Who expects uniformity of physiognomy or frame with such a distribution?
The size of ethnological areas.—Comparatively speaking, Europe is pretty equally divided amongst the European families. The Slavonic populations of Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, Servia, and Russia may, perhaps, have more than their due—still the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Wallachians, all speaking languages of classical origin, have their share; and so has our ownGermanic or Gothic family of English, Dutch, Frisians, Bavarians, and Scandinavians. Nevertheless, there are a few families as limited in geographical area as subordinate in political importance. There are the Escaldunac, or Basques,—originally the occupants of all Spain and half France, now pent up in a corner of the Pyrenees—the Welsh of the Iberic Peninsula. There are, also, the Skipetar, or Albanians; wedged in between Greece, Turkey, and Dalmatia. Nevertheless, the respective areas of the European families are pretty equally distributed; and the land of Europe is like a lottery wherein all the prizes are of an appreciable value.
The comparison with Asia verifies this. In immediate contact with the vast Turkish population centred in Independent Tartary, but spread over an area reaching, more or less continuously, from Africa to the Icy Sea (an area larger than the whole of Europe), come the tribes of Caucasus—Georgians, Circassians, Lesgians, Mizjeji, and Irôn; five well-defined groups, each falling into subordinate divisions, and some of them into subdivisions. The language of Constantinople is understood at the Lena. In the mountain range between the Caspian and the Black Sea, the mutually unintelligible languages are at least fifteen—perhaps more, certainly not fewer. Now, the extentof land covered by the Turk family shows the size to which an ethnological area may attain; whilst the multiplicity of mutually unintelligible tongues of Caucasus shows how closely families may be packed. Their geographical juxtaposition gives prominence to the contrast.
At the first view, this contrast seems remarkable. So far from being so, it is of continual occurrence. In China the language is one and indivisible: on its south-western frontier the tongues are counted by the dozen—just as if in Yorkshire there were but one provincial dialect throughout; two in Lincolnshire; and twenty in Rutland.
The same contrast re-appears in North America. In Canada and the Northern States the Algonkin area is measured by the degrees of latitude and longitude; in Louisiana and Alabama by the mile.
The same in South America. One tongue—the Guarani—covers half the continent. Elsewhere, a tenth part of it contains a score.
The same in Southern Africa. From the Line to the neighbourhood of the Cape all is Kaffre. Between the Gambia and the Gaboon there are more than twenty different divisions.
The same in the North. The Berbers reach from the Valley of the Nile to the Canaries, andfrom theMediterraneanto the parts about Borneo. In Borneo there are said to be thirty different languages.
Such are areas in size, and in relation to each other; like the bishoprics and curacies of our church, large and small, with a difficulty in ascertaining the average. However, the simple epithetsgreatandsmallare suggestive; since the former implies anencroaching, the latter arecedingpopulation.
A distribution over continents is one thing; a distribution over islands another. The first is easiest made when the world is young and when the previous occupants create no obstacles. The second implies maritime skill and enterprise, and maritime skill improves with the experience of mankind. One of the greatest facts of ethnological distribution and dispersion belongs to this class. All the islands of the Pacific are peopled by the members of one stock, or family—the Polynesian. These we find as far north as the Sandwich Islands, as far south as New Zealand, and in Easter Island half-way between Asia and America. So much for thedispersion. But this is not all: thedistributionis as remarkable. Madagascar is an African rather than an Asiatic island; within easy sail of Africa; the exact island for an African population. Yet, ethnologically, it is Asiatic—the same familywhich we find in Sumatra, Borneo, the Moluccas, the Mariannes, the Carolines, and Polynesia being Malagasi also.
Contrast between contiguous populations.—Ethnological resemblance by no means coincides with geographical contiguity. The general character of the circumpolar families of the Arctic Circle is that of the Laplander, the Samoeid, and the Eskimo. Yet the zone of population that encircles the inhospitable shores of the Polar Sea is not exclusively either Lap or Samoeid—nor yet Eskimo. In Europe, the Laplander finds a contrast on each side. There is the Norwegian on the west; the Finlander on the east. We can explain this. The former is but a recent occupant; not a natural, but an intruder. This we infer from the southern distribution of the other members of his family—who are Danish, German, Dutch, English, and American. For the same reason the Icelander differs from the Greenlander. The Finlander, though more closely allied to the Lap than the Norwegian—belonging to the same great Ugrian family of mankind—is still a southern member of his family; a family whose continuation extends to the Lower Volga, and prolongations of which are found in Hungary. East of the Finlander, the Russian displaces the typically circumpolar Samoeid; whilst at the mouth of the Lena we havethe Yakuts—Turk in blood, and tongue, and, to a certain extent, in form also.
In America the circumpolar population is generally Eskimo. Yet at one point, we find even the verge of the Arctic shore occupied by a population of tall, fine-looking athletes, six feet high, well-made, and handsome in countenance. These are the Digothi Indians, called also Loucheux. Their locality is the mouth of the McKenzie River; but their language shows that their origin is further south—i. e.that they are Koluches within the Eskimo area.
In Southern Africa we have the Hottentot in geographical proximity to theKaffre, yet the contrast between the two is considerable. Similar examples are numerous. What do they denote? Generally, but not always, they denote encroachment and displacement; encroachment which tells us which of the two families has been the stronger, and displacement which has the following effect. It obliterates those intermediate and transitional forms which connect varieties, and so brings the more extreme cases of difference in geographical contact, and in ethnological contrast; henceencroachment,displacement, and theobliteration of transitional formsare terms required for the full application of the phænomena of distribution as an instrument of ethnological criticism.
