We know, too, that sun-worship has prevailed among the most highly civilized races, and that it was the basis of Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, and Oriental mythologies. “Our northern natures,” says Mr. Helps,[179] referring to the influence of this religion of the outer world, “can hardly comprehend how the sun and the moon and the stars were imaged in the heart of a Peruvian, and dwelt there; how the changes in these luminaries were combined with all his feelings and his fortunes; how the dawn was hope to him; how the fierce mid-day brightness was power to him; how the declining sun was death to him; and how the new morning was a resurrection to him: nay, more, how the sun and the moon and the stars were his personal friends, as well as his deities; how he held communion with them, and thought that they regarded every act and word; how, in his solitude, he fondly imagined that they sympathized with him; and how, with outstretched arms, he appealed to them against their own unkindness, or against the injustice of his fellow-man.” But such a creed as this is indicative of some degree of advancement, of some modicum of civilization, and may not be compared with the monstrous fetichism prevailing in Melanesia, Australia, Africa, and the Polar Deserts. In these regions the savage takes for the objects of his veneration beasts and inanimate objects; or is without any definite belief, and shows himself refractory to all religious teaching. Such is the case, according to Sir John Ross, among the Eskimos; while the Australians, according to Latham, have not even succeeded in formulating the rudest elements of a mythology; and the negroes of Equatorial Africa indulge in horrible superstitions which are a hundredfold worse than the absence of all belief.
The individuals, therefore, who act as priests among these ignorant and stupid savages are, in reality, only miserable sorcerers, to whom they attribute the power of predicting the future, of controlling wind and rain, the sun and the moon, of curing disease, either by magic potions, incantations, or amulets; but they fear without respecting them, and never hesitate to put them to death when the effect of their juggleries or their prophecies does not respond to the hopes cherished by the worshippers.
Among these credulous and cruel peoples we find the realization of all those terrible dreams embodied by the poet in his picture of the influences and consequences of superstition. For a vivid commentary on the following lines of Pope, the reader should turn to the pages of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Du Chaillu, William Ellis, John Williams, or Admiral Wilkes. Of superstition, the poet says:[180]—
The savage has only rudimentary notions of the justice, the respect, and the good-will which man owes to his fellows. Nevertheless, if in some parts of the world he appears an intractable, cruel, and perfidious being, in others his manners are gentle, inoffensive, and hospitable. And nearly everywhere he seems capable of gratitude, devotion, and even of veritable heroism. But, in general, the law of the strongest is the only law which he recognizes; the fear of an immediate and corporeal chastisement is the sole restraint upon his passions; and the material instincts are the most powerful impulses of his actions. The want or narrowness of the moral sense induces as its natural consequences among the unfortunate savages every form of debauchery—the absolute and brutal tyranny of the chief over his tribe, of man over woman, of the father over his children, of the conqueror over the conquered; murder on the slightest occasion, and with incredible refinements of cruelty; and, finally, anthropophagy—that hideous custom which lowers man below the most ferocious beasts, and which, nevertheless is not always, as might be supposed, the sign of the lowest abasement.
Anthropophagy springs from different causes, and clothes itself in various forms. Sometimes it is but the expression of a sanguinary instinct, of an atrocious sentiment of vengeance; sometimes it is the consequence of a state of misery and of famine almost permanent; often, also, it is closely connected with the usage of human sacrifices, and those who practise it consider it as a sacred duty, as an act of piety, agreeable to their divinities or to the manes of the victims whose very flesh they devour.
Unknown to the stupid Eskimos, and in general to all hyperborean races, anthropophagy rages with intensity among peoples comparatively civilized. The Ghonds of Hindostan, peaceful and laborious cultivators, are not exactly cannibals, but every year they immolate to their divinities a multitude of children, whom they flay and cut to pieces while alive, and whose flesh they distribute in fragments over the fields they are about to sow.
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A CANNIBAL FEAST AMONG THE BATTAS OF SUMATRA.
A CANNIBAL FEAST AMONG THE BATTAS OF SUMATRA.
In Sumatra there exists a tribe, that of the Battas, which has not only a religion and a worship, but a kind of constitution, a literature, and a penal code. This code condemns certain classes of criminals to be eaten alive. After the sentence has been pronounced by the competent tribunal, two or three days are suffered to elapse in order to give the people time to assemble. On the appointed day the criminal is led to the place of execution, and bound to a stake. The offended party, or his nearest relation, if he has been murdered, advances and chooses the choicest morsel; the others follow in their turn, and with their own hands cut off such pieces as please their fancy. Finally, the unfortunate wretch is relieved from his sufferings by the chief, who strikes off his head. The flesh is eaten on the spot, raw or cooked, according to each man’s taste.
The natives of some of the Polynesian Islands consider that they render a service to their aged parents by slaying them, and that, by eating them, they provide the most honourable mode of sepulture. Others believe that a man, by devouring his enemy, infiltrates into his blood all the virtues with which the latter was endowed. A similar prejudice exists among certain tribes on the Amazon.
It is beyond doubt that, in a majority of cases, anthropophagy originates in scarcity of food, in the lack of cattle and game, while, in others, many cannibals are attracted by the delicious savour of human flesh, which they prefer to every other. Among the Cobens of the Uanpès, says Maury, man is considered as veritable game, and these savages declare war against the neighbouring tribes only with the object of procuring a supply of human flesh. When they have more than they require for present needs, they dry it, smoke it, and store it away as provision.
In the Viti Islands, whose natives are eulogized by Dumont-d’Urville as the most intelligent in Melanesia, great festivals are celebrated at different epochs of the year, which require a certain number of victims. Prisoners of war are the first to be immolated; then all those unfortunates who are without an asylum are hunted and collected; and if this inhuman chase should not be sufficiently productive, the purveyors eke out the supplies by adding some wretched women, who are eaten by their own relatives. Dumont-d’Urville speaks of a chief, named Tanoa, who, for a public banquet, caused thirty women to be slain, and their kin, far from murmuring or lamenting, took part in the hideous feast.
In Africa, Captain Burton saw, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, a cannibal people, named the Vouabembés, who feed upon carrion, vermin, larvæ, and insects, and carry their sluggishness and brutality to such an extreme as to eat raw and putrid human flesh. Although you may see on every countenance, says this adventurous traveller,[181] the expression of chronic hunger, the poor wretches, timid, fuliginous, stunted, degraded, seem far more dangerous enemies to the dead than to the living.
Owing to the exertions of our missionaries, this horrible practice, against which our better nature instinctively rebels, is rapidly dying out in every region where their beneficial influence extends. In Polynesia and New Zealand, for instance, cannibalism is almost extinct. And if we owed no other service to the self-denying exertions of the soldiers of the Cross, this alone would entitle them to our gratitude, for the extermination of anthropophagy is the first step towards teaching man to reverence man.
