It was left to the pygmy to revenge all of the creatures of fable upon
incredulous mankind. He was doubted, yet he is. Not until some fifty
years ago would the learned doubters admit that Homer and Herodotus
were right, and themselves wrong. Now it is in the books that half a
hundred groups of pygmies are living on the earth, to say nothing of
others that have become extinct. Every race has had such groups, and
every continent has known their tread.
There is palliation for ancient and modern doubts as to these dwarfish
nations. The pygmies of reality are not so small as the pygmies of
tradition. Their name is from the Greek word for fist, or the distance
between the elbow joint and the knuckles of the average man--a little
more than thirteen inches. The ancient geographers, however, allowed
the smallest pygmies at least double that stature. There were two
species of little men--the one averaging three spans, or two feet three
inches high, the other averaging five spans, or three feet nine inches.
These measurements recur again and again for fifteen centuries in the
writings of the east and west.
No race has a mean stature as short even as the pygmies of five spans,
but among the dwarf tribes there are many women who do not greatly
exceed it; and there are women, not so small according to the standards
of their brothers as to be accounted deformed, who do not equal it.
Stanley saw among the Akkas of the West African Rain Forest a grown
girl of seventeen who was half an inch short of three feet.
Poetic license of the old time took liberties with the estimates of
geographers, but these liberties were understood as such. The dwarf
nation on the Upper Nile that was reputed to war with the cranes used
the ax, it was said, to cut down ears of wheat. When Hercules passed
through their country they set up ladders to climb to the rim of his
goblet for a drink. In his slumber two armies swooped down upon his
right hand and two on his left; but, awaking, the hero laughingly
gathered them all in his lion skin.
The myth of their warfare with the cranes became a theme of literature
and art, but cast doubt over the whole pygmy tradition. It first
appears in Homer. The _Iliad_ likens the shouts of the onrushing
Trojans to the cries of cranes as they fly southward “with noise and
order through the sky,” bringing “wounds and death to pygmy nations.”
Megasthenes elaborates the theme. It is the three-span pygmies, he
says, that war upon the cranes, as well as on the partridges, which are
as large as geese. The small folk collect and destroy the eggs of the
cranes, which breed in India and nowhere else. Pliny adds that every
spring the little men go in a body to the seashore, astride of rams and
goats, and there destroy the eggs and young of the birds; “otherwise,
it would be impossible for them to withstand the increasing multitude
of the cranes.” The shore booths which they occupy they build of mud
mixed with feathers and egg shells.
So the story moves from Africa to India, and towards modern times.
Maundeville declares that in the Land of Pygmies, which he seems to
place to the west of, and tributary to, China, the inhabitants “have
oftentimes war with the Birds of that Country that they take and eat.”
There is even a reference to this warfare in the writing (1563) of a
traveler in Greenland. There Dithmar Blefkens of Hamburg met a blind
monk who said that the pygmies represented the most perfect shape of
man, but were “hairy to the uttermost Joynts of the Fingers,” had no
proper speech, and were “unreasonable Creatures that live in Perpetual
Darkness.”
India appears to be the home of the tradition that the dwarfish peoples
warred with the cranes. Just a hint of its origin is afforded by
Ctesias. The “swarthy men called Pygmies,” he said, “hunt hares and
foxes not with dogs, but with ravens and kites and crows and vultures.”
Falconry is known to have been practiced in India as early as B.C. 600
and may be a thousand years older there. From a people’s using birds of
prey in hunting to themselves fighting against birds of prey is a step
of inference easy to take.
There is, however, a more direct explanation. According to a tradition
of the Indians, the Garuda, the bird of Vishnu, was hostile to the
people of the Kirata, and the name of this people means “dwarfish.”
While the sacred bird as pictured by the poets does not look like the
crane, or any other known species, it may be near enough to account for
the legend.
Herodotus was the first to give the pygmy tradition a historical
quality. He heard of the little people while he was collecting
materials for his books in Africa. His informants were natives of
Cyrene who had been to the shrine of Ammon and talked with Etearchus
the Ammonian king. The latter tells the story of the adventure of
the five Nasamonian youths, which he had received from their Libyan
countrymen and which Herodotus, therefore transcribes at third hand:
“The Nasamonians said there had grown up among them some wild young
men, the sons of certain chiefs, who, when they came to man’s estate,
indulged in all manner of extravagances, and among other things drew
lots for five of their number to go and explore the desert parts of
Libya, and try if they could not penetrate further than any had done
previously. The young men, therefore, dispatched on this errand by
their comrades with a plentiful supply of water and provision, traveled
at first through the inhabited region, passing which they came to the
wild beast tract, whence they finally entered upon the desert, which
they proceeded to cross from east to west. After journeying for many
days over a wide extent of sand, they came at last to a plain where
they observed trees growing; approaching them, and seeing fruit on
them, they proceeded to gather it.