Continuity and isolation.—In Siberia there are two isolated populations—the Yakuts on the Lower Lena, and the Soiot on the Upper Yenesey. The former, as aforesaid, are Turk; but they are surrounded by nations other than Turk. They are cut off from the rest of the stock.
The Soiot in like manner are surrounded by strange populations. Their true relations are the Samoeids of the Icy Sea; but between these two branches of the stock there is a heterogeneous population of Turks and Yeneseians—so-called.
The great Iroquois family of America is separated into two parts—one northern and one southern. Between these lie certain members of the Algonkin class. Like the Soiot, and the Northern Samoeids, the two branches of the Iroquois are separated.
The Majiars of Hungary are wholly enclosed by non-Hungarian populations; and their nearest kinsmen are the Voguls of the Uralian Mountains, far to the north-east of Moscow.
This shows that ethnological areas may be either uninterrupted or interrupted; continuous or discontinuous; unbroken or with isolated fragments; and a little consideration will show, thatwherever there is isolation there has been displacement. Whether the land has risen or the sea encroached is another question. We know why theMajiars stand separate from the other Ugrian nations. They intruded themselves into Europe within the historical period, cutting their way with the sword; and the parts between them and their next of kin were never more Majiar than they are at the present moment.
But we know no such thing concerning the Iroquois; and we infer something quite the contrary. We believe that they once held all the country that now separates their two branches, and a great deal more beside. But the Algonkins encroached; partially dispossessing, and partially leaving them in occupation.
In either case, however, there has beendisplacement; and the displacement is the inference from thediscontinuity.
But we must remember that true discontinuity can exist incontinentsonly. The populations of twoislandsmay agree, whilst that of a whole archipelago lying between them may differ. Yet this is no discontinuity; since the sea is an unbroken chain, and the intervening obstacle can be sailed round instead of crossed. The nearest way from the continent of Asia to the Tahitian archipelago—the nearest part of Polynesia—isviâNew Guinea, New Ireland, and the New Hebrides. All these islands, however, are inhabited by a different division of the Oceanic population. Doesthis indicate displacement? No! It merely suggests the Philippines, the Pelews, the Carolines, the Ralik and Radak groups, and the Navigators’ Isles, as the route; and such it almost certainly was.
[10]Mill (vol. ii.), speaking of the allied subject of the Moral History of Man.
Details of distribution—their conventional character—convergence from the circumference to the centre—Fuegians; Patagonian, Pampa, and Chaco Indians—Peruvians—D’Orbigny’scharacters—other South American Indians—of the Missions—of Guiana—of Venezuela—Guarani—Caribs—Central America—Mexican civilization no isolated phænomenon—North American Indians—Eskimo—apparent objections to their connection with the Americans and Asiatics—Tasmanians—Australians—Papuás—Polynesians—Micronesians—Malagasi—Hottentots—Kaffres—Negroes—Berbers—Abyssinians—Copts—the Semitic family—Primary and secondary migrations.
Ifthe inhabited world were one large circular island; if its population were admitted to have been diffused over its surface from some single point; and if that single point were at one and the same time unascertained and requiring investigation, what would be the method of our inquiries? I suppose that both history and tradition are silent, and that the absence of otherdataof the same kind force us upon the general probabilities of the case, and a large amount ofà prioriargument.
We should ask what point would give us the existing phænomena with the least amount of migration; and we should ask this upon the simpleprinciple of not multiplying causes unnecessarily. The answer would be—the centre. From the centre we can people the parts about the circumference without making any line of migration longer than half a diameter; and without supposing any one out of such numerous lines to be longer than the other. This last is the chief point—the point which more especially fixes us to the centre as a hypothetical birth-place; since, the moment we say that any part of the circumference was reached by a shorter or longer line than any other, we make a specific assertion, requiring specific arguments to support it. These may or may not exist. Until, however, they have been brought forward, we apply the rulede non apparentibus, &c., and keep to our conventional and provisional point in the centre—remembering, of course, its provisional and conventional character, and recognising its existence only as long as the search for something more real and definite continues.
In the earth as it is, we can do something of the same kind; taking six extreme points as our starting-places, and investigating the extent to which theyconverge. These six points are the following:—
From these we work through America, Australia, Polynesia, Africa, and Europe, to Asia—some part of which gives us ourconventional, provisional, and hypothetical centre.
I.From Tierra del Fuego to the north-eastern parts of Asia.—The Fuegians of the island have so rarely been separated from the Patagonians of the continent that there are no recognised elements of uncertainty in this quarter, distant as it is. Maritime habits connect them with their northern neighbours on the west; and that long labyrinth of archipelagoes which runs up to the southern border of Chili is equally Fuegian and Patagonian. Here we are reminded of the habits of some of the Malay tribes, under a very different sky, and amongst the islets about Sincapore—of the Bajows, or sea-gipsies, boatmen whose home is on the water, and as unfixed as that element; wanderers from one group to another; fishermen rather than traders; not strong-handed enough to be pirates, and not industrious enough to be cultivators. Such skill as the Fuegian shows at all, he showsin his canoe, his paddles, his spears, his bow, his slings, and his domestic architecture. All are rude—the bow-strings are made exclusively of the sinews of animals, his arrows headed with stone. Of wood there is little, and of metal less; and, low as is the latitude, the dress, or undress, is said to make a nearer approach to absolute nakedness than is to be found in many of the inter-tropical countries.
