E T H N O G R A P H I C S T U D I E S
_Printed by R. & R. Clark_
FOR
DAVID DOUGLAS, EDINBURGH
T H E L O S T A T L A N T I S
AND OTHER
ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES
BY
SIR DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
AUTHOR OF ‘THE PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND’
‘PREHISTORIC MAN: THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION,’ ETC. ETC.
NEW YORK
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1892
_All rights reserved_
P R E F A C E
“THE Preface is the most troublesome part of a book,” I have often heard
my dear Father say; and now it falls to my unaccustomed pen to write a
preface for him.
I cannot undertake to define the aim of this book; I can only tell how
the last work on it was done. In my Father’s note-book I find it
described as “A few carefully studied monographs, linked together by a
slender thread of ethnographic relationship.”
Returning in June last from a brief visit to Montreal, with the first
signs of illness beginning to show, he found a bundle of proofs waiting
for him, and with the characteristic promptness which never let any duty
wait, he set to work at once to correct them. “It is my last book,” he
said, conscious that his busy brain had nearly fulfilled all its tasks;
and so through days of rapidly increasing weakness and pain he lay on
the sofa correcting proofs till the pen dropped from the hand no longer
able to hold it. His mind turned to the book in his _wandering_ thoughts
from illness, and on one of these occasions he murmured: “Sybil will
write the Preface”; and so I try to fulfil his wish. “Ask Mr. Douglas to
correct the proofs himself, and to be sure to make an index,” was one of
his last requests, thus providing for the finishing of the work which he
could not himself finish. He has passed now from this world whose
prehistoric story he so lovingly tried to decipher, and where he was
ever finding traces of the hand of God, into that other world, “where
toil shall cease and rest begin”; but where I doubt not he still goes on
learning more and more, no longer seeing through a glass darkly but in
perfect light.
The silent lips seem to speak once more in this volume—his last words
to the public; and I commit it very tenderly to those who are interested
in his favourite study of Ethnology.
SYBIL WILSON.
BENCOSIE, TORONTO,
_August 1892_.
C O N T E N T S
PAGE
1. THE LOST ATLANTIS 1
2. THE VINLAND OF THE NORTHMEN 37
3. TRADE AND COMMERCE IN THE STONE AGE 81
4. PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN 130
5. THE ÆSTHETIC FACULTY IN ABORIGINAL RACES 185
6. THE HURON-IROQUOIS; A TYPICAL RACE 246
7. HYBRIDITY AND HEREDITY 307
8. RELATIVE RACIAL BRAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE 339
INDEX 403
THE LOST ATLANTIS
I
EARLY IDEAS
THE legend of Atlantis, an island-continent lying in the Atlantic Ocean
over against the Pillars of Hercules, which, after being long the seat
of a powerful empire, was engulfed in the sea, has been made the basis
of many extravagant speculations; and anew awakens keenest interest with
the revolving centuries. The 12th of October 1892 has been proclaimed a
World’s holiday, to celebrate its accomplished cycle of four centuries
since Columbus set foot on the shores of the West. The voyage has been
characterised as the most memorable in the annals of our race; and the
century thus completed is richer than all before it in the
transformations that the birth of time has disclosed since the wedding
of the New World to the Old. The story of the Lost Atlantis is recorded
in the _Timæus_ and, with many fanciful amplifications, in the _Critias_
of Plato. According to the dialogues, as reproduced there, Critias
repeats to Socrates a story told him by his grandfather, then an old man
of ninety, when he himself was not more than ten years of age. According
to this narrative, Solon visited the city of Sais, at the head of the
Egyptian delta, and there learned from the priests of the ancient empire
of Atlantis, and of its overthrow by a convulsion of nature. “No one,”
says Professor Jowett, in his critical edition of _The Dialogues of
Plato_, “knew better than Plato how to invent ‘a noble lie’”; and he,
unhesitatingly, pronounces the whole narrative a fabrication. “The
world, like a child, has readily, and for the most part, unhesitatingly
accepted the tale of the Island of Atlantis.” To the critical editor,
this reception furnishes only an illustration of popular credulity,
showing how the chance word of a poet or philosopher may give rise to
endless historical or religious speculation. In the _Critias_, the
legendary tale is unquestionably expanded into details of no possible
historical significance or genuine antiquity. But it is not without
reason, that men like Humboldt have recognised in the original legend
the possible vestige of a widely-spread tradition of earliest times. In
this respect, at any rate, I purpose here to review it.
It is to be noted that even in the time of Socrates, and indeed of the
elder Critias, this Atlantis was referred to as the vague and
inconsistent tradition of a remote past; though not more inconsistent
than much else which the cultured Greeks were accustomed to receive. Mr.