“While they were thus engaged there came upon them some dwarfish men,
under the middle height, who seized them and carried them off. The
Nasamonians could not understand a word of their language, nor had they
any acquaintance with the language of the Nasamonians. They were led
across extensive marshes, and finally came to a town where all the men
were of the height of their conductors, and black complexioned. A great
river flowed by the town, running from west to east, and containing
crocodiles.
“Here let me dismiss Etearchus, the Ammonian, and his story, only
adding that he declared that the Nasamonians got safely back to their
country and that the men whose city they had reached were a nation of
sorcerers. With respect to the river which ran by their town, Etearchus
conjectured it to be the Nile, and reason favors that view.”
Thus ends one of the most valuable records which have come down from
ancient times. The river referred to is now believed to be the Niger,
or perhaps an affluent of Lake Tchad. Herodotus has another story of
a dwarfish people found in the west when Sataspes, the Carthaginian,
undertook to sail around Libya.
Although Strabo doubted the existence of pygmy races, yet his keen mind
brought him within reach of the truth. He finds in the wretched mode
of life of the people he called the Ethiopians, an explanation of the
reports of their dwarfish stature. They were naked and wandered from
place to place, and their sheep, goats, oxen, and dogs were undersized
like themselves. “It was perhaps from the diminutive size of these
people,” he concludes, “that the story of the pygmies originated,
whom no person worthy of credit has asserted that he himself has
seen.” The Greek geographer seems to have had reliable information as
to a fact that on its face is as hard to believe as the legends he
discredits--that there was dwarfish live stock as well as a dwarfish
people. Sir Samuel Baker found that the cows and ewes of the Bari,
a tribe living in the same district with the forest pygmies, “have
dimensions truly liliputian.”
Aristotle speaks with authority of the pygmies of Africa. “The storks,”
he said, “pass from the plains of Scythia to the marsh of upper Egypt,
toward the sources of the Nile. This is the district which the pygmies
inhabit, whose existence is not a fable. There is really, as men say,
a species of men of little stature, and their horses are little also.
They pass their life in caverns.” Pliny speaks of the pygmies as
dwelling in Thrace near the Black Sea, in the Carian district of Asia
Minor, in India under the shadow of the Himalayas, and at the sources
of the Nile. There is a valuable fact behind this apparently confused
geography: the Roman was right in assuming there were several such
races.
The pygmy races of Asia and Indonesia are cited in classic, Arabic, and
Chinese geography, and in mediæval travel. “In the middle of India,”
Ctesias says, “are found the swarthy men called pygmies, who speak the
same language as the other Indians. They are very diminutive, the
tallest but two cubits high, the majority only one and one-half. They
let their hair grow very long--down to their knees and even lower.
They have the largest beards anywhere to be seen, and when these have
grown sufficiently long and copious, they no longer wear clothing, but
let the hair of the head fall down their backs far below the knee,
while in front are their beards trailing down to their very feet. When
their hair has thus thickly enveloped their whole body they bind it
round them with a zone and so make it serve for a garment. They are
snub-nosed and otherwise ill-favored. Their sheep are of the size of
our lambs, and their oxen and asses rather smaller than our rams. Three
thousand men attend the king of the Indians on account of their great
skill in archery. They are eminently just and have the same laws as the
other Indians.”
This may be a description of the Kiratas, whose district is east of
Bengal in the Himalaya foothills.
There were vague reports in the classic world of other pygmy peoples
far to the southeast in Asia. The Chinese records make these more
definite. The _Hill and Sea Classic_ describes the Chiau Yau, a tribe
of cap-wearing pygmies three cubits (3 feet 3 inches) high whose
country was east of the country of the Three-headed Men. This is
perhaps the country now inhabited by the Yau tribes, who are short
of stature and may be this long-sought-for pygmy race. Individuals
of the Chiau Yau tribe, “diminutive black slaves,” were sent to the
Chinese court from the coasts of Indo-China in the reign of Ming Tu
(A.D. 58-76). There was also a pygmy people whom the Annamese called
the Phong. They were only two cubits, or twenty-six inches, high,
and although they were cave dwellers a fragrant perfume emanated
from their skins. As hunters they paid their dues to the state in
camphor, rhinoceros horns, and elephant tusks. Both of these races
Gerini locates in “the mysterious country of the pygmies” in French
Indo-China, between the Mekong and the Black rivers, under the
twenty-first parallel of north latitude. North of this district on the
Red River dwell the dark, dwarfish Pu-lu tribes which seem to be the
remnants of a once widely spread pygmy race. The Santom aborigines of
Yun-nan and Laos are also of inferior stature, with flat faces and
black skins. In China itself ancient writings speak of the black dwarfs
of Shantung province as early as the twenty-third century B.C.