In size they fall short of the continental Patagonians; in colour and physical conformation they approach them very closely. The same broad and flattened face occurs in both, reminding some writers of the Eskimo, others of the Chinuk. Their language is certainly referable to the Patagonian class, though, probably, unintelligible to a Patagonian.
Within the island itself there are differences; degrees of discomfort; and degrees in its effects upon the bodily frame. At the eastern extremity[11]the population wore the skins of land-animals, and looked like hunters rather than fishers and sealers. Otherwise, as a general rule, the Fuegians areboatmen.
Not so their nearest kinsmen. They are all horsemen; and in their more northern localities the most formidable ones in the world—Patagoniansof considerable but exaggerated stature, Pampa Indians between Buenos Ayres and the southern Andes, and, higher up, the Chaco Indians of the water-system of the river Plata. To these must be added two other families—one on the Pacific and one on the Atlantic—the Araucanians of Chili, and the Charruas of the lower La Plata.
Except in the impracticable heights of the Andes of Chili, and, as suggested above, in the island of Tierra del Fuego, the same equestrian habits characterize all these populations; and, one and all, the same indomitable and savage independence. Of the Chaco Indians, the Tonocote are partially settled, and imperfectly Christianized; but the Abiponians—very Centaurs in their passionate equestrianism—the Mbocobis, the Mataguayos, and others, are the dread of the Spaniards at the present moment. The resistance of the Araucanians of Chili has given an epic[12]to the country of their conquerors.
Of the Charruas every man was a warrior; self-relying, strong, and cruel; with his hand against the Spaniard, and with his hand against the other aborigines. Many of these they exterminated, and, too proud to enter into confederations, always fought single-handed. In 1831, the President of Uraguay ordered their total destruction, and theywere cut down, root and branch; a few survivors only remaining.
Minusthe Fuegians, this division is pre-eminently natural; yet the Fuegians cannot be disconnected from it. As a proof of the physical differences being small, I will add the description of a naturalist—D’Orbigny—who separates them. They evidently lie within a small compass.
D’Orbignyis a writer by no means inclined to undervalue differences. Nevertheless he places thePeruviansand the Araucanians in the same primary division. This shows that, if other characters connect them, there is nothing very conclusive in the way of physiognomy against their relationship. I think that certain other charactersdoconnect them—language most especially. At the same time, there is no denying important contrasts.The civilization of Peru has no analogue beyond the Tropics; and if we are to consider this as a phænomenonper se, as the result of an instinct as different from those of the Charrua as thearchitecturalimpulses of the bee and the hornet, broad and trenchant must be our lines of demarcation. Yet no such lines can be drawn. Undoubted members of the Quichua stock of the Inca Peruvians (architects and conquerors, as that particular branch was) are but ordinary Indians—like the Aymaras. Nay, the modern Peruvians when contrasted with their ancestors are in the same category. The present occupants of the parts about Titicaca and Tiaguanaco wonder at the ruins around them, and confess their inability to rival them just as a modern Greek thinks of the Phidian Jupiter and despairs. Again, the gap is accounted for—since most of those intervening populations which may have exhibited transitional characters have become either extinct, or denationalized. Between the Peruvians and Araucanians, the Atacamas and Changos are the only remaining populations—under 10,000 in number, and but little known.
Nevertheless, an unequivocally allied population of the Peruvian stock takes us from 28° S. lat. to the Equator. Its unity within itself is undoubted; and its contrast with the next nearestfamilies is no greater than the displacements which have taken place around, and our own ignorance in respect to parts in contact with it.
Of all the populations of the world, the Peruvian is the mostverticalin its direction. Its line is due north and south; its breadth but narrow. The Pacific is at one side, and the Andes at the other. One is well-nigh as definite a limit as the other. When we cross the Cordilleras the Peruvian type has changed.
The Peruvians lie between the Tropics. They cross the Equator. One of their Republics—Ecuador—even takes its name from its meridian. But they are also mountaineers; and, though their sun is that of Africa, their soil is that of the Himalaya. Hence, their locality presents a conflict, balance, or antagonism of climatologic influences; and the degrees of altitude are opposed to those of latitude.
Again,their line of migration is at a right angle with their Equatorial parallel—that is, if we assume them to have come from North America. The bearing of this is as follows:—The town of Quito is about as far from Mexico due north, as it is from French Guiana due west. Now if we suppose the line of migration to have reached Peru from the latter country, the great-great-ancestors of the Peruvians would be people asinter-tropical as themselves, and the influences of climate would coincide with the influences of descent; whereas if it were North America from which they originated, their ancestors of a corresponding generation would represent the effect of a climate twenty-five degrees further north—these, in their turn, being descended from the occupants of the temperate, and they from those of the frigid zone. The full import of the relation of the lines of migration—real or hypothetical—to the degrees of latitude has yet to be duly appreciated. To say that the latter go for nothing because the inter-tropical Indian of South America is not as black as the negro, is to compare things that resemble each other in one particular only.
It is Peru where the ancient sepulchral remains have complicated ethnology. The skulls from ancient burial-places are preternaturally flattened. Consider this natural; and you have a fair reason for the recognition of a fresh species of the genusHomo. But is it legitimate to do so? I think not. That the practice of flattening the head of infants was a custom once as rife and common in Peru as it is in many other parts of both North and South America at the present day, is well known. Then why not account for the ancient flattening thus? I hold that the writers whohesitate to do this should undertake the difficult task of proving a negative: otherwise they multiply causes unnecessarily.
