Considering, then, that the affections and wishes do not count for nothing even among savages; considering that among savages, more even than in civilized life, marriage is a question of property and of means, so that, whilst the richest members of a tribe almost universally have several wives, it is oftenall that the poorer can do to get a wife at all, we have a set of circumstances leading naturally sometimes to voluntary elopement on the part of the girl, in defeat of her parents, sometimes to literal wife-capture by a man otherwise unable to become a husband. This condition of things leads of necessity to polyandry and wife-robbery. In some Australian tribes, owing to a disproportion between the sexes, many men have to steal a wife from a neighbouring horde. But it is not their normal recognized mode of marriage. On the contrary, their laws on this subject are somewhat elaborate; and as it appears that before that state of society in which a daughter belongs to her father there is one in which she belongs to her mother, and perhaps a still prior state in which she belongs to her tribe, so from their birth Australian girls are appropriated to certain males of the tribe, nor can the parents annul the obligation. If the male dies the mother may then bestow her daughter on whom she will, for by the death of her legal owner the girl becomes to some extent the property of her relations, who have certain claims on her services for the procurement of food. But to the surrender of a girl by her mother the full consent of the whole tribe is necessary; and if, as sometimes happens, ‘the young people, listening rather to the dictates of inclination than those of law, improvise a marriage by absconding together,’ they incur thefatal enmity of the whole tribe.[333]According to Bonwick, a Tasmanian or Australian woman was never stolen contrary to her expectations or wishes. Only if all other schemes to have her own way failed, would a girl face the penalty of having ‘the spear of the disappointed, the spear of the guardian, and the spears of the tribe’ thrown at her, for her breach of tribal law.[334]
The conception of the daughters of a clan as its property, as a source of contingent wealth to it, of additional income to it in sheep, dogs, or whatever the medium of exchange, tends to keep up in many cases that prohibition to marry in the same clan or subdivision of a tribe which is known as exogamy. Among the Hindu Kafirs it is said to be uncertain why a man may not sell his girls to his own tribe, and why a man must always buy his wife from another; but it is certain that for this reason the more girls a man has born to him the better he is pleased and the richer his tribe becomes.[335]A Khond father distributes among the heads of the families, belonging to his branch of a tribe, the sum raised on behalf of a son-in-law by subscription from the son-in-law’s branch. But, supposing a great inequality of wealth to arise between different clans, originally united by profitable intermarriages, it might becomemore profitable to sell within the clan than outside it, so that the same motives of interest which, under some circumstances, would tend to encourage exogamy would under others lead to the opposite principle, a rich bridegroom of the same clan being preferable to a poor one of another, whether the gain accrued to a girl’s parents or her clan. It is, perhaps, for this reason that a Hindu Kooch incurs a fine if he marries a woman of another clan, becoming a bondsman till his wife redeems him; that is, till she pays back to his clan or its chief what the bridegroom, by purchasing her, has alienated from the use of the tribe.[336]On the other hand, the reason given by the Khonds for marrying women from distant places was, that they gave much smaller sums than for women of their own tribe.[337]
Exogamy and endogamy would thus co-exist, as the customs of tribes that have attained to a more or less complete recognition of the rights of property, and are so far advanced as to be capable of preserving complex rules of social organization. Marriages, therefore, under eitherrégimeare matters generally of friendly settlement, of ordinary contract; and where such arrangements are defeated by the perversity of the principal parties—namely, the bride or the bridegroom—what more natural than the device of giving legal sanction to an elopement by settling a subsequent compensation with the parent?
