TOOLS.
MAN THE ARTIFICER—THE LAW OF REASON—INDIGENOUS RACES—MAN’S
CAPACITY FOR DETERIORATION—WHAT IS A STONE-PERIOD?—MATERIALS
OF PRIMITIVE ART—SUCCESSION OF RACES—INDICATIONS OF ANCIENT
TRADE—THE SHOSHONE INDIAN—TEXAS IMPLEMENTS—MODES OF HAFTING—
DEER’S-HORN SOCKETS—STONE KNIVES—THLINKETS OF ALASKA—METALS
OF A STONE PERIOD—ARTS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC—MALAYAN INFLUENCE
—FIJIAN CONSTRUCTIVE SKILL—FIJIAN POTTERY—SLOW MATURITY OF
RACES—THE FLINT-EDGED SWORD—THE LEAGUE OF THE FIVE NATIONS—
IROQUOIS PREDOMINANCE—WORK IN OBSIDIAN AND FLINT—HONDURAS
FLINT IMPLEMENTS—SOURCES OF THE MATERIAL—COLLISION OF RACES—
FATE OF INFERIOR RACES.
As the type of oceanic migration, the canoe claims a prominent place
among the primitive arts of man. In it we see the germs of commerce,
maritime enterprise, and much else that is indispensable to any progress
in civilisation. But the primitive ship implies the existence of tools;
and, as we have seen, probably owed its earliest fashioning to the
useful service of fire. Intelligent design was working out the purposes
of reason by processes which, even in their most rudimentary stage,
reveal the characteristics of a new order of life, compared with which
the tool-born ant, the spider, and the bee, seem but as ingenious
self-acting machines, each made to execute perfectly its one little item
in the comprehensive plan of creation.
As industrial artificers, the creatures so far beneath us in the scale
of organisation seem often to put to shame our most perfect workmanship;
yet provided with no other instruments than the eye and the hand, but
guided by that intelligent reason which distinguishes man from the
brutes, we see him, even as an artificer, presenting characteristics
which are altogether wanting in the lower animals. Labour is for them no
sternly imposed necessity, but an inevitable process, having only one
possible form of manifestation; producing in its exercise the highest
enjoyment the labourer is capable of; and in its results leading our
thoughts from the wise, unerring, yet untaught worker, to Him whose work
it is, and of whose wisdom and skill the workmanship, not less than the
workman, appears a direct manifestation. It is not so with man. The
capacity of the workman is a divine gift, but the work is his own, and
too often betrays, in some of its most ingenious devices and results,
anything rather than a divine origin.
If ours be not the latest stage of being, but is to be succeeded by “new
heavens and a new earth,” marvellous indeed are the revelations which
posthistoric strata have yet to disclose. But even they will scarcely
suffice to reveal the most striking characteristics of a being on whom
the economy of nature reacts in a way it never did on living being
before; in whom all external influences are subordinated to an inner
world of thought, by means of which he is capable of searching into the
past, anticipating the future, of looking inward, and being a law unto
himself. His nature embraces possibilities of the widest conceivable
diversity, for his is no longer the law of instinct, but of reason: law,
therefore, that brings with it conscious liberty, and also conscious
responsibility.
But an important and seemingly conflicting element arises out of the
capacity of man for moral progression, to which some ethnologists fail
to give due weight. A suggestive thought of Agassiz, relative to certain
real or supposed analogies between the geographical distribution of
species of simiæ, and especially the anthropoid apes, and certain
inferior types of man, sufficed as the nucleus of Gliddon’s elaborate
monkey-chart, in the _Indigenous Races of the Earth_, illustrative of
the geographical distribution of monkeys in relation to that of certain
types of men. Notwithstanding the very monkeyfying process to which some
of the illustrations of inferior human types have been subjected in this
pictorial chorography, the correspondences are not such as to carry
conviction to most minds. But, assuming, as a supposed _reductio ad
absurdum_, the descent of all the diverse species of monkeys from a
single pair, Mr. Gliddon thus sums up his final observations: “I
propose, therefore, that a male and female pair of the ‘species’
_Cynocephalus Hamadryas_, be henceforward recognised as the anthropoid
analogues of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet; and that it must be from these
two individuals that, owing to transplantation, together with the
combined action of aliment and climate, the fifty-four monkeys
represented on our chart have originated. It is, notwithstanding,
sufficiently strange, that, under such circumstances, this ‘primordial
organic type’ of monkey should have so highly improved in Guinea, and in
Malayana, as to become _gorillas_ and _chimpanzees_, _orangs_ and
_gibbons_; whereas on the contrary, the descendants of ‘Adam and Eve’
have, in the same localities, actually deteriorated into the most
degraded and abject forms of humanity.” In reality, however, whatever
may be said about the possibility of such simian development, possible
human deterioration is an inevitable attribute of the rational, moral
free-agent man: capable of the noblest aspirations and of wondrous
intellectual advancement, but also with a capacity for moral degradation
such as belongs to him alone. The one characteristic, no less than the
other, separates man from all those other living creatures that might
appear in some respects gifted with endowments akin to his own.