Two stocks of vast magnitude take up so large a proportion of South America, that though they are not in immediate geographical contact with the Peruvians, they require to be mentioned next in order here. They are mentioned now in order to enable us to treat ofotherandsmallerfamilies. These two great stocks are the Guarani and the Carib; whilst the classes immediately under notice are—
The remaining South Americans who are neither Carib nor Guarani.—This division is artificial; being based upon a negative character; and it is geographical rather than ethnological. The first branch of it is that whichD’OrbignycallsAntisian, and which he connects at once with the Peruvians Proper; both being members of that primary division to which he referred the Araucanians—the Araucanians being the third branch of theAndo-Peruvians; the two others being the—
The Yuracarés, Mocéténès, Tacanas, Maropas, and Apolistas, areAntisien; and their locality is the eastern slopes of the Andes[13], between 15° and 18° S. lat. Here they dwell in a thickly wooded country, full of mountain streams, and their corresponding valleys. One portion of them at least is so much lighter-skinned than the Peruvians, as to have taken its name from its colour—Yurak-kare=white man.
To the west of the Antisians lie the Indians of theMissionsof Chiquito and Moxos, so called because they have been settled and Christianized. The physical characters of these also areD’Orbigny’s. The division, however, he places in the same group with the Patagonians.
And now we are on the great water-system ofthe Amazons; with the united effects of heat and moisture. They are not the same as in Africa. There are no negroes here. The skin is in some cases yellow rather than brown; in some it has a red tinge. The stature, too, is low; not like that of the negro, tall and bulky. It is evident that heat is not everything; and that it may have an inter-tropical amount of intensity without necessarily affecting the colour beyond a certain degree. As to differences between the physical conditions of Brazil and Guiana on one side, and those of the countries we have been considering on the other, they are important. The condition of both the soil and climate determines to agriculture. This gives us a contrast to the Pampa Indians; whilst, in respect to the Peruvians, there is no longer the Andes with its concomitants; no longer the variety of climate within the same latitude, the abundance of building materials, and the absence of rivers. Boatmen, cultivators, and foresters—i. e.hunters of the wood rather than of the open prairie—such are the families in question. Into groups ofsmallclassificational value they divide and subdivide indefinitely more than the few investigators have suggested; indeed,D’Orbignythrows them all into one class.
The tribes of the Orinoco form the last section of Indians, which are neither Guarani nor Caribs;and this brief notice of their existence clears the ground for the somewhat fuller account of the next two families.
The Guaranialone cover more land than all the other tribes between the Amazons, the Andes, and the La Plata put together: but it is not certain that their area is continuous. In the Bolivian province of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and in contact with the Indians of the Missions and the Chaco, we find the Chiriguanos and Guarayos—and these are Guarani. Then as far north as the equator, and as far as the river Napo on the Peruvian frontier, we find the flat-head Omaguas, the fluviatile mariners (so to say) of the Amazons; and these are Guarani as well.
The bulk, however, of the stock is Brazilian; indeed,BrazilianandGuaranihave been sometimes used as synonyms. There are, however, other Guarani in Buenos Ayres; there are Guarani on the boundaries of Guiana; and there are Guarani at the foot of the Andes. But amidst the great sea of the Guarani populations, fragments of other families stand out like islands; and this makes it likely that the family in question has been aggressive and intrusive, has effected displacements, and has superseded a number of transitional varieties.
The Caribsapproach, without equalling, the Guarani, in the magnitude of their area. Thislies mostly in Guiana and Venezuela. The chief population of Trinidadis, that of the Antilleswas, Carib. The Caribs, the Inca Peruvians, the Pampa horsemen, and the Fuegian boatmen represent the four extremes of the South American populations.
In some of the Brazilian tribes, the oblique eye of the Chinese and Mongolians occurs.
In order to show the extent to which a multiplicity of small families may not only exist, but exist in the neighbourhood of great ethnological areas, I will enumerate those tribes of the Missions, Brazil, Guiana, and Venezuela, for which vocabularies have been examined, and whereof the languages are believed, either from the comparison of specimens, or on the strength of direct evidence, to be mutually unintelligible; premising that differences are more likely to be exaggerated than undervalued, and that the number of tribes not known in respect to their languages is probably as great again as that of the known ones.
A. Between the Andes, the Missions, and the 15′ and 17′ S. L. come the Yurakares; whose language is said to differ from that of the Mocéténès, Tacana, and Apolistas, as much as these differ amongst themselves.
B. In the Missions come—1. The Moxos. 2. The Movima. 3. The Cayuvava. 4. TheSapiboconi—these belonging to Moxos. In Chiquitos are—1. The Covareca. 2. The Curuminaca. 3. The Curavi. 4. The Curucaneca. 5. The Corabeca. 6. The Samucu.
C. In Brazil, the tribes, other than Guarani, of which I have seen vocabularies representing mutually unintelligible tongues, are—
D. Of French, Spanish, and Dutch Guiana I know but little. UponBritishGuiana a bright light has been thrown by the researches of SirR. Schomburgk. Here, besides numerous well-marked divisions of the Carib group, we have—
E. Venezuela means the water-system of Orinoco, and here we have the mutually unintelligible tongues of—
The Ottomaka.—These are thedirt-eaters. They fill their stomach with an unctuous clay, found in their country; and that, whether food of a better sort be abundant or deficient.
