Bosman mentions the following ordeals as customary on the Gold Coast in offences of a trivial character:
1. Stroking a red-hot copper arm-ring over the tongue of the suspected person.2. Squirting a vegetable juice into his eye.3. Drawing a greased fowl’s feather through his tongue.4. Making him draw cocks’ quills from a clod of earth.
1. Stroking a red-hot copper arm-ring over the tongue of the suspected person.
2. Squirting a vegetable juice into his eye.
3. Drawing a greased fowl’s feather through his tongue.
4. Making him draw cocks’ quills from a clod of earth.
Innocence was staked on the innocuousness of the two former proceedings, on the facility of the execution of the two latter. For great crimes the water ordeal was employed, a certain river being endowed with the quality of wafting innocent persons across it, how little soever they could swim, and of only drowning the guilty.[233]
Livingstone mentions the anxiety of negro women, suspected by their husbands of having bewitched them, to drink a poisonous infusion prepared by the shaman, and to submit their lives to the effect of this drink on their bodies; a judicial method strikingly similar to the test of bitter waters ordained in the Book of Numbers to decide the guilt of Jewish wives whom their husbands had reason to suspect of infidelity. The Barotse tribe, in Africa, who judge ofthe guilt of an accused person by the effect of medicine poured down the throat of a dog or cock, manifest more humanity in their system of detection.[234]
But perhaps the best collection of African ordeals is that given in the voyage of the Capuchin Merolla to Congo in 1682. In case of treason a shaman would present a compound of vegetable juices, serpents’ flesh, and such things to the delinquent, who would die if he were guilty, but not otherwise; it being of course open to the administrator to omit at will the poisonous ingredients. Innocence was further proved, if a man suffered nothing from a red-hot iron passed over his leg, if he felt no bad effects from chewing the root of the banana, from eating the poisoned fruit of a certain palm, from drinking water in which a torch of bitumen or a red-hot iron had been quenched, or from drawing a stone out of boiling water. The crime of theft was proved by the ignition or the non-ignition of a long thread held at either end by the shaman and the accused, on the application of a red-hot iron to the middle. Among the Bongo tribe a murder is often traced to its source, by making plastic representations so closely resembling the victim, that at a feast given with dances and songs the criminal will generally manifest a desire to leave the company.[235]
So great in general is the dread of such ordeals,that they often actually serve as the most potent instruments for the discovery of crimes. In the kingdom of Loango was kept a fetich in a large basket before which all cases of theft and murder were tried; and when any great man died, a whole town would be compelled to offer themselves for trial for his murder by kissing and embracing the image, in the fear of falling down dead if they fancied themselves guilty. In the space of one year Andrew Battel witnessed the death of many natives in this way.
In the Tongan Islands the king would call the people together, and, after washing his hands in a wooden bowl, command everyone to touch it. From a firm belief that touching the bowl, in case of guilt, would cause instantaneous death, refusal to touch it amounted to conviction.[236]
Among the Fijians, distinguished in so many points from other savages by originality of conception, the ordeal of the scarf was the one of greatest dread, extorting confession, it is said, as effectually as a threat of the rack might have done. The chief or judge, having called for a scarf, would proceed, if the culprit did not confess at the sight of it, to wave it above his head, till he had caught the man’s soul, bereft of which the culprit would be sure ultimately to pine away and die.[237]
Among the ordeals of the Sandwich Islanders was one called the ‘shaking-water.’ The accused persons, sitting round a calabash full of water, were required in turns to hold their hands above it, that the priest, by watching the water, might detect, when it trembled, the presence of guilt. On the Society Islands the ordeal only differed slightly, the priest reading in the water the reflected image of the thief, after prayer to the gods to cause his spirit to be present. The mere report that such a measure had been resorted to often led to timely restitutions of stolen goods.[238]
In Sardinia there is, or was, a well, the waters of which were supposed to blind a person suspected of robbery or lying, if he were guilty; otherwise to strengthen and improve his sight.[239]
The above instances, remarkable for their practical efficiency no less than for their puerile ingenuity, suffice to illustrate the nature of savage judicial ordeals and the extreme variety displayed in their invention. The identity of many ordeals among different people, such as that by fire or water, is probably due to the readiness with which such tests would suggest themselves to the imagination. ‘He who, holding fire in his hand,’ said the Indian law, ‘is not burnt, or who, diving under water, is not soon forced up by it, must be held veracious in his testimony upon oath;’ andthe same was the idea in China and Africa as well as in Europe. That these ordeals, like others, were originated by the class of shamans, and were traditionally preserved by them as one of the sources of their power, derives probability from their close analogy to the judicial ordeals invented and administered by the priests of early Europe. The trial by the hallowed morsel, which decided guilt by the effects of swallowing a piece of hallowed bread or cheese; the trial by the cross, when both accuser and accused were placed under a cross with their arms extended, and the wrong adjudged to him who first let his hands fall; or the trial by the two dice, when innocence was proved if the first dice taken at hazard bore the sign of the cross—though they may have been metamorphosed heathen ordeals, seem rather to have been of pure Christian invention; nor are they distinguished in any point above corresponding practices on the coast of Guinea, except in this, that they were called the judgments of God, and implied some belief in a personal spirit, who could and would control the verdict of chance to prove guilt or innocence.[240]
As in Europe after the fifteenth century the oath of canonical purgation gradually displaced the oldersystem of ordeals, so it would seem that in savage life too the judicial oath succeeds in order of time the judicial ordeal. An oath implies a prayer, an invocation of punishment in case of perjury; and a man’s conscience is evidently more directly appealed to where his guilt is tested to some extent by his own confession, than where it is decided by something quite external to himself.