The custom of exogamy is so widely spread over the world that its origin must be sought in conditions as prevalent as itself, and it is possible that it arose out of the same condition which certainly sustains it and is co-extensive with itself, namely, from the marketable position of women. That female infanticide should have led to it is improbable, not only from the comparative rarity of the practice among therudesttribes, but from the negative instance of the Todas, a wild Indian hill-tribe, who, notwithstanding the scarcity of their women, and a scarcity actually attributed to former female infanticide, ‘never contract marriage with the other tribes, though living together on most friendly terms.’[338]Judgingà priori, we should expect to find as of earlier date a prejudice in favour of tribal exclusiveness, of strict endogamy. The idea of the Abors that marriage out of the clan is a sin only to be washed out by sacrifice—a sin so great as to cause war among the elements, and even obscuration of the sun and moon—has a more archaic appearance than the contrary principle; and the confinement of marriages to a few families of known purity of descent is characteristic of some of the lowest Hindu castes.[339]The prejudice against foreign women is so strong that there is often a tendency toregard female prisoners of war as merely slaves, as not of the same rank with the real wives of their captors. Thus, ‘though the different tribes of the Aht nation are frequently at war with one another, women are not captured from other tribes for marriage, but only to be kept as slaves. The idea of slavery connected with capture is so common that a free-born Aht would hesitate to marry a woman taken in war, whatever her rank had been in her own tribe.’[340]The Caribs, too, if they kept female prisoners as wives always regarded them as slaves, as standing on a lower level than their legitimate wives.[341]
Leaving, however, the obscure problem of the origin of exogamy, there is a point of view from which both that and endogamy are one. For exogamy as regards the subdivisions of a tribe is endogamy as regards the tribe itself, tending in fact to preserve tribal unity and to check an indefinite divergency of interests and dialects. For example, where a Hindoo caste or tribe is composed of several Gotrams, no person of whom may marry an individual of the same Gotram, it is evident that the unity of the tribe is actually sustained by the exogamy of its constituent parts. Such a custom therefore, howsoever originated, would, as serviceable in maintaining tribal unity against hostile neighbouring people, tend to survive from motives of common expediency, from its adaptationto the interests of peace; a beneficial result of the system which in Mr. Bancroft’s account of the Thlinkeet and Kutchin Indians clearly appears.[342]The Thlinkeets are nationally divided into two great clans, under the totems of the Wolf and the Raven, and these two are again subdivided into numerous sub-totems. ‘In this clanship some singular social facts present themselves. People are at once thrust widely apart and yet drawn together. Tribes of the same clan may not war on each other, but at the same time members of the same clan may not marry each other. Thus the young Wolf warrior must seek his mate among the Ravens....Obviously this singular social fancy tends greatly to keep the various tribes of the nation at peace.’ The Kutchins, again, are divided into three castes, resident in different territories, no two persons of the same caste being allowed to marry. ‘This system operates strongly against war between the tribes, as in war it is caste against caste, not tribe against tribe. As the father is never of the same caste as the son, who receives clanship from the mother, there can never be international war without ranging fathers and sons against each other.’ So among the Khonds, who punish intermarriage between persons of the same tribe with death, the intervention of the women was always essential to peace, as they were neutral between the tribe of their fathersand that of their husbands.[343]But it is difficult to think that, if hostile relations between exogamous clans became permanent, the several clans would still insist on exogamous marriages as the only marriages legally valid, and consequently regard the use of force or fraud as the only legitimate title to a wife.
It seems indeed certain that wherever the rule of exogamy exists it may be analysed into a prohibition to marry within the divisions of a larger group; that larger group being consciously recognised as uniting the divergent families by resemblance of dialect, common political ties, or a traditional common descent. The Kalmucks, for instance, call themselves ‘the peculiar people,’ or ‘the four allies,’ and any danger of their national dissolution is obviously diminished by the very fact of the exogamy of their four clans. The Circassians, whose constituent brotherhoods are exogamous, by the occasional assemblies of the brotherhoods for the settlement of disputes, show a consciousness of their political unity, which by the exogamy of the brotherhoods they help to maintain. The Hindu castes preserve their mutual exclusiveness by the very fact of compelling all their constituent families to intermingle in marriage, and so preventing any one of them from dissolving the common relationship by absolute separation or independent growth. So that exogamy rather sustains than prevents asystem of marriages within the same stock, and is a mark of a higher conception of social organisation, when people have learned to classify themselves with respect to their neighbours, when tribal and personal property is well established, and when, consequently, marriages between the groups can be effected by purchase better than by violence. Exogamy therefore as the product or concomitant of a somewhat advanced state of thought, not of utter barbarism, would never make marriages by capture a necessity of existence; but, if it did, it would argue so much culture in a tribe capable of maintaining such rules, as would equally justify us in ascribing to them moral feelings, not less advanced and refined than those involved in their adherence to so restrictive a political system.