Hyde Clarke, in an “Examination of the Legend,” printed in the
_Transactions of the Royal Historical Society_, arrives at the
conclusion that Atlantis was the name of the king rather than of the
dominion. But king and kingdom have ever been liable to be referred to
under a common designation. According to the account in the _Timæus_,
Atlantis was a continent lying over against the Pillars of Hercules,
greater in extent than Libya and Asia combined; the highway to other
islands and to a great ocean, of which the Mediterranean Sea was a mere
harbour. But in the vagueness of all geographical knowledge in the days
of Socrates and of Plato, this Atlantic domain is confused with some
Iberian or western African power, which is stated to have been arrayed
against Egypt, Hellas, and all the countries bordering on the
Mediterranean Sea. The knowledge even of the western Mediterranean was
then very imperfect; and, to the ancient Greek, the West was a region of
vague mystery which sufficed for the localisation of all his fondest
imaginings. There, on the far horizon, Homer pictured the Elysian plain,
where, under a serene sky, the favourites of Zeus enjoyed eternal
felicity; Hesiod assigned the abode of departed heroes to the Happy
Isles beyond the western waters that engirdled Europe; and Seneca
foretold that that mysterious ocean would yet disclose an unknown world
which it then kept concealed. To the ancients, Elysium ever lay beyond
the setting sun; and the Hesperia of the Greeks, as their geographical
knowledge increased, continued to recede before them into the unexplored
west.
In the youth of all nations, the poet and historian are one; and,
according to the tale of the elder Critias, the legend of Atlantis was
derived from a poetic chronicle of Solon, whom he pronounced to have
been one of the best of poets, as well as the wisest of men. The
elements of oral tradition are aptly set forth in the dialogue which
Plato puts into the mouth of Timæus of Locris, a Pythagorean
philosopher. Solon is affirmed to have told the tale to his personal
friend, Dropidas, the great-grandfather of Critias, who repeated it to
his son; and he, eighty years thereafter, in extreme old age, told it to
his grandson, a boy of ten, whose narrative, reproduced in mature years,
we are supposed to read in the dialogue of the _Timæus_. Even those are
but the later links in the traditionary catena. Solon himself visited
Sais, a city of the Egyptian delta, under the protection of the goddess,
Neith or Athene. There, when in converse with the Egyptian priests, he
learned, for the first time, rightly to appreciate how ignorant of
antiquity he and his countrymen were. “O Solon, Solon,” said an aged
priest to him, “you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old man who
is a Hellene; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you
which is white with age.” Solon had told them the mythical tales of
Phoroneus and Niobe, and of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and had attempted to
reckon the interval by generations since the great deluge. But the
priest of Sais replied to this that such Hellenic annals were children’s
stories. Their memory went back but a little way, and recalled only the
latest of the great convulsions of nature, by which revolutions in past
ages had been wrought: “The memory of them is lost, because there was no
written voice among you.” And so the venerable priest undertook to tell
him of the social life and condition of the primitive Athenians 9000
years before. It is among the events of this older era that the
overthrow of Atlantis is told: a story already “white with age” in the
time of Socrates, 3400 years ago. The warriors of Athens, in that elder
time, were a distinct caste; and when the vast power of Atlantis was
marshalled against the Mediterranean nations, Athens bravely repelled
the invader, and gave liberty to the nations whose safety had been
imperilled; but in the convulsion that followed, in which the
island-continent was engulfed in the ocean, the warrior race of Athens
also perished.
The story, as it thus reaches us, is one of the vaguest of popular
legends, and has been transmitted to modern times in the most obscure of
all the writings of Plato. Nevertheless, there is nothing improbable in
the idea that it rests on some historic basis, in which the tradition of
the fall of an Iberian, or other aggressive power in the western
Mediterranean, is mingled with other and equally vague traditions of
intercourse with a vast continent lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
Mr. Hyde Clarke, in his _Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch_, draws
attention to the ancient system of geography, alluded to by various
early writers, and notably mentioned by Crates of Pergamos, B.C. 160,
which treated of the Four Worlds. This he connects with the statement by
Mr. George Smith, derived from the cuneiform interpretations, that Agu,
an ancient king of Babylonia, called himself “King of the Four Races.”
He also assigns to it a relation with others, including its Inca
equivalent of _Tavintinsuzu_, the Empire of the Four Quarters of the
World. But the extravagance of regal titles has been the same in widely
diverse ages; so that much caution is necessary before they can be made
a safe basis for comprehensive generalisations. Four kings made war
against five in the vale of Siddim; and when Lot was despoiled and taken
captive by Chederlaomer, King of Elam, Tidal, King of Nations, and other
regal allies, Abraham, with no further aid than that of his trained
servants, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen in all, smote
their combined hosts, and recovered the captives and the spoil. Here, at
least, it is obvious that “the King of Nations” was somewhat on a par
with one of the six vassal kings who rowed King Edgar on the River Dee.