The witness in a modern English law court, invoking upon himself divine wrath if he swear falsely by the book he kisses, preserves with curious exactitude the judicial oath of savage times and lands. Our English judicial oath, in use though no longer compulsory, has withstood all attacks upon it, for the insuperable practical reason that the majority of men are more afraid of swearing falsely than of speaking falsely, and that the fewer scruples a man feels about lying, the more he is likely to feel about perjury. The notion that one is morally worse than the other is probably due to the imaginary terrors which, associated time out of mind with perjury, have given it a legal existence apart, and made it, so to speak, a kind of lying-extraordinary, a crime outside the jurisdiction of humanity.
In Samoa, as at Westminster, physical contact with a thing adds vast weight to the value of a man’s evidence. Turner relates how in turn each person suspected of a theft was obliged before the chiefs totouch a sacred drinking-cup, made of cocoa-nut, and to invoke destruction upon himself if he were the thief. The formula ran: ‘With my hand on this cup, may the god look upon me and send swift destruction if I took the thing which has been stolen.’ ‘Before this ordeal the truth was rarely concealed,’ it being firmly believed that death would ensue, were the cup touched and a lie told. Or the suspected would first place a handful of grass on the stone or other representative of the village god, and laying his hands on it, say, ‘In the presence of our chiefs now assembled, I lay my hand on the stone; if I stole the thing, may I speedily die,’ the grass being a symbolical curse of the destruction he invoked on all his family, of thegrassthat might grow over their dwellings. The older ordeal of fixing the guilt upon a person to whom the face of a spun cocoa-nut pointed when it rested, shows how ordeals may survive in use after the attainment of judicial oaths and contemporaneously with them.[241]
To understand the binding force of oaths among savages it is necessary to observe how closely connected they are with savage ideas of fetichism and their belief in witchcraft as a really active natural force. The hair or food of a man, which a savage burns to rid himself of an enemy, is no mere symbol of that enemy so much as in some sense that enemyhimself. The physical act of touching the thing invoked has reference to feelings of casual connection between things, as in Samoa, where a man, to attest his veracity, would touch his eyes, to indicate a wish that blindness might strike him if he lied, or would dig a hole in the ground, to indicate a wish that he might be buried in the event of falsehood. In Kamschatka, if a thief remained undetected, the elders would summon all the ostrog together, young and old, and, forming a circle round the fire, cause certain incantations to be employed. After the incantations the sinews of the back and feet of a wild sheep were thrown into the fire with magical words, and the wish expressed that the hands and feet of the culprit might grow crooked; there being apparently a connection assumed between the action of the fire on the animal’s sinews and on the limbs of the man. And in Sweden there are still cunning men who can deprive a real thief of his eye, by cutting a human figure on the bark of a tree and driving nails and arrows into the representative feature. But perhaps the best illustration of this feeling is the practice of the Ostiaks, who offer their wives, if they suspect them of infidelity, a handful of bear’s hairs, believing that, if they touch them and are guilty, they will be bitten by a bear within the space of three days. It would seem that oaths appeal to the same idea of vicarious or representative influence, a real but invisible connection beingimagined between the actual thing touched and the calamity invoked in touching it.
Instances from the oaths of other tribes will manifest the operation of the same feeling as that which makes grass a symbol of utter ruin in Samoa, or some bear’s hairs of a bear’s bite among the Ostiaks.
North Asiatic tribes have in use three kinds of oaths, the first and least solemn one being for the accused to face the sun with a knife, pretending to fight against it, and to cry aloud, ‘If I am guilty, may the sun cause sickness to rage in my body like this knife!’ The second form of oath is to cry aloud from the tops of certain mountains, invoking death, loss of children and cattle, or bad luck in hunting, in the case of guilt being real. But the most solemn oath of all is to exclaim, in drinking some of the blood of a dog, killed expressly by the elders and burnt or thrown away, ‘If I die, may I perish, decay, or burn away like this dog.’[242]Very similar is the oath in Sumatra, where, a beast having been slain, the swearer says, ‘If I break my oath, may I be slaughtered as this beast, and swallowed as this heart I now consume.’[243]The most solemn oath of the Bedouins, that of the cross-lines, is also characterised by the same belief which appears in the case of the slain beast affecting with sympathetic decay anyone guilty of perjury. If a Bedouin cannot convict a man he suspects of theft itis usual for him to take the suspected before a sheikh or kady, and there to call upon him to swear any oath he may demand. If the defendant agrees, he is led to a certain distance from the camp, ‘because the magical nature of the oath might prove pernicious to the general body of Arabs were it to take place in their vicinity.’ Then the plaintiff draws with his sekin, or crooked knife, a large circle in the sand with many cross-lines inside it, places his right foot inside it, causes the defendant to do the same, and makes him say after himself, ‘By God, and in God, and through God, I swear I did not take the thing, nor is it in my possession.’ To make the oath still more solemn, the accused often puts also in the circle an ant and a bit of camel’s skin, the one expressive of a hope that he may never be destitute of camel’s milk, the other of a hope that he may never lack the winter substance of an ant.[244]
Firm, however, as is the savage belief that the consequences of perjury are death or disease, a belief which shows itself not unfrequently in actually inferring the fact of perjury from the fact of death, escape from the obligation of an oath is not unknown among savages. On the Guinea Coast recourse was had to the common expedient of priestly absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath, imprecating death on himself if he failed in his promise, the priestswere sometimes compelled to take an oath too, to the effect that they would not employ their absolving powers to release him. In Abyssinia a simpler process seems to be in vogue; for the king, on one occasion having sworn by a cross, thus addressed his servants: ‘You see the oath I have taken; I scrape it clean away from my tongue that made it.’ Thereupon he scraped his tongue and spat away his oath, thus validly releasing himself from it.[245]
