Among the peoples of prodigy there were races without deformity and yet set apart from other men by their peculiar habits or habitat, or, as in the case of the giants of geography, by their unusual stature. Men who dwelt in caves or whose diet was too much unlike their fellows’ were themes of marvel. Under fables told about them the outlines of historical peoples may often be discerned.
While the tall men merge on the one side into the colossal creatures of mythology, on the other they approach mortal size and the human quality. Their tradition has been shaped by nature myths growing out of volcanic eruptions, the phenomena of frost and darkness, and storms in the desert. But popular beliefs rest mainly on more tangible things—on the argument that since there are giant individuals there may well be giant races; on the actual existence of tall races; on the presumption that men of old time were taller than those of to-day; on dim memories of tall vanished races such as the Cromagnous, and on an ancient notion that the fossil remains of extinct animals were the bones of giants. Travelers have done much to build the legend. Almost always they underestimate the mean stature of a people with many small individuals and overestimate that of a people with many tall individuals, the usual margin of error running from two to four inches.
Above all, there has been the witness of geological strata uncovered to eyes that misread their record. On the basis of a five-pound tooth and an eleven-foot thigh bone, found in New England in 1712 and supposed to have been a mastodon’s, Increase Mather reported to the Royal Society of London that men of prodigious stature had inhabited the New World. Other fossil bones found in Switzerland in 1577 became the basis of a legend, which is commemorated in the colossal statues of Basle and in the figures supporting the arms of Lucerne, that a race of giants from sixteen to nineteen feet high lived in the Alps.
Ctesias reported that the Seres, whom he located in upper India, reached a stature of fourteen feet and an age of two hundred years. Onesicritus declared that in those parts of India where the sun cast no shadow the men were eight feet high. But ancient writers were neither so specific nor so insistent upon the existence of a colossal race as later writers have been. Near the Vale Perilous, says Maundeville, are two islands occupied by giants. The tenants of the first of these are of comparatively modest stature, from twenty-eight to thirty feet. Those of the farther isle are from forty-five to fifty feet.
“I saw none of these,” admits Sir John, “for I had no Lust to go to those Parts. But men have seen many times those Giants take Men in the Sea out of their Ships, and bring them to Land, two in one Hand and two in another, eating them going, all raw and all alive.”
Amerigo Vespucci found a prodigious people in the island of Curaçoa off the coast of Venezuela, “every woman appearing as a Penthesilea, and every man an Antæus.” Pigafetta, writing of Magellan’s cruise, is responsible for the belief, long held in Europe, that the tall Patagonians were true Titans. One of them he pictures as advancing to greet the white men, dancing and singing and putting dust on his head, as if in token of peace. The savage towered above the Spaniards, who came only to his waist. Dismissed with gifts, he returned at length with other men of a like stature, and two of these the mariners decoyed on shipboard. Leg irons were placed on them on the pretext that they were ornaments, but when the Spanish purpose was disclosed they broke in pieces as easily as if they were the baubles they were represented to be.
Herrera, Van Noort, Le Maire and other travelers confirmed the account of the size of the antipodal Indians. Lopez Vaz described them as “very mightie men of bodie of ten or eleven foot high, and good bow-men, but no man-eaters.” It remained for Drake to correct report when he made his own circumnavigation of the globe. This was one of the “notorious lies” which the Spaniards disseminated; the Patagonians were “but of the height of Englishmen”; they are, however, somewhat above it. Five feet eleven inches is the average among them and individuals reach the height of six feet seven.
At the other extremity of South America the natives of the northern Andes have a legend of a monstrous race that arrived in huge boats at Cape Santa Elena about the beginning of the Christian era. Their knees stood as high as the heads of other men and their eyes were like small plates. They abused the Indians, their habits were abominable, and fire from heaven destroyed them. This is perhaps a reminiscence of an extinct civilization, the grotesque art of which has been brought to light by recent excavations. There is an Oregon tradition of an underground village of gigantic Indians on Coos Bay. They bashed each other over the head with heavy bone knives without being hurt. When the smaller Indians attacked them they fled down the river and out to sea on two rafts and never came back.
Buffon, who would not credit the pygmies, believed there had been giants of from ten to perhaps fifteen feet in height. The Bible narrative giving Goliath, the Philistine bravo, the stature of six cubits and a span, or three inches above seven feet, is conservatively phrased. Buffon to the contrary notwithstanding, it is generally thought that no man ever lived who reached the stature of ten feet, and no race that reached the mean stature of seven. A very few individuals have exceeded the height of eight feet and there is record of one or two who have passed nine feet. According to the principles governing the distribution of the overlarge individuals of a race, as worked out by Quetelet, the appearance of a twenty-foot giant would imply the existence of a race with a mean stature of from twelve to fourteen feet.