Certainly, within any early period of authentic history, the conceptions
of the known world were reduced within narrow bounds; and it would be a
very comprehensive deduction from such slight premises as the legend
supplies, to refer it to an age of accurate geographical knowledge in
which the western hemisphere was known as one of four worlds, or
continents. When the Scottish poet, Dunbar, wrote of America, twenty
years after the voyage of Columbus, he only knew of it as “the new-found
isle.”
The opinion, universally favoured in the infancy of physical science, of
the recurrence of convulsions of nature, whereby nations were
revolutionised, and vast empires destroyed by fire, or engulfed in the
ocean, revived with the theories of cataclysmic phenomena in the earlier
speculations of modern geology; and has even now its advocates among
writers who have given little heed to the concurrent opinion of later
scientific authorities. Among the most zealous advocates of the idea of
a submerged Atlantic continent, the seat of a civilisation older than
that of Europe, or of the old East, was the late Abbé Brasseur de
Bourbourg. As an indefatigable and enthusiastic investigator, he
occupies a place in the history of American archæology somewhat akin to
that of his fellow-countryman, M. Boucher de Perthes, in relation to the
palæontological disclosures of Europe. He had the undoubted merit of
first drawing the attention of the learned world to the native
transcripts of Maya records, the full value of which is only now being
adequately recognised. His _Histoire des Nations Civilisées_ aims at
demonstrating from their religious myths and historical traditions the
existence of a self-originated civilisation. In his subsequent _Quatre
Lettres sur le Mexique_, the Abbé adopted, in the most literal form, the
venerable legend of Atlantis, giving free rein to his imagination in
some very fanciful speculations. He calls into being, “from the vasty
deep,” a submerged continent, or, rather, extension of the present
America, stretching eastward, and including, as he deems probable, the
Canary Islands, and other insular survivals of the imaginary Atlantis.
Such speculations of unregulated zeal are unworthy of serious
consideration. But it is not to be wondered at that the vague legend, so
temptingly set forth in the _Timæus_, should have kindled the
imaginations of a class of theorists, who, like the enthusiastic Abbé,
are restrained by no doubts suggested by scientific indications. So far
from geology lending the slightest confirmation to the idea of an
engulfed Atlantis, Professor Wyville Thomson has shown, in his _Depths
of the Sea_, that while oscillations of the land have considerably
modified the boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean, the geological age of its
basin dates as far back, at least, as the later Secondary period. The
study of its animal life, as revealed in dredging, strongly confirms
this, disclosing an unbroken continuity of life on the Atlantic sea-bed
from the Cretaceous period to the present time; and, as Sir Charles
Lyell has pointed out, in his _Principles of Geology_, the entire
evidence is adverse to the idea that the Canaries, the Madeiras, and the
Azores, are surviving fragments of a vast submerged island, or
continuous area of the adjacent continent. There are, indeed, undoubted
indications of volcanic action; but they furnish evidence of local
upheaval, not of the submergence of extensive continental areas.
But it is an easy, as well as a pleasant pastime, to evolve either a
camel or a continent out of the depths of one’s own inner consciousness.
To such fanciful speculators, the lost Atlantis will ever offer a
tempting basis on which to found their unsubstantial creations. Mr. H.
H. Bancroft, when alluding to the subject in his _Native Races of the
Pacific States_, refers to forty-two different works for notices and
speculations concerning Atlantis. The latest advocacy of the idea of an
actual island-continent of the mid-Atlantic, literally engulfed in the
ocean, within a period authentically embraced by historical tradition,
is to be found in its most popular form in Mr. Ignatius Donnelly’s
_Atlantis, the Antediluvian World_. By him, as by Abbé Brasseur, the
concurrent opinions of the highest authorities in science, that the main
features of the Atlantic basin have undergone no change within any
recent geological period, are wholly ignored. To those, therefore, who
attach any value to scientific evidence, such speculations present no
serious claims on their study. There is, indeed, an idea favoured by
certain students of science, who carry the spirit of nationality into
regions ordinarily regarded as lying outside of any sectional pride,
that, geologically speaking, America is the older continent. It may at
least be accepted as beyond dispute, that that continent and the great
Atlantic basin intervening between it and Europe are alike of a
geological antiquity which places the age of either entirely apart from
all speculations affecting human history. But such fancies are wholly
superfluous. The idea of intercourse between the Old and the New World
prior to the fifteenth century, passed from the region of speculation to
the domain of historical fact, when the publication of the _Antiquitates
Americanæ_ and the _Grönland’s Historiske Mindesmærker_, by the
antiquaries of Copenhagen, adduced contemporary authorities, and
indisputably genuine runic inscriptions, in proof of the visits of the
Northmen to Greenland and the mainland of North America, before the
close of the tenth century.