It does not appear that savages refine on their motives for punishment, the sum of their political philosophy in this respect being rather to inflict penalties that accord with their ideas of retribution deserved for each case or crime, than to deter other criminals by warning examples. The statement that New Zealanders beat thieves to death, and then hung them on a cross on the top of a hill, as a warning example, conflicts with another account which says that thieves were punished by banishment.[246]But, subject to the influence of collateral circumstances, savage penal laws appear to be as fixed, regular, and well-known, as inflexibly bound by precedent, as often improved by the intelligence of individual chiefs, as penal laws are in more advanced societies. The case of an Ashantee king, who, limiting the number of lives to be sacrificed at his mother’s funeral, resisted all importunities and appeals to precedent for a greaternumber, is not without parallel in reforms of law. Thus we may read of one Caffre chief who abolished in his tribe the fine payable for the crime of approaching a chief’s krall with the head covered by a blanket; whilst another chief made the homicide of a man taken in adultery a capital offence, thus transferring the punishment for the crime from the individual to the tribe.[247]
In legal customs analogous to those of the savage or rather semi-civilized world, the legal institutions of civilized countries, their methods of procedure, of extorting truth, of punishing crimes, seem to have their root and explanation. For this reason the same interest attaches to the legal institutions of modern savages as attaches to the laws of the ancient Germanic tribes or to the ordinances of Menu, the interest, that is, of descent or relationship. The oath, for instance, of our law courts presupposes in the past, if not in the present, precisely the same state of thought as the oath customary in Samoa; and the same virtue inherent in touching and kissing the Bible in England, or the cross in Russia, leads the Tunguse Lapp to touch and then kiss the cannon, gun, or sword, by which he swears allegiance to the Russian crown.[248]The Highlander of olden time, kissing his dirk, to invoke death by it if he lied, is a similar instance of the survival of the primitiveconception, that physical contact with a thing creates a spiritual dependence upon it. The ordeal, so lately the judicial test of witchcraft, still retains a foothold of faith among our country people, as is proved by the fact that not longer ago than 1863 an octogenarian died in consequence of having been ‘swum’ as a wizard at Little Hedingham, in Essex. And, lastly, the English law that no person could inherit an estate from anyone convicted of treason, or from a suicide, shows how naturally the savage law of collective responsibility, in reality so unjust, may survive into times of civilisation, whilst the ignominy still attached to the blood-relations of a criminal shows with what difficulty the feeling is eradicated.
Amid the wonderful uniformity which pervades the thoughts and customs of the world some strange reversals here and there occur, as where white is the colour significative of grief, or where to turn one’s back on a person is a sign of reverence. But perhaps few such reversals are more curious than the custom of the Garos, in India, who consider any infringement of the rule that all proposals of marriage must come from the female side as an insult to themahárito which the lady belongs, only to be atoned for by liberal donations of beer and pigs from the man’smahárito that of the ‘proposee.’ More curious, however, than even this is their marriage ceremony; at which, after the bride has been bathed in the nearest stream, the wedding party proceed to the house of the bridegroom, ‘who pretends to be unwilling and runs away, but is caughtand subjected to a similar ablution, andthen taken, in spite of the resistance and counterfeited grief and lamentations of his parents, to the bride’s house.’[249]
An exactly analogous custom as regards the bride’s behaviour at her wedding is sufficiently well known; and if it has been correctly interpreted as the survival, in form and symbol, of a system of capturing wives from a neighbouring tribe, there must have been a time when among the Garos a husband could only have been obtained in a similar way. The improbability of this suggests the possibility of some other explanation underlying the reluctance, feigned or real, with which it is common in savage life for a girl to enter upon the paths of matrimony, and for the show of resistance with which her friends oppose her departure with her husband.
In many instances this peculiar feature of primitive life appears as simply the outcome of feelings and affections which are the same, howsoever different in expression, in savage as in civilised lands. The conviction that there is an utter absence of anything like love between children and their parents, or between men and women, in the ruder social communities, is so strong and has been so often dwelt upon, that in speculations on this subject there is a tendency and danger of altogether overlooking the influence of natural affection in the formation of customs. It is needful, therefore, to preface the present chapter with a brief reference to the express statements of missionaries and travellers; for if it can be shown that there is such a thing as affection betweenparents and children, the inference is fair that neither would parents part with their children nor children leave their parents without mutual regret, when the children are married.
Of the Fijians, so famous for their cannibalism and their parenticide, it is declared to be ‘truly touching to see how parents are attached to their children and children to their parents.’[250]Among the Tongans, who would sacrifice their children cruelly for the recovery of the sick, children were ‘taken the utmost care of.’[251]The New Zealanders were not guiltless of infanticide, yet ‘some of them, and especially the fathers, seemed fond of their children.’[252]The Papuans of New Guinea manifested ‘respect for the aged, love for their children, and fidelity to their wives.’[253]In Africa, Mungo Park says of the Mandingoes: ‘The maternal affection is everywhere conspicuous among them, and creates a corresponding return of tenderness in the child.’[254]Among the Eastern Ethiopians were women who lived a wild life in the woods; yet the testimony is the same: ‘However barbarous these people be by nature, they yet are not devoid of feeling for their children; these they rear with nicest care, and for their provision strive to amass what property they can.’[255]Yoruba ‘children are much beloved byboth parents.’[256]Love for their children unites the greater number of the Bushmen for their whole lives.[257]In North America the Thlinkeet Indians ‘treat their wives and children with much affection and kindness.’[258]Among the Greenlanders, says Cranz, ‘the bonds of filial and parental love seem stronger than amongst any other nations.’ Their fondness for their children is great; parents seldom let them out of their sight, and mothers often throw themselves in the water to save a child from drowning. In return ingratitude towards their aged parents is ‘scarcely ever exemplified among them.’[259]Of the natives of Australia, Sir G. Grey says that they ‘are always ardently attached to their children,’ and similar testimony has been borne to the parental affection even of the Tasmanians.[260]
But, lest it should be thought that these evidences are drawn from the higher savagery, let appeal be made to the case of savages who confessedly belong to the lowest known types of mankind, the Andaman Islanders, the Veddahs, and the Fuejians.