If there was once a race a foot or so above the stature of modern man, it may be that the tall individuals who appear in each generation are not the product of a favorable environment and fortunate combination of elemental forces, but represent remote ancestors of unusual size. Zell in his Polyphem ein Gorilla argues that if races of average height are the normal, and if there are dwarf races, then there must have been giant ones to strike the balance. At any rate, tales of such races are world-wide and a tang as of reality is in some of them. The Celt, for example, said that giants had a strong body odor. “Giants,” says Grimm in his summary of their tradition, “consider themselves the old masters of the land, live up in the castle, and look down upon the peasant;” the picture might be of something fabled, or of something vanished.
The Macrobians
As report gave certain races a great stature, so it gave others a great age. These were known as the Macrobians. Herodotus mentions such a people in Ethiopia; “the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,” Walt Whitman calls them. Such also were the Hyperboreans, on the other side of the north wind. The tall Seres lived to be two hundred years old. In tropical India another tall race lived to the age of one hundred and thirty years, and died just as if they were in the middle period of life. Some writers called the elderly Indians Gymnetæ, or Naked Folk. Another Indian people, the Cyrni, were reported to attain four hundred years. Holding that the Indians were exceedingly just, and that the just are long lived, the ancients credited the general statement of Ctesias that the nations of the Indus live to one hundred twenty, one hundred thirty, and one hundred fifty years, and the very old to two hundred years. Pliny adds that they never expectorate and are subject to no pains in the head, teeth, or eyes. There were Macrobians in Brazil. A German woodcut of 1505 pictures them at a cannibal feast, and the accompanying legend says, “They become a hundred and fifty years old, and have no government.”
There was a reason, named by Isogonus, for the longevity of the inhabitants of Mount Athos in the Balkans. They used the flesh of vipers for food, and hence were “free from all noxious animals both in their hair and their garments.”
Albinos
The Albania of the ancients was a country of Asia in the eastern part of the Caucasus. Somehow the early writers confused its inhabitants, the Alani, with Albinos. Beeton says that there is in Albania “a certain race of men whose eyes are of a sea-green color, who have white hair from childhood, and who see better by night than by day.” In the kingdom that men call Mancy in “Ind the More,” says Maundeville, “they be full fair Folk, but they be all pale. And the Men have thin Beards and few Hairs, but they be long. In that Land be many fairer Women than in any other Country beyond the Sea, and therefore Men call that Land Albany.” Also, the hens are white.
Sun-hating Folk
There were sun-haters as well as sun-worshipers in the sun-smitten lands of the older day. Carpini tells of the troglodytes of the Caucasus who “lived in terror of the mysterious and fatal sound which accompanied the rising of the sun.” Herodotus and Pliny describe the Moroccan peoples called the Atlantes. When they look upon the rising and the setting sun they “utter direful imprecations against it as being fatal to themselves and their lands.” If one believes what is said of these tribes beside the western sea, says Pliny, they have lost all characteristics of humanity. They do not distinguish one another by names, “nor are they visited with dreams, like the rest of mortals.”
A Poisonous Nation
The Psylli were a nation dwelling near the Great Syrtis on the North African coast. Pliny, who sponsors them and says they were exterminated by the Nasamonians, tells a story which reveals the two great obsessions of the ancients—a curious credulity as to poisons, and an incredulous curiosity as to the continence of women. In the bodies of the Psylli, there was by nature a certain kind of poison that was fatal to serpents and the odor of which rendered them instantly torpid. It was the custom to expose newly born infants to the fiercest serpents “and in this manner to make proof of the fidelity of their wives, the serpents not being repelled by such children as were the offspring of adultery.”
The Troglodytes
What the moderns call cave-men the ancients called troglodytes. In the phrase of Æschylus they knew not how to build a house against the sun, but “lived like silly ants, beneath the ground, in hollow caves unsunned.” Because they shared the habitations of bats and snakes, their voices were bat-like in their shrillness, and with hissing tones; and they ate reptiles and crickets. They were fleet-footed like the creatures of the rocks, the troglodyte Ethiopians being, says Herodotus, the swiftest of men. The inhabitants of the country of the Robbers (Lestai) in Farther Asia, says Ptolemy, were savages, living in caves, and “having skins like the hide of the hippopotamus which darts cannot pierce.” Artemidorus speaks of naked night-traveling troglodytes of Arabia who put away their dead amid laughter. There are cave-dwellers to this day in southern Cambodia, and a Chinese account of the thirteenth century tells of the skin breastplates which they wore.