South Australia supplies a typical illustration of the confusion relating to intertribal marriages which arises from the vague use of the wordtribe. For wherever there is reason to suspect that the word clan or family should stand for the word tribe, it is probable that the exogamy predicated of the tribe only prevails between its constituent elements; in other words, that it is only, as among the Kalmucks, Circassians, or Hindu castes, an extended form of the principle of endogamy. Thus, Collins, describing wife-capture in New South Wales, says that ‘it is believed’ the women so taken are always selectedfrom women of a different tribe from that of the males, and from one with whom they are at enmity; that as wives ‘they are incorporated into the tribes to which their husbands belong, and but seldom quit them for others.’ But he uses the word tribe as convertible with the word family, as when he speaks of the natives near Port Jackson being distributed into families, each under the government of its own head, and deriving its name from its place of residence.[344]And the statements of Captain Hunter, a previous writer, that the natives are associated ‘in tribes of many families together,’ living apparently without a fixed residence; that ‘the tribe takes its name, from the place of their general residence;’ and that, the different families wander in different directions for food, but unite on occasion of disputes with another tribe, make it still more probable that when Collins spoke of different tribes he meant merely, different families, or groups, which with all their separate wanderings united sometimes in cases of common danger. So when Captain Hunter himself says that ‘there is some reason to suppose that most of their wives are taken by force from the tribes with whom they are at variance, as the females bear no proportion to the males,’ we may take it that by tribes he means families, and families who recognise their community of blood when a really different tribeprovokes their hostility by assembling as a tribe themselves.[345]Mr. Stanbridge, who spent eighteen years in the wilds of Victoria, corroborates this view; for, according to him, each tribe has its own boundaries, the land of which is parcelled out amongst families and carefully transmitted by direct descent; these boundaries being so sacredly maintained that the member of no one family will venture on the lands of a neighbouring one without invitation. The several families (or tribes) unite for mutual purposes under a chief. The women often, but not always, marry into distant tribes; they are generally betrothed in their infancy, but if they grow up unbetrothed the father’s consent must be solicited; failing him, the brother’s; then the uncle’s; and last of all that of a council or a chief of a tribe.[346]That force was ever the normal method by which marriages were effected in Australia, there is no proof; that, on the contrary, mutual likings often set the law, is proved by the story of the native captive girl, who, after living among the colonists for some time, expressed a desire to go away and be married to a young native of her acquaintance; albeit that she left him after three days, returning sadly beaten and jealous of the other wife.[347]
Quite distinct, again, either from the real or pretended reluctance of a savage girl to become a bride, or from the custom of forcing an avaricious parent to a settlement by the shorter process of taking first and paying afterwards, is the custom of stealing women from the same or a neighbouring clan, a custom which prevailed widely in Ireland and Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which in the latter country has been ‘glorified in a whole literature of songs and ballads.’[348]
That polygamy and wife-purchase and artificial tribal regulations often lead to such a result cannot be denied; but that it is anywhere a system, sustained by prejudices, whencesoever derived, seems completely unwarranted by the evidence hitherto collected. The Coinmen of Patagonia, who made annual inroads on the Tekeenica tribe, killing the men and carrying off not only the women but the children, dogs, arrows, spears, and canoes, seem to have been actuated rather by the ordinary motives of freebooters (by such motives, for instance, as induced our early convict settlers in Tasmania to set off with their bullock-chains to make captives of the native women[349]) than by any scruples of marrying relations at home. Carib wives taken in war were accounted slaves; and so far were the Caribs from being dependent on aggressionfor their wives, that before their customs were modified by acquaintance with the Christians their only legitimate wives were their cousins.[350]If a man had no cousin to marry, or put off doing so till it was too late, he might then marry some non-relative, with the consent of her parents. At the festival that followed a successful war the parents vied with one another in offering their daughters as wives to those who were praised by their captains as having fought with bravery. The Caribs of the continent differed from those of the islands in that men and women spoke the same language, not having corrupted their native tongue by marriages with foreign women.[351]According to Humboldt, the language of the Caribs of the continent was the same, from the source of the Rio Branco to the steppes of Cumana; and the pride of race which led them to withdraw from every other people, and was the cause of the failure of all missionary efforts that tried to combine them with villages containing people of another nation and speaking another idiom, would surely have militated againstmaking exogamy a preliminary condition of matrimony.