Man, as a tool-using artificer, seems to have a rival in the beaver,
felling its timber, carrying its clay, and building its dam; in the
spider weaving its web, more perfect than any net of human fisher; and
even in the squirrel with its provident hoard of well-secured winter
store, or the monkey employing the cocoa-nut and other shell-fruit as
missiles. But in such artificial appliances there is nothing obsolete,
nothing inventive, nothing progressive; whereas the child born amid the
most highly developed civilisation,—the son of a Watt, a Stephenson, a
Brunel,—if reared from infancy to manhood without any knowledge of
mechanical science or the industrial arts, would start anew from the
rudimentary instincts of the tool-using animal, and expend his
ingenuity, not perhaps without some traces of hereditary mechanical
genius, on the primitive materials of flint, stone, horn, or shell.
Man depends for all on his teachers; and when moral and intellectual
deterioration return him to the toolless condition of the uncivilised
nomad, he is thrown back on the resources of his infantile reason and
primary instincts, and reaches that point from which the primeval
colonist has had to start anew in all lands, and work his way upwards,
through stone, and bronze, and iron periods, into the full co-operation
of a civilised community, treasuring the experience of the past, and
making for itself a new and higher future.
The subdivisions of the archæologist designated =The Stone
Period=, THE BRONZE PERIOD, and THE IRON PERIOD, have been brought
into some discredit, in part by what, as a general system, must be
regarded only as a hypothesis, being assumed as involving facts of no
less indisputable and universal application than the periods of the
geologist. In part, also, their non-acceptance is due to wilful errors
of their impugners; and to the want of appreciation of the inevitable
characteristics which pertain to transitional periods, such as chiefly
come under the European archæologist’s observation. So far as the
American Indian is concerned, the New World is in the first transitional
stage still: that of a stone-period, very partially affected by the
introduction of foreign-wrought weapons and implements; and scarcely
indicating, among the numerous tribes of North America, any traces of
the adoption of a superinduced native metallurgy. Such therefore appears
to be a condition of things, the comparison of which with traces of a
corresponding stage in the early ages of Britain, may be of use in
clearing the subject from much confusion.
The special characteristics of the native civilisation which the early
Spanish adventurers found already existing in Mexico and Central
America, will come under review at a later stage; but it cannot admit of
question that throughout the whole Red Indian forest-area metallurgic
arts were unknown, as they still are among the Indians of the North-west
after an intercourse of upwards of three centuries and a half with
Europeans. Copper, indeed, was wrought among them, but it was used
without any application of fire, and as what maybe most fitly designated
a mere malleable stone. In Britain, as I have already observed, “the
working of gold may have preceded the age of bronze, and in reality have
belonged to the Stone Period. If metal could be found capable of being
wrought and fashioned without smelting or moulding, its use was
perfectly compatible with the simple arts of the Stone Period. Masses of
native gold, such as have been often found both in the Old and the New
World, are peculiarly susceptible of similar application by the workers
in stone; and some of the examples of Scottish gold personal ornaments
fully correspond with the probable results of such an anticipatory use
of the metals.”[68] The idea thus formed from an examination of some of
the most artless examples of primeval British goldsmiths’ work, has been
amply confirmed by observing the mode of using the native copper, and
the traces of its former working, among the American Indians. Even now
their highest attainment in metallurgic skill extends only to grinding
the iron hoops with which the Hudson’s Bay fur-traders supply them, into
knives, arrow-heads, and the like substitutes for the older implements
chipped out of flint, or ground from the broken stone. Further
opportunities will occur for illustrating this subject; which is full of
interest to the ethnologist, from the light it throws on the rate of
progress of a barbarous people towards civilisation; or rather on the
capacity of man in a certain undeveloped stage, for witnessing the most
remarkable products of the useful arts, without evincing any desire to
master them.
After centuries devoted to the elucidation of Roman remains, and the
assignment to Roman artificers of much which more discriminating
classification now awards to totally different workmen: the discovery of
weapons and implements of stone, shell, or bone, in nearly every quarter
of the globe, has at length excited a lively interest among the
archæologists of Europe. Made, as these primitive relics are, of the
most readily wrought materials, and by what may be styled the
constructive instincts, rather than the acquired skill of their rude
artificers, they belong to one condition of man, in relation to the
progress of civilisation, though pertaining to many periods of the
world’s history, and to widely separated areas. In one respect, however,
those relics possess a peculiar value to the ethnologist. The materials
employed in their manufacture have within themselves, most frequently,
the evidence of their geographical origin, and in some of them also of
their era. The periods to which numerous European relics pertain may
frequently be determined, like those of older strata, by the
accompanying imbedded or buried fossils. The bones of the _Bos
primigenius_ have been found indented with the stone javelin of the
aborigines of Northern Europe, and dug up even in places of regular
British sepulture. Those of the _Megaceros Hibernicus_ seem, in like
manner, to be traced to a period of ancient Irish colonisation, when
flint-knives and stone hatchets prove the simple character of the native
arts; though even then they furnished the material for constructing one
of the earliest musical instruments. Yet other evidence shows that the
same gigantic Irish deer was contemporary with the woolly rhinoceros,
the mammoth, and the fossil carnivora of the caverns. The _Bos
longifrons_, doubtless, traces its descent from an ancestry not less
ancient; but from its wild herds the native Briton derived his
domesticated cattle, and its most recent relics pertain to an era later
than the Roman times. The ornamented tusks of the wild boar, the bones
of the brown bear, the teeth and skulls of the beaver, carvings wrought
from the walrus ivory, skates formed from the metatarsal and metacarpal
bones of the red-deer and small native horse, with numerous kindred
relics of palæontology within the era of the occupation of the British
Islands by man, all serve to assign approximate dates to the examples of
his ancient arts which they accompany.
