Abstract
HEN, AT THE TAIL-END of the last century, a land-hungry Germany set herself to fashion Pacific colonies in the likeness of the Reich, her ambition was tinged with the sturdy idealism that can flower only when ignorant of the task ahead. For it was the German ambition to teach the natives the German language and to spread other blessings of German culture among the antipodean innocents. There was, however, one major obstacle to these plans. The English had been in the Pacific much longer than the Germans and had been responsible for the propagation of an imbecile nursery talk which no German idealist could root out. This was pidgin English or beach-la-mar.1 Pidgin English was so well established in the South Seas that the Germans could make no impression on it. Even the German missionaries threw in the towel; they were obliged to swallow their pride and to use pidgin English as a means of teaching religion. They adopted it in their schools, and used it in printed books. The lone relic of German influence upon pidgin English is the word rauss or rouse, 'to shift, remove, go away,' from heraus.2
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