In reference to the first it is said that ‘the parents are fond of their children, and the affection is reciprocal.’[261]The Veddahs are not only ‘kind and constant to theirwives,’ but ‘fond of their children;’[262]whilst Mr. Parker Snow saw among the Fuejians ‘many instances of warm love and affection for their children;’[263]so that if in the sequel we find daughters at their marriage displaying a real or simulated repugnance to their fate, the fact need not appear to us of such extreme mystery as it otherwise might, nor as one in which natural affection can play no part.
A recent Italian writer on the primitive domestic state says that ‘la passione viva d’amore che suole attribuirsi ai popoli primitivi ... é una pura illusione.’[264]But happily for the primitive populations, their lot is far from being really thus unbrightened by love, though with them, as with the rest of the world, it is a frequent cause of wars and quarrels, interfering especially with the savage custom of infant betrothal, and leading to elopements in defeat of parental contracts. It is peculiar to neither sex. A Tahitian girl, love-stricken, but not encouraged, led her friends, by her threats of suicide, to persuade the object of her affections to make her his wife.[265]The Tongans had a pretty legend of a young chief, who, having fallen in love with a maiden already betrothed to a superior, saved her, when she was condemned to be killed with the other relations of a rebel, by hiding her in a cavern he had found, whence they finally effected their jointescape to Fiji.[266]New Zealand mythology abounds in love-tales. There is the tale of Hinemoa and Tutanekai, which begins with stolen glances, and ends in a nocturnal swim on the part of Hinemoa to the island, whither the music of her lover guided her. There is the tale also of Takaranji and Raumahora—of Takaranji, who, though besieging her father in his fortress, consented to present both of them with water in their distress. ‘And Takaranji gazed eagerly at the young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takaranji ... and as the warriors of the army of Takaranji looked on, lo, he had climbed up and was sitting at the young maiden’s side; and they said among themselves, “O comrades, our lord Takaranji loves war, but one would think he likes Raumahora almost as well.’”[267]
Nor would it be fair to argue, because in most savage tribes the hard work of life devolves upon the women, that therefore there is an entire absence of affection in savage households, whether polygamous or otherwise, during their continuance. It is scarcely a hundred years ago that in Caithness ‘the hard work was chiefly done, and the burdens borne, by the women; and if a cottier lost a horse, it was not unusual for himto marry a wife as the cheapest substitute.’[268]The Fuejians, whose condition Captain Weddell felt compelled to describe as that of the lowest of mankind, and whose women did all the work, gathering the shellfish, managing the canoes, and building the wigwams, are said to have shown ‘a good deal of affection for their wives,’ and care for their offspring.[269]Among the Fijians, who made their women carry all the heavy loads and do all the field-work, and who remonstrated with the Tongans for their more humane treatment of them, not only have widows been known to kill themselves if their relatives refused to do the duty which custom laid upon them—namely, of killing them at their husbands’ burial—but ‘even widowers, in the depth of their grief, have frequently terminated their existence when deprived of a dearly beloved wife.’[270]In India, Abor husbands treated their wives with a consideration that appeared ‘singular in so rude a race.’[271]In America the lot of a woman was generally one of hardship; yet, says Schoolcraft, ‘the gentler affections have a much more extensive and powerful exercise among the Indians than is generally believed.’[272]Carib husbands are said to have had much love for their wives, like as it was to a straw fire,except with respect to the first wife they married.[273]Of the Thlinkeet Indians, characterised by great cruelty to prisoners and other marks of much barbarity, it is said that ‘there are few savage nations in which the women have greater influence or command greater respect.’[274]‘It is one of the fine traits,’ says Schweinfurth of the cannibal Niam-Niam, ‘that they display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled among natives of so low a grade ... a husband will spare no sacrifice to redeem an imprisoned wife.’[275]Though against this evidence there is much of a darker character to be set, the above instances will suffice to demonstrate the real existence, the real operation, among some of the rudest representatives of our species, of ordinary feelings of love and affection. As in geology so in ethnology it holds true, that the action of known existing causes is sufficient to account for much that is obscure in the past and for all that is strange in the present.
Having so far cleared the ground as to be justified in postulating the existence of ordinary feelings of affection between parents and children, and between men and women, asveræ causæ, or real forces, even in the lowest known savage life, let us pass to the inference that at no time are those feelings more likely to be called into play than at a time when the daughterof a family is about to leave her parents, and perhaps her clan, to live henceforth with a man whom she may not even know, or knows only to dislike.[276]In China, where on the wedding-day the bride is locked up in a sedan-chair, and the key and chair consigned to the bridegroom, who may not see her before that day, a traveller once witnessed a separation between the bride and her family. ‘All the family appeared much affected, particularly the women, who sobbed aloud; the father shed tears, and the daughterwas with difficulty torn from the embraces of her parentsand placed in the sedan-chair.’[277]It seems more likely in this case that the reluctance and resistance were real, than that they were merely the symbols, conventionally observed, of a system of wife-capture. But in many instances it is impossible to distinguish a real from a feigned grief. A witness of the marriage ceremonies among the Tartars, who describes the bride and her girl friends as raising piteous lamentations beforehand, says that the poor girl either was or appeared to be a most unwilling victim.[278]
Jenkinson, one of the earliest English travellers in Russia, noticed the same custom there, but thought it affectation. On the day of marriage the bridewould in nowise consent to leave the house to go to church, but would resist, strive, and weep, only suffering herself to be led there by force, with her face covered, to hide her simulated grief, and making a great noise, as though she were sobbing and weeping, all the way to the scene of her wedding.[279]But a modern French writer ascribes some reality to the custom, mentioning that traditional songs are still sung in which the young bride addresses words of regret and sorrow to her parents in the midst of her preparations for the nuptial feast.[280]Before this last ceremony she is accustomed to go the round of her village, with a woman who calls for the sympathy of her hearers for the young girl whose carefree existence is about to be exchanged for the troubles and anxieties of married life.[281]
Yet, if in China and Russia, much more among uncivilized tribes, would the life in prospect for a bride, unless perchance her wishes coincided with her parents’ interest, cause her to leave the home of her youth with something more than those ‘light regrets’which cause tears to commingle with smiles even in England. Greenland girls, says Cranz, do nothing till they are fourteen but sing, dance, and romp about; but a life of slavery is in store for them as soon as they are fit for it; ‘while they remain with their parents they are well off, but from twenty years of age till death their life is one series of anxieties, wretchedness, and toil.’[282]Marriage is a fate they would not seek, but cannot avoid. Should they, however, not oppose it, they must enter upon it with reluctance, not with alacrity.