Thus within the historic period, as in prior geological eras, the
progress of time is recorded by the extinction of races. The advent of
man was speedily marked by the disappearance of numerous groups of
ancient life which pertain to that transitional era where archæology
begins; though the most recent discoveries of works of art along with
the fossil mammals of the drift, confirm, by new and striking evidence,
the fact that man entered on this terrestrial stage, not as the highest
in an entirely new order of creation, and belonging to an epoch detached
by some overwhelming catastrophe from all preceding periods of organic
life: but as the last and best of an order of animated beings whose line
sweeps back into the shadows of an unmeasured past.
The disclosures of British tumuli, along with rarer chance deposits,
show that the Celtic Briton was an intruder upon older allophylian
occupants; while the presence of the Roman is recorded for us by the
extinction of an ancient fauna, as well as of whole British tribes. What
the Roman partially accomplished, the Saxon, the Dane, and the Norman
completed: displacing the Briton everywhere but from the fastnesses of
Wales; and gradually extirpating all but such animals as are either
compatible with the development of social refinement, or are worthy of
protection as a means of ministering to man’s pleasures. And as it has
been in the Old World, so it is in the New. The progress of the European
colonists not only involves the extirpation alike of the wild animals
and the forests which formed their haunts; but also the no less
inevitable disappearance of the aborigines who made of them a prey. Thus
the grave-mound of the Red Indian, and the relics of his simple arts,
become the memorials of an extinct order of things no less clearly
defined than the post-tertiary fossils of the drift.
But while the remains of extinct species thus serve to determine the
periods at which certain eras had their close, the traces of living or
extinct fauna are no less valuable as fixing the geographical origin of
the ancient colonists, amid whose relics they are found: just as the
elephants, the camels, the monkeys, and baboons of the Nimrod obelisk,
or the corresponding sculptures on the walls of Memphis or Luxor,
indicate the countries whence tribute was brought, or captives were
carried off, to aggrandise their Assyrian or Egyptian conquerors. Among
relics which help to fix the geographical centres of ancient arts, the
sources of early commerce, or the birthplaces of migrating races, might
be noted the tin and amber of the Old, and the copper of the New World.
So also the Mexican obsidian, the clay-slate of Columbia, the favourite
red pipe-stone, or _Catlinite_, of the Couteau des prairies, and the
pyrulæ and conch-shells of the Gulf of Florida, indicate varied sources
of ancient trade or barter, and lines of migration extending over fully
twenty degrees of latitude. Objects wrought in the favourite materials
brought from such remote sources have been found mingling with relics of
ancient tribes in the islands and on the north shores of the great
Canadian lakes, along the southern slope of the same water-shed whence
the Moose and the Abbitibbe pour their waters into the frozen sea of
Hudson’s Bay.
The designation of any primitive stage of industrial arts as a Stone
Period signifies, as has been already sufficiently indicated, that
condition in which, in the absence of metals, and the ignorance of the
simplest rudiments of metallurgy, man has to find materials for the
manufacture of his tools, and the supply of his mechanical requirements,
in the commoner objects which nature places within his reach.
Nothing can well be conceived much more artless than some of the stone
implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Yet it is worthy
of note that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, but in
southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources
for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making are found. In
the report of the United States Geological Survey for 1872, which
embraces Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, Professor Joseph Leidy
furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements of art, rude as
any found in the drift, met by him during a survey of the Bridgers Basin
at the base of the Unitah Mountains, in Southern Wyoming. “In some
places the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so
rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider
them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[69]
But with them are mingled implements of the finest finish. The Shoshones
who haunt the region have no further knowledge of them than is indicated
in their belief that they were a gift of God to their ancestors. But
many are sharp, and fresh in appearance, as if recently worked from the
parent block; and though others are worn, and decomposed on the surface,
Professor Leidy does not assume more than a date of “centuries back” for
the oldest of them. For, indeed, he found that the Shoshone Indians had
in use a stone implement of so simple a character that he says, “had I
not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of
the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I
would have viewed it as an accidental spawl. It consists of a thin
segment of a quartzite boulder, made by striking the stone with a smart
blow. It is called a _teshoa_, and is employed as a scraper in dressing
buffalo skins.” Subsequently he discovered a precisely similar
implement, together with some perforated tusks of the elk, in an ancient
Indian grave.
[Illustration: FIG. 53.—Texas Stone Axe, hafted.]