Perhaps the first record of the Aetas, or Philippine negritos, appears
in Chao Fu-Kua, a Chinese author of the early thirteenth century, who
told of a tribe of small black men with frizzly hair, round yellow
eyes, and teeth that showed through their lips, who lived in remote
valleys of the archipelago. A Chinese work on novelties, published
in 1636, has several passages on the black dwarfs of Cochin-China.
Anywhere from Annam to Siam, it says, “there are pygmies whose stature
is not over three feet seven inches, who are regarded as of animal
origin, who sell themselves for longer or shorter periods to dealers in
aloes. When engaged they are provisioned, supplied with hatchets and
saws, and sent into the mountains. These dwarfs are very submissive and
servile.”
Ibn Khordadbeh and Idrisi tell of the Rami, a pygmy race of Sumatra,
who go naked, find shelter in thickets, avoid intercourse with other
people, and use a hissing speech. They are swift runners and adept tree
climbers. They have red frizzly hair and a stature of but three feet.
Curled hair of this color had been ascribed from the seventh century
A.D. to the clawed negrito savages on the east coast of the Malay
Peninsula, and a traveler of the last generation reports hairy dwarfs
on the southwest coast of Sumatra. Dunashki (about A.D. 1300) has this
note: “When ships approach Volcano Island at the beginning of a squall,
tiny black dwarfs, five spans (nearly four feet) or less in stature,
resembling negroes, appear and climb aboard, without harming anyone.”
All three of these travel notes may be reflected in the incident in the
third voyage of Sindbad, when his ship, driven by a storm amid strange
islands, is boarded by “an innumerable multitude of frightful savages
about two feet high, covered all over with red hair,” who compel the
crew to follow them to the palace of a giant cannibal.
Accounts of several other travelers bring the pygmy tradition down
to the era of modern disbelief. Odoric, the fourteenth-century
missionary monk, reports that the Yangste Kiang waters the Country of
the Pygmies, whom he describes as an innumerable folk, three spans
high, and foremost of all cotton workers. Their city of Chatan is one
of the fairest of places. Æthicus of Istria declares that he sailed
northwest from Ceylon and passed, among other islands in the Northern
Sea, Bridinno, the land of dwarfs. Marco Polo tells how pygmies were
fabricated from monkeys in Sumatra and sold to curio collectors.
Maundeville makes the pygmies subject to “the great Chan.” “The River
Dalay,” he says, “goeth through the land of Pygmies, where that the
Folk be of little Stature, and be but three Span long, and they be
right fair and gentle. And they marry them when they be half a Year of
Age and get Children. And they live not but six Year or seven at the
most; and he that liveth eight Year, Men hold him there right passing
old. These Men be workers of Gold, Silver, Cotton, Silk and of all such
Things, the best of any other that be in the World.” Men of larger size
work their lands and mines for them.
In another passage Sir John populates an isle with “Little Folk,” who
have no mouths and only an adder speech. Pigafetta, who went with the
Magellan expedition around the world and wrote its story, reports two
races of dwarfs in the Philippines, one with gigantic ears. The latter
were shaven, naked, shrill-voiced troglodytes, whose food was the sago
tree.
Ludovico Varthema, an Italian Mohammedan, a contemporary of Columbus
and a wide-ranging traveler, tells an incident of his pilgrimage to
Mecca, which may or may not shed light on the moot question of the
Middle Ages and since, as to what became of the lost Ten Tribes. There
was a mountain in the Hedjaz, he said, inhabited by pygmy Jews, color
black, who skipped from crag to crag like goats--he watched them from a
distance--and when they caught a Moslem skinned him alive.
In Madagascar in 1770 the French naturalist Commerson, who accompanied
Bougainville in his voyage around the world, found evidences of a
pygmy tribe with an average stature of three and a half feet, all
traces of which vanished in the following century. His report was
corroborated by Count de Modave, governor of Fort Dauphin. The men of
this tribe wore long beards and were workers in iron and steel, of
which they made lances and assagais. They were brave pacifists. When
from their mountain homes they saw a formidable force approaching on
the plains below, they drove down such cattle as they could spare to
the entrances of their defiles to purchase immunity from invasion. If,
however, the enemy entered these defiles, the little folk savagely
attacked them.