The ancients knew of various races of troglodytes, notably those along both shores of the Red Sea. Others were in Syria, and upon the Nile, and in Fezzan, and in the Caucasus. The voiceless troglodytes of Pliny are supposed to be the Rock Tibboos on whose whistling speech their neighbors still comment. The best account of the elder cave-dwellers happens to be authentic history. When Xenophon was retreating with the Ten Thousand to the Black Sea he found upon the Armenian frontier a people who lived in underground burrows with vertical entrances like wells, up and down which they passed on ladders. Their beasts used a sloping path and lived with them underground, cattle, goats, and sheep thriving there on green fodder gathered above. These subterranean habitations were also granaries and wine-cellars.
With all their lively interest in the ways of troglodytes, the ancients knew less than the moderns about them, and were perhaps farther in spirit from the cave-man. In the caverns of western Europe men of to-day have studied his household economy, his art, and the animals he tamed or hunted. Travelers in various lands have come upon underground chambers, many of them still occupied. In the Berber rock-towns these subterranean dwellings number thousands, and the ravines which furrow the plateaus serve as their streets. On the Cappadocian plain deserted subterranean villages, called kataphugia, or places of refuge, underlie occupied villages of the surface, and thither the cattle descend in severe weather, as in Xenophon’s time twenty-three centuries ago. The peoples of the surface are supposed to be descendants of true troglodytes.
The Anthropophagi
It never occurred to the early writers to classify men according to the color of their skins, or the breadth of their skulls, or fundamental differences in their languages; and the Greeks and Romans were ignorant of the Noachian genealogy and heedless of the apportionment of the earth among the sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth. But they had a rough-and-ready method of cataloguing savage races according to what they ate, in the thought that whatsoever a man ate, that in some degree he became. After naming the races of fable from the size of their feet or ears or other bodily peculiarity, they grouped and named, according to their supposed diet, various races of reality that dwelt at a distance.
Classic writers took passing note of the Anthropophagi, or tribes that ate human flesh. There were such peoples in Africa and in Asia. The best known account is the description in Herodotus of the Issedones. These Scythians of Central Asia ate the flesh of their deceased relatives prepared with other meat, and made gold-rimmed drinking cups of their skulls—a rite of honor to the dead. A tribe in northern Tibet is supposed to be descended from them.
The Ichthyophagi
The races that subsisted on fish, the Ichthyophagi, were described by the ancients with unusual detail. One of the first accounts is by Herodotus, who tells of the folk that lived on platforms above Lake Prasias. They drew their fish through trap-doors from the water beneath, and the custom was that for every woman a man took to wife he drove three piles into the lake.
All along the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea there were tribes of Ichthyophagi. Their very cattle ate dried fish and the beef had a fishy flavor; Ibn Batuta remarked this in Yemen, and it is still true of the Coromandel Coast. Arrian’s account of the voyage of Nearchus describes the Ichthyophagi as occupying for four hundred miles the barren shores of the Mekran; they had few boats and were indifferent fishermen, but by intercepting the ebb tide with palm-bark nets they obtained their food.
Arrian repeats a legend of the origin of these tribes in whose lines one hears faintly the wild music of the Sirens. The island of Nosala, off the Mekran coast, was the residence of a Nereid “whose practice was to seduce such mariners as landed there to her embraces, and then, after transforming them into fish, to throw them into the sea.” But the sun ordered the nymph to quit the island and himself changed the fish back into men. These were the first Ichthyophagi.
Farther west, in Ariana, were fish-eating tribes who made their dwellings, Strabo says, of shells and of the bones of large whales, the ribs furnishing the beams and supports, and the jawbones the doorways. Sections of the backbones of whales were used as mortars wherein sun-dried fish were pounded.
Diodorus Siculus has a spirited account of the Ichthyophagi along the Red Sea. This people, he says, do not use nets, but so wall the caverns and gullies of their rocky shore that the receding tide leaves the fish imprisoned there. Whereupon, with a shout, the tribe assembles on the beach. Women and children gather the little fish next the shore; with sharp goats’ horns the men dispatch the larger ones, throwing all upon the land. The booty is put into stone pots tilted toward the south and the fish are fried by the sun until the flesh drops off. The bones are cast into a pile and the meat boiled with fruit seeds. Then everybody falls to and gorges. The heap of bones is a dietary reserve which the tribe pulverizes and devours when storms shut off the shore.