No such rude implements are found among the productions of the arctic
tool-makers. The necessities of the Esquimaux, in their clothing and
hunting, beget systematic habits of industry and matured skill. The
elaborate decorations of their skin and fur dresses, the carving of
their ivory and bone implements, and the ingenuity lavished upon their
children’s toys, all prove how thoroughly the æsthetic, as well as the
industrial arts, are developed by the stimulus which man’s necessities
create. In Fig. 53, an axe, or war-club, is shown, procured from the
Indians of the Rio Frio, in Texas. The blade is a piece of trachyte, so
rudely chipped that it could scarcely attract attention as having been
subjected to any artificial working, but for the club-like haft into
which it is inserted. I am indebted to Mr. Evans for the use of the
woodcut. He describes the haft as formed of some indigenous wood, which
has evidently been chopped into shape by means of stone tools. Nothing
ruder has been brought to light among the earliest disclosures of drift
or cave deposits. Another Texas implement in the Smithsonian collection
at Washington is a roughly shaped flint blade, which, as shown of the
full size in Fig. 54, closely resembles a familiar class of oval
implements of the river-drift. It is curious, indeed, to note the
undesigned correspondence between the implements of races equally widely
separated by time and space. Several examples of stone celts or hatchets
attached to their handles have been recovered in British and Irish bogs,
and in the submerged lake-dwellings of Switzerland.
[Illustration: FIG. 54.—Texas Flint Implement. (1/1).]
All alike show a wooden haft pierced so as to admit of the insertion of
the stone blade, which must have been secured by a withe or thong
tightly bound round it, according to a fashion still practised in
America, and among the islands of the Pacific. But in spite of this
ligature, the wedge-like form of the axe must have had a tendency to
cleave the haft, and so to loosen its hold. The experience of the
ancient Lake-dwellers led them to counteract this by inserting the stone
blade in a socket of deer’s-horn, the end of which is usually cut into a
squared tenon designed to fit into a mortice in the handle. This must
have accomplished the desired purpose, as examples of such deer’s-horn
sockets are common on the sites of lake-dwellings. During the last visit
of Professor Agassiz to his native Swiss Canton, and the village
parsonage of Concise where his early years were passed, he obtained from
Lake Neuchâtel a valuable collection of stone implements, along with
pottery and other illustrations of the arts and habits of the
Lake-dwellers, already referred to. Some of those are specially
interesting as examples of the mode of hafting implements of flint and
stone.
[Illustration: FIG. 55.—Chisel and deer’s-horn socket, Concise.]
Fig. 55 shows a perforated deer’s-horn socket with a chisel of
greenstone inserted in it. The exposed part of the blade measures nearly
two inches in length. It must have been secured in its haft by a strong
cement, such as some of the Pacific Islanders employ at the present day
in fastening their axe-heads to bone and wooden handles. In some cases a
tine of the deer’s antler has been left so as to form the handle of the
hammer or hatchet. A rare example of this type is described by Dr.
Clement, among numerous varieties recovered from different localities on
Lake Neuchâtel. The horn of the stag was also at times converted into a
formidable weapon by retaining the brow-antler as the offensive weapon,
and detaching the rest, so as to leave only the main portion of the horn
as a handle. Fig. 56, also from Lake Neuchâtel, may be described as a
stone knife. The blade, which is of polished serpentine, measures 3½
inches in the exposed part, and is still secure in its horn haft. In the
collection of Mr. J. H. Blake of Boston are flint implements recovered
from an ancient Peruvian tomb on the Bay of Chacota, attached to their
hafts by a tough green cement.
[Illustration: FIG. 56.—Stone Knife, Concise.]
It is remarkable to notice how rarely the simple process of perforating
the blade for the reception of the handle was resorted to, even where
the workmen were in the habit of perforating both bone and stone
implements for other purposes. This was no doubt partly due to the
frangible character of much of the material in which they wrought; but
even after the primitive metallurgist had mastered the art of alloying
and casting his bronze, it seems to have been long before he learned to
fit a handle to his axe or hammer by perforating the blade or
hammer-head. Some of the most usual modes of attaching the axe or
hatchet to a haft of wood or bone, in use among the islanders of the
Pacific, are shown in a group of implements from the collection of the
Scottish Antiquaries, Fig. 57. They bear a close resemblance to others
described by Mr. William H. Dall as pertaining to the Thlinkets, a coast
tribe of Alaska, not far to the south of Behring’s Strait.[70] But tools
and weapons of stone, as well as of native copper, are already becoming
rare among the tribes of the North Pacific Coast, owing to the
introduction of iron by the Russian and Hudson’s Bay traders. Previous
to this change, the Alaskans knew metal only in the form of cold-wrought
native copper, as among all the native tribes north of the Mexican Gulf.
