From the first Portuguese and Spanish contacts with the Moluccas, the Philippines, and New Guinea in the early sixteenth century, diversity was a recurrent theme in descriptions of Oceanian people. By the late eighteenth century, the kaleidoscope of skin and hair colour seen in the Pacific Islands by Quirós had settled into the paradox of Forster's 'two great varieties'. On the one hand, it was recognized that cognate language communities — now called Austronesian — were scattered across the vast area from Madagascar to the Malay Archipelago and the furthest Pacific Islands. The Dutch scholar Adriaan Reelant (1676-1718) had discerned this striking linguistic affinity early in the century by comparing published wordlists; Banks established it empirically; the East India Company employee and orientalist philologist William Marsden (1754-1836) confirmed it; and Reinhold Forster joined language to physical form as taxonomic criteria, noting 'a very remarkable similarity' between words spoken by the 'fair tribe' of South Sea Islanders and 'some' Malays. On the other hand, the groups comprising his 'blacker' variety supposedly spoke 'wholly different', mutually unrelated languages despite physical and behavioural commonalities.^[71] The New Hollanders, whom Forster had not seen, were reportedly 'totally different' in appearance, 'customs', and language from both varieties of South Sea Islanders though Georg Forster later allowed that physical and moral parallels between the New Hollanders and nearby 'black' Islanders might suggest 'a certain relationship' or even a common origin, despite very different languages and life styles.^[72]

For several decades, Reinhold Forster's classification of South Sea Islanders, or one resembling it, was rehearsed in much the same humanist spirit by voyagers and savants alike.^[73] Signs of significant divergence from this relatively generous, optimistic ethos emerged around the turn of the century as certain naturalists and geographers redeployed Forster's categories to serve altered agendas. In a drastic departure from orthodoxy, Virey (1800, I:135-8) drew on travellers' narratives to classify the 'human genus' into five or six 'primordial races' split between two 'distinct species'. His first species included the 'reddish-brown Malay tribes' who were widely dispersed but analogous in 'form, colour, customs, and mother tongue'. The 'Negro or Ethiopian' comprised a second species distributed between two stocks: one, 'more or less black', peopled much of Africa, the 'land of the Papous', and New Guinea; the second, 'blackish olive' in colour, encompassed the 'Hottentots' and the inhabitants of New Holland, New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides whom Virey characterized venomously as 'excessively stupid and brutish' with a 'vile' face, 'elongated like an ape's muzzle', and a 'squashed nose'. The major differences dividing the human genus, he asserted (1800, I:166, 415‑19), were 'radical', 'indelible', and 'endemic' to physical organization which was itself largely immune to the 'superficial' influence of climate and other external conditions.

The longstanding concern of geographers to demarcate and denominate the 'parts' and the 'great natural divisions' of the physical globe had usually encompassed current knowledge and speculation about its human inhabitants, as with Brosses. However, later authors not only proposed new geographic nomenclatures for the fifth part of the world but evinced a novel preoccupation to map and classify human types, entangled with emerging ideas of race as innate and permanent.^[74] A key figure in this process was Malte-Brun who dismantled Brosses's geography and categorized the region's inhabitants into races: 'black' Oceanic Negroes and 'tanned' or 'copper-coloured' Polynesians. Replacing Terres australes with Océanique, 'Oceanica', he and Mentelle jettisoned Australasie and contracted Polynésie to label 'two Polynesias', separated 'naturally' by the equator and soon to be called Micronesia and Polynesia. Noncommittal about the orthodox 'system of a common human origin' and unwilling to accept Reinhold Forster's argument that the South Sea Islands must have been populated from the west, in the teeth of prevailing winds and currents, they hypothesized that the 'race called Malay' might be 'native' to the Pacific Ocean.^[75] A few years later, Malte-Brun formally partitioned Océanique into western (Malay Archipelago), eastern (Polynesia), and central segments occupied by races emergent from two 'very distinct' physical and linguistic stocks: the Malays 'or yellow Oceanians' and the Oceanic Negroes. The central region, comprising New Holland, Van Diemen's Land, New Guinea, and the large archipelagoes immediately to the east, contained the 'most substantial remnants' of the Oceanic Negro race. They were, he suggested, echoing his earlier intimation of an independent islands origin for the Malays, probably 'originary to this part of the world'. Indeed, the differences between the Van Diemen's Landers, the New Caledonians and the Papous were such that he was 'uncertain' whether they were descendants of 'a common stock' or whether each race had originated in situ.^[76] As with Péron's ruminations on the 'essential' difference of the inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land from 'all other known peoples', such insinuations of autochthony signalled the growing conceivability of the hitherto heterodox idea that the diversity of human races was fundamental, innate, and possibly original rather than an ambiguous product of interbreeding or the degeneration of a single species triggered by migration to new environments.