There is plenty of difference here; still where there is difference in some points there is so often agreement in others that no very decided difficulties are currently recognized as lying against the doctrine of the South Americans being specifically connected. When such occur, they are generally inferences from either the superior civilization of the ancient Peruvians or from the peculiarity of their skulls. The latter has been considered. The former seems to be nothing different in kind from that of several other American families—the Muysca of New Grenada, the Mexican, and the Maya further northwards. But this may prove too much; since it may merely be a reason for isolating the Mexicans, &c. Be it so. The question can stand over for the present.
Something has now been seen of two classes of phænomena which will appear and re-appear in the sequel—viz. the great difference in the physical conditions of such areas as the Fuegian, the Pampa, the Peruvian, and the Warows, and the contrast between the geographical extension of such vast groups as the Guarani, and small families like the Wapisiana, the Yurakares, and more than twenty others.
There is a great gap between South and Central America: nor is it safe to say that the line of the Andes (or the Isthmus of Darien) gives the only line of migration. The islands that connect Florida and the Caraccas must be remembered also.
The natives of New Grenada are but imperfectly known. In Veragua a few small tribes have been described. In Costa Rica there are still Indians—but they speak, either wholly or generally, Spanish. The same is, probably, the case in Nicaragua. The Moskito Indians are dashed with both negro and white blood, and are Anglicized in respect to their civilization—such as it is. Of the West Indian Islanders none remain but the dark-coloured Caribs of St. Vincents. In Guatimala, Peruvianism re-appears; and architectural remains testify an industrial development—agriculture, and life in towns. The intertropical Andes have an Art of their own; essentially thesame in Mexico and Peru; seen to the best advantage in those two countries, yet by no means wanting in the intermediate districts; remarkable in many respects, but not more remarkable than the existence of three climates under one degree of latitude.
Mexico, like Peru, has been isolated—and that on the same principle. Yet the Ægyptians of the New World cannot be shown to have exclusively belonged to any one branch of its population. In Guatimala and Yucatan—where the ruins are not inferior to those of the Astek[14]country—the language is the Maya, and it is as unreasonable to suppose that the Asteks built these, as to attribute the Astek ruins to Mayas. It is an illegitimate assumption to argue that, because certain buildings were contained within the empire of Montezuma, they were therefore Astek in origin or design. More than twenty other nations occupied that vast kingdom; and in most parts of it,where stone is abundant, we find architectural remains.
Architecture, cities, and the consolidation of empire which they determine, keep along the line of the Andes. They also stand in an evidentratioto the agricultural conditions of the soil and climate. The Chaco and Pampa habits which stood so much in contrast with the industrial civilization of Peru, and so coincided with the open prairie character of the country, re-appear in Texas. They increase in the great valley of the Mississippi. Nevertheless the Indians of Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and the oldforestswere partially agricultural. They were also capable of political consolidation. Powhattan, in Virginia, ruled over kings and sub-kings even as Montezuma did. Picture-writing—so-called—of which much has been said as a Mexican characteristic, is being found every day to be commoner and commoner amongst the Indians of the United States and Canada.
In an alluvial soil the barrow replaces the pyramid. The vast sepulchral mounds of the Valley of the Mississippi are the subjects of one of the valuable works[15]of the present time.
The Natchez, known to the novelist from the romance of Chateaubriand, are known to the ethnologist as pre-eminent amongst the Indians of the Mississippi for their Mexican characteristics. They flattened the head, worshiped the sun, kept up an undying fire, recognized a system of caste, and sacrificed human victims. Yet to identify themwith the Asteks, to assume even any extraordinary intercourse, would be unsafe. Their traditions, indeed, suggest the idea of a migration; but their language contradicts their traditions. They are simply what the other natives of Florida were. I see in the accounts of the early Appalachians little but Mexicans and Peruviansminustheir metals, and gems, and mountains.
The other generalities of North America are those of Brazil, Peru, and Patagonia repeated. The Algonkins have an area like the Guarani, their coast-line only extending from Labrador to Cape Hatteras. The Iroquois of New York and the Carolinas—a broken and discontinuous population—indicate encroachment and displacement; they once, however, covered perhaps as much space as the Caribs. The Sioux represent the Chaco and Pampa tribes. Their country is a hunting-ground, with its relations to the northern Tropic and the Arctic Circle, precisely those of the Chaco and Pampas to the Southern and Antarctic.
The western side of the Rocky Mountains is more Mexican than the eastern; just as Chili is more Peruvian than Brazil.
I believe that if the Pacific coast of America had been the one first discovered and fullest described, so that Russian America, New Caledonia, Queen Charlotte’s Archipelago, and Nutka Sound,had been as well known as we know Canada and New Brunswick, there would never have been any doubts or difficulties as to the origin of the so-called Red Indians of the New World; and no one would ever have speculated about Africans finding their way to Brazil, or Polynesians to California. The common-senseprimâ facieview would have been admitted at once, instead of being partially refined on and partially abandoned. North-eastern Asia would have passed for the fatherland to North-western America, and instead of Chinese and Japanese characteristics creating wonder when discovered in Mexico and Peru, the only wonder would have been in the rarity of the occurrence. But geographical discovery came from another quarter, and as it was the Indians of the Atlantic whose history first served as food for speculation, the most natural view of the origin of the American population was the last to be adopted—perhaps it has still to be recognized.