Near to the country of the warrior women in South America, said the
Spaniards, was pygmy land. Peru has traditions of a race not over two
cubits high. California Indians tell of a witch-like little people in
the redwood forest. The Arapahoes tell of dark-skinned, pot-bellied,
cannibal dwarfs who were only three feet high but strongly made, and
skillful trackers. They could carry buffaloes on their backs, so the
Crows said of the small folk that once roved Montana. In the Gila
Canyon in New Mexico there have been exhumed the mummies of a true
pygmy people, some of them scarcely three feet long, with cerements
of woven cloth, sandals of yucca fiber and ornaments of hummingbird
feathers; legend speaks of thievish dwarfs who lived in underground
houses and sometimes came to the cities for supplies. D’Orbigny
described, in 1831, the so-called Chiquitos, or Little Folk, who
inhabit the heights on the divide between the Mamore and Paraguay
rivers. The men he measured averaged only four feet ten inches, which
brings them within strict pygmy requirements--not over four feet eleven
inches. They are a broad-shouldered, robust Indian people, hospitable,
sociable, musical. D’Orbigny estimated their number at about twenty
thousand. No recent traces have been found of the Ayamanes whom
Friedemann met in the northern Andes regions and who, he said, were no
more than “five empans,” or three feet four inches, high.
There is a Chinese legend that in the remote northern mountains of the
old empire there has lived for seventeen centuries a race of hairy
dwarfs. Inscriptions on the Great Wall are said to recite that whenever
one of the millions of laborers who were building it was found to have
made a mistake in his work, he was imbedded alive in the wall at the
place of his error. About A.D. 210, the story continues, a body of
workmen rebelled at the custom, and with their families fled to distant
forests where their descendants still live. The hardships of their
journey and their rude surroundings brought these people down to the
pygmy level.
It is asserted that there is a race of dwarfs in Morocco in the Atlas
Mountains whose existence the Moors have kept secret for three thousand
years because they are regarded as holy men, and great saints who bring
good luck to towns. “Our Blessed Lord,” the people call a dwarf. “It
is a sin to speak about them to you,” one Moor said to a traveler. The
Moorish silence is declared to be the remnant of a superstition older
than the Mohammedan religion.
These pygmy stories, of perhaps twenty-seven centuries so far as the
record goes, of at least double that period if unwritten tradition
be included, have been brought together here in order to assess the
scientific reaction to them. Some of them on their face are completely
fabulous, some have an admixture of truth, some are good enough
history. To all except the very latest of them the scientific reaction
was unfavorable until a deluge of facts made this attitude impossible.
Strabo among the ancients was in his rights when he complained that
nobody had seen any pygmies, but his facts were incomplete, for long
before his day civilized peoples had seen them. Browne summarizes
in his stiff but elegant English the unbelief of the scholars of
the Renaissance: “Julius Scaliger, a diligent enquirer, accounts
thereof, but as a poetical fiction. Ulysses Aldrovandus, a most exact
geographer, in an express discourse hereon, concludes the story
fabulous and a poetical account of Homer. Albertus Magnus, a man
ofttimes too credulous, herein was more than dubious; for he affirmeth
if any such dwarfs were ever extant, they were surely some kind of
apes; which is a conceit allowed by Cardan and not esteemed improbable
by many others.” “There is as much reality,” concludes Browne, “in the
pygmies of Paracelsus, that is, his non-adamical men, or middle natures
betwixt men and spirits.”
Two towering names in natural history, Buffon and Cuvier, are ranged
against the pygmy tradition. Here is Buffon’s conclusion: “Deceived by
some optical illusion, the ancient historians gravely mention whole
nations of pygmies as existing in remote quarters of the world. The
more accurate observation of the moderns, however, convinces us that
these accounts are entirely fabulous. The existence, therefore, of
a pygmy race of mankind, being founded in error or in fable, we can
expect to find men of diminutive stature only by accident, among men
of the ordinary size.”
Buffon’s explanation of the fable that the pygmies war with the cranes
is so plausible that men would accept it, as his own generation did,
if they did not know that these little folk are human and not simian.
Even so, there may be truth in the theory advanced. “One knows,” says
Buffon, “that the monkeys, which go in large bands in Africa and India,
carry on continual warfare against birds; they seek to surprise their
nests, and without ceasing prepare ambushes for them. The storks defend
themselves vigorously. But the monkeys, anxious to carry off the eggs
and the young birds, return constantly, and in bands, to the combat;
and as by their tricks, their feints and movements they seem to imitate
human actions, they would appear to ignorant people to be a band of
little men. Behold the origin and the history of these fables!”