It is worth noticing the reason Cranz gives for this reluctance, because, in so far as modern savages may be taken to represent primitive life, it proves the existence, in that condition, of notions, howsoever they may have arisen, which are exactly analogous to those we connote by the word ‘modesty.’ When the two old women, commissioned to negotiate with a girl’s parents on behalf of a young man, first give a hint of their purpose by praise of him and of his family, ‘the damsel directly falls into the greatest apparent consternation and runs out of doors, tearing her bunch of hair; forsingle women always affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty, though their destined husbands be previously well assured of their acquiescence.’[283]Not, indeed, that the reluctanceis always feigned, for sometimes the name of her proposed husband causes her to swoon, to elope to a desert place, or to effectually free herself from further addresses, by cutting off her hair in token of grief. Should, however, her parents consent to the match, the usual course is for the old women to go in search of her, ‘anddrag her forcibly into the suitor’s house, where she sits for several days quite disconsolate, with dishevelled hair, and refuses nourishment. When friendly exhortations are unavailing she is compelled by force, and even blows, to receive her husband.’
In Greenland, then, as in China, the form of capture resolves itself either into a most unequivocal reluctance to leave home or to a reluctance so to do feigned from feelings of bashfulness. Nor about this bashfulness does it appear that Cranz was in error, for Egede agrees substantially with him, telling how the bridegroom, when he has obtained her parents’ and relations’ consent, sends some old womento carry away the bride by force; ‘for though she ever so much approves of the match, yetout of modesty she must make as if it went against the grain, and as if she were much ruffled at it; else she will be blamed and get an ill name.’ When brought to his hut, therefore, she sits in a corner with dishevelled hair, ‘covering her face, being bashful and ashamed.’ For ‘a new-married woman is ashamed of having changed her condition fora married state;’[284]and this feeling occurs again plainly in South-Eastern Russia, where, on the eve of marriage, the bride goes round the village, throwing herself on her knees before the head of each house andbegging his pardon.[285]
This last statement of Egede is most important, since it proves the existence of feelings which seem really to contain the keynote of the symbol of capture, however slight the reasons for suspecting their presence in particular cases. The sentiment prevalent in Greenland has also been noticed among the Tartars, for an authentic witness writes, ‘that if one tells a Tartar girl that it is said she is about to be married, she runs immediately out of the room and will never speak to a stranger on that subject.’[286]It has been justly observed that it is unlikely feminine delicacy should diminish with civilization. But the principleimpuris omnia impurawill meet the difficulty. The Aleutian Islander, says a Russian writer, ‘knows nothing of what civilized nations call modesty. He has his own ideas of what is modest and proper, while we should consider them foolish.’[287]For, addicted though he is to the worst vices of the Northern nations, he will yet blush to address his wife or ask her for anything in the presence of strangers, and will be bashful ifhe be caught doing anything unusual, as, for instance, buying or selling directly for himself without the agency of an intermediary.
Characteristic as it is of savages to express all the feelings they share with us with an energy intensified a hundredfold, as is shown abundantly in our different manner of grieving for the dead, it is not surprising if we find their feelings of the kind in question display themselves in extraordinary and often ludicrous rules of social intercourse. The same rule, that an Aleutian husband and wife might not be seen speaking together, led Kolbe to think that no such thing as affection existed among the Hottentots. But this was simply for the same reason that prohibited the Hottentot wife from ever setting foot in her husband’s apartment in the hut, or the latter from ever entering hers except by stealth.[288]Among the Yorubas a woman betrothed by her parents is so far a wife that prematrimonial unfaithfulness is accounted adultery; ‘yet conventional modesty forbids her to speak to her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.’[289]A minority of the Afghan tribes are careful to keep up a similar reserve between the time of betrothal and marriage, so that, as among the warlike Eusofyzes, no man can see his wife till the completion of the marriageceremony.[290]Among the Mongols not only may bride and bridegroom not see each other within the same period, but the bride is not allowed to see his parents.[291]In Russia it was once a disgrace for a young man to propose directly to a lady, and between the day of settling the dowry with her parents and the day of marriage he was strictly forbidden the house of his betrothed.[292]But many tribes continue such reserve even after marriage. A Circassian bridegroom must not see his wife or live with her without the greatest mystery: ‘this reserve continues during life. A Circassian will sometimes permit a stranger to see his wife, but he must not accompany him.’[293]In parts of Fiji which are still unmodified by Christian teaching it is ‘quite contrary to ideas of delicacy that a man ever remains under the same roof with his wife or wives at night.’ If they wish to meet, they must appoint a secret rendezvous.[294]And a similar law of social decorum prevails, or prevailed, among the Spartans, Lycians, Turcomans, and some tribes of America,[295]though the processes of thought which led to such customs lie lost, perhaps hopelessly, behind the darkness of a thousand ages.
The custom, again, of deserting a husband and returning home for a longer or shorter period, as found among the Votyaks of Russia and the Mezeyne Arabs, may possibly be traced to feelings of the same description, for we read that among the Hos, ‘after remaining with her husband for three days only, it isthe correct thing for the wife to run awayfrom him and tell all her friends that she loves him not, and will see him no more;’ it is alsocorrectfor the husband to manifest great anxiety for his loss, and diligently to seek his wife, and ‘when he finds herhe carries her off by main force.’[296]This second show of resistance, customary also among the Votyaks, seems difficult to explain as a traditional symbol of a system of capture.