The reason for all this lies in the following fact. The Eskimo, who form the only family common to the Old and the New World, stand in a remarkable contrast to the unequivocal and admitted American aborigines of Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada, the New England States, New York, and the other well-known Indians in general.Size, manners, physical conformation, and language, all help to separate the two stocks. But this contrast extends only to the partseastof the Rocky Mountains. On the west of them there is no such abruptness, no such definitude, no such trenchant lines of demarcation. The Athabascan dialects of New Caledonia and Russian America are notably interspersed with Eskimo words, andvice versâ. So is the Kolúch tongue of the parts about New Archangel. As for a remarkable dialect called the Ugalents (or Ugyalyackhmutsi) spoken by a few families about Mount St. Elias, it is truly transitional in character. Besides this, what applies to the languages applies to the other characteristics as well.
The lines of separation between the Eskimo and the non-Eskimo Americans are as faint on the Pacific, as they are strong on the Atlantic side of the continent.
What accounts for this? The phænomenon is by no means rare. The Laplander, strongly contrasted with the Norwegian on the west, graduates into the Finlander on the east. The relation of the Hottentot to the Kaffre has been already noticed. So has the hypothesis that explains it. One stock has encroached upon another, and the transitional forms have been displaced. In the particular case before us, the encroachingtribes of the Algonkin class have pressed upon the Eskimo from the south; and just as the present Norwegians and Swedes now occupy the country of a family which was originally akin to the Laps of Lapland (but with more southern characters), the Micmacs and other Red Men have superseded the southerly and transitional Eskimo. Meanwhile, in North-westernAmerica no such displacement has taken place. The families still standin situ; and the phænomena of transition have escaped obliteration.
Just as the Eskimo graduate in the American Indian, so do they pass into the populations of North-eastern Asia—language being the instrument which the present writer has more especially employed in their affiliation. From the Peninsula of Aliaska to the Aleutian chain of islands, and from the Aleutian chain to Kamskatka is the probable course of the migration from Asia to America—traced backwards,i.e.from the goal to the starting-point, from the circumference to the centre.
Then come two conflicting lines. The Aleutians may have been either Kamskadales or Curile Islanders. In either language there is a sufficiency of vocables to justify either notion. But this is a mere point of minute ethnology when compared with the broader one which has just preceded it.The Japanese and Corean populations are so truly of the same class with the Curile islanders, and the Koriaks to the north of the sea of the Okhotsk are so truly Kamskadale, that we may now consider ourselves as having approached our conventional centre so closely as to be at liberty to leave the parts in question for the consideration of another portion of the circumference—another extreme point of divergence.
II.From Van Diemen’s Land to the South-Eastern parts of Asia.—The aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, conveniently called Tasmanians, have a fair claim, when considered by themselves, to be looked upon as members of a separate species. The Australians are on a level low enough to satisfy the most exaggerated painters of astate of nature; but the Tasmanians are, apparently, lower still. Of this family but a few families remain—occupants of Flinders’ Island, whither they have been removed by the Van Diemen’s Land Government. And here they decrease; but whether from want of room or from intermarriage is doubtful. The effects of neither have been fairly investigated. From the Australians they differ in the texture of their hair—the leading diagnostic character. The Tasmanian is shock-headed, with curled,frizzy, matted and greased locks. None of their dialects are intelligible to any Australian, and the commercial intercoursebetween the two islands seems to have been little or none. Short specimens of four mutually unintelligible dialects are all that I have had the opportunity of comparing. They belong to the same class with those of Australia, New Guinea, and the Papua islands; and this is all that can safely be said about them.
It is an open question whether the Tasmanians reached Van Diemen’s Land from South Australia, from Timor, or from New Caledonia—the line of migration having, in this latter case, woundroundAustralia, instead of stretchingacrossit. Certain points of resemblance between the New Caledonian and Tasmanian dialects suggest this refinement upon theprimâ faciedoctrine of an Australian origin; and the texture of the hair, as far as it proves anything, goes the same way.
Australia is radically and fundamentally the occupancy of a single stock; the greatest sign of difference between its numerous tribes being that of language. Now this is but a repetition of the philological phænomena of America. The blacker and ruder population of Timor represents the great-great ancestors of the Australians; and it was from Timor that Australia was, apparently, peopled. I feel but little doubt on the subject. Timor itself is connected with the Malayan peninsula by a line of dark-coloured, rude, and fragmentary populations, to be found in Ombay andFloris at the present moment, and inferred to have existed in Java and Sumatra before the development of the peculiar and encroaching civilization of the Mahometan Malays.
It is in the Malayan peninsula that another line of migration terminates. From New Caledonia to New Guinea a long line of islands—Tanna, Mallicollo, Solomon’s Isles, &c.—is occupied by a dark-skinned population of rude Papuas, with Tasmanian rather than Australian hair,i.e.with hair which is frizzy, crisp, curled, or mop-headed, rather than straight, lank, or only wavy. This comes from New Guinea; New Guinea itself comes from the Eastern Moluccas;i.e.from their darker populations. These are of the same origin with those of Timor; though the lines of migration are remarkably distinct. One is from the Moluccas to New CaledoniaviâNew Guinea; the other isviâTimor to Australia.
Both these migrations were early; earlier than the occupancy of Polynesia. The previous occupancy of Australia and New Guinea proves this; and the greater differences between the different sections of the two populations do the same.