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SAVAGERY is evidently the primitive condition of man. But while for certain races it has only been the first period of a more or less rapid progressive evolution, a movement in advance more or less complete, for others it seems to be a perpetual infancy, an incurable atrophy of the noble faculties which are the privilege of our species. It is not the province of the present writer to determine the causes, undoubtedly very complex, which have operated in the formation of the various races composing the human genus, to allot to each the physiological and psychological characteristics which distinguish them, and to explain their distribution in the different regions of the globe. These are problems, indeed, which science has only begun to investigate, and in whose discussion scientific men exhibit the widest discrepancies of opinion. While one authority contends for man’s unity of origin, another believes that he has sprung from several independent sources. All at present is hypothesis and conjecture; nor do there apparently exist any well-approved facts on which a satisfactory theory can be erected apart from the brief and succinct details recorded in Holy Writ. Why one race has emerged from barbarism while another remains sunk in its lowest depths, we can only explain by admitting the exercise of a superhuman power. No evidence can be given that any people has achieved civilization by its own unassisted efforts. But in these pages I am not called upon to enter into any philosophical speculations. I have only to deal with facts; and with one incontestable fact, the superiority of those races which have acquired civilization over those which are incapable of so grand a work, and which show little, if any, aptitude to profit by the examples and the lessons brought within their reach.
Whether it is due to wholly external circumstances, such as climate, geographical situation, geological constitution of the soil, its nature and that of its productions, that such differences should exist between different races, that some should reign as sovereigns over the earth, while others, in their pretended liberty, are given up to all the horrors of slavery, ignorance, misery, and cannibalism, I am not called upon to determine. It seems both probable and possible. “To understand any people thoroughly,” says Mr. Helps, “we must know something of the country in which they live, or at least of that part inhabited by the dominant race. The insects partake the colour of the trees they dwell upon, and man is not less affected by the place of his habitation on the earth.” We cannot pretend to undervalue the importance of race. We cannot deny that one is the ruler, the other the ruled. As Emerson says,[182] “It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments.” It is race that has planted the Anglo-Saxon on every shore, and that for ages has subjected the negro to the yoke of bondage. At all events, it is certain that, even in the present day, savagery is the exclusive portion of certain races, perfectly distinct in a physiological point of view from the white and yellow races (the Caucasian and Mongolian), which, either in antiquity or the modern age, have arrived at more or less advanced degrees of civilization.
The savage races may be divided into four great groups:—
The Negro, in Africa and North America;
The Malayo-Polynesian, in Polynesia and the Indian islands.
The American, or Red Indians; and
The Hyperborean, chiefly represented by the Eskimos.
The Negro or Black races are distributed over the whole of Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to the frontiers of the Saharan region. The name of Negro is also given to the natives of Australia and Papouasia. But most anthropologists agree in considering the Australian branch wholly distinct from, and independent of, the African branch; which, nevertheless, it resembles in several organic peculiarities, and especially in the deep colour of the skin.
This characteristic, which is the most conspicuous at the first glance, is, however of secondary importance: it is extremely marked on the east African coast, among the Nubians and the Abyssinians; on the banks of the Cuzamance, not far from the Sierra Leone coast, among the Feloupas, and on the Guinea coast, among the Aminas. All these peoples are black as ebony; but their oval countenances, their regular features, the elegance of their forms and the development of their faculties, evidently connect them, some with the Semites, others with the Aryan-Hindus.
On the other hand, several varieties of Negroes properly so-called wear but a fuliginous or reddish-brown tint. It is, therefore, by less superficial peculiarities that we distinguish the true Negro. His skull is elongated, and laterally compressed. Sometimes his jaw projects, a characteristic scientifically designated by the name of prognathism; sometimes it is more vertically disposed, but then the cheek-bones (or “zygomathic arches”) are extremely prominent. His teeth project; that is, they are inclined outward, and always long and white. The skeleton, whiter than our own, is also heavier and more massive. The abdomen is exceedingly narrow, and with a conical cavity; the legs are bowed. Short the neck, broad the thorax, and convex, and generally well made. The muscles, but slightly developed in proportion to the dimensions of the osseous framework, have not the vivid red colour which distinguishes the flesh of the European; the blood is black, thick, and circulates slowly. The body is always deprived of hair; there is little or no beard; the hair of the head is black, woolly, and frizzled. The eyes are of the deepest black, but inexpressive. The forehead is low, the chin short, the mouth large, the lips are long and thick. Finally, and this is the most remarkable sign of the Negro’s inferiority, the type of the face, in the same race, is so uniform that it is difficult to distinguish one individual from another. To this physical uniformity corresponds a moral and intellectual uniformity, which effaces, so to speak, all individuality. In Africa we meet with numerous tribes more or less intelligent and capable of being educated, many sanguinary and fierce, others benevolent and inoffensive; but the character and dispositions of a tribe are reproduced among all the individuals who compose it with scarcely perceptible differences.
The Negroes of Africa may be divided into three principal varieties: the pure Negroes, the Kaffirs, and the Hottentots. The former comprehends all the populations of the east, centre, and west of Africa. Its primitive stock is supposed to be the people called Mandinké or Malinké (Mandingue), formerly established at Mendé, in the delta of the Nile, but who emigrated towards the western coast, and now inhabit the mountainous countries bordering on the Upper Senegal. Between this river and the Niger are grouped some tribes in whom the Berber or Semitic blood appears mingled with the Negro blood; such are the Yolofs, the Foulahs, and the Peulas, or Fellatahs. The latter are of a sooty black, with a well-shaped head, a square frontal development, thick and woolly hair. They have founded powerful states, and are considered as the true civilizers of the Soudan, where they have introduced Islamism.
Further south, at the Gaboon, we meet with the wholly savage nations of the Mpongwes, the Shekianis, and the Fans. The Mpongwes inhabit the right bank of the Gaboon, spreading over an extent of seventy to eighty miles. They are of a medium height, and comparatively agreeable physiognomy. The men are clothed in a calico shirt, and wrap themselves in an ample piece of stuff as a mantle. Their head-dress is a simple straw-hat; but the king, as a sign of his dignity, wears a hat of silk. The women have no other garment than close-fitting drawers descending to the knee; but they decorate their arms and legs with copper rings. Great amateurs are both sexes of tinsel and perfumery, and they besprinkle themselves with all kinds of essences. According to Du Chaillu, their characteristic trait is their passionate ardour for trade. Their principal wares are ivory, precious woods, and slaves. They display in their commercial manœuvres great ability jointed to the most signal bad faith.