It is possible that in similar primitive ideas originated the curious restrictions on the intercourse between a man and his mother-in-law, or between a woman and her father-in-law. On the theory that these are remnants of the real anger shown by parents when capture was real, it is not easy to account for the fact that in Fiji the restriction as to eating or speaking together existed not only between parents and children-in-law, or brothers and sisters-in-law, but between brothers and sisters of the same family, and also between first cousins.[297]In Suffolk ‘it is (or was) very remarkable that neither father nor mother ofbride or bridegroom come with them to church’ at the weddings of agricultural labourers; and it is said that at Russian weddings also the parents are forbidden to be present, though the priest sometimes waives the prohibition in favour of persons of the higher classes.[298]
There is, therefore, noà prioriinconceivability against the theory that kicking and screaming at weddings, where they do not arise from genuine reluctance, are really a tribute to conventional propriety; that, at the marriages of the uncivilized, just as at their burials, shrieks and violence take the place of tears, and a vigorous struggle argues a modest deportment. The evidence of quite independent eye-witnesses confirms this interpretation. The Thlinkeet Indian, on his wedding-day, goes to the bride’s house and sits with his back to her door. All her relations then ‘raise a song, to allure the coy bride out of the corner where she has been sitting;’ after which she goes to sit by her husband’s side; but ‘all this time she must keep her head bowed down,’ nor is she allowed to take part in the festivities of the day.[299]
Atkinson, who was witness of the first visit of a Kirghiz bridegroom to his wife, declares that the latter could only be persuaded by the pressure of her female relations to see him at all; ‘after a display ofmuch coyness she consented, and was led by her friends to his dwelling.’[300]
In Kamschatka the original etiquette was for women to cover their faces with some kind of veil when they went out, and if they met any man on the road whom they could not avoid, to stand with their backs to him until he had passed. They would also, if a stranger entered their huts, turn their face to the wall or else hide behind a curtain of nettles.[301]Kamschatka, however, being the last place where one would have looked for such prudery, it is possible that the feelings of the Greenlanders were also operative in the marriage customs of the Kamschadals. These were rather extraordinary, the form of capture being anything but a mere symbol for an aspirant to matrimony. Such an one, having looked for a bride in some neighbouring village (seldom in his own), would offer his services to the parent for a fixed term, and after some time would ask for leave to seize the daughter for his bride. This obtained, he would seek to find her alone or ill-attended, the marriage being complete on his tearing from her some of the coats, fish-nets, and straps with which from the day of proposal she was constantly enveloped. This was never an easy matter, for she was never left alone a single instant, her mother and a number of old women accompanying her everywhere,sleeping with her, and never losing her out of sight upon any pretext whatever. Any attempt to execute his task entailed upon the suitor such kicking, hair-pulling, and face-scratching, at the hands of this female body-guard, that sometimes a year or more would elapse before he was entitled to call himself a husband; nay, there is record of one pertinacious bachelor who found himself at the end of seven years, in consequence of such treatment, not a husband, but a cripple. If he were disheartened by repeated failures he incurred great disgrace and lost all claim to the alliance; and if the bride continued obdurate from real dislike, he was ultimately expelled from the village.[302]But, however well-disposed towards him she might be, she had always to simulate refusal as a point of honour, and proof was always required ‘that she was taken by surprise and made fruitless efforts to defend herself.’[303]
The Bushmen, again, generally betroth their daughters as children without consulting them; but should a girl grow up unbetrothed her consent to be married is as necessary as that of her parents to herlover’s suit, ‘and on this occasion his attentions are received with an affectation of great alarm and disinclination on her part.’[304]
If, then, Greenlanders, Kamschadals, Thlinkeet Indians, and even Bushmen, carry their notions of propriety to the extent asserted by eye-witnesses, it is scarcely surprising to find very similar rules of etiquette among the more advanced Zulus of Africa or Bedouins of Arabia in their wedding ceremonials; especially when we are told that in some parts Bedouin women sit down and turn their backs to any man they cannot avoid on the road, and refuse to take anything from the hands of a stranger.[305]‘The principal idea of a Kaffir wedding seems to be to show the great unwillingness of the girl to be transformed into a wife,’ for which reason a Zulu wife simulates several attempts to escape.[306]Both the Arabs of Sinai and the Aenezes enact the form of capture to the greatest perfection; among the latter ‘the bashful girl’ runs from the tent of one friend to another till she is caught at last, whilst among the former she acquires permanent repute in proportion to her struggles of resistance. And if a Sinai Arab marries a bride belonging to a distant tribe, she is placed on a camel and led to her husband’s camp escorted by women: during which procession ‘decencyobliges her to cry and sob most bitterly.’[307]Also, among the modern Egyptians, ‘if the bridegroom is young, one of his friends has tocarry himpart of the way to the hareem, toshow his bashfulness.’[308]So that where the carrying of the bride or bridegroom is not merely due to the same feelings that caused our own ancestors to add solemnity to their weddings by such singular sights as blue postilions, it appears in many cases to be nothing more than a prudish way of saying, that matrimony is and ought to be an estate forced upon reluctant victims, not entered upon by voluntary agents. The early Christian Church said the same; but where the saint and the savage meet in sentiment they differ in expression.