[352]Humboldt, indeed, says that polygamy was more extensively practised by the Caribs and other nations that ‘preserved the custom of carrying off young girls from the neighbouring tribe;’ but it would be contrary to all previous accounts of the people to suppose these were their only wives, such a supplement to domestic felicity being everywhere the common reward, though seldom the chief object, of successful war. The curious difference in the language of the men and of the women found to exist among the Caribs of the West Indian Archipelago, and attributed by tradition to the conquest of a former people on the islands, whose wives the conquerors appropriated, has perhaps been rather exaggerated, for in a list of 488 words and phrases employed by both sexes, in only 36 is there any difference marked between the language of the men and that of the women. The origin of the difference may be doubted, as there were also words and phrases used by the old men of the people which the younger ones might not use; and there was a war-dialect of which neither women, girls, or boys had any knowledge.[353]But probably the difference arose from a custom similarto that of the Zulus, which makes it unlawful for a woman to use any word containing the sound of her father-in-law’s name or of the names of her husband’s male relations. ‘Whenever the emphatic syllable of either of their proper names occurs in any other word, she must avoid it, by either substituting an entirely new word, or at least another syllable in its place. Hencethis custom has given rise to an almost distinct language among the women.’[354]In consequence of thisHlonipacustom, according to another witness, ‘the language at this present time almost presents the phenomenon of a double one.’[355]That the Caribs maintained the common etiquette of reserve between parents and children-in-law,[356]makes it not improbable that the reserve extended itself to their language, and thus produced the same phenomenon that we find in South Africa.
In the same way other cases of wife-capture appear simply in the light of savage lawlessness, which may have been more common among quite primitive tribes than it is in their nearest modern representatives; but which, if it ever was widely prevalent, is most unlikely to have been perpetuated in symbol, by a form of capture. If then the form is easily explicable on other grounds, such as have been suggested, we have a reason the less for supposing in the past a state of thingswhich would exclude from the relations between male and female the happy influence of that mutual affection which has been shown not to have been entirely absent even among, perhaps, the rudest of our species, the aborigines of Australia or the Veddahs of Ceylon, and which is certainly disseminated more or less widely, outside the human race, through a large part of the animal creation.
It is probably impossible to resuscitate in imagination a picture of primitive times. It is with the lower societies of the world as with the lower animal organisms: the more they are studied, the more wonderful is the complexity of structure they unfold. Tribal and subtribal divisions of communities, tribal and subtribal divisions of territory, strong distinctions of rank, stringent rules of etiquette, are found on all sides to characterise populations in other circumstances of life scarcely less rude than the brute creation around them. The first beginnings of social evolution are lost, nor can they be observed in any known races that appear to have advanced the least distance from the starting-point of progress. But, as there is no reason to suppose that the external conditions of primitive man were ever very different from those of existing tribes; that those, for instance, of the shell-mound builders or the cave-dwellers differed widely from those of existing Ahts or Bushmen, so there is nothing unreasonable in believing, that the earliesthuman denizens of the globe were endowed with the same rudiments of feelings that prevail among them, and that these should, even in very early times, have produced very similar social institutions. That Greeks and Egyptians, Chinese and Hindus, had legends ascribing marriage to the invention of a particular legislator, thereby implying there was a time when marriage was not, no more proves that there was ever a time when some sort of marriage was unrecognised than the many legends of the origin of fire prove that mankind were ever destitute of the blessing of its warmth. A minimum of reflection on the subject would produce the legend, just as reflections on the world’s origin have produced countless legends of its creation, of a time when it too was nonexistent. And it will be found, wherever any known savage tribe really practises no wedding customs, that the fact of the marriage is distinctly recognised, either by payment in kind or labour by the bridegroom or by some symbolical act notifying the union to all fellow-tribesmen. The Veddahs, for instance, according to Tennant, used no marriage rites; but another writer mentions, that on the day of marriage the husband received from his bride a cord twisted by herself, which he had to wear round his waist till his death, as a symbol of the lastingness of the union between them. The Kherias of India, who have no word for marriage in their language, give public recognition to the factby certain rites and festivities, closely analogous to those in vogue in neighbouring tribes. The Coroadas of Brazil have no marriage solemnity, but the suitor presents the bride’s parents with fruit or game, as a tacit engagement to support her by the chase. Such a tacit expression of willingness and ability to take good care of his wife is a common symbolical act among savages, even the rudest; whilst the fact that for the married pair henceforth there will be a union of life and fortune is indicated by many a wedding custom, of no doubtful meaning, as by the eating of a cake together, or by the Dyak custom of making the married couple sit together on two bars of iron, ‘to intimate the wish of the bystanders that blessings as lasting and health as vigorous as that metal may attend the pair.’