Such a recognition of some convenient uses to which the malleable native
metals could be applied as substitutes for stone, can scarcely be
regarded as even an initial step in the transition towards the first
true metallurgic period. This cannot be considered to have been
introduced until the native copper-worker had perceived the wonderful
transformations which could be wrought by fire, and had learned at least
to melt the pure metal, and to mould the weapons and implements he
required; if not to harden it with alloys, and to quarry and smelt the
unfamiliar ores. To this stage the savage tribes of the New World have
not even now attained, after intercourse with Europeans for more than
three centuries and a half. There, on the contrary, the Indians, who
originally possessed only weapons, implements, and personal ornaments of
bone, shell, flint, and stone, or at most of native copper rudely
hammered into shape, are still seen after an interval of upwards of
three centuries of European colonisation and traffic, without the
slightest acquired knowledge of working in metals. They do, indeed,
possess numerous metal implements and weapons, which, as their greatest
treasures, they freely lavish on the loved or honoured dead; but such
traces of metallurgy afford no proof of acquired native art. The copper
kettles of the ancient Huron graves on the Georgian Bay, or the Chinook
coffin-biers on the Columbia river, were brought, not from the copper
regions of Lake Superior, but from France, London, or Liverpool, along
with the beads, knives, hatchets, and other objects of barter, by means
of which the fur-traders still carry on their traffic with the Indian
hunter. At most this only proves that a race, still in its stone-period,
and possessing no greater skill than is required to grind an iron hoop
into lance or arrow-heads, has been brought into contact with a
civilised people, familiar with metallurgy and many acquired arts, such
as the musket and the rifle may most aptly symbolise.
[Illustration: FIG. 57.—South Pacific Stone Implements.]
The same diversity of inventive power and artistic skill is discernible
among the Indians of North America as has been already referred to in
comparing the arts of other uncivilised races. In some constructive
skill predominates, while others manifest a peculiar aptitude for
imitative art. The powers of imitation common to the barbarous and the
civilised nations of the New World, are specially worthy of note; and
will again come under review when referring to the pipe manufacture, so
curiously typical of American art. But meanwhile an equally instructive
illustration of what may thus be designated æsthetic and constructive
instincts may be selected from the diversely gifted islanders of the
Southern Pacific. On the extreme western verge of the Polynesian
archipelago lie the Fiji Islands, occupied by a people remarkable among
the islanders of the Pacific alike for physical and intellectual
peculiarities. The Fijian physiognomy is described as presenting general
characteristics of debasement, when compared with that of the true
Polynesian, and the entire proportions and contour of their figure are
markedly inferior to those of the Friendly and Navigator islanders. This
is the more remarkable in a people dwelling in the midst of abundance,
and enjoying an unusual variety of choice articles of food. Their
ferocious and treacherous habits, however, and the hideous customs of
cannibalism and systematic parricide, with attendant crimes inevitable
in such a social condition, have rendered the Fijian Islands, which seem
fitted by nature to be abodes of happiness, among the most wretched
scenes of moral degradation. Nevertheless it is in this strange
island-group that the arts of the South Pacific have their highest
development.
The Papuans, or Negrillos, appear to be the true inventive race, from
whom the Fijians, who are unquestionably allied to them in blood,
acquired, elaborated, and greatly improved many applications of art and
skill. The Papuans of New Caledonia, though superior in physical
characteristics to other islanders of the Negrillo type, present some
curious analogies to the Australian, especially in their mode of
sepulture. Fig. 58 is an example of their ingenuity in adapting a simple
stone chisel to its haft, so as to serve as a boat-carpenter’s adze. But
the ingenious Negrillo is altogether unsocial and prone to isolation,
and the Fijians manifest an equally strong disinclination to leave their
island-home. It required, therefore, the intervention of a migratory or
aggressive race to diffuse their acquired knowledge and skill; and this
is supplied by the Malayans, who are found in contact with many nations,
and are of a roving disposition, the proper children of the sea.
“Naturally,” says Dr. Pickering, “the most amiable of mankind, they are
free from antipathies of race, are fond of novelty, inclined rather to
follow than to lead, and in every respect seem qualified to become a
medium of communication between the different branches of the human
family.” Such an impressible race of mediators being found, a curious
light is thrown on the diffusion of knowledge and the primitive arts
throughout the widely-scattered island groups of the Southern Pacific,
where almost every Polynesian art, it is said, can be distinctly traced
to the Fiji Islands, while the Fijian himself is so averse to roam.
[Illustration: FIG.58.—Stone Adze, New Caledonia.]
Mr. Wallace, in reviewing the races of the Malay archipelago, dwells on
the marked differences, physically, intellectually, and morally, between
the Papuan and the Malay. The central home of the Papuans is New Guinea
and some of the adjacent islands; but the same ethnical characteristics
are traceable over the islands to the east of New Guinea, as far as the
Fijis. “The Papuan,” Mr. Wallace remarks, “has a greater feeling for art
than the Malay. He decorates his canoe, his house, and almost every
domestic utensil, with elaborate carving; a habit which is rarely found
among tribes of the Malay race.” In the affections and moral sentiments,
on the contrary, the Papuans compare unfavourably with the Malays, who
are gentle and passive in all their social relations. But this is
properly traced to their listless, apathetic character; while the vigour
of the uncivilised Papuan manifests itself in the unrestrained display
of every emotion and passion, even among the women and children, and in
violent collisions, inevitable in the social life of this savage race.