The idea of pre-Columbian intercourse between Europe and America, is
thus no novelty. What we have anew to consider is: whether, in its wider
aspect, it is more consistent with probability than the revived notion
of a continent engulfed in the Atlantic Ocean? The earliest students of
American antiquities turned to Phœnicia, Egypt, or other old-world
centres of early civilisation, for the source of Mexican, Peruvian, and
Central American art or letters; and, indeed, so long as the unity of
the human race remained unquestioned, some theory of a common source for
the races of the Old and the New World was inevitable. The idea,
therefore, that the new world which Columbus revealed, was none other
than the long-lost Atlantis, is one that has probably suggested itself
independently to many minds. References to America have, in like manner,
been sought for in obscure allusions of Herodotus, Seneca, Pliny, and
other classical writers, to islands or continents in the ocean which
extended beyond the western verge of the world as known to them. That
such allusions should be vague, was inevitable. If they had any
foundation in a knowledge by elder generations of this western
hemisphere, the tradition had come down to them by the oral
transmissions of centuries; while their knowledge of their own eastern
hemisphere was limited and very imperfect. “The Cassiterides, from which
tin is brought”—assumed to be the British Isles,—were known to
Herodotus only as uncertainly located islands of the Atlantic of which
he had no direct information. When Assuryuchurabal, the founder of the
palace at Nimrud, conquered the people who lived on the banks of the
Orontes from the confines of Hamath to the sea, the spoils obtained from
them included one hundred talents of _anna_, or tin; and the same prized
metal is repeatedly named in cuneiform inscriptions. The people trading
in tin, supposed to be identical with the Shirutana, were the merchants
of the world before Tyre assumed her place as chief among the merchant
princes of the sea. Yet already, in the time of Joshua, she was known as
“the strong city, Tyre.” “Great Zidon” also is so named, along with her,
when Joshua defines the bounds of the tribe of Asher, extending to the
sea coast; and is celebrated by Homer for its works of art. The
Seleucia, or Cilicia, of the Greeks was an attempted restoration of the
ancient seaport of the Shirutana, which may have been an emporium of
Khita merchandise; as it was, undoubtedly, an important place of
shipment for the Phœnicians in their overland trade from the valley of
the Euphrates. One favoured etymology of Britain, as the name of the
islands whence tin was brought, is _barat-anna_, assumed to have been
applied to them by that ancient race of merchant princes: the
Cassiterides being the later Aryan equivalent, Gr. κασσίτεροϛ, Sansk.
_kastira_.
In primitive centuries, when ancient maritime races thus held supremacy
in the Mediterranean Sea, voyages were undoubtedly made far into the
Atlantic Ocean. The Phœnicians, who of all the nations settled on its
shores lay among the remotest from the outlying ocean, habitually traded
with settlements on the Atlantic. They colonised the western shores of
the Mediterranean at a remote period; occupied numerous favourable
trading-posts on the bays and headlands of the Euxine, as well as of
Sicily and others of the larger islands; and passing beyond the straits,
effected settlements along the coasts of Europe and Africa. According to
Strabo (i. 48), they had factories beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the
period immediately succeeding the Trojan war: an era which yearly
becomes for us less mythical, and to which may be assigned the great
development of the commercial prosperity of Tyre. The Phœnicians were
then expanding their trading enterprise, and extending explorations so
as to command the remotest available sources of wealth. The trade of
Tarshish was for Phœnicia what that of the East has been to England in
modern centuries. The Tartessus, on which the Arabs of Spain
subsequently conferred the name of the Guadalquivir, afforded ready
access to a rich mining district; and also formed the centre of valuable
fisheries of tunny and muræna. By means of its navigable waters, along
with those of the Guadina, Phœnician traders were able to penetrate far
inland; and the colonies established at their mouths furnished fresh
starting points for adventurous exploration along the Atlantic seaboard.
They derived much at least of the tin, which was an important object of
traffic, from the mines of north-west Spain, and from Cornwall; though,
doubtless, both the tin of the Cassiterides and amber from the Baltic
were also transported by overland routes to the Adriatic and the mouth
of the Rhone. It was a Phœnician expedition which, in the reign of
Pharaoh Necho, B.C. 611-605, after the decline of that great maritime
power, accomplished the feat of circumnavigating Africa by way of the
Red Sea. Hanno, a Carthaginian, not only guided the Punic fleet round
the parts of Libya which border on the Atlantic, but has been credited
with reaching the Indian Ocean by the same route as that which Vasco de
Gama successfully followed in 1497. The object of Hanno’s expedition, as
stated in the _Periplus_, was to found Liby-Phœnician cities beyond the
Pillars of Hercules. How far south his voyage actually extended along
the African coast is matter of conjecture, or of disputed
interpretation; for the original work is lost. It is sufficient for our
purpose to know that he did pursue the same route which led in a later
century to the discovery of Brazil. Aristotle applies the name of
“Antilla” to a Carthaginian discovery; and Diodorus Siculus assigns to
the Carthaginians the knowledge of an island in the ocean, the secret of
which they reserved to themselves, as a refuge to which they could
withdraw, should fate ever compel them to desert their African homes. It
is far from improbable that we may identify this obscure island with one
of the Azores, which lie 800 miles from the coast of Portugal. Neither
Greek nor Roman writers make other reference to them; but the discovery
of numerous Carthaginian coins at Corvo, the extreme north-westerly
island of the group, leaves little room to doubt that they were visited
by Punic voyagers. There is therefore nothing extravagant in the
assumption that we have here the “Antilla” mentioned by Aristotle. While
the Carthaginian oligarchy ruled, naval adventure was still encouraged;
but the maritime era of the Mediterranean belongs to more ancient
centuries. The Greeks were inferior in enterprise to the Phœnicians;
while the Romans were essentially unmaritime; and the revival of the old
adventurous spirit with the rise of the Venetian and Genoese republics
was due to the infusion of fresh blood from the great northern home of
the sea-kings of the Baltic.