The Shekianis occupy, between the banks of the Muni and La Mondah, and those of the Ogobay, a territory which stretches to within some two hundred miles of the sea. Their appearance is less prepossessing than that of the Mpongwes. Perfidious warriors, artful traders, bold and astute hunters; such are the salient traits of their character. As for the Fans, they are cannibals of the worst species, whose appetite for human flesh leads them even to eat individuals who have died of disease, and to disinter the dead in order to roast or smoke them. When human flesh fails amongst them, they buy or steal it from their neighbours. They are, however, according to M. Du Chaillu, the handsomest and most gallant-looking negroes of the interior, and their horrible diet seems to fatten and strengthen them. Living in the mountains, they have that bold free air which distinguishes all mountaineers.
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Negroes—Natives of Kidi, Africa
Negroes—Natives of Kidi, Africa
The Negro type is seen in all its purity among the populations of Congo, Nigritia, the Soudan, Dahomey, and Timbuctu, as well as among those of the eastern coast, below the tenth parallel of north latitude. In the region of the great lakes, between the coast of Zanguebar and the Lakes Victoria-Nyanza and Tanganyika, lie the kingdoms of Ugogo, Unyamezi, Unyoro, Kidi, and others, visited by Grant and Speke in their celebrated journey to the sources of the Nile. The inhabitants of these countries are “darkly, deeply, beautifully” black, with prominent jaws, thick lips, and oblique eyes. Some of them, as, for instance, those of Unyoro, show a certain amount of taste in their accoutrements, and drape themselves in the Romanesque manner with folds of cotton or calico. Those of Kidi wear no other clothing than an apron round the loins; they carry large rings on the arms, legs, and neck; and arrange their hair in sufficiently complicated tresses.
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Kaffir Warriors.
Kaffir Warriors.
The Kaffir and Hottentot races are spread over all Southern Africa, below the fourteenth degree of south latitude; the former on the east, the latter on the west coast.
In the hierarchy of races, the Kaffirs occupy a rank superior to that of the Negroes of Equatorial Africa. They have neither the pronounced tint nor the broad flat nose of the blacks of Guinea and the Soudan. They form great nations, build towns, cultivate the land, and work in metals. Their stock throws off four branches: the handsomest and most cultured is that of the Zulus, whose hue is not darker than that of the Arabs, and of whom the Wanikas offer the most conspicuous type. Then follow the south Kaffir branch, including the Amacondas and the Ama-Hupubas; the Sofaloa branch, whose type most nearly approaches the pure Negro race; finally, the Kaffir-Hottentot branch, which comprehends the Makololos, the Bakonis, the Basoutos, the Batouas, the Damaras, people of a clear brown hue, who have migrated from the north to the south, driving before them or subjugating the Hottentots, with whom they have intermixed.
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Hottentots—A Man and Woman.
Hottentots—A Man and Woman.
The Hottentot race, or Quaiqua, is characteristic of Southern Africa. Its origin appears of remote antiquity; but it formerly dwelt further to the north, and has been driven back towards the south by the progress of the more warlike Kaffirs. The Hottentots are of low stature; their skin is a yellowish-brown. Their head is long, with projecting forehead and cheek-bones; flat nose, thick lips. Their women are hideous in face and deformed in body; as they grow old they grow stout, and a truly monstrous embonpoint invades the posterior part of their person. Morally, they are in an abject condition, which must be attributed rather to their sloth and wretchedness than to any lack of intelligence. Their sole garment is the carross, a kind of sheepskin mantle. They live in such low huts that they can only enter them by crawling. Some Hottentot tribes cultivate the soil, or depasture herds of cattle; such are the Bayéyés, established on the banks of Lake Ngami; the Namaquas, who are distinguished into “the great” and “the little;” and the Koranas, who roam along the Orange River. The most miserable members of this family are the Bosjesmans, or Bushmen, who inhabit the Kalahari Deserts, between the Cape Colony and Kaffraria. The total number of the Hottentot race probably does not exceed 150,000.
I have said that the Negroes of Australia and Papouasia were wholly distinct from those of Africa. And, in fact, I can hardly admit that it could ever have been possible for the latter to colonize the Australian continent and the adjacent islands. What, then, is the origin of the Australians and the Papuans? According to some anthropologists, they are descended from that strange race of savages which still exists in Hindostan, in the Nielgherries, and the Téraï, between Palmoco, Sumbhulpoor, and the sources of the Nerbudda. But whence came the latter? On this subject all historical tradition is dumb, and science knows not what to think of those black-skinned savages, with the face of an ape, a body covered with red hair, disproportionably long arms, a protuberant belly, and who live in the trees like the orangs and the gibbons.
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Australians.
Australians.
Whatever may be its origin, the Pelagian Negro race now-a-days occupies New Holland, Tasmania, New Caledonia, New Britain, New Guinea, the Fiji Islands, and the Andaman. It comprehends the Australians, the Papuans, the Andamanese, the Alfourous, and some other secondary branches. We often, but erroneously, confound the Australians and Papuans. While both are black, they differ markedly from one another, and the latter are superior to the former. The Australians are puny and wretched in appearance. They have a protuberant belly, feeble limbs, a long but not projecting face, a depressed skull, long black frizzled hair. Their attire is remarkable for its simplicity: a kangaroo skin flung over the right shoulder! The custom of painting and tatooing the body is generally adopted among them, as well as among all savages, to whatever race they belong, and whatever part of the world they inhabit. The tribes are distinguished by the colours they make use of, and by the number and arrangement of the incisions which the warriors make on their limbs, their chest, and their shoulders. Their arms are spears pointed with heads of jagged flint, and hatchets of the same material. The indigenous population of Australia is rapidly decreasing; it does not exceed a total of 3000 souls. In Tasmania the aborigines are reduced to four, three aged women, and a young man, who has recently visited England.[183]
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Papuans.
Papuans.
The Papuans have not woolly hair, like the Australians. Their hair grows in separate plaits, which twine one in another, and form, when of some length, a voluminous and characteristic coiffure. The Papuans of New Guinea, according to Dumont d’Urville, are men of medium stature, with elegant forms, oval countenance, and tolerably regular features. Their skin is of a dark brown colour. They appear to be of a timid and unenterprising character. Their residence they have planted on the shores of the sea, where they dwell in long wooden huts, raised upon piles which are plunged deep in the very waters of ocean. It does not seem that they acknowledge the authority of any chiefs. They know only a few words of the Malayan language, and speak the papoua, which differs from it essentially.
The Andamanese, or Andamans, are of a jet-black colour. Their stature rarely exceeds four and a half to five feet. Their head is large, and sunken between the shoulders; their hair woolly; most of them are disfigured by protuberant stomach and meagre lower limbs. They go about in an absolute nudeness, for we cannot regard as any species of clothing the coat of clay or yellow ochre which they plaster over their bodies to protect them against the stings of insects; the red ochre which the earth supplies them they make use of to powder their hair and paint their face. According to the latest estimates, the total population of the Andaman Islands does not exceed 2000 individuals.