Roulin was equally ingenious in his explanation of the pygmy
populations and their campaigns against the birds. He noted the squat
frames of the Lapps and Eskimos who dwell within, or not far from, the
Arctic Circle. The pygmies, he decided, were a circumpolar population.
Homer placed their home and their battles at the southern end of the
crane path; Roulin placed them at the northern terminus, in that
Scythia of misty boundaries one of which was supposed to be the boreal
ocean. Pliny had told that every year the pygmies rode down to the
seashore to destroy the eggs and young of the cranes. Very well, here
was the story explained, for every year the Lapps and Eskimos come down
to the sea and return to the interior, and these people partly subsist
on the eggs of aquatic birds.
Cuvier is reproachful of Pliny. “I am not surprised,” he says, “at
finding the pygmies in the works of Homer; but to find them in Pliny
I am surprised indeed.” The great French naturalist has contributed
more, perhaps, than any other man to find the basis of truth or the
source of error in classic fables. His explanation of the pygmy legend,
like that of Buffon, is more convincing almost than truth itself, but
its teaching is error. He finds the source of a fable in a flattering
convention of ancient sculpture: “The custom of exhibiting in the same
sculpture, in bas-relief, men of very different heights--of making
kings and conquerors gigantic while their subjects and vassals are
represented as only one-fourth or one-fifth of their size--must have
given rise to the fable of the pygmies.”
Cuvier died in 1832. Chambers’ _Journal_ in 1844 voiced with less
reserve the unbelief of that period. In a scoffing article it declares
that “the world has long been haunted with the idea that somewhere in
Africa there is a nation of Tom Thumbs”; but “the grand difficulty
about the African nation of dwarfs is the fact that not a single
specimen has been seen either in Abyssinia or Egypt.” “The pygmy dream,
one of the last lingering superstitions of travel, has been puffed
away,” confidently asserts this periodical. These so-called pygmies
were monkeys, not men.
In 1863 Paul du Chaillu explored the coast lands of West Africa and
in 1871 published the results in _The Country of the Dwarfs_. The
scientific skepticism of the ages delivered its last stroke in the
attacks that met this book, for already, although the world did not
know it, Schweinfurth, farther east in the equatorial region, had
reviewed an entire pygmy army. The _London Graphic_ wonders whether
or not “Mr. du Chaillu means us to accept the book as a bona-fide
narrative of what he has himself seen.” Thus cautiously this periodical
registers its doubts: “The first part of the book reads very much
like other descriptions of African exploration; but further on Mr. du
Chaillu represents himself as having arrived at the country of the
dwarfs, whom he considers to be identical with the supposed fabulous
pygmies. This strange race, who average only from four feet to four
feet seven inches high, live a perfectly wild life in the forests of
equatorial Africa, feeding on snakes, rats, mice, and berries. They go
entirely naked, and inhabit huts made by bending branches of trees in
the shape of a bow. The height of the huts is just enough to keep the
head of a man from touching the roof when he is seated. These dwarfs
are very shy of being seen and hold no communion with the negro tribes
about them, by whom they are called Obongos. Truly we have here a
strange tale.”
Truly, there are not only lost arts, but lost records, forgotten
histories. Forty-four centuries before du Chaillu was scoffed at for
a true tale, an authentic pygmy testimony was set down in a letter
which a king of Egypt wrote to a vassal chief, and which is still in
existence. The world believed in pygmies then because sometimes it saw
them; and their descendants still hunt the elephant in the forests of
equatorial Africa.
[Illustration: “THE SWARTHY MEN CALLED PYGMIES”]
To the Egyptians of that time the country beyond the Second Cataract
of the Nile was the Land of Ghosts, whence the negroes brought to the
markets of Assuan strange stories of shadowy folk who dwelt there. Into
this land a prince of Elephantine named Herkhuf marched with a little
force. An account of his journey has been written by Arthur E. P.
Weigall, of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt.