The history of the ancient world is, for us, to a large extent, the
history of civilisation among the nations around the Mediterranean Sea.
Its name perpetuates the recognition of it from remote times as the
great inland sea which kept apart and yet united, in intercourse and
exchange of experience and culture, the diverse branches of the human
family settled on its shores. Of the history of those nations, we only
know some later chapters. Disclosures of recent years have startled us
with recovered glimpses of the Khita, or Hittites, as a great power
centred between the Euphrates and the Orontes, but extending into Asia
Minor, and about B.C. 1200 reaching westward to the Ægean Sea. All but
their name seemed to have perished; and they were known only as one
among diverse Canaanitish tribes, believed to have been displaced by the
Hebrew inheritors of Palestine. Yet now, as Professor Curtius has
pointed out, we begin to recognise that “one of the paths by which the
art and civilisation of Babylonia and Assyria made their way to Greece,
was along the great high-road which runs across Asia Minor”; and which
the projected railway route through the valley of the Euphrates seeks to
revive. For, as compared with Egypt, and the earliest nations of Eastern
Asia, the Greeks were, indeed, children. It was to the Phœnicians that
the ancients assigned the origin of navigation. Their skill as seamen
was the subject of admiration even by the later Greeks, who owned
themselves to be their pupils in seamanship, and called the pole-star,
the Phœnician star. Their naval commerce is set forth in glowing
rhetoric by the prophet Ezekiel. “O Tyrus, thou that art situate at the
entry of the sea, a merchant of the people of many isles. Thy borders
are in the midst of the seas. The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were
thy mariners. Thy wise men, O Tyrus, were thy pilots. All the ships of
the sea, with their mariners, were in thee to occupy thy merchandise.”
But this was spoken at the close of Phœnician history, in the last days
of Tyre’s supremacy.
Looking back then into the dim dawn of actual history, with whatever
fresh light recent discoveries have thrown upon it: this, at least,
seems to claim recognition from us, that in that remote era the eastern
Mediterranean was a centre of maritime enterprise, such as had no equal
among the nations of antiquity. Even in the decadence of Phœnicia, her
maritime skill remained unmatched. Egypt and Palestine, under their
greatest rulers, recognised her as mistress of the sea; and, as has been
already noted, the circumnavigation of Africa—which, when it was
repeated in the fifteenth century, was considered an achievement fully
equalling that of Columbus,—had long before been accomplished by
Phœnician mariners. Carthage inherited the enterprise of the mother
country, but never equalled her achievements. With the fall of Carthage,
the Mediterranean became a mere Roman lake, over which the galleys of
Rome sailed reluctantly with her armed hosts; or coasting along shore,
they “committed themselves to the sea, and loosed the rudder bands, and
hoisted up the mainsail to the winds”; or again, “strake sail, and so
were driven,” after the blundering fashion described in the voyage of
St. Paul. To such a people, the memories of Punic exploration or
Phœnician enterprise, or the vague legends of an Atlantis beyond the
engirdling ocean, were equally unavailing. The narrow sea between Gaul
and Britain was barrier enough to daunt the boldest of them from
willingly encountering the dangers of an expedition to what seemed to
them literally another world.
Seeing then that the first steps in navigation were taken in an age
lying beyond all memory, and that the oldest traditions assign its
origin to the remarkable people who figure alike in early sacred and
profane history—in Joshua and Ezekiel, in Dius and Menander of Ephesus,
in the Homeric poems and in later Greek writings,—as unequalled in
their enterprise on the sea: what impediments existed in B.C. 1400 or
any earlier century that did not still exist in A.D. 1400, to render
intercourse between the eastern and the western hemisphere impossible?
