Among the Head-Hunters of Formosa. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern

Scepticism regarding the Existence of a Matriarchate—Glimpse of Formosa from a Steamer’s Deck in passing—Hearsay in Japan concerning the Island Colony—Opportunity of going to Formosa as a Government Official.

As to the actual existence of matriarchates I had always been sceptical. Matrilineal tribes, and those matrilocal—that was a different matter. The existence of these among certain primitive peoples had long been substantiated. But that the name should descend in the line of the mother, or that the newly married couple should take up its residence in the tribe or phratry of the bride, has not of necessity meant that the woman held the reins of power. Quite the reverse in many cases, as actual contact with peoples among whom matrilineal and matrilocal customs existed has proved to every practical observer.[1]

Those lecturers in the “Woman’s Cause” who boasted of the “great matriarchates of old” I thought weakened, rather than strengthened, the cause they would advocate by attempting to bring to its aid evidence builded on the sands. The great “matriarchates of antiquity” I was inclined to class with the “Golden Age” of the Theosophists, as representing a state of affairs not only “too good to be true,” but one in which the wish was—to paraphrase—father to the belief. And as to prehistoric matriarchates, representing a highly evolved state of civilization—in anything like the present-day significance of that word—I am still sceptical; as sceptical as I am of a Golden Age preceding the day of Pithecanthropus and his kind.

But a land which is, as regards its aboriginal inhabitants—now confined to a few tribes, and those fast diminishing, in its more mountainous and inaccessible portions—sufficiently matripotestal to justify its being called a matriarchate, I have found. And this, as is often the case with a quest of any sort, rather by accident. Residence among the American Indians of New Mexico, of Arizona, and of Nevada, and a slight knowledge of the natives of certain of the Pacific Islands—particularly those of Hawaii and of the Philippines—had led me to give up the idea of finding a genuine matriarchate even among primitive peoples. Too often I had found that where those who had “passed by” had spoken of a “matriarchal state” as existing, investigation had proved one that was only matrilineal or matrilocal.

It was in Formosa that I found these matriarchal people; Formosa, that little-known island in the typhoon-infested South China Sea, so well called by its early Portuguese discoverers—as its name implies—“the beautiful.” Indeed, it was the beauty of Formosa that first attracted me. I shall never forget the first glimpse that I caught of the island as I passed it, going by steamer from Manila[2] to Nagasaki. There it lay, in the light of the tropical sunrise, glowing and shimmering like a great emerald, with an apparent vividness of green that I had never seen before, even in the tropics. During the greater part of the day it remained in sight, apparently floating slowly past—an emerald on a turquoise bed. For on that day there was no typhoon or threat of typhoon, and on such a day the China Sea can, with its wonderful blueness and calm, make amends for the many other days on which, like the raging dragon that the Chinese peasants believe it veritably to be, of murky green, spitting white foam, deck-high, it threatens—and often brings—death and destruction to those who venture upon it. Nor was the emerald island a jewel in the rough. The Chinese call it Taiwan, a name which means, in the characters of their language, Terrace Beach, Chinese character .[3] This name the Japanese—the present masters of the Island—have adopted; and it is not an inappropriate one. Nor do the terraces refer to those small, low-lying ones of the rice-paddies which for some centuries Chinese coolies have cultivated on the fertile east coast of the island; but rather to those bolder mountain terraces, carved by the hand of Nature, and covered with that wild verdure which only tropical rains, followed by tropical sunshine, can produce.[4] These terraces—gleaming brilliant green, and seeming to refract the sunlight of that April day, as we sailed across the Tropic of Cancer, which cuts Formosa through the middle—were curiously like the facets of a great emerald, polished and carefully cut.

The glimpse which I caught that day of the shining island with its vivid colouring, and seemingly wondrously carved surface, remained with me as a pleasant memory during the several years that I spent in Japan.

Although Formosa is now a Japanese colony—has been since 1895—one is able to get curiously little definite information in Japan regarding the island. From the Japanese themselves one hears only of the marvellous energy and skill of the Japanese in exploiting the resources of the island—sugar, camphor, tea—and the manufacture of opium, a Government monopoly. From the English, Scottish, and Canadian missionaries stationed in Formosa, who sometimes spend their summers in Japan, one hears more of the exploiting, on the part of the Japanese, of the Chinese population of Formosa—a fact which later I found to be cruelly true.

Now and then, while I was in Japan, I heard vague rumours of head-hunting aboriginal tribes in the mountains of Formosa, but regarding these I could gain little exact information. The Japanese, when questioned about the aborigines, were either curiously uncommunicative, or else launched at once into panegyrics concerning the nobility of the

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