The Alfourous, or Harfourous, inhabit Borneo, the Celebes, the Moluccas, Mindanao, and some other isles. Their type has no very definite peculiarity, and ethnologists seem agreed to consider them a mixed race, resulting from a cross between the Papuans and the Malays, and forming the transition between the two races.
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THE Malayo-Polynesian race has also been designated, and much more felicitously, the Neptunian or Pelagian, because it peoples exclusively the peninsulas and islands of the great Southern Ocean. It is, to speak the truth, an ill-defined, heterogeneous, and composite race, presenting very diverse types. Ethnologists, however, divide it into two original branches—the Malayan and the Polynesian.
The Malays have the skull flattened in the inferior portion, the malar bones very wide apart, a flat nose, an exceedingly wide mouth, thick lips, and eyes raised in the direction of the temples; their yellow skin embrowns by exposure to the sun, but if sheltered from its rays, grows almost white, especially with the females. Generally speaking, they are corrupt, sanguinary, and perfidious, as our seamen wrecked upon their shores have too frequently experienced; but they are intelligent, and capable of a certain degree of civilization. The best marked types of this race are found in Sumatra, among the anthropophagous Battas already spoken of, the Orang-Lobous, and the Pagais. The latter tatoo the body, says Maury,[184] and like the Nagas of Assam, make new marks every time they have killed a foe; thus bearing about on their own persons the evidences and glorification of their prowess. Like the Michmis of Assam, they expose their dead on rudely-constructed scaffolds or platforms, where they leave them to decay; a custom which prevails amongst nearly all the Polynesian populations, as well as among the Redskins of North America. We must therefore conclude that the Malayan race was, at the outset, extremely barbarous. It owes its civilization to the influence of the Hindus, and especially to that of the inhabitants of the Malabar coast.
This civilization, in all its conditions, the Malays appear to have transported to Madagascar, where they have formed, by intermixture with the Negroes of Africa, two new races—the Hovas, who still preserve distinctly visible affinities with the Negroes properly so called, and the Sakalaves, who approximate towards the Kaffirs.
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Malays—Male and Two Females.
Malays—Male and Two Females.
These two mixed races comprise in themselves several varieties, but all bear the common denomination of Malagasy or Madecassy.[185]
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Hovas of Madagascar—Men, Woman, and Child.
Hovas of Madagascar—Men, Woman, and Child.
According to M. Maury, the populations of Polynesia depart the more completely from the Malayan type as we advance in an eastward direction; so that, from the Caroline Islands to the Marquesas, and from the Sandwich Islands to New Zealand, they constitute a sufficiently homogeneous race, the Polynesians or Kanaks.[186] This race is represented in the Sandwich Islands by an almost white variety, whose type very closely approaches the Caucasian race; in New Zealand, on the other hand, by tribes of a dark brown. In the island of Ombaï, situated at the extremity of that vast archipelago which seems in some remote age to have formed an isthmus connecting the Australian with the Asiatic continent, the natives are of a more or less decided olive-brown. Their eyes are deep-set and brilliant, their lips thick, the mouth is large, and the nose generally flat, yet sometimes tolerably well made. They are of medium height, robust, and good figures. They wear a scanty beard, if any; but their hair is long and thick; sometimes they suffer it to flow freely about their shoulders, sometimes they gather it on the top of the head with pieces of vari-coloured stuffs. These savages have a fierce and martial air, are abrupt in their manners, and rapid in their movements. They display extraordinary skill in the management of the bow, and also make use of the Malayan kris or crease, which they carry in their girdle. In battle they protect their persons with a breast-plate and a buckler of buffalo hide; these two pieces of armour are ornamented with shells in regular and pleasing designs. The people of Ombaï are anthropophagic.
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Warriors of the Island of Ombai.
Warriors of the Island of Ombai.
If now we transport ourselves to the eastern extremity of Polynesia, the Marquesas Islands, occupied by France in 1842, we shall find there the Pelagian race under one of its handsomest and most amiable types. The Kanaks of this group are not exempt from cannibalism. Nevertheless, before the commerce, civilization, and vices of Europe intruded upon their savage Eden, they lived in a condition of comparative innocence; and the corruption which has since invaded them preserves that open and simple character proper to people in whom the capacity of discerning good from evil is but imperfectly developed.
A traveller, who possesses the threefold merit of being an elegant writer, a judicious observer, and an accurate narrator, M. Max Radiguet, has embodied in an agreeable volume, entitled “The Last Savages,” some lively impressions of a sojourn of several years in the Marquesas, and principally at Noukahiva. It is from his pages that I borrow the following sketch of the islanders of this group.
“If you would wish,” he says, “to see the Noukahivian in all his purity, in all his native elegance, it is not among the Teës, it is among the Taïpis, and in the other less frequented islands of the group, that you must seek him.
“Of lofty stature, well-spread shoulders, swelling chest, a shapely figure, the body lightly set upon the haunches, the Noukahivian advances with proud and sometimes arrogant bearing, but always with a confident mien, a free and hardy manner. He seems fitted for the race and the escalade rather than for the struggle. He has more the character of the gymnast than of the athlete. His features are regular and handsome, his nose straight or aquiline, sometimes short or slightly flattened, never ill-sloped. The mouth is neither large nor thick-lipped; the forehead, rather low and somewhat receding, is shaved on the upper portion, whence arises the common saying that the Kanaks have a high forehead.
“We may easily portray the physical form of an inhabitant of the Marquesas; but it is more difficult to define the eccentricities of his fantastic nature. There is much of the child in his disposition; he is as insensible, or nearly so, to the emotions of gratitude, and has the same irascible caprice. He is nervous, restless, impatient. Superstition is one of his prominent failings. He is hospitable; his first advances are warm, earnest, playful; then, at the least chill, and from motives which a stranger cannot always appreciate, an abrupt revolution takes place, and he becomes wayward and moody.
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Islanders of Noukahiva.
Islanders of Noukahiva.
“The women are of medium stature, their contours frequently modelled with a purity which the sculptor has revealed to us almost alone in France.... Few women of fashion are more graceful, if not in their movements, at least in their attitudes; and the women of the neighbouring archipelagoes, the so much eulogized Tahitians,[187] appear awkward, unwieldy, and sunburnt peasants compared with the exquisitely elegant daughters of Noukahiva.
“The Kanaks talk but little. Frequently they convey their thoughts to one another by a play of the physiognomy which Europeans find it difficult to seize. Seated face to face, the back supported against a stone, the arms crossed beneath the head, they regard each other for whole hours without exchanging a single word. In direct contrast to the negro, they are very sparing both in words and gestures, when even their dearest interests are involved. Slow, indolent, averse to labour, not knowing how to submit themselves to any regular work, they pass the greatest part of their time stretched in the shadow of the trees on their mats, sleeping, singing, or weaving garlands. And yet, though they are sensual, gluttonous, and careless of the morrow, they are gifted with a quick wit, a sound judgment, and a very accurate conception of right and justice.”