Among such a people the best and the worst characteristics are often
strangely intermingled. The Fiji Islanders use the bow and throw the
javelin with great dexterity; but their peculiar and distinguishing
weapon is a short missile club, which all habitually wear stuck in the
belt, the symbolic national instrument of assassination. Many analogies
of history tend, however, to refute the error of assuming the occurrence
of moral degradation, even when manifested in parricide, cannibalism,
and systematic treachery and assassination, to be necessarily
incompatible with such intellectual development as distinguishes the
Fijians from the Malays or other islanders of the Pacific. Of all the
aborigines of the Pacific, the ferocious New Zealander has proved most
capable of civilisation; and is found moreover to possess a traditional
poetry and mythical legends of a highly striking and peculiar character.
And turning from still undeveloped races of the world, we have only to
study deeds perpetrated by the pagan Saxon, the Hun, or the later Dane
and Norseman, to see in what hideous aspects the energies of a rude
people may be manifested, who are nevertheless capable of becoming
leaders in the civilisation of Europe. To judge by the monkish
chronicles, no Fiji cannibal could surpass, either in savage atrocity or
in hideousness of aspect, the Hungarian or Northman from whom the
proudest of Europe’s nobles claim descent. The chroniclers of Germany,
France, and Italy, dwell on the savage fury of the Huns; and the liturgy
of the Gallican Church of the ninth century preserves the memorial of
the pagan Northmen’s ravages, in the supplication added to its litany:
_A furore Normannorum libera nos_.
[Illustration: FIG. 59.—Fijian Pottery.]
It is obvious therefore that the savage vices of the Fijians are
perfectly compatible with considerable skill in such arts as pertain to
their primitive and insular condition. Their musical instruments are
superior to those of the Polynesians, and include the Pan-pipe and
others unknown in the islands beyond their range. Their pottery also
exhibits great variety of form, and includes examples of vessels
combined in groups, presenting a curious correspondence to similar
productions of Peruvian art. Their fishing-nets and lines are remarkable
for neat and skilful workmanship, and they carry cultivation to a
considerable extent. “Indeed,” remarks the ethnologist of the United
States Expedition, in summing up the characteristics of the Fijians, “we
soon began to perceive that the people were in possession of almost
every art known to the Polynesians, and of many others besides. The
highly-finished workmanship was unexpected, everything being executed
until recently, and even now for the most part, without the use of iron.
In the collection of implements and manufactures brought home by the
Expedition, the observer will distinguish in the Fijian division
something like a school of arts for the other Pacific islands.” Fig. 59
shows two characteristic specimens of their pottery selected from the
Smithsonian collections at Washington. They are extremely well burnt,
and finished with a bright glaze. One of them illustrates a class of
double vessels suggestive of certain analogies with a familiar style of
Peruvian pottery; and the prevailing characteristics of the whole
collection confirm the superiority ascribed to the Fijian artificer. In
such a strangely-gifted savage race we see the degradation of which
human nature is susceptible; and at the same time recognise germs of a
constructive and artistic capacity capable of development into many
marvellous manifestations, if once subjected to such influences as those
which changed the merciless pirate of the northern seas into the refined
Norman, the chivalrous crusader, and the imaginative troubadour.
The native races of America are neither devoid of energy nor ingenious
artistic skill; and the progress attained by the Mexicans and Peruvians,
as well as by the nations of Central America, proved their capacity for
advancement in the arts of civilisation. But the fate which has
everywhere befallen the Red Indians when brought into direct contact
with European settlers, shows how impossible it is to abruptly bridge
over the gulf which separates the infancy of nations from a maturity
like that to which the rude Saxon and Northman attained through the
schooling of many centuries. The Aztecs at the time of the Mexican
conquest were probably not ruder than the first Angle and Saxon
colonists. They were certainly no crueler than the Northmen of the
eighth century. But they were far in advance of the northern tribes from
which, according to Aztec traditions, they traced their descent.
Among the barbarous races of the northern continent, the tribes of the
Iroquois confederacy, though scarcely rising above the hunter stage,
offer a subject of study of peculiar value in reference to the ethnology
of the New World. In the great valley of the St. Lawrence, at the period
of earliest European contact with its native tribes, we find this
confederacy of Indian nations in the most primitive condition as to all
knowledge of progressive arts; but full of energy, delighting in
military enterprise, and amply endued with the qualities requisite for
effecting permanent conquests over a civilised but unwarlike people. Nor
did the primitive arts of the Iroquois prevent the development of
incipient germs of civilisation among them. Agriculture was
systematically practised; and their famous league, wisely established,
and maintained unbroken through very diversified periods of their
history, exhibits a people advancing in many ways towards the initiation
of a self-originated civilisation, when the intrusion of Europeans
abruptly arrested its progress, and brought them in contact with
elements of foreign progress pregnant for them only with sources of
degradation and final destruction.