America was no further off from Tarshish in the golden age of Tyre than
in that of Henry the Navigator. With the aid of literary memorials of
the race of sea-rovers who carved out for themselves the Duchy of
Normandy from the domain of Charlemagne’s heir, and spoiled the Angles
and Saxons in their island home, we glean sufficient evidence to place
the fact beyond all doubt that, after discovering and colonising Iceland
and Greenland, they made their way southward to Labrador, and so, some
way along the American coast. How far south their explorations actually
extended, after being long assigned to the locality of Rhode Island, has
anew excited interest, and is still a matter of controversy. The
question is reviewed on a subsequent page; but its final settlement does
not, in any degree, affect the present question. Certain it is that,
about A.D. 1000, when St. Olaf was introducing Christianity by a
sufficiently high-handed process into the Norse fatherland, Leif, the
son of Eric, the founder of the first Greenland colony, sailed from
Ericsfiord, or other Greenland port, in quest of southern lands already
reported to have been seen, and did land on more than one point of the
North American coast. We know what the ships of those Norse rovers were:
mere galleys, not larger than a good fishing smack, and far inferior to
it in deck and rigging. For compass they had only the same old
“Phœnician star,” which, from the birth of navigation, had guided the
mariners of the ancient world over the pathless deep. The track pursued
by the Northmen, from Norway to Iceland, and so to Greenland and the
Labrador coast, was, doubtless, then as now, beset by fogs, so that
“neither sun nor stars in many days appeared”; and they stood much more
in need of compass than the sailors of the “Santa Maria,” the “Pinta,”
and the “Nina,” the little fleet with which Columbus sailed from the
Andalusian port of Palos, to his first discovered land of “Guanahani,”
variously identified among the islands of the American Archipelago. Yet,
notwithstanding all the advantages of a southern latitude, with its
clearer skies, we have to remember that the “Santa Maria,” the only
decked vessel of the expedition, was stranded; and the “Pinta” and
“Nina,” on which Columbus and his party had to depend for their homeward
voyage, were mere coasting craft, the one with a crew of thirty, and the
other with twenty-four men, with only _latine_ sails. As to the compass,
we perceive how little that availed, on recalling the fact that the
Portuguese admiral, Pedro Alvares de Cabral, only eight years later,
when following on the route of Vasco de Gama, was carried by the
equatorial current so far out of his intended course that he found
himself in sight of a strange land, in 10° S. lat., and so accidentally
discovered Brazil and the new world of the west, not by means of the
mariner’s compass, but in spite of its guidance. It is thus obvious that
the discovery of America would have followed as a result of the voyage
of Vasco de Gama round the Cape, wholly independent of that of Columbus.
What befell the Portuguese admiral of King Manoel, in A.D. 1500, was an
experience that might just as readily have fallen to the lot of the
Phœnician admiral of Pharaoh Necho in B.C. 600, to the Punic Hanno, or
other early navigators; and may have repeatedly occurred to
Mediterranean adventurers on the Atlantic in older centuries. On the
news of de Cabral’s discovery reaching Portugal, the King despatched the
Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of South America,
prepared a map of the new-found world, and thereby wrested from Columbus
the honour of giving his name to the continent which he discovered.
When we turn from the myths and traditions of the Old World to those of
the New, we find there traces that seem not unfairly interpretable into
the American counterpart of the legend of Atlantis. The chief seat of
the highest native American civilisation, is neither Mexico nor Peru,
but Central America. The nations of the Maya stock, who inhabit Yucatan,
Guatemala, and the neighbouring region, were peculiarly favourably
situated; and they appear to have achieved the greatest progress among
the communities of Central America. They may not unfitly compare with
the ancient dwellers in the valley of the Euphrates, from the grave
mounds of whose buried cities we are now recovering the history of ages
that had passed into oblivion before the Father of History assumed the
pen. Tested indeed by intervening centuries their monuments are not so
venerable; but, for America’s chroniclings, they are more prehistoric
than the disclosures of Assyrian mounds. The cities of Central America
were large and populous, and adorned with edifices, even now magnificent
in their ruins. Still more, the Mayas were a lettered people, who, like
the Egyptians, recorded in elaborate sculptured hieroglyphics the
formulæ of history and creed. Like them, too, they wrote and ciphered;
and appear, indeed, to have employed a comprehensive system of computing
time and recording dates, which, it cannot be doubted, will be
sufficiently mastered to admit of the decipherment of their ancient
records. The Mayas appear, soon after the Spanish Conquest, to have
adopted the Roman alphabet, and employed it in recording their own
historical traditions and religious myths, as well as in rendering into
such written characters some of the ancient national documents. Those
versions of native myth and history survive, and attention is now being
directed to them. The most recent contribution from this source is _The
Annals of the Cakchiquels_, by Dr. D. G. Brinton, a carefully edited and
annotated translation of a native legal document or _titulo_, in which,
soon after the Conquest, the heir of an ancient Maya family set forth
the evidence of his claim to the inheritance. Along with this may be
noted another work of the same class: _Titre Généalogique des Seigneurs
de Totonicapan. Traduit de l’Espagnol par M. de Charencey._ These two
works independently illustrate the same great national event. In one, a
prince of the Cakchiquel nation, tells of the overthrow of the Quiché
power by his people; and in the other a Quiché seignior, one of the
“Lords of Totonicapan,” describes it from his own point of view. Both
were of the same Maya stock, in what is now the State of Guatemala. Each
nation had a capital adorned with temples and palaces, the splendour of
which excited the wonder of the Spaniards; and both preserved traditions
of the migration of their ancestors from Tula, a mythical land from
which they came across the water.