We do not remark among the numerous tribes scattered over the immense territory of the two American continents, and vaguely comprehended under the denomination of the Red or American race, differences less profound or characteristic than among the different fractions of the Negro or Malayo-Polynesian race. Just as, in speaking of the New World, we formerly made use of the expression “the West Indies,” or the “Great Indies,” we also call by the term “Indians” all the aboriginal peoples of this portion of the globe, and the use of this term, incorrect as it is, writers as well as readers seem indisposed to surrender. In fact, it possesses the twofold advantage of being short, and of not attributing to the peoples which it designates an unity of origin which is doubtful, or a similitude of colour which does not exist.
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Indians of North America—The Red Skins.
Indians of North America—The Red Skins.
“From the North Pole even to Tierra del Fuego,” says Maury, “there is scarcely a shade of human colouring which is not manifested, from the black to the yellow. The aborigines, according to their nation, are of a brown-olive, a dark brown, bronze, pale yellow, copper yellow, red, white, brown, &c. Their stature does not vary less. Between the stature, not gigantic but very tall, of the Patagonians and the dwarf-like proportions of the Changos, we meet with a host of intermediary ‘sizes.’ The proportions of the body present the same diversity; some peoples have the bust very long, like the tribes of the Pampas; others, short and broad, like the inhabitants of the Peruvian Andes; the same is the case with the shape and size of the head. Yet we recognize between the various American populations an air of kinship, certain general features which distinguish them from the races of the Old World. Among these features must be placed, in the front rank, the pyramidal form of the head and the narrowness of the forehead—characteristics of great antiquity among the American populations, since they belong to skulls discovered by Mr. Lund in the caves of Brazil associated with the bones of extinct animals.”
Spite of this diversity of type, we may divide the Indians of America into two races, of which one at least, the Red Skins, is remarkable for its complete homogeneity. The Red Skins were formerly distributed over all the upper portion of the American continent—that is, over the territory of Canada and the United States, and the northern districts of Mexico. In the sixteenth century they numbered a million and a half of souls. They are now reduced to a few thousand families. A few years more, and American rifles, brandy, and poverty, will have completed the extermination of this indomitable race, which has deserved at least the respect and the recognition due to honourable courage of those who have dispossessed them from the immense territories they formerly enjoyed. It is true, however, that we must not take our estimate of the Red Skins from the romantic pages of Chateaubriand or Fenimore Cooper. We must not delude ourselves into a belief that the North American tribes are or were composed of Deerskins, Hawkeyes, and Leatherstockings. Yet we cannot refuse to them a character of real grandeur and true nobility. Their contempt of death and suffering, their stoical composure under the severest tortures, their disdain of civilization, their horror of foreign supremacy, their haughtiness, and even their cold and reflective ferocity, are so many traits which place them, in a moral sense, far above the majority of the other savage races. A hundred times in romance, song, and drama have been described the manners of the Red Skins, their stratagems in war and the chase, the perseverance with which they hunt down their enemy or their prey, their cunning, their impassiveness, their vengeance. Who among us has not eagerly followed them in their long journeys across the rolling savannahs and through the primeval forests? Who has not listened eagerly, when, seated round the watch-fire, with the calumet to their lips, they have deliberated gravely on peace and war? Who has not seen them with alarm dashing to the combat on their nimble chargers, brandishing the tomahawk and scalping their conquered victims, whose scalps they hung up in their wigwams as trophies to their prowess? Who has not followed them breathlessly when on the trail of a flying foe, or winding serpent-like through the thick brush-wood in escape from some persistent pursuer? Assuredly these men were well worthy of study; and it is impossible to peruse their history or the narrative of their adventures without a breathless interest. There was poetry in their faith, in their customs, in their language at once laconic and picturesque, and even in the names which they bestowed on each tribe, each chief, each warrior. One can hardly suppress a feeling of regret that so much wild romance should have been swept from the face of the earth, unless we call to mind the shadows of the picture—the Indian’s cruelty, perfidiousness, and savage lust. Even then our humanity revolts from the treatment to which he has been subjected by the “white man.” Tracked and hunted like wild beasts, driven back from one hunting-ground to another, embruted by misery or drunkenness, incapable of labour, the poor Indians have vainly struggled against the all-devouring influence of a civilization without bowels, ill adapted to attract and persuade them, and far less solicitous to assimilate than to destroy them. The great nations which were formerly the valued allies or dreaded enemies of the European settlers, the Hurons, Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Natchez, the Leni-Lenapes, have entirely disappeared. The wrecks of other but less important nations still exist on the shores of the great northern lakes, in the Far West, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, in California, in Texas, in Arkansas, and in the northern provinces and deserts of Mexico. Such are the Sioux, the Dacotahs, the Flatheads, the Big-Bellies, the Blackfoot, the Apaches, the Comanches. The two latter people have, above all, preserved a certain vitality. Their characteristics, it is said, are very diverse. The Comanches are of a mild, gentle nature, and eager to live on peaceable terms with the Whites. The Apaches, on the contrary, have vowed a relentless hatred against the Pale Faces; they are the terror of the hacienderos[188] and gold-seekers of Upper Mexico, and the American journals frequently contain accounts of their incursions, their acts of brigandage, and cruelty.
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Indian Women of North America.
Indian Women of North America.
The most characteristic features of the Red Skin type are, in addition to the colour of the skin and the pyramidal form of the head, the prominency and arched outline of the nose, the greatness of the nasal openings, corresponding to a singular development of the olfactory nerve, and the absence of beard. Several tribes subject the head of the new-born to a systematic mis-shapement by compressing it. Hence has arisen the nickname of Flat-heads, popularly bestowed on the Choctaws. The same custom existed among the Atacapas, the Creeks, the Muskogis, and the Catawhas, and is found among most tribes of the Californian stock.
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The Apaches attacking an Emigrant Train.
The Apaches attacking an Emigrant Train.
The peoples who have alternately dominated in Mexico and Central America, and who are now in great part destroyed—the Chichinequas, the Toltequas, and the Aztecs—are allied to the Red Man by their physical peculiarities as well as by their moral characteristics. The comparatively advanced civilization which the Spanish conquerors found established in Mexico had not effaced among the Indians the sanguinary instincts and vindictive propensities of their savage ancestors.
The race, or rather races which people South America are very far from offering the same homogeneity as the populations of North America. These races are four in number, each of which may be subdivided into several distinct branches.