The historian of the Iroquois,[71] when describing their simple arts and
manufactures, remarks, that in the western mounds rows of arrow-heads or
flint-blades have been found lying side by side, like teeth, the row
being about two feet long. “This has suggested the idea that they were
set in a frame, and fastened with thongs, thus making a species of
sword.”[72] In this description we cannot fail to recognise the
_mahguahuitl_, or native sword of Mexico and Yucatan. In the large canoe
with its armed crew, first met off the latter coast, Herrera tells us
the Indians had “swords made of wood, having a gutter in the forepart,
in which were sharp-edged flints strongly fixed with a sort of bitumen
and thread.” Among the Mexicans this toothed blade was armed with the
_itzli_, or obsidian, capable of taking an edge like a razor; and the
destructive powers of this formidable weapon are frequently dwelt upon
by the early Spaniards. Among the ruins of Kabah, in Yucatan, the
attention of Stephens was attracted by the protruding corner of a huge
sculptured slab, the basso-relievos on which consist of an upright
figure having a lofty plume of feathers falling to his heels; while
another figure kneels before him holding in his hands the very same
weapon, with its flint or obsidian blades projecting from the wooden
socket. The idea it suggests is not necessarily that assumed by
Stephens: that the sculptors and architects of the great ruins of
Central America and Yucatan were the same people whom the Spaniards
found there on their landing. The sculpture may be of a greatly older
date. On its lower compartment is a row of hieroglyphics; and the
suppliant attitude of the armed figure is rather suggestive of a record
of conquest over some barbarian chief of Mexican or more northern
tribes, of whom the flint-edged sword-blade was the most typical
characteristic. Nevertheless, there is a singular interest in the simple
chain of evidence, thus confirmatory of the Aztec traditions of original
migration, and the subjugation of the elder civilised race of Anahuac by
northern warriors: which leads us, step by step, from such rude arts as
those of the Iroquois, and relics of other barbarous tribes in western
sepulchral mounds, to the Mexican armature of the era of the conquest,
and artistic records of the lettered architects of Yucatan.
The history of the Iroquois and their simple arts, illustrates with
peculiar aptness the unwritten chronicles of the New World. In their
rude state they achieved a remarkable civil and military organisation,
and acquired more extensive and enduring influence than any nation of
native American lineage, excepting the civilised Mexicans and Peruvians.
Their own traditions pointed to an era when they migrated from the
northern shores of the St. Lawrence into that region to the south and
east of Lake Ontario, where they dwelt through all the period of their
authentic history; though two members of the league, the Senecas and
Onondagas, claimed to be autochthones, sprung from the soil of that
Iroquois territory. The league embraced the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas,
Senecas, and Mohawks, all united in a strictly federal union; and to
this the Tuscaroras were admitted, on their expulsion from North
Carolina in 1715. The claim of a common origin advanced by a people
occupying territory so far to the south, throws an interesting light on
the migrations of Indian tribes. It is confirmed by the character of
their language, and received practical recognition in the assignment of
a portion of the Oneida territory for their occupation. In the
seventeenth century the Iroquois were the great aggressive nationality
of the continent to the north of Mexico. In the very beginning of that
century, Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their
canoes on the upper part of the Chesapeake Bay, bearing a band of them
to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. The Shawnees,
Susquehannocks, Nanticokes, Miamis, Delawares, and Minsi, were, one
after another, reduced by them to the condition of dependent tribes.
Even the Canarse or Long-Island Indians found no protection from them in
their sea-girt home beyond the Hudson; and their power was felt from the
St. Lawrence to Tennessee, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
How long before the discovery of this vast region by Europeans, it had
been in occupation by those who claimed to be its autochthones, we have
no other knowledge than their own traditions of migration. But so far as
arts are any evidence of national progress, they were then in their
infancy. The region they occupied offered no advantages for the
inauguration of a copper or bronze era, such as those of Lake Superior
or the Southern Andes supplied to their ancient possessors. Of working
in metals they knew nothing; and only supplemented their primitive
implements, wrought in stone, flint, horn, bone, and wood, by barter
with the European intruders. Nevertheless, for nearly two centuries, the
Indians of the Five Nations, as they were called before the addition of
the Tuscaroras, presented a sturdy and unbroken front to the
encroachments alike of Dutch, French, and British colonists. But their
hostility was concentrated in opposition to the French nation; and as
the rival colonies of France and England were long nearly balanced, it
is not unjustly affirmed by the historian of the Iroquois, that France
owed the final overthrow of her magnificent schemes of colonisation in
North America to their uncompromising antagonism.
Among the Mexicans the arts of a true stone-period had been carried to
the highest perfection, along with a development of those of their
bronze age. On the northern frontier of Mexico, towards the head-waters
of the Great Barauca, is the Cerro de Navajas, the “Hill of Knives,”
where, before the conquest, obsidian was mined for manufacturing
purposes: like the chert and hornstone of the Flint Ridge pits of
Kentucky and Ohio. Examples of elaborately-worked obsidian and flint,
and of polished implements and ornaments of stone, executed by Mexican
artificers, rival the finest specimens recovered among the relics of
Europe’s neolithic period. The Christy collection is specially rich in
objects of this class. One flame-shaped arrow-head chipped with the
nicest art, is evidently executed as a display of lapidary skill.