Such traditions of migration meet us on many sides. Captain Cook found
among the mythological traditions of Tahiti, a vague legend of a ship
that came out of the ocean, and seemed to be the dim record of ancestral
intercourse with the outer world. So also, the Aztecs had the tradition
of the golden age of Anahuac; and of Quetzalcoatl, their instructor in
agriculture, metallurgy and the arts of government. He was of fair
complexion, with long dark hair, and flowing beard: all, characteristics
foreign to their race. When his mission was completed, he set sail for
the mysterious shores of Tlapallan; and on the appearance of the ships
of Cortes, the Spaniards were believed to have returned with the divine
instructor of their forefathers, from the source of the rising sun.
What tradition hints at, physiology confirms. The races of America
differ less in physical character from those of Asia, than do the races
either of Africa or Europe. The American Indian is a Mongol; and though
marked diversities are traceable throughout the American continent, the
range of variation is much less than in the eastern hemisphere. The
western continent appears to have been peopled by repeated migrations
and by diverse routes; but when we attempt to estimate any probable date
for its primeval settlement, evidence wholly fails. Language proves
elsewhere a safe guide. It has established beyond question some
long-forgotten relationship between the Aryans of India and Persia and
those of Europe; it connects the Finn and Lapp with their Asiatic
forefathers; it marks the independent origin of the Basques and their
priority to the oldest Aryan intruders; it links together widely diverse
branches of the great Semitic family. Can language tell us of any such
American affinities, or of traces of Old World congeners, in relation to
either civilised Mayas and Peruvians, or to the forest and prairie races
of the northern continent?
With the millions of America’s coloured population, of African blood and
yet speaking Aryan languages, the American comparative philologist can
scarcely miss the significance of the warning that linguistic and
ethnical classifications by no means necessarily imply the same thing.
Nevertheless, without overlooking this distinction, the ethnical
significance of the evidence which comparative philology supplies cannot
be slighted in any question relative to prehistoric relations between
the Old World and the New. What then can philology tell us? There is one
answer, at the least, which the languages of America give, that fully
accords with the legend, “white with age,” that told of an
island-continent in the Atlantic Ocean with which the nations around the
Mediterranean once held intercourse. None of them indicates any trace of
immigration within the period of earliest authentic history. Those who
attach significance to the references in the _Timæus_ to political
relations common to Atlantis and parts of Libya and Europe; or who, on
other grounds, look with favour on the idea of early intercourse between
the Mediterranean and the western continent, have naturally turned to
the Eskuara of the Basques. It is invariably recognised as the surviving
representative of languages spoken by the Allophyliæ of Europe before
the intrusion of Aryans. The forms of its grammar differ widely from
those of any Semitic, or Indo-European tongue, placing it in the same
class with Mongol, East African, and American languages. Here,
therefore, is a tempting glimpse of possible affinities; and Professor
Whitney, accordingly, remarks in his _Life and Growth of Languages_,
that the Basque “forms a suitable stepping-stone from which to enter the
peculiar linguistic domain of the New World, since there is no other
dialect of the Old World which so much resembles in structure the
American languages.” But this glimpse of possible relationship has
proved, thus far, illusory. In their morphological character, certain
American and Asiatic languages have a common agglutinative structure,
which in the former is developed into their characteristic polysynthetic
attribute. With this, the Eskuarian system of affixes corresponds. But
beyond the general structure, there is no such evidence of affinity,
either in the vocabularies or grammar, as direct affiliation might be
expected to show. Elements common to the Anglo-American of the
nineteenth century and the Sanskrit-speaking race beyond the Indus, in
the era of Alexander of Macedon, are suggested at once by the
grammatical structure of their languages; whereas there is nothing in
the resemblance between the Basque and any of the North American
languages that is not compatible with a “stepping-stone” from Asia to
America by the islands of the Pacific. The most important of all the
native American languages in their bearing on this interesting
inquiry—those of Central America,—are only now receiving adequate
attention. Startling evidence may yet reward the diligence of students;
but, so far as language furnishes any clue to affinity of race, no
American language thus far discloses such a relationship, as, for
example, enabled Dr. Pritchard to suggest that the western people of
Europe, to whom the Greeks gave the collective name of Kέλται, and whose
languages had been assumed by all previous ethnologists as furnishing
evidence that they were precursors of the Aryan immigrants, in reality
justified their classification in the same stock.
