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.”
* * * * *
Because they are recognizable peoples with representatives who may
still be studied, the folk of tradition are useful exhibits in the
museum of history.