But symbolical acts like these—and they might be multiplied indefinitely—presuppose an advanced state of thought and feeling, behind which we cannot get in the observation of any existing savage tribes; and since they are common wherever the pretence of capture is common, that pretence may well be symbolical too; but symbolical, not of an earlier system of marriage, but of a conventional regard for good manners. Wherever the pretence of capture exists, it exists amid conditions of life so far removed from what might naturally be conceived as the most archaic, that it is quite legitimate to attribute the decorousreluctance of the bride and the resistance of her relations at weddings to such feelings as have been proved to prevail upon such occasions, and so to consider the bride’s behaviour as something quite unconnected with the lawless practice of wife-abduction, a practice which undoubtedly prevails to a certain extent in the savage world (chiefly in consequence of artificial social arrangements), which may have prevailed to a still greater extent when men lived in the caves of Périgord or upon former continents, but which it is incredible should ever have survived by transmission as a symbol, as a custom worthy of religious preservation.
A comparison of some of the fancies of the rudest known tribes of the earth concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, and the stars, proves abundantly not only that the demand for a reason for things is a principle operative in every stage of human development, but that the primitive explanation of things is sought in the occurrences of daily experience and given in terms and figures originally applied to terrestrial objects. From a philosophy of nature of so rude a type and so humble an origin spring many of those marvellous traditions, which in after times rank as the mythology, or perhaps serve as the religion, of the people among whom they had birth.
To begin with some of the astro-mythological ideas of the Australians. Mr. Stanbridge mentions the astonishment with which, as he sat by his camp fire, he listened for the first time to the remarks of two Australian natives as they pointed to the beautifulconstellations of Castor and Pollux, of the Pleiades and Orion. These men belonged to a race who had ‘the reputation of being lowest in the scale of mankind,’ who were ‘cannibals of the lowest description,’ and ‘who had no name for numerals above two;’ yet they could explain the wanderings of the moon, by the story that, being once discovered trying to persuade the wife of a certain star in Canis Major to elope with him, he was beaten and put to flight by the angry husband. As so frequently elsewhere, most of the stars were bound by the ties of human relationship, being wives, brothers, sisters, or mothers to one another. The stars in the belt of Orion were believed to be a group of young men dancing, whilst the Pleiades were girls who played to them as they danced. Two large stars in the fore legs of Centaurus were two brave brothers who speared Tchingal to death, and the east stars of Crux were the points of the spears that pierced his body.[357]
Few tribes of known savages appear to be without conceptions of a similar nature. The Tasmanians, according to Bonwick, were no exception to the connection of theology with astronomy. To them Capella was a kangaroo pursued by Castor and Pollux, whose smoke as it was roasted might be seen till the autumn. The Pleiades were maidens whocourted the kangaroo hunters of Orion and dug up roots for their suppers. Two other stars were two black men who of old appeared suddenly on a hill and threw fire down to earth for the use of its inhabitants; whilst two other luminaries were two women whom a sting-ray had killed as they dived for cray-fish, but whom these same fire-bringers restored to life, by placing stinging ants on their breasts; then escorting them to heaven, after they had first killed the sting-ray.[358]
Bushman star-lore is framed in exactly the same way, the planets of distant solar systems sinking into the insignificance of daily African surroundings. What is the moon but a man who, having incurred the wrath of the sun, is pierced by his knife till he is nearly destroyed, and who, having implored mercy, grows from the small piece left him, till he is again large enough for the stabbing process to recommence? What is the Milky Way but some wood ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night? Other stars are reduced to mortal origin, or identified with certain lions, tortoises, or clouds, that have placein Bushman mythology; nor does it lie beyond their limits of belief that the sun should once have been seen sitting by the wayside as he travelled on earth, and that the jackal’s back is black to this day because he carried that burning substance on his back.[359]This sun they believe was once a mortal on earth who radiated light from his body, but only for a short space round his house; till some children were sent to throw him as he slept into the sky, whence he has ever since shone over the earth.[360]These children belonged to an earlier race of Bushmen; and it is an odd coincidence that in Victoria as in South Africa the belief about the sun is associated with the tradition of a race that preceded both Bushmen and Australians in their present homes. In the Australian creed, the earth lay in darkness, till one of the former race threw an emu’s egg into space, where it became the sun. That former race was translated in various forms to the heavens, where they made all the celestial bodies, and where they continue to cause all the good and evil that happens on earth. Such traditions may point to a fact; for both Australians and Bushmen may be degenerate from a better social type than they now present; but the fact that, even if degenerate, they should preserve such tales and fictions, makes it not inconceivable that such talesshould arise, as spontaneous products of the mind, among tribes that seem neither to have lapsed from a higher condition, nor ever to have emerged from their primeval state of barbarism.