III.From Easter Island to the South-Eastern parts of Asia.—The northern, southern, and eastern extremities of Polynesia are the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, and Easter Island respectively.These took their occupants from different islands of the great group to which they belong; of which the Navigators’ Islands were, probably, the first to be peopled. The Radack, Ralik, Caroline, and Pelew groups connect this group with either the Philippines or the Moluccas; and when we reach these, we arrive at the point where the Papuan and Polynesian lines diverge. Just as the Papuan line overlapped or wound round Australia, so do the Micronesians and Polynesians form a circuit round the whole Papuan area.
As the languages, both of Polynesia and Micronesia, differ from each other far less than those of New Guinea, the Papuan Islands, and Australia, the separation from the parent stock is later. It is, most probably, through the Philippines that this third line converges towards the original and continental source of all three. This is the south-eastern portion of the Asiatic Continent, or the Indo-Chinese Peninsula.
The Malay of the Malayan Peninsula is aninflectedtongue as opposed to the Siamese of Siam, which belongs to the same class as the Chinese, and is monosyllabic. This gives us a convenient point to stop at.
In like manner the Corean and Japanese tongues, with which we broke off the American line of migration, were polysyllabic; though the Chinese,with which they came in geographical contact, was monosyllabic.
The most remarkable fact connected with the Oceanic stock is the presence of a certain number of Malay and Polynesian words in the language of an island so distant as Madagascar; an island not onlydistant fromthe Malayan Peninsula, butnear tothe Mozambique coast of Africa—an ethnological area widely different from the Malay.
Whatever may be the inference from this fact—and it is one upon which many very conflicting opinions have been founded—its reality is undoubted. It is admitted by Mr. Crawfurd, the writer above all others who is indisposed to admit the Oceanic origin of the Malagasi, and it is accounted for as follows:—“A navigation of 3000 miles of open sea lies between them[16], and a strong trade-wind prevails in the greater part of it. A voyage from the Indian Islands to Madagascar is possible, even in the rude state of Malayan navigation; but return would be wholly impossible. Commerce, conquests, or colonization, are, consequently, utterly out of the question, as means of conveying any portion of the Malayan language to Madagascar. There remains, then, but one way in which this could have taken place—the fortuitous arrival on the shores of Madagascar oftempest-driven Malayanpraus. The south-east monsoon, which is but a continuation of the south-east trade-wind, prevails from the tenth degree of south latitude to the equator, its greatest force being felt in the Java Sea, and its influence embracing the western half of the island of Sumatra. This wind blows from April to October, and an easterly gale during this period might drive a vessel off the shores of Sumatra or Java, so as to make it impossible to regain them. In such a situation she would have no resource but putting before the wind, and making for the first land that chance might direct her to; and that first land would be Madagascar. With a fair wind and a stiff breeze, which she would be sure of, she might reach that island, without difficulty, in a month. * * * The occasional arrival in Madagascar of a shipwreckedpraumight not, indeed, be sufficient to account for even the small portion of Malayan found in the Malagasi; but it is offering no violence to the manners or history of the Malay people, to imagine the probability of a piratical fleet, or a fleet carrying one of those migrations of which there are examples on record, being tempest-driven, like a singleprau. Such a fleet, well equipped, well stocked, and well manned, would not only be fitted for the long and perilous voyage, but reach Madagascar in a bettercondition than a fishing or trading boat. It may seem, then, not an improbable supposition, that it was through one or more fortuitous adventures of this description, that the language of Madagascar received its influx of Malayan.”
As a supplement to the remarks of Mr. Crawfurd, I add the following account from Mr. M. Martin:—“Many instances have occurred of the slaves in Mauritius seizing on a canoe, or boat, at night-time, and with a calabash of water and a few manioc, or Cassada roots, pushing out to sea and endeavouring to reach across to Madagascar or Africa, through the pathless and stormy ocean. Of course they generally perish, but some succeed. We picked up a frail canoe within about a hundred miles of the coast of Africa; it contained five runaway slaves, one dying in the bottom of the canoe, and the others nearly exhausted. They had fled from a harsh French master at the Seychelles, committed themselves to the deep without compass or guide, with a small quantity of water and rice, and trusting to their fishing-lines for support. Steering by the stars, they had nearly reached the coast from which they had been kidnapped, when nature sank exhausted, and we were just in time to save four of their lives. So long as the wanderers in search of home were able to do so, the days werenumbered by notches on the side of the canoe, and twenty-one were thus marked when met with by our vessel.”
These extracts have been given for the sake of throwing light upon the most remarkable Oceanic migration known—for migration there must have been, even if it were so partial as Mr. Crawfurd makes it; migration which may make the present Malagasi Oceanic or not, according to the state in which they found the island at their arrival. If it were already peopled, the passage across the great Indian Ocean is just as remarkable as if it were, till then, untrodden by a human foot. The only additional wonder in this latter case would be the contrast between the Africans who missed an island so near, and the Malays who discovered one so distant.
Individually, I differ from Mr. Crawfurd in respect to the actual differences between the Malay and the Malagasi, with the hesitation and respect due to his known acquirements in the former of these languages; but I differ more and more unhesitatingly from him in the valuation of them as signs of ethnological separation; believing, not only that the two languages are essentially of the same family, but that the descent, blood, or pedigree of the Malagasi is as Oceanic as their language.