In the country which Herkhuf penetrated he found pygmies dwelling, and
one he secured. He sent word back to the boy Pharaoh, Pepy II, and had
from him a letter believed to be the earliest example of a private
communication. Yet life still throbs through its lines and the colors
glow in the picture of an excited royal lad awaiting the coming of this
wonder of the south, directing that his meals shall be ample, that his
slumbers shall be guarded, and that on taking ship at Memphis there
shall be men to see he does not fall into the water. The Pharaoh’s
letter follows:
“You say in your letter that you have brought a dancing pygmy of the
god from the Land of Ghosts, like the pygmy which the Treasurer Baurded
brought from the Land of Pount in the time of Asesa. You say to my
majesty, ‘Never before has one like him been brought by anyone who has
visited Aam.’ Come northward, therefore, to the court immediately, and
bring this pygmy with you, which you must bring living, prosperous, and
healthy, from the Land of Ghosts, to dance for the King and to rejoice
and gladden the heart of the King. When he goes down with you into the
vessel, appoint trustworthy people to be beside him at either side of
the vessel: take care that he does not fall into the water. When he
sleeps at night, appoint trustworthy people who shall sleep beside him
in his cabin; and make an inspection ten times each night. My majesty
desires to see this pygmy more than the gifts of Sinai and of Pount. If
you arrive at court, the pygmy being with you, alive, prosperous, and
healthy, my majesty will do for you a greater thing than that which was
done for the Treasurer Baurded in the time of Asesa, according to the
heart’s desire of my majesty to see this pygmy. Orders have been sent
to the chief of the New Towns to arrange that food shall be taken from
every store-city and every temple (on the road) without stinting.”
A Nubian Highway, so Weigall calls the ancient road down which the
dancing pygmy came to civilization about B.C. 2500. In A. D. 1878 a
little farther south, Stanley followed what he calls a Pygmy Highway,
“along which quite a tribe must have passed. It was lined with amoma
fruit skins, and shells of nuts, and the crimson rinds of phrynia
berries. Our elephant and game track had brought us across another
track leading easterly from Andari, and both joined presently,
developing to a highway much patronized by the pygmy tribes. We could
tell where they had stopped to light their pipes, and to crack nuts,
and trap game, and halted to gossip. The twigs were broken three feet
from the ground, showing that they were snapped by dwarfs. Where it was
a little muddy the path showed high, delicate insteps, proving their
ancient ancestry and aristocratic descent, and small feet not larger
than those of young English misses of eight years old.” Later Stanley
met individuals of this tribe.
These were the Akkas, or Mambuti, the same pygmy tribe, it would
appear, whose sculptured reliefs on monuments of Egypt going back as
far as B.C. 3366 were dwarfed, so Cuvier had thought, merely to make a
conqueror seem larger than life and indicate their own inferior estate.
When a regiment of several hundred of these little warriors marched
behind Moummeri in 1870 to do homage to Munza, the East African negro
monarch, the pygmy tradition marched with them out of the mists of
fable across the border of geographical knowledge. For Schweinfurth, a
European explorer, was there to behold these “grasshopper warriors,” as
he called them.
The revolution in scientific opinion since that day appears in the
statement that the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_
prints one paragraph about the pygmies, nearly all of which is an
exposition of myths and a statement of doubts, while the eleventh
edition prints two full pages of ascertained facts.
Although science always balked at the name of pygmy and refused as long
as it could to admit that the African forests concealed a race of tiny
men, yet the world had long known something of the little peoples.
The Spaniards rightly reported that pygmy Indians had lived in Peru,
and they found negritos in the Philippines. Although Arab traders gave
the Andamans a wide berth because, as they believed, these islands
contained cannibals and no cocoanuts, yet they knew even before the
Middle Ages that a dwarfish people dwelt there. The Dutch found the
Bushmen when they settled South Africa, and hunted them for sport as
if they were jackals; they found also the still smaller Vaalpens, or
“dusty-bellies.” The Lapps of Russia and Scandinavia were known to
mediæval travelers, who were terrified by their diminutive stature
and witch repute. These mongoloid people, whose mean stature is only
five feet, and their kinsmen, the Eskimos, who are a little taller,
are, however, not classified among the true pygmies, a term which an
arbitrary convention restricts to Little Black Men.
The pygmies of Asia and Oceania are called negritos, the pygmies of
equatorial Africa negrillos. They vary by tribes in average height from
four feet eight inches to five feet two inches, with the women smaller
and many individuals only a little above four feet. A full-grown
Akka adult, says Stanley, may weigh ninety pounds. Another explorer
estimated the average weight of six of these adults at seventy-seven
pounds and found that two of them weighed but fifty-three pounds apiece.