But while thus far, the evidence of language is, at best, vague and
indefinite in its response to the inquiry for proofs of relationship of
the races of America to those of the Old World; physiological
comparisons lend no confirmation to the idea of an indigenous native
race, with special affinities and adaptation to its peculiar
environment, and with languages all of one class, the ramifications from
a single native stem. So far as physical affinities can be relied upon,
the man of America, in all his most characteristic racial diversities,
is of Asiatic origin. His near approximation to the Asiatic Mongol is so
manifest as to have led observers of widely different opinions in all
other respects, to concur in classing both under the same great
division: the Mongolian of Pickering, the American Mongolidæ of Latham,
the Mongoloid of Huxley. Professor Flower, in an able discussion of the
varieties of the human species, addressed to the Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain in 1885, unhesitatingly classes the Eskimo as
the typical North Asiatic Mongol. In other American races he notes as
distinctive features the characteristic form of the nasal bones, the
well-developed superciliary ridge, and retreating forehead; but the
resemblance is so obvious in many other respects, that he finally
includes them all among the members of the Mongolian type. If, then, the
American Mongol came originally from Asia, or sprung from the common
stock of which the Asiatic Mongol is the typical representative, within
any such period as even earliest Phœnician history would embrace, much
more definite traces of affinity are to be looked for in his language
than mere correspondence in the agglutination characteristic of a very
widely diffused class of speech. But we, thus far, look in vain for
traces of a common genealogy such as those which, on the one hand,
correlate the Semitic and Aryan families of Asia and Europe with parent
stocks of times anterior to history, and on the other, with
ramifications of modern centuries. We have, moreover, to deal mainly
with the languages of uncivilised races. To the continent north of the
Gulf of Mexico, the grand civilising art of the metallurgist remained to
the last unknown; and in Mexico, it appears as a gift of recent origin,
derived from Central America. The Asiatic origin of the art of
Tubal-cain has, indeed, been pretty generally assumed, both for Central
and Southern America; but by mere inference. In doing so, we are carried
back to some mythic Quetzalcoatl: for neither the metallurgist nor his
art was introduced in recent centuries. Assuming, for the sake of
argument, the dispersion of a common population of Asia and America,
already familiar with the working of metals, and with architecture,
sculpture and other kindred arts, at a date coeval with the founding of
Tyre, “the daughter of Sidon,” what help does language give us in favour
of such a postulate? We have great language groups, such as the
Huron-Iroquois, extending of old from the St. Lawrence to North
Carolina; the Algonkin, from Hudson Bay to South Carolina; the Dakotan,
from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains; the Athabascan, from the
Eskimo frontier, within the Arctic circle, to New Mexico; and the Tinné
family of languages west of the Rocky Mountains, from the Youkon and
Mackenzie rivers, far south on the Pacific slope. With those, as with
the more cultured languages, or rather languages of the more cultured
races, of Central and Southern America, elaborate comparisons have been
made with vocabularies of Asiatic languages; but the results are, at
best, vague. Curious points of agreement have, indeed, been
demonstrated, inviting to further research; but as yet the evidence of
relationship mainly rests on correspondence in structure. The
agglutinative suffixes are common to the Eskimo and many American Indian
tongues. Dr. H. Rink describes the polysynthetic process in the Eskimo
language as founded on radical words, to which additional or imperfect
words, or affixes, are attached; and on the inflexion, which, for
transitive verbs, indicates subject as well as object, likewise by
addition. But, while Professor Flower unhesitatingly characterises the
Eskimo as belonging to the typical North Asiatic Mongols; he, at the
same time, speaks of them as almost as perfectly isolated in their
Arctic home “as an island population.” Nevertheless, the same structure
is common to their language and to those of the great North American
families already named. All alike present, in an exaggerated form, the
characteristic structure of the Ural-Altaic or Turanian group of Asiatic
languages.
Race-type corresponds in the Old and New World. A comparison of
languages by means of the vocabularies of the two continents, yields no
such correspondence. All the more, therefore, is the American student of
comparative philology stimulated to investigate the significance of the
polysynthetic characteristic found to pertain to so many—though by no
means to all—of the languages of this continent. The relationship which
it suggests to the agglutinative languages of Asia, furnishes a subject
of investigation not less interesting to American students, alike of the
science of language, and of the whole comprehensive questions which
anthropology embraces, than the relations of the Romance languages of
Europe to the parent Latin; or of Latin itself, and all the Aryan
languages, ancient and modern, not only to Sanskrit and Zend, but to the
indeterminate stock which furnished the parent roots, the grammatical
forms, and that whole class of words still recognisable as the common
property of the whole Aryan family. Sanskrit was a dead language three
thousand years ago; the English language, as such, cannot claim to have
endured much more than fourteen centuries, yet both partake of the same
common property of numerals and familiar terms existing under certain
modifications in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Celtic, German,
Anglo-Saxon, and in all the Romance languages. Thus far the American
philologist has been unable to show any such genealogical relationship
pervading the native languages; or to recover specific evidence of
affinities to languages, and so to races of other continents. There are,
indeed, linguistic families, such as some already referred to,
indicating a common descent among widely dispersed tribes; but this has
its chief interest in relation to another aspect of the question.