Of the Esquimaux, Egede observes that ‘their notion about the stars is that some of them have been men and others different sorts of animals or fishes.’[361]Here two stars are two persons at a singing combat, or two rival women taking each other by the hair; those other three are certain Greenlanders who, when once out seal-catching, failed to find their way home again and were taken to heaven. It is true such fancies, taken primarily from Cranz, must be received with the reservation that he makes, namely, that they were only harboured by the weaker heads of Greenland, and that the natives had art enough to play off on the Europeans quite as marvellous stories as any they received.[362]But the possible reality of such belief is vouched for by other testimony from all parts of the globe, of which two instances, taken from the Hervey Islanders and the Thlinkeet Indians, will suffice to illustrate the general character. According to the former, a twin boy and girl were badly treated by their mother; so they left their home and leapt into the sky, whither they were also followed by their parents, and where all four may still be seenshining; ‘brother and dearly-loved sister, still linked together, pursue their never-ceasing flight, resolved never again to meet their justly-enraged parents.’[363]The Thlinkeet Indians ascribe to a being called Yehl the liberation of the world from its pristine darkness; for, amid the many conflicting stories told of him, it is agreed that he it was who obtained light for men at a time when ‘sun, moon, and stars were kept by a rich chief in separate boxes which he allowed no one to touch.’ Yehl, having become grandson to this chief, cried one day so much for these boxes that his grandfather let him have one. ‘He opened it, and lo! there were stars in the sky.’ The grandparent was next cheated out of the moon in the same way; but to get the sunbox Yehl had to refuse food and become really ill, and then its owner only parted with it on condition that it should not be opened. The prohibition, however, was unheeded. Yehl turned into a raven, flew off with the box, and blessed mankind with the light of the sun.[364]
From these samples of the fairy tales of savages, it is clear that, in addition to the myths which arise from forgotten etymologies, there are many others which are not formed at all by this process of gradual forgetfulness, but spring directly from the use of the intellect and the imagination, in obedience to the impulseto find a reason for everything. To observe peculiarities in nature is the beginning of science; to account for them in any way is science itself, true or false. The science of savages is not limited to the skies, but is directed to everything that calls for notice on earth; nor in the stories invented by them to answer the various problems of existence, are they a whit behind the traditions of European folk-lore on similar subjects, their explanations of natural peculiarities disclosing quite as vivid imaginative powers as the stories of the white race concerning birds or beasts.
Let us take, for instance, as a parallel to the German reason for the owl flying in solitude by night (namely, that when set to watch the wren, imprisoned in a mousehole, he fell asleep, and was so ashamed at letting him thus escape that he has never since dared show himself by day), the story of the rude Ahts, made to account for the melancholy note of the loon as it is heard flying about the wild lakes of Vancouver’s Island; and as a good instance of the resemblance in construction of plot often found in very distant regions, let us place side by side with it a story of the Basutos in the south of Africa:—
THE AHT STORY.Two fishermen went one day in two canoes to catch halibut. But while one of them caught many,the other caught none. So the latter, angered by the taunts of his more fortunate but physically weaker companion, bethought himself how he might take all his fish from him by force, and cause him to return home fishless and ashamed. Suddenly, whilst his friend was pulling up a fish, he knocked him on the head with the wooden club he used for killing halibut, and, to prevent the tale ever being told, cut out his companion’s tongue, and took the fish home to his own wife. When the tongueless man arrived at the village, and his friends came to enquire of his sport, he could only answer by a noise resembling the note of the loon. ‘The great spirit, Quawteaht, was so angry at all this, that he changed the injured Indian into a loon, and the other into a crow; and the loon’s plaintive cry now is the voice of the fisherman trying to make himself understood.’[365]
THE AHT STORY.