Wherever seen, the tribes of little people have certain things in
common beside their stature. One of these is their discontinuous
distribution. They do not adjoin each other in a continuous zone of
population as the taller races do, but are dotted here and there
across the earth like islands in a sea of alien populations. Always
they occupy the less desirable districts. The Spaniards called the
Philippine pygmies Negritos del Monte, for they had retired before the
Malays to the mountain gorges. The Lapps rove the tundras of northern
Europe. The Bushmen dwell in the deserts of South Africa. The Akkas
inhabit the steaming forests of equatorial Africa, in parallels of
latitude deadly to the white man. The Batwas live on volcanic uplands
in the Tanganyika country. In the Malay Peninsula and New Guinea, one
seeks in vain for littoral-dwelling negritos; they have been driven
inland and to the mountain recesses.
Almost everywhere the little people somewhat resemble in feature
the races that surround them. This is due to unions, temporary or
otherwise, between the pygmy women and the men of the neighbor
tribes, by which various streams of strange blood have poured into
the veins of the lesser stock. Among the Lapps of earlier generations
it almost seemed as if it were conscious tribal policy to promote
a taller stature by encouraging women and girls to form irregular
connections with men of other European races. There is Bushman blood
in the Hottentots, or Hottentot blood in the Bushmen. In the so-called
Bastards of the Kalahari Desert--a term whereof the wearers are
proud because it concedes to them a Caucasian strain--the blood of
the Bushmen meets the blood of the Boers in the halfway house of the
Hottentot.
Herbert Long, who spent six years in Central Africa with an expedition
from the American Museum of Natural History, notes in its _Journal_ for
1919 the fact that the pygmy men he saw were often much taller than
their mates, and gives a reason, that may explain the same phenomenon
in related tribes. Comely pygmy girls enter the harems of the chiefs of
the tall negro tribes. Their half-breed sons are sent back to their own
people. Since women are valuable chattels, the daughters are retained
by the father’s tribe. The custom increases pygmy prestige; but the
little men must not wed the women of their tall friends.
The small black folk of the forest have thus won a right to the marked
regional resemblance they bear to the larger black folk of the yam and
breadfruit clearings, whom they serve as scouts against the approach of
an enemy and as allies in forest warfare. “In western Africa, as in the
Philippines and in the two Gangetic peninsulas,” asserts Quatrefages,
“the pygmies have played an ethnological rôle, at times important,
in crossing with superior races and in giving birth to half-breed
populations.” The Pandavas, or heroes of the oldest Indian times, set
the example of these unions with lower races.
The Dravidians of southern India, Quatrefages declares, occupy the
territory formerly populated by the negritos--and carry their blood.
He also thinks that the blood of these little blacks shows itself in
the skin and stature of natives in parts of Japan. Relics of a pygmy
race are supposed to exist in Sicily and Sardinia, “along the highroad
between Pleistocene Africa and Europe”; fifteen per cent of the men
of South Italy and Sardinia are rejected for military service because
less than sixty-one and one half inches high. South of Salamanca in
western Spain, the valley called Las Jurdes is peopled by men and women
said to be little more than three feet high, whose shrunken stature is
attributed to unwholesome surroundings.
No true pygmy race has developed a pronounced nose bridge, and only
the lozenge-faced Bushmen have salient chins. Among nearly all of the
tribes there is a deficiency in the fatty tissues which affect the
skin, so that, even before old age comes, they present a wrinkled
appearance as if the skin fitted too loosely. This is true even of the
Lapps. The countenances of these northern dwarfs are mongoloid, but
without the slanting eyes of the Chinese and Tartars, and their heads
are the roundest of any race of men. The negrito and negrillo tribes
have rounder heads than the tall negroes. The bodies of many of the
little people in Central Africa and New Guinea are covered with a downy
growth. Pygmy complexions show olive in the Lapps, light yellow in the
Bushmen, yellow brown in the Indonesians, dark brown in the negritos of
the Andamans and Philippines, and among the Akkas, as Schweinfurth puts
it, the color of coffee slightly roasted.
Small hands and in some cases small feet characterize these tribes, and
grown girls of the Bushmen show, under measurement, feet but little
more than four inches long. Their bodies are long in proportion to
their legs, and the legs are slim. The mid-point of the body is above
the navel instead of below, as it is in the tall races. The pygmies
of Africa are pot-bellied; this is due to diet, and is corrected by
regular and wholesome food.
In other respects the pygmies differ from the rest of mankind chiefly
in what they lack. Save in the case of the Semangs of the Malay
Peninsula they may have no separate language; and they use always the
speech of their taller neighbors. There is no pygmy state, or king,
and often no tribal organization; even among the Lapps there was a
nomad tribe called the “twice and thrice tributary Lapps,” because
its members paid tribute to two, sometimes to three states--Russia,
Denmark, and Sweden. The Andaman negritos and the Akkas of the West
African Rain Forest are the only races that never devised a means of
making fire, though both know its use. The Andamanese are also the only
people that never made a musical instrument and the only people that
never domesticated a food animal or cultivated a plant.
