednica (large bowl), sagan (kettle), sznycel (minced cutlet), warzyć (cook).

Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Kashubian, with standard Polish below.

Òjcze nasz, jaczi jes w niebie,

niech sã swiãcy Twòje miono,

niech przińdze Twòje królestwò,

niech mdze Twòja wòlô

jakno w niebie tak téż na zemi.

Chleba najégò pòwszednégò dôj nóm dzysô

i òdpùscë nóm naje winë,

jak i më òdpùszcziwómë naszim winowajcóm.

A nie dopùscë na nas pòkùszeniô,

ale nas zbawi òde złégò. Amen

Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,

święć się imię Twoje,

przyjdź królestwo Twoje,

bądź wola Twoja jako w niebie tak i na ziemi,

chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam dzisiaj,

i odpuść nam nasze winy,

jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom,

i nie wódź nas na pokuszenie,

ale nas zbaw od złego. Amen

This text written in the indigenous Kashubian language contains characters unknown in Polish: ã, é, ë, ò, ô, ù.

  • ã – nasal ‘a’ (IPA: [ã], so-called ‘a’ with tilde);
  • é – approximately ‘yj’ (IPA: [e], [ej], so-called ‘e’ with acute);
  • ë – between ‘e’ and ‘a’ (IPA: [ə], so-called schwa);
  • ò – ‘łe’ (IPA: [wɛ], so-called labialisation);
  • ô – depending on the dialect, identical with ‘o’ or more inclined towards ‘e’ (IPA: [ɞ] or [ɔ], so-called ‘o’ with circumflex);
  • ù – ‘łu’ (IPA: [wu]).

However, the letter ‘u’ is read like ‘u’ inclined towards ‘i’ [u/i]. There are also differences in the grammar of the two languages.

The oldest texts containing Kashubian records date back to 1402, but these are text in Polish containing Kashubianisms and not texts written entirely in Kashubian. The oldest Kashubian printed texts are considered to be the 1586 ‘Duchowne piesnie Dra Marcina Luthera i inszich naboznich męzow’ (Spiritual Songs of Dr Martin Luther and Other Pious Men) by Szimón Krofey.

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