The Guarani, or Carib race, formerly occupied the Antilles, and on the mainland extended as far as Paraguay. It is principally distinguished by the yellow colour of its skin, by the rounded contour of its visage, by the flatness of the nose, and the oblique disposition of the eyes. It comprises three branches: that of the Caribs properly so called, that of the Guaranis, and that of the Botocoudos.
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Guarani Indians (South America).
Guarani Indians (South America).
The Caribs, whose name has become in our common parlance a synonyme with cannibal, formed at the epoch of the discovery of the New World the anthropophagic population of the islands of the Mexican Gulf. To-day, however, it is completely annihilated; but a few scattered offshoots of the same race inhabit the banks of the Orinoco. The Caribs are tall and robust, and are included among the most ferocious tribes of South America.
The Guaranis, in their physiognomy, the colour of their skin, and their manners, approximate closely to the Red Skins. They show the same love of independence and the same antipathy to the trammels of civilization. They are dispersed in the Brazilian forests, and principally in the province of Maranhao or Maragnan.
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Patagonians.
Patagonians.
The Botocoudos are the least intelligent scions of the Brazilo-Guarani branch. So great is the resemblance between their features and those of the Chinese, that Auguste St. Hilaire relates that the Botocoudos, having encountered some natives of “the Celestial Empire” in a part of Brazil, joyously saluted them with all kinds of amicable demonstrations, and christened them “their uncles.”
The Pampas Indians form a mass of tribes dwelling east of the great Cordillera range, from the river Paraguay to the extreme south of the continent. Most of these tribes are nomades; but, thanks to the persevering efforts of the Roman Catholic missionaries, they have attained a certain degree of civilization. Their type varies according to the climate of the country which they inhabit, and according to their mode of life. In general they have a large head, flat on the top, with small eyes, a big nose, large mouth, and thick lips. They are tall in stature, and robust-limbed. To this group belong the Patagonians, who wander, almost constantly on horseback, over the grassy Pampas of the southern extremity of the continent, where they depasture immense herds of cattle. Former travellers represented the Patagonians as giants upwards of six and seven feet high, and wonderful accounts of them figure in the pages of Drake, Cavendish, and the early navigators. But these are violent exaggerations. The Patagonians are certainly tall and athletic, but their stature does not exceed that of most Europeans, and assuredly not that of the corps d’élite of the armies of England, France, Prussia, and Austria. Their arms and legs are very long. Their forehead is exceedingly low; the eyes are sunken; the nose, very thin at the root, widens greatly at the base; the lips are very thick; the complexion is of a reddish-brown tint. They suffer their long black rough hair to grow unchecked, and to fall over the face in “admired disorder.” Their manners are fierce, brutal, and intractable. The Chiquitos, who inhabit a wooded and well-watered country, lead a more sedentary and social life; they have embraced Christianity, and dwell on friendly terms with the Whites. The Tohas, nomades like the Patagonians, form a still numerous nation. Their skin is copper-hued, but they have straight eyes, an aquiline nose, a free and haughty physiognomy.
The Ando-Peruvian race inhabits the forests which clothe the plateau on the eastern slope of the Andes. It is characterized by an olive tint, a medium height, a receding forehead, and horizontal eyes. The Aymaras and the Quichuas are its principal representatives. The latter, according to Orbigny, do not the least resemble the Caribs or the Pampas Indians, and approximate much nearer to the Mexicans. Their head is large, oblong from front to back; the forehead low and receding, the face broad, the nose prominent and aquiline, the mouth large, the chin small, but not retreating. They had attained, at the time of the Spanish invasion, an elevated degree of civilization. They support with difficulty the yoke of the stranger, and the melancholy with which the remembrance of their past greatness inspires them—the recollection of their vanished independence—is reflected in their grave physiognomy and the sombre and mistrustful expression of their gaze.
The fourth South American race may be considered as a more southernly expansion of the preceding. Ethnologists designate it the Araucanian. The region which it occupies stretches from the 30th parallel of south latitude to the vicinity of Tierra del Fuego. The Araucanians properly so called form three tribes—that of the Ranquels, the Huilliches, and the Aucas. They are warriors and nomades. It was in Araucania that a French adventurer, some few years ago, was declared king under the title of Orélie Antoine I. Overthrown and captured by the Chilian Government, with whom he had embroiled himself in hostilities, he succeeded in effecting his escape and returning to Europe, where his adventures became a “nine days’ wonder.”
To the Araucanian branch belong the Pécherais, an ichthyophagous tribe of Tierra del Fuego.
The natives of these islands, says Admiral Wilkes,[189] are not more than five feet high, of a light copper colour, which is much concealed by smut and dirt, particularly on their faces, which they mark vertically with charcoal. They have short faces, narrow foreheads, and high cheek-bones. Their eyes are small and usually black, the upper lids in the inner corner overlapping the under one, and bear a strong resemblance to those of the Chinese. The nose is broad and flat, with wide-spread nostrils, mouth large, teeth white, large, and regular. The hair is long, lank, and black, hanging over the face, and is covered with white ashes, which give them a hideous appearance. The whole face is compressed. Their bodies are remarkable from the great development of the chest, shoulders, and vertebral column; their arms are long, and out of proportion; their legs small, and ill-made. There is, in fact, little difference between the size of the ankle and the leg; and, when standing, the skin at the knee hangs in a large loose fold. In some individuals the muscles of the leg appear almost wanting, and possess very little strength. This want of muscular development is owing to their constant sitting posture, both in their huts and canoes. Their skin is sensibly colder than ours. It is impossible to fancy anything in human nature more filthy. They are an ill-shapen and ugly race.
The Pecherais build their huts on the shore of boughs or small trees planted in the earth, their tops woven together, and roofed with grass or bark. Circular in form, they have generally a diameter of seven to eight feet, and measure four or five feet in height, with an oval aperture to serve for an entrance. The fire is built up in a central excavation in the clay floor. The sole, or at all events the principal, food of this people is shell-fish. They strike the fish, or defend themselves, with rudely-fashioned spears and slings. The women generally paddle the canoes.
We also encounter, in the southern provinces of America, in the midst of the copper-coloured races of whom I have already spoken, a group of Indians, almost black, whom Prichard, the illustrious ethnologist, has designated the Mediterranean, and whose features recall in a striking manner those of some of the Californian tribes. Is this resemblance a sign of the close relationship existing between two peoples placed, as it were, at the two extremities of the world? We can hardly admit the supposition. It seems more probable that it results from the analogy of the climates, and perhaps still more surely from that of the soils, which appear to exercise a mysterious but a powerful influence upon the modification of species and races.