One or two things, however, may be said for the culture of the little
folk. There are no pygmy cannibals. Although the Bushman houses, mere
mats suspended on stakes, are the most primitive known, yet these are
the most skilled artists in South Africa, and some of their figures
suggest that they may have known hieroglyphic writing. All the little
peoples treat their women kindly, and reverence gray hairs. The
Andamanese are monogamous and believe in an omniscient deity. On the
other hand, the highest religious concept among the polygamous Akkas
is of a pygmy devil. The Bushmen live in a state approaching sexual
promiscuity; it used to be the custom, when a man wished a temporary
mate, to kidnap a small child, and the mother would follow the child
into his home. The Andamanese have the peculiar custom of manifesting
joy by weeping, and it is said the Veddahs never laugh.
No certain statements may be made as to the aggregate numbers of the
dwarf nations. There are about 50,000 Bushmen, 27,000 Lapps, 20,000
Aetas, 2,000 Mincoupies, 2,000 Veddahs. It may be that the equatorial
pygmies are half as numerous as the Aetas. Everywhere the number of
these people is diminishing.
As to their origin and the cause of their shrunken stature, there is
no agreement among ethnologists. The small blacks may have come into
existence in South India and spread thence east and west, peopling
Melanesia and Africa. Once they formed a belt of population clear
across equatorial Africa. On the evidences of crania which he examined,
Professor Kollman believes that, about b.c. 5000, they dwelt as far
down the Nile Valley as the Thebaid. The Oriental branch of the race,
pure or mixed, extends, says Quatrefages, from the extreme southeast
of New Guinea to the archipelago of the Andamans and from the Sunda
Islands to Japan, and on the Asiatic continent from Annam and the
peninsula of Malacca to the western Ghauts, and from Cape Comorin
to the Himalayas. This grandiose geography is challenged by later
scholarship.
Yet over all these wide spaces, and over the Dark Continent, pygmies
may have been the first settlers. Once it was surmised that the tall
negritoes sprang from them; but this is a moot point. To accept
it would be to assert that short stature is a primitive trait,
and that all the tall races are in this respect abnormal. British
anthropologists hold that the Bushmen are a distinct people, but
that the Congo pygmies, though of livelier intelligence than the
tall blacks, are yet special groups of the Nilotic or Bantu negroes,
arrested or degenerated by the inhospitable forest. Their diminished
stature, Stanley urges, is the result of “three thousand years of
isolation, intermarriage, and a precarious diet of fungi, wild fruit,
lean fibrous meat of animals, and dried insects; in a word, of the
utter absence of sunshine and the lack of gluten and saccharine bodies
in their food.”
Handicapping conditions may have produced the Lapps of the Arctic
Circle, the vanished Indian dwarfs of the Andes, the enigmatic Bushmen,
and the little black men of Africa, the Malay Peninsula, and various
isles of the eastern sea. But in old fables pygmyland is hard by the
country of the giants. It happens that the diminutive Lapp is neighbor
to the tall Karelian, the Bushman and Akka to the stalwart Bantu.
There are little people of the frigid zone, the tropics, and the south
temperate. There were dwarfs of rich ocean littorals as well as of the
tundra, the mountain glen, the desert, and the equatorial forest.
“I believe mankind was originally a dwarf,” says Leland. Churchward, in
his _Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man_, holds that paleolithic man
was a pygmy, “the first little earth man or red man,” and that he was
evolved near the Nile springs, and thence overspread the earth. Sign
language and articulate sounds, the Masonic writer thinks, were worked
out by these little folk. After talking with representatives of their
race, he concludes that they have a monosyllabic speech, and words
with the same sounds as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The resemblance of
living pygmies to the long-armed, short-legged, paunchy dwarf-gods of
Egypt and Phœnicia, and notably to Bes, has been remarked. These squat
divinities may have owed their being to ancient fear of small men, the
elder brothers of historic man. Sir Harry Johnston thinks it possible
that the little blacks once overspread Europe and, by their prankish
good nature and curious power of becoming invisible in herbage and
behind rocks, gave rise to folk-tales of gnomes, kobolds, and fairies.
Kollman, the Basle anatomist, contends that the pygmies were the child
race of mankind, and that each tall race was preceded by a small one.
The common opinion, that healthy dwarf tribes have been produced by
degeneration from men of larger mold, is not fully satisfying. Yet the
oldest human skeletons found thus far are of men of normal size.
There are pygmies, but why? The one riddle succeeds the other.