The life of these Ichthyophagi is thrown into a sort of rhythm by the need, every fifth day, of going inland on an extended journey for fresh water. For four days they fish continually and make merry in great throngs, “congratulating one another with harsh and discordant songs; then they fall promiscuously, as every man’s lot chances, to company with their women for procreation sake.” On the fifth day the tribe goes in a body to a district lying under the foot of the mountains where there are springs of sweet water. Hither, also, the shepherds drive the flocks. Nor do the shore folk differ much from the herds, for “they go making a horrid noise and without articulate voice.” Arrived at the springs, they throw themselves on their faces and “drink as beasts until their stomachs are distended like a drum.” Slowly they wend their way back to salt water, and for a day recline without tasting food. The following day they begin anew their fishing and feeding. Such is the round of their lives.
Diodorus remarks, apparently to commend, that these fish-eaters “far exceed all other men in freedom from boisterous passions.” They give no heed to a stranger, nor even look at one when he addresses them: “Nay, if they be assaulted with drawn swords they will not stir; and though they are hurt and wounded, yet they are not in the least provoked. Even though their wives and children be killed before their eyes, they show no sign of anger.”
These accounts are not fables. But there is fabulous admixture, most of it arising from the primitive belief that a fish diet makes men as cool-blooded as the creatures upon which they live.
Other Dietary Nations
Akin to these nations were the Chelonophagi, or turtle-eaters, concerning whom Strabo recites facts entirely in keeping. This tribe lives under the cover of turtle shells, which also it uses as boats. Some of its members, however, collect seaweed in heaps, hollow the heaps, and dwell under them. Their dead are cast into the sea, and carried away by the tide to become food in turn for the fish and turtles.
The Acridophagi were grasshopper-eaters—insectivorous, ornithologists would call them. The locust was, and is, a favorite diet of desert peoples, a staple food of the Arab, as well as of the pygmy folk and other singular breeds. Niebuhr likens its taste to that of “a small sardine of the Baltic, which is dried in some towns of Holstein.” What Dampier has to say of customs he found in two Pacific islands in 1687 may stand without essential change for the ways of earlier acridophagi: “They had another dish made of a sort of locusts, whose bodies are about one and one-half inches long, and as thick as the top of one’s little finger; with large thin wings, and long and small legs. These came in great swarms to devour their potato leaves and other herbs; and the natives would go out with small nets and take a quart at one sweep. When they had enough they would parch them in an earthen pan; and then their wings and legs would fall off, and their heads and backs would turn red like boiled shrimp. Their bodies, being full, would eat very moist, their heads would crackle in one’s teeth. I did once eat of this dish, and like it well enough.”
Certain other races living in Africa the ancients knew chiefly as specialists in diet. Pomponius places the Ophiophagi, or snake-eaters, on the Red Sea. Homer gives the Lotophagi, or lotus-eaters, a habitat on the Mediterranean coast. Agatharcides names the Rhizophagi or root-eaters who dwell on the banks of the Atbara and subsist on reed roots; and the Elephantophagi, farther inland, who hunt and eat the elephant. Also in the interior Diodorus places the ostrich-eating Struthophagi, and there Pliny places the Agriophagi “who live principally on the flesh of panthers and lions,” and the Pamphagi “who will eat anything.”
Geographical Glimpses
The citations below, from classical, mediæval and modern writers, are reproduced because of their flavor and for whatever they are worth:
The Gamphasantes, who go naked, are unacquainted with war and hold no intercourse with strangers.
In the African deserts “men are frequently seen to all appearance and then vanish in an instant,” says Pliny—perhaps the mirage.
“On the one side of the Senegal,” says John Lok, “the inhabitants are of high stature and black, and on the other side of browne or tawnie colour.” The latter are the “tawny Moors” of Prince Henry’s ship captains.
The Annamese of pure stock have a peculiar formation of the great toe whereby they are able to pick up small objects with their prehensile feet, says Keane. Their ancient Chinese name was Giao-chi, which signifies “with the big toe.”
“Many of Canton and Quansi Provinces,” says a Jesuit missionary in Purchas, “on their little toes have two nailes, as they have generally in Cochin-China.”
On the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, says the seventh-century History of the T’ang Dynasty, is a naked swarthy race with red frizzled hair, bestial teeth, and hawk claws who hold their markets at night with veiled faces.
The Korwars of India, according to a local legend, “derive from scarecrows animated by a prowling demon.”
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Because they are recognizable peoples with representatives who may still be studied, the folk of tradition are useful exhibits in the museum of history.