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IN countries which enjoy an always elevated temperature, the excess of their fertility is not much more favourable than extreme dryness to the material and moral development of man. There can be no doubt that the exuberant vegetation is a potent cause of the insalubrity of the atmosphere. And thus it comes that civilization, commerce, industry, labour, have only been able to establish themselves and to make any considerable progress in temperate or even cold countries, where man has found a climate more healthy, but at the same time sufficiently unequal, and often sufficiently inclement, to compel him to defend himself by various means against the rigour of the atmosphere, and a soil capable of furnishing him abundantly with the products necessary for his wants, but on the condition that he gains them by intelligent and persistent toil—by the “sweat of his brow.”
When we arrive under a latitude or a thermometrical mean which exceeds by some degrees that of England or France, we find the inhabitants giving way to sloth and indolence; their manners are at once softer and yet fiercer, their passions more violent and their tastes more fertile; arts and poesy occupy them to the neglect of the exact sciences; industry and commerce languish, agriculture is despised. But if, on the contrary, we proceed towards the north, we discover a greater degree of civilization, a warmer devotion to labour. The most industrious peoples of the world, the English and the Dutch, inherit a cold, humid, and even foggy atmosphere. In Canada and the northernmost States of the American Union, the Anglo-Saxon race has lost nothing of its laborious habits and its enterprising audacity. In Sweden and in Norway, in Russia, even in Siberia, the traveller meets with towns and villages in a flourishing condition up to the 60th parallel of north latitude and beyond, under a climate whose mean annual temperature is inferior to the mean winter temperature of France, and where the thermometer frequently descends in winter below—40° R. Thus, then, we see that the warm bland tropical air enervates the mind as well as the body, while the cold of the north seems to increase their energy. It is also true that cold climates, all things considered, are healthier than hot countries, where disease is more rapid and fatal in its inroads; and that, finally, civilization furnishes man with the means of protecting himself against the injurious effects of a very low temperature, while it leaves him without defence against those of excessive heat. We shall see hereafter that the human organism modifies itself, in the Polar regions, in such a manner as to support, without too great suffering, a degree of cold which at the outset it appears to us must be absolutely intolerable.
We may place between the isothermal lines of +5° and of 0° the limit where commences the territory which, in the northern hemisphere, merits the name of the Region of the Polar Deserts. Already, in effect, under this glacial latitude, the landscape assumes a sombre and desolate aspect, which seems to indicate the propinquity of the “funereal glaciers” of the Pole. The daring traveller who beards the Winter-king in his own realms meets no more with massive and lofty mountain-crests; a few only of the great chains of Europe and Asia—here the Scandinavian Alps, there the Oural Mountains; still further, at the easternmost extremity of Asia, some scattered summits, which we may consider as belonging to the elevation of the Altai, prolong even to the Arctic shores their cantled and snow-shrouded peaks. Everywhere, also, immense steppes, intersected by swamps and relieved with woods of fir and birch, spread for leagues upon leagues in the dull light of a wintry sky, until they merge into those rent and rocky plains, bare of all vegetation except a few lichens and mosses, which are almost always encrusted in glittering snow and ice, and mingle in the distance with the frost-bound waters of the Arctic Sea.
It is in America that these icy deserts are most extensive; not only because that continent stretches much nearer the Pole than does the Old World, but because, owing to its geographical disposition and geological structure, it is much more exposed, even towards the south, to that combined action of the atmosphere, land, and water, whose effects constitute the Arctic climate.[190]
This climate, then, prevails over nearly the whole of Danish America, the recently-acquired possessions of the United States, the Hudson’s Bay Territory, and Labrador, down to that inconsiderable watershed which separates from the tributaries of Hudson’s Bay, the three basins of the St. Lawrence, the five great lakes, and the Mississippi. This line of watershed undulates between the 52nd and 49th parallel of latitude, from Belle-Isle Strait to the sources of the Saskatchewan, in the Rocky Mountains, where it inflects towards the Pacific Ocean, skirting on the north the basin of the Columbia.
“Thus circumscribed on the side of the south,” say Messieurs Hervé and F. de Lanoye,[191] “the Arctic lands of America, including the archipelagoes of the north and north-east, cannot measure less than 560,000 square leagues. They therefore greatly exceed in superficies the mass of the European lands, estimated at about 490,000 square leagues.”
The same authors divide the Arctic lands into three regions, of which one—they name it “the Province of the North-West”—belongs rather to those undulating Prairies described in Book III. than to the Polar Deserts. The two others are the “Middle or Wooded Region,” and the “Barren Landes.” The Wooded Region comprehends the basins of the Upper Mackenzie, the Churchill, the Nelson, and the Severn. Hudson’s Bay cuts into it on the east with its deep anfractuosities. The navigation of this Mediterranean of the North, open to the currents and to the drift of the Polar ices, begins only in the month of June, to close in that of September; yet in this interval the obstruction of the ices is so great that it occupies a stout vessel two months to traverse the diameter of the bay. Along the littoral of this sea the soil never thaws below the surface, and it often freezes on the very surface in the middle of summer.
Like a fierce and despotic tyrant does Winter reign on these shores for from eight to nine months. From the end of September the earth, the rivers which flow into the bay, their affluents, and the chaplet of lakes which connect them with one another, all disappear under a layer of hoar-frost. “The provinces of New Wales and of Maine do not enjoy for a longer period than three months the temperature of +11° (centigrades), necessary for the development of vegetation. The southern shores of the Great Bear and Slave Lakes possess that temperature for only two months at the most.” It is not until the month of May that the thermometer rises ever so little above zero in the Wooded Region, and that a breath of life passes into the plants. Then only the reddish shoots of the willows, the poplar trees, and the birches attire themselves in their long cottony pods; the thickets grow green; the dandelion, the burdock, and the saxifrages flourish at the foot of the rocks; then the sweet-brier, the gooseberry, and the strawberry put forth their fruity burden; and above these dwarf shrubs the pines, the larches, the thuyas display all the luxury of their sombre verdure. But at the same time the melted snows have transformed the soil, recently so hard and polished like marble, into peaty bogs, where myriads of mosquitoes swarm—an intolerable scourge, which the traveller can only escape by surrounding himself with clouds of smoke.
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THE DESERT OF ICE (ARCTIC POLE).
THE DESERT OF ICE (ARCTIC POLE).