Two fishermen went one day in two canoes to catch halibut. But while one of them caught many,the other caught none. So the latter, angered by the taunts of his more fortunate but physically weaker companion, bethought himself how he might take all his fish from him by force, and cause him to return home fishless and ashamed. Suddenly, whilst his friend was pulling up a fish, he knocked him on the head with the wooden club he used for killing halibut, and, to prevent the tale ever being told, cut out his companion’s tongue, and took the fish home to his own wife. When the tongueless man arrived at the village, and his friends came to enquire of his sport, he could only answer by a noise resembling the note of the loon. ‘The great spirit, Quawteaht, was so angry at all this, that he changed the injured Indian into a loon, and the other into a crow; and the loon’s plaintive cry now is the voice of the fisherman trying to make himself understood.’[365]
THE BASUTO STORY.Two brothers, having gone in different directions to make their fortunes, met again, after sundry adventures, the elder enriched by a pack of dogs, the younger by a large number of cows. The younger offered his brother as many of these cows as he pleased, with the exception of a certain white one. This he would not part with; so as they went home, and the younger brother was drinking from a pool, Macilo, the elder, seized his brother’s head and held it under the water till he was dead. Then he buried the body, and covered it with a stone, and proceeded to drive back the whole flock as his own. He had not, however, gone far, before a small bird perched itself on the horn of the white cow and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Twice did Macilo kill the bird with a stone, but each time it reappeared and uttered the same words. So the third time he killed it he burnt it, and threw its ashes to the winds. Then proudly he entered his village, and when they all enquired for his brother, he said that they had taken different roads, and that he was ignorant where he was. The white cow was greatly admired, but suddenly a small bird perched itself on its horns and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Thus, through a birdinto which the heart of the murdered man had been transformed, did the truth become known, and everyone departed with horror from the presence of the murderer.[366]
THE BASUTO STORY.
Two brothers, having gone in different directions to make their fortunes, met again, after sundry adventures, the elder enriched by a pack of dogs, the younger by a large number of cows. The younger offered his brother as many of these cows as he pleased, with the exception of a certain white one. This he would not part with; so as they went home, and the younger brother was drinking from a pool, Macilo, the elder, seized his brother’s head and held it under the water till he was dead. Then he buried the body, and covered it with a stone, and proceeded to drive back the whole flock as his own. He had not, however, gone far, before a small bird perched itself on the horn of the white cow and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Twice did Macilo kill the bird with a stone, but each time it reappeared and uttered the same words. So the third time he killed it he burnt it, and threw its ashes to the winds. Then proudly he entered his village, and when they all enquired for his brother, he said that they had taken different roads, and that he was ignorant where he was. The white cow was greatly admired, but suddenly a small bird perched itself on its horns and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Thus, through a birdinto which the heart of the murdered man had been transformed, did the truth become known, and everyone departed with horror from the presence of the murderer.[366]
European folk-lore accounts for the redness of the robin’s breast, either by the theory that he extracted a thorn from the thorn-crown of Christ, or by the theory that he daily bears a drop of water to quench the flames of hell. For either reason he might be justly called the friend of man; but for the bird’s friendliness the Chippewya Indians give a more poetical explanation than either of the above. There was once, they say, a hunter so ambitious that his only son should signalise himself by endurance, when he came to the time of life to undergo the fast preparatory to his choosing his guardian spirit, that after the lad had fasted for eight days, his father still pressed him to persevere. But next day, when the father entered the hut, his son had paid the penalty of violated nature, and in the form of a robin had just flown to the top of the lodge. There, before he flew away to the woods, he entreated his father not to mourn his transformation. ‘I shall be happier,’ he said, ‘in my present state than I could have been as a man. I shall always be the friend of men and keep near their dwellings; I could not gratify your pride as a warrior,but I will cheer you by my songs.... I am now free from cares and pains, my food is furnished by the fields and mountains, and my path is in the bright air.’[367]