Were it not for some of the concomitant and incidental signs, the bowed or veiled head, the dishevelled hair, it might be said that the positive statements of Cranz, Egede, Burchell, and other writers arose from malobservation or from pure mistake. This objection, therefore, is of little avail; and however difficult it may be to account for the presence of such sentiments among tribes of so rude a type as the Esquimaux, the Kamschadals, and the Bushmen, the fact remains, that in the cases above cited the ‘form of capture’ is explicable as having its origin in primitive conceptions of what is due to delicacy; as being, in fact,the original expression of them in the language of pantomime so common to savages.[309]And the presence of such feelings of delicacy may be often suspected, even where they are not directly mentioned, in the ceremony of capture; as, for instance, in the African kingdom of Futa, where the form of capture prevails in the usual way, but where we have the indirect evidence that for months after marriage the bride never stirs abroad without a veil, and that Futa wives are ‘so bashful that they never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their marriage.’[310]
There is, however, no reason to press this explanation too far, nor to account it the only efficient cause. Quite as potent, and perhaps a more natural one, is dislike and disinclination on the part of the bride, which compels the bridegroom to resort to force. The conditions of savage life are a sufficient explanation of this, irrespective of any old custom of capturing wives out of a tribe by reason of a prejudice against marrying within it. A man proposes personally or mediatelyto the parents or relations of the woman he fancies for a wife; if they consent to accept him as a son-in-law and they agree as to a price, there is a reserved stipulation on the part of the vendor: ‘If you can get her.’ In Tartary, in the thirteenth century, after such a bargain, the daughter would flee to one of her kinsfolk to hide; the father would say to the husband, ‘My daughter is yours; take her wheresoever you can find her.’ The suitor, seeking with his friends till he found her, would then take her by force and carry her home.[311]Here the girl’s reluctance is not so much feigned as overridden, and is only so far formal in that it is entirely disregarded. Often it is no mere ceremony on her part, but a natural and genuine protest—a protest against being treated as a chattel, not as an individual—but a protest which, opposed as it is to parental persuasion and marital force, tends, as far as the husband is concerned, to pass into the region of the merest ceremony.
A few instances will suffice to illustrate the co-operation of dislike and force in savage matrimony. In some Californian tribes the consent of the girl is necessary, although ‘if she violently opposes the match she is seldom compelled to marry or to be sold.’ Among the Neshenam tribe of the same people ‘the girl has no voice whatever in the matter, and resistanceon her part merely occasions brute force to be used by her purchaser.’[312]So in the Utah country, where ‘families and tribes living at peace would steal each others’ wives and children and sell them as slaves,’ a wife is usually bought of her parents; but should she refuse, ‘the warrior collects his friends,carries off the recusant fair,’ and thus espouses her.[313]So among the Navajoes ‘the consent of the father is absolute, and the one so purchased assentsor is taken away by force.’[314]It is the same with the Horse Indians of Patagonia. There, as elsewhere, it is common for a cacique to have several wives, and poor men only one, marriages being ‘made by sale more frequently than by mutual agreement.’ The price is often high, and girls are betrothed without their knowledge in infancy and married without their consent at maturity. But ‘if a girl dislikes a match made for her she resists; and althoughdragged forcibly to the tent of her lawful owner, plagues him so much by her contumacy that he at last turns her away, and sells her to the person on whom she has fixed her affections.’[315]In Africa, Yorubas, Mandingoes, and Koossa Kafirs follow the custom of infant betrothal (and it is worth notice as being quite in accordancewith the theory that kinship was originally traced through mothers, that Yoruba, Mandingo, and Loango Africans, and some Esquimaux tribes, regard the mother’s consent only as necessary to an engagement);[316]but sometimes a Yoruba girl, when the time comes for her to fulfil her mother’s engagement, preferring some other than the intended husband, absolutely refuses to co-operate. ‘Then she is either teased and worried into submission or the husband agrees to receive back her dowry and release her.’[317]A Mandingo girl must either marry a suitor chosen for her or remain ever afterwards unmarried. Should she refuse, the lover is authorized by the parents ‘by the laws of the country to seize on the girl as his slave.’[318]If a Koossa girl, bound by the contract of her parents, ‘makes any attempt at resisting the union, corporal punishment is even resorted to, in order to compel her submission.’[319]
It appears, therefore, that resistance on the part of the bride in many cases procures her ultimate release, so that her wishes in the matter are always an element to be considered. In all contracts of marriage, to which she is seldom a party, there is accordingly, in the nature of things, an implied covenant that adaughter shall be so far allowed a voice in the matter that if she can make good her resistance she shall not become the property of the intending purchaser. The frequency with which it must have occurred that a girl would defeat a match she disliked by flight, elopement, or resistance, would tend to create a sort of common law right, for all daughters sold in marriage to a certain ‘run’ for their independence;[320]and the amusement naturally connected with the exercise of such a right would help to preserve the custom in a modified form; so that, however slight in some cases might be the modesty of the bride or her dislike of her suitor, her friends, if only for the sport of the thing, would gladly enact the fiction of an outrage to be resented, of a woman to be defended. In all the interesting cases of the form of capture cited by Sir John Lubbock it appears that in eight (that is, among the Mantras, the Kalmucks, the Fuejians, the Fijians, the New Zealanders, the Papuans of New Guinea, the Philippine Islanders, and the African Kafirs and Futas), the ceremony affords the bride a chance of an effectual escape from a match she dislikes. Should she fly, should she hide successfully, or should her friends defend her successfully, the contract betweenher parents and suitor becomes null and void; or sometimes, as among the Zulus and Bassutos, the price for her is raised.[321]And it is remarkable with what precision the rules of the chase have been elaborated in many instances; as by the Oleepas of Central California, among whom, if a bride is found twice out of three times, she is legally the seeker’s; and the bridegroom, if he fails the first time, is allowed a second and final attempt a few weeks later. ‘The simple result is, that if the girl likes him she hides where she is easily found; but if she disapproves of the match a dozen Indians cannot find her.’[322]
Other feelings would also be present to sustain the pretence of wife-capture. For the savage parent, in parting with his daughter for a favourable settlement, does not act from gratuitous cruelty; he provides for her future as best he can, sometimes in accordance with her wishes, sometimes against them. As a rule marriage for her is a change for the worse; but if she does not dislike the bridegroom to the extent of availing herself of her prescriptive and real chance of escape, her natural feelings for her parents and relationswould make it incumbent on her at least to affect a dutiful regret at leaving them (in cases where she does), by a half-bashful, half-serious resistance. It would be difficult to find a case of capture, whether in form or in fact, which is not readily explicable as simply the outcome of the natural affections and their protest against so artificial an arrangement as marriage by purchase; for with marriage by purchase the form of capture always co-exists, so that capture was not necessarily an earlier mode of marriage than that by purchase or agreement. The mock fights between the party of the bride and that of the bridegroom among so many Indian tribes;[323]the dances, lasting several days, during which it is the business of the squaws to keep the bridegroom at a distance from his bride, among the Tucanas of South America;[324]the similar duty which devolves on the matrons of the tribe at Sumatran weddings;[325]the mock skirmishes at Arab weddings, and the efforts of the negresses to keep the bridegroom away from the camel of the bride;[326]these are surely more intelligible, as arising from the rude ideas and customs of savage life, than as being survivals, artificially preserved, of a time when the bride was really fought for or stolen; and if such explanationis sufficient, should it not logically be admitted before resorting to the hypothesis of a practice whose very existence is rather an inference from such ceremonies than a cause observable in actual operation?