The commencement of the region of “Barren Landes” is marked by a line drawn from the mouth of the Churchill in Hudson’s Bay to Mount St. Elias on the Pacific coast, and passing by the southern shores of the Bear and the Slave Lakes. To the north of this region it loses itself in the eternal ices, with the last shores of the Parry Archipelago; to the east and to the north-east, the conformity of the soil and the identity of the climate include within it the greatest part of Labrador and all Greenland, from which it is only separated accidentally by the breaking up of the ices which constantly solidify Baffin’s Bay, and renders so difficult, in those districts, the distinction between land and water. “In these vast countries,” say the writers already quoted, “the primitive crust of the globe preserves still the chaotic character which it assumed at the moment that its fluid elements congealed. Except at the bottom of the ravines and hollows, where each winter’s thaw has accumulated long tracts of moss and the wrecks of dwarf willows—the embryo vegetation of the Polar clime—the slow action of the ages has nowhere oxidized this rough rude surface to the extent of clothing with a layer of mould its abrupt nakedness. There no transitionary stratum extends between the primeval granite and the erupted rocks. There, prolonged chains of trachyte, and gigantic causeways of basalt, display again their strata as regular, their ridges as keen, their rents as deep, as on the morrow of that day when they emerged from the original chaos. At a great number of points, as at the bottom of Repulse Bay and in the interior of Melville Island, whole skeletons of whales elevated from the depths of ocean, with the submarine layer wherein death had ensepulchred them, have not received in all the ages that have passed by since their exposure to the day any other shroud than the snows of successive winters, which, melting before the suns of successive summers, annually uncovers their whitened bones, irrefragable proofs of a great geological law.”
In Asia, the isothermal line of 0° descends even towards the 55th parallel of latitude—that is to say, a little lower than in America; but beyond this line we meet again, as I have already said, with towns of some importance, such as Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, in lat. 58° 11´ north; Irkutsk, in lat. 58° 16´ north; and Iakutsk, in lat. 62°. All this northern part of Siberia is only distinguished by the greater rigour of its climate, and by a more and more scanty vegetation from the great Steppes, of which it is the continuation. However, the north-eastern extremity, comprising the peninsula of Kamtschatka, bristles with volcanic mountains which still exhibit some craters in activity, notably those of Avatcha and Klioutchevskoï, or Klutschew. The latter belches forth its fires from one of the loftiest summits of the globe.
In Continental Europe, the only Polar Lands, properly so called, are Russian Lapland and the deeply-indented coast of Northern Russia. To the north of the most advanced point of that coast, and separated from the continent by a narrow arm of the sea, lie three almost contiguous islands, which form Nova Zembla (lat. 68° 50´ to 76° north); desert islands, inhabited by a few fishermen, and containing a few vegetables and animals. The western side of the group is traversed by a mountain-range 2000 feet in height. Finally, almost in the centre of the Frozen Sea, and at nearly equal distances from the Old and the New World, rises the gloomy archipelago of Spitzbergen (that is, the Peaked Mountains), first visited by Barentz in 1596, and lying between the parallels of 77° and 81°, and the meridians of 10° and 24° east of Greenwich. Their summits, I need hardly tell you, are shrouded in eternal ice and snow, and separated by narrow valleys, or rather ravines, mostly occupied with those slowly-moving ice-rivers called glaciers. The surrounding seas swarm with fish, and the frozen wastes of the islands are haunted by the Arctic fox, the reindeer, and the white bear. The walrus and the seal live upon their shores, which bristle everywhere with lofty granitic rocks, and glaciers that plunge down into the very waters. Their extremities are constantly throwing off huge masses of ice, which float out to sea, and in the shape of icebergs appal and threaten the mariner. Except during a brief interval of summer, the access to Spitzbergen is barred by a formidable barrier of ice, and the channels between the different islands are so blocked up by the same material, that it was long doubted whether Spitzbergen was not one large island deeply fissured and intersected by creek and gulf. It is wholly uninhabited, but the voyager landing at certain points of the coast—in Madeleine Bay, for example—treads at every step upon human bones thickly scattered over the snow, pell-mell with the bones of bears and seals, and upon the ghastly memorials of empty or half-open coffins. These are the remains, the last relics, of unfortunate seamen slain by cold and hunger in these desolate regions. For want of strength to dig decent graves, on account of the thickness of the ice, the survivors load the coffins with pieces of rock to act as a rampart against the wild beasts. But “the great man in a pelisse,” as the Norwegian hunters denominate the white bear, has stout arms, and, impelled by famine, he frequently succeeds in displacing the stones, and making a hideous banquet off the frozen bodies.
The very ocean which washes this gloomy coast shows us the Arctic Desert under a form which is at once more imposing, more majestic, and more terrible. On its surface float vast fields, mountains, and banks of ice, far more formidable to the mariner than the typhoons and cyclones of the Torrid Zone. These floating ice-mountains proceed, as I have said, from the terrestrial glaciers which, in these latitudes, descend to the margin of the sea, frequently project a considerable distance beyond the coast, and, loosened by their own weight or by the incessant clash and collision of the waves, splinter into enormous fragments. Hence it is that their ice, when liquefied, supplies a fresh, sweet, and wholesome water for drinking purposes. Their outlines are of the most fantastic, and often of the most beautiful character; old ruined keeps of Norman castles, long lines of frowning battlements, minarets and domes of Moorish mosques, and the tapering spires, arched roofs, and flying buttresses of mediæval cathedrals. Lit up by the radiance of an Arctic sun, they wear a most singular and weird beauty, and probably the time may come when the artist will gain that inspiration from their sublime or graceful shapes which he now seeks in the forest, on the sea-shore, or in the pine-clad mountain-glen.
Masses of ice rise every year from the bosom, so to speak, of the Polar Sea, and accumulating together, and with the ruins of half-dissolved icebergs, gradually develop into immense ice-fields, which have often an area of several thousand square yards. Their thickness varies, but is always considerably inferior to that of the icebergs. It is not uncommon, however, for them to attain an elevation of 300 feet, and you can form an idea of their gigantic dimensions by recollecting that the submerged portion will be from four to eight times the height of that which rises above the waves. During the winter, mountains and fields of ice congeal together in such wise as to spread over the ocean a compact and impenetrable crust, an immense desert of snow, broken up by walls and columns—I should rather say, by monuments—of fantastic design, whose radiant glittering surfaces reflect in changing lights of amethyst, azure, vermilion, gold, and emerald, the wondrous fires of the northern auroras. When, after a long absence, the sun returns to dart obliquely his rays upon the Pole, all this crust splits up and becomes dislocated; the confusion spreads; the ocean-currents carry off to sea the blocks and floes of ice which roll, and glide, and chase, and cross each other, hurtling together in an indescribable mêlée, and with a fearful tempest of sounds!
This is not the place to speak of the dangers which beset the seaman who dares to penetrate into the silent recesses of the Polar Seas. And, indeed, a tale so often told would have little interest for the English reader, who cannot fail to be familiar with the adventures of the Arctic explorers, from Hudson to M‘Clure, through the long list of honoured and immortal names—Parry, Ross, Franklin, Scoresby, Davis, M‘Clintock, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Too many, alas! have fallen victims to their heroic courage, and the most fortunate have not returned in safety without accomplishing prodigies of valour and energy, without undergoing the severest privations and most terrible sufferings.