Not less poetical is the Hervey Islanders’ account of the origin of some peculiarities among fishes, and notably of the well-known conformation of the head of the common sole. They relate how Ina, leaving the house of her rich parents because she had been beaten and scolded for suffering the arch-thief, Nyana, to steal certain treasures left in her charge, resolved to make her way to the sea beach, and from thence to the Sacred Isle that lay across the sea at the place where the sun set. Arrived at the shore, she first asked the small fish, theavini, to bear her across the sea; but the avini, unable to support her weight, soon let her fall into the water, for which Ina in her anger struck it repeatedly with her foot, thereby causing those beautiful stripes on its sides which are called to this day ‘Ina’s tattooing.’ Trying next thepaoro, and meeting with the same mischance, she caused it in the same way to bear ever after those blue marks which are now its glory; and it is said to be historically true that tattooing on that island ‘was simply an imitation of the stripes on the avini and the paoro.’ Then theapi, a white fish, incurring the same displeasure,became at once and for ever of an intensely black hue. The sole, indeed, carried Ina farther than the others, but no farther than the breakers by the reef; and Ina, now wild with rage, stamped with such fury on its head that its underneath eye was removed to the upper side, and thus it was condemned ever afterwards to swim flatwise, unlike other fish, because one side of its face had no eye. How Ina then caused a protuberance on the forehead of all sharks, known to this day as Ina’s bump, by cracking a cocoa-nut she wished to drink out of on the forehead of a shark that bore her, how the shark then left her, and how she finally reached the Sacred Isle on the back of the king of sharks, and became the wife of Timirau, the king of all fish, may be read in further detail in Mr. Gill’s interesting collection of Myths and Songs from the South Pacific.[368]
The necessity for a reason for everything, exemplified in these traditions, exercises its influence on mythology itself, reasons being invented for inexplicable customs or beliefs just as they are for strange phenomena in nature. The custom, for instance, of hunting a wren to death once a year, which has been observed in Ireland, the isle of Man, and the South of France, has for its general explanation a belief that the wren is a fairy who, after having decoyed manymen to meet their deaths in the sea, took the form of a wren to escape the plot laid for her by a certain knight-errant. But the Irish have found quite another reason for the custom, having invented the story, that on the eve of the battle of the Boyne the Irish had stolen up to King William’s sleeping camp and were on the point of putting an end to the heretics, when a wren hopped upon the drum of a Protestant drummer, and by thus waking him caused their defeat; a defeat which they avenge on every anniversary of the day by the persecution of that unhappy bird.[369]
The story of the wren is well known; how, when the birds were competing for the kingship by the test of the greatest height attained in flying, the wren hid in the eagle’s feathers, and, when the eagle had flown far beyond the other birds, darted himself yet a little above it. It is said that the first appearance of this story is in a collection of beast-fables, composed by a rabbi in the 13th century.[370]But the resemblance between the wren-story as it is told in Germany or Ireland, and a story of a linnet as told by the Odjibwas of North America, is so striking a testimony of the way in which closely similar tales are framed independently, that the two stories are worth comparing.
THE ODJIBWA STORY.‘The birds met together one day to try which could fly the highest. Some flew up very swift, but soon got tired, and were passed by others of stronger wing. But the eagle went up beyond them all, and was ready to claim the victory, when the grey linnet, a very small bird, flew from the eagle’s back, where it had perched unperceived, and being fresh and unexhausted, succeeded in going the highest. When the birds came down and met in council to award the prize, it was given to the eagle, because that bird had not only gone up nearer to the sun than any of the larger birds, but it had carried the linnet on its back.’For this reason the eagle’s feathers became the most honourable marks of distinction a man could bear.[371]
THE ODJIBWA STORY.
‘The birds met together one day to try which could fly the highest. Some flew up very swift, but soon got tired, and were passed by others of stronger wing. But the eagle went up beyond them all, and was ready to claim the victory, when the grey linnet, a very small bird, flew from the eagle’s back, where it had perched unperceived, and being fresh and unexhausted, succeeded in going the highest. When the birds came down and met in council to award the prize, it was given to the eagle, because that bird had not only gone up nearer to the sun than any of the larger birds, but it had carried the linnet on its back.’
For this reason the eagle’s feathers became the most honourable marks of distinction a man could bear.[371]