To pass to a third and quite distinct class of marriages by capture, in which the essential element is not maidenly bashfulness nor real repugnance, but the voluntary elopement of a girl with her lover, in defeat of a prior contract of betrothal. The large part which questions of profit and property play in savage betrothals can never be lost sight of, in estimating the causes of real wife abduction, either within or without the tribe. The primary conception of a daughter is a saleable possession, a source of profit, to her clan in marketings with other clans or to her parents in their bargains in her own clan. This fact alone militates against the supposition of the wide prevalence of female infanticide in primitive communities, the prejudice being rather in favour of killing the boys than the girls; not solely for the use of the latter as slaves and labourers, but for the price which even among Fuejians or Bushmen is payable in some form or another for their companionship as wives. Abiponian mothers spared their girls oftener than their boys, because their sons when grown up would want wherewithal to purchase a wife, and so tend to impoverish them; whilst their daughters would bring them in money by their sale in that capacity.[327]To raise theprice by limiting the supply was also the reason why the Guanas of America preferred to bury their girls alive rather than their boys.[328]
From this view of daughters as saleable commodities comes polygamy for the rich, polyandry, or illicit elopement, for the poor. Among the Hos of India so high at one time was the price in cattle placed by parents on their daughters that the large number of adult unmarried girls became a ‘very peculiar feature in the social state of every considerable village of the Kohlán.’ What, then, was the result? That ‘young men counteracted the machinations of avaricious parents against the course of true love byforcibly carrying off the girl,’ thus avoiding extortion by running away with her. The parents in such cases had to submit to terms proposed by arbitrators; but at last wife-abduction became so common that it could only be checked by the limitation by general consent of the number of cattle payable at marriage.[329]
‘A very singular scene,’ it is said, ‘may sometimes be noticed in the markets of Singbhoom. A young man suddenly makes a pounce on a girl and carries her off bodily, his friends covering the retreat (like a group from the picture of the Rape of theSabines). This is generally asummary method of surmounting the obstacles that cruel parents may have placed in the lovers’ path; but though it is sometimes done in anticipation of the favourable inclination of the girl herself, and in spite of her struggles and tears, no disinterested person interferes, and the girls, late companions of the abducted maiden, often applaud the exploit.’[330]
In Afghanistan the pecuniary value of women has given rise to the curious custom of assessing part of the fines in criminal cases in a certain number of young women payable in atonement as wives to the plaintiff or to his relations from the family of the defendant. Thus murder is or was expiated by the payment of twelve young women; the cutting off a hand, an ear, or a nose by that of six; the breaking of a tooth by that of three; a wound above the forehead by that of one. This was the logical result of the state of thought which produces wife-purchase; but there was also another. For in the country parts, where matches generally begin in attachment, an enterprising lover may avoid the obstacle of parental consent by a form of capture, which has a legal sanction, though it does not exempt the captor from subsequent payment. This consists in a man’s ‘seizing an opportunity of cutting off a lock of her (the woman’s)hair, snatching away her veil, or throwing a sheet over her, and claiming her as his affianced wife.’ But the most common expedient is an ordinary elopement; though this is held an outrage to a family equivalent to the murder of one of its members; and being pursued with the same rancour, is often the cause of long and bloody wars between the clans; for as the fugitive couple are never refused an asylum, ‘the seduction of a woman of one Oolooss by a man of another, or a man’s eloping with a girl of his own Oolooss,’ is the commonest cause of feuds between the clans.[331]
Love attachments, in defeat of parental plans, lead to very similar results in Bokhara. For ‘the daughter of a Turcoman has a high price; and the swain, in despair of making a legitimate purchase, seizes his sweetheart, seats her behind him on the same horse, and gallops off to the nearest camp, where the parties are united, and separation is impossible. The parents and relations pursue the lovers, and the marriage is adjusted by an intermarriage with some female relation of the bridegroom, while he himself becomes bound to pay so many camels and horses as the price of his bride.’[332]
There is, therefore, evidence to justify the theory that the form of capture may often be explained asan attempt to regulate by law the danger to a tribe arising from too frequent elopements, naturally resulting from the abuse of the parental right of selling daughters. In Sumatra the defeat of matrimonial plans by an elopement with a preferred suitor is so common as to be sanctioned and regulated by law, being known as the system of marriage bytelari gadis; the father in such a case having to pay the fine to which he would have been liable for bestowing his daughter after engagement to another suitor, and only being allowed to recover her, if he catches her in immediate pursuit. ‘When the parties,’ says Mr. McLennan, ‘cannot agree about the price, nothing is more common among the Kalmucks, Kirghiz, Nogais, and Circassians than to carry the lady off by actual force of arms. The wooer having once got the lady into hisyurt, she is his wife by the law, and peace is established by her relations coming to terms as to the price.’ So too in England, elopements have often preceded and promoted more definite marriage settlements, or, with some slight observances, have stood legally as a substitute for them.