Another fine spear-blade, made of a semi-opalescent chalcedony which
occurs as concretions in the trachytic lavas of Mexico, measures eight
inches long, and is supposed to have served as a state halberd, as it is
much too delicate for actual warfare. But it is obvious that a finer
material than usual frequently tempted the worker in flint or obsidian
to an unwonted display of his art. In various private collections in
Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, I have seen choice specimens of spear
and arrow-heads, and other objects, made of jasper, milky-quartz, and
rock crystal; some of them wrought into fantastic or purely ornamental
forms.
A state battle-axe in the Christy collection made of green quartzose
avanturine, measures 11 inches in length. It is a thick wedge, with the
upper part carved as the head of a Mexican idol or king, and the arms
outlined on the blade. Jade, green serpentine, grey granite, agate, and
obsidian of different colours, were all worked into various shapes for
ornament or use, with a care often prompted by the attractive character
of the material, and with a skill no longer known to the native Mexican
artificers.
[Illustration: FIG. 60.—Honduras serrated Implement.]
In the southern continent also examples of mastery in the manufacture of
flint and stone implements survive, in some cases as the sole memorials
of races which have perished; and traces of the arts of savage tribes in
the primitive condition of a purely stone-period lie everywhere outside
of the remarkable centres of Peruvian civilisation. Three such relics
from the Bay of Honduras are deserving of special notice, from their
unusually large size and peculiar forms. They were found, along with
other implements, about the year 1794, in a cave between two and three
miles inland. One of them is now preserved in the British Museum, and
the others have been repeatedly exhibited at meetings of the
Archæological Institute. The accompanying illustrations will best convey
an idea of their peculiar forms. One (Fig. 60) is a serrated weapon,
pointed at both ends, and measuring sixteen and a half inches long.
Another (Fig. 61), in the form of a crescent, with projecting points,
measuring 17 inches in greatest length, may have served as a weapon of
parade, like the state partisan or halberd of later times. The third,
which is imperfect, is shown in Fig. 62. The whole are examples of flint
implements of unusually large proportions, and chipped with
extraordinary regularity and skill. A well-executed head of a warrior,
in terra-cotta, obtained about the same period, if not indeed along with
these implements, was presented to the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland in 1798, and is figured on a subsequent page. The unwonted size
of those Honduras implements attracted special notice when first
produced; but this ceases to excite surprise when it is seen that blocks
of flint or hornstone adequate for the largest of them are readily
procurable throughout extensive regions of North America, as in Ohio and
Kentucky. To the north of Ohio, where the material is rare, flint
implements and weapons are mostly of small size. The larger implements
are of stone; and among the Iroquois, the Hurons, the Chippewas, and
other tribes on the shores of the great lakes, the copper of Lake
Superior seems to have been recognised, and sought for, as a fitter
material for large hatchets and spear-heads.
[Illustration: FIG. 61.—Honduras State Halberd.]
[Illustration: FIG. 62.—Honduras Implement.]
In this respect we see the very privations of those Indian tribes
forcing on their notice the resources of the copper region, which might,
among so energetic a people as the Iroquois proved themselves to be,
have at length led to such a mastery of the metallurgic arts as was
achieved by the nations of Mexico and Peru. But their energies were
diverted into far different channels by the very advent of races already
familiar with all the highest acquirements of civilisation; and whatever
time might have developed out of the Iroquois confederacy, akin to the
native civilisation which had already taken root beyond the verge of
their southern conquests, they had little to hope from the triumph of
either of the European aggressors between whom they so long held the
balance. In the rivalry of the French and English colonists the insular
race proved the victors; and when at a later date England and her
American colonies came into collision, the nations of the League took
different sides, and the Hodenosaunee[73] finally ceased to be the ideal
rallying-point of a united people. They had run their destined course;
and now the poor scattered remnants of the once-famous Indian federation
serve only to illustrate how irreconcilable are the elements of high
civilisation with the most vigorous and progressive energy of a people
only maturing the first stage in the progress of nations. They lacked
the qualities which protect an inferior race from extinction when
brought into contact with a long matured civilisation. Passive and
naturally submissive races, like the Malay or the Negro, survive the
intrusion of a dominant race, and are protected by their docility, as
the natural serfs of the intruders. But an energetic people, who find
their chief employment in war and the chase, can be subjected to no
useful servitude. They are separated by too wide a gulf from their
rivals to claim any equality in the rights of civilisation. The only
alternative left for them is to drive out the intruder, or to be
exterminated by him like the bear and wolf. Stone, Bronze, and Iron
Periods are not indispensable steps in the advancement of the human
race; but all experience proves that when such extreme social conditions
are abruptly brought into contact as stone and iron periods aptly
symbolise, the tendency is towards the degradation and final extinction
of the less advanced race.
-----
[68] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 2d Ed. vol. i. p. 331.
[69] _U. S. Geological Survey_, 1872, p. 652.
[70] _Alaska and its Resources_, p. 418.
[71] Lewis H. Morgan: _League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois_.
[72] See footnote 71.
[73] _Ho-dé-no-sau-nee_, or People of the Long House, expressive of the
numerous assembly in the Council of the Confederacy.