IV.From the Cape of Good Hope to the South-western parts of Asia.—The Hottentots of the Cape have a better claim than any other members of the human kind to be considered as a separate species. Characteristics apparently differential occur on all sides. Morally, the Hottentots are rude; physically, they are undersized and weak. In all the points wherein the Eskimo differs from the Algonkin, or the Lap from the Fin, the Hottentot recedes from the Kaffre. Yet the Kaffre is his nearest neighbour. To the ordinary distinctions, steatomata on the nates and peculiarities in the reproductive organs have been superadded.
Nevertheless, a very scanty collation gives the following philological similarities; the Hottentot dialects[17]being taken on the one side and the other African languages[18]on the other. I leave it to the reader to pronounce upon the import of the table; adding only the decided expression of my own belief that the coincidences in question are too numerous to be accidental, too little onomatopœicto be organic, and too widely as well as too irregularly distributed to be explained by the assumption of intercourse or intermixture.
Unless we suppose Southern Africa to have been the cradle of the human species, the population of the Cape must have been an extension of that of the Southern Tropic, and the Tropical family itself have been originally Equatorial. What does this imply? Even this—that those streams of population upon which the soil, climate, and other physical influences of South Africa acted, had themselves been acted on by the intertropical and equatorial influences of the Negro countries. Hence the human stock upon which the physical conditions had to act, was as peculiar as those conditions themselves. It was not in the same predicament with the intertropical South Americans. Between these and the hypothetical centre in Asia there was the Arctic Circle and the Polar latitudes—influences that in some portion of the line of migration must have acted on their ancestors’ ancestors.
It was nearer the condition of the Australians. Yet the equatorial portion of the line of migrationof these latter had been very different from that of the Kaffres and the Hottentots. It was narrow in extent, and lay in fertile islands, cooled by the breezes and evaporation of the ocean, rather than across the arid table-land of Central Africa—the parts between the Gulf of Guinea and the mouth of the river Juba.
Between the Hottentots and their next neighbours to the north there are many points of difference. Admitting these to a certain extent, I explain them by the assumption of encroachment, displacement, and the abolition of those intermediate and transitional tribes which connected the northern Hottentots with the southern Kaffres.
And here I must remark, that the displacement itself is no assumption at all, but an historical fact; since within the last few centuries the Amakosa Kaffres alone have extended themselves at the expense of different Hottentot tribes, from the parts about Port Natal to the head-waters of the Orange River.
It is only the transitional character of the annihilated populations that is an assumption. I believe it—of course—to be a legitimate one; otherwise it would not have been made.
On the other hand I consider it illegitimate to assume, without inquiry, so broad and fundamental a distinction between the two stocks as toattribute all points of similarity to intercourse only—none to original affinity. Yet this is done largely. The Hottentot language contains a sound which I believe to be anin-aspiratedh,i. e.a sound ofhformed bydrawing inthe breath, rather than byforcing it out—as is done by the rest of the world. This is called theclick. It is a truly inarticulate sound; and as the commonhis found in the language as well, the Hottentot speech presents the remarkable phenomenon oftwoinarticulate sounds, or two sounds common to man and the lower animals. As a point of anthropology this may be of value: in ethnology it has probably been misinterpreted.
It is found inoneKaffre dialect. What are the inferences? That it has been adopted from the Hottentot by the Kaffre; just as a Kaffre gun has been adopted from the Europeans. This is one of them.
The other is that the sound in question is less unique, less characteristic, and less exclusively Hottentot than was previously believed.
Now this is certainly not one whit less legitimate than the former; yet the former is the commoner notion. Perhaps it is because it flatters us with a fresh fact, instead of chastening us by the correction of an over-hasty generalization.
Again—the roott-k(as intixo,tixme,utiko) isat once Hottentot and Kaffre. It means either a Deity or an epithet appropriate to a Deity. Surely the doctrine that the Kaffres have simply borrowed part of their theological vocabulary from the Hottentots is neither the only nor the most logical inference here.
The Kaffre area is so large that it extends on both sides of Africa to the equator; and the contrast which it supplies when compared with the small one of the Hottentots is a repetition of the contrasts already noticed in America.
The peculiarities of the Kaffre stock are fully sufficient to justify care and consideration before we place them in the same class either with the true Negros, or with the Gallas, Nubians, Agows, and other Africans of the water-system of the Nile. Yet they are by no means of that broad and trenchant kind which many have fancied them. The undoubted Kaffre character of the languages of Angola, Loango, the Gaboon, the Mozambique and Zanzibar coasts is a fact which must run through all our criticism. If so, it condemns all those extreme inferences which are drawn from the equally undoubted peculiarities of the Kaffres of the Cape. And why? Because these last are extreme forms; extreme, rather than either typical, or—what is more important—transitional.
Let us, however, look to them. What find wethen? Until the philological evidence in favour of the community of origin of the intertropical Africans of Congo on the west, and of Inhambame, Sofala, the Mozambique, &c. on the east, was known, no one spoke of the natives in any of those countries as being anything else but Negro, or thought of enlarging upon such differences as are now found between them and the typical Black.
Even in respect to the languages, there are transitional dialects in abundance. In Mrs. Kilham’s tables of 31 African languages, the last is aKongovocabulary, all the rest being Negro. Now this Kongo vocabulary, which is truly Kaffre, differs from the rest so little more than the rest do from each other, that when I first saw the list, being then strongly prepossessed by the opinion that the Kaffre stock of tongues was, to a great extent, a stockper se, I could scarcely believe that the true Kongo and Kaffre language was represented; so I satisfied myself that it was so, by a collation with other undoubted vocabularies, before I admitted the inference. And this is only one fact out of many[19].