The Human Race Part 34

[Ill.u.s.tration: 178.--NATIVE OF THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.]

One of the officers of the _Bonite_, M. Vaillant, was invited to come on sh.o.r.e by a district chief, named Kapis-Lani, who happened to be a woman.

Her toilet did not in the least resemble that of the natives, consisting of a white muslin robe confined at the waist by a long blue riband, a silk kerchief rolled about her neck, and a head-dress of hair fastened by two horn combs.

The former customs of the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands have been completely modified, from every point of view, by the English missionaries, who, in order to gain their object have availed themselves of the weapon heretofore so powerful in the hands of priests and of kings,--"taboo."

Formerly, when a s.h.i.+p arrived, a mult.i.tude of women used to come to take it by a.s.sault, either in canoes or swimming, contending among themselves, _per fas et nefas_, for the bounties of the strangers: the missionaries declared the sea "tabooed" for the softer s.e.x.

In order to restrain the laxity of morals, wives were proclaimed "tabooed" for everyone except their husbands, and unmarried girls "tabooed" for all. It was necessary to proscribe the pa.s.sion for strong drinks, and consequently brandy, wine, and other liquors were struck with the same interdiction.

We should add that these reformers did not limit themselves to the moral authority of "taboo," but supported it by the stick and hard labour on the roads.

By such means they have succeeded in altering the external and public behaviour of the natives, but not in uprooting vice among them.

We shall borrow a few features from the picture which M. Vaillant has sketched of his walk in a village of Hawaii.

Scarcely had he arrived when he heard himself called from the interior of a large cabin in which were a.s.sembled about thirty persons, who invited him to enter.

The dwelling was built of straw, and along its walls calabashes, cocoa-nuts, and a few fis.h.i.+ng utensils were to be seen hanging in confusion.

A single apartment usually answered all purposes, but it was separated into two parts. Some mats spread upon the ground at one side indicated where the occupants slept; the ground opposite was bare, and in the latter division the hearth was placed.

The officer seated himself on the matting in the same way as his hosts, who surrounded him and overpowered him with questions. Men and women, moreover, without giving a thought to decency or the civilization introduced by the English missionaries, put themselves perfectly at their ease, and were content with the very simple attire of their forefathers; the "maro" formed the whole extravagance of their toilette.

The most apparent result of the efforts of the missionaries is that the natives of the Sandwich Islands are for the most part able to read and write. These perfectly naked savages possess a prayer-book, a treatise on arithmetic, and a bible.

Any little presents which people liked to offer them were accepted by the women with grat.i.tude; after a few coquettish advances, in case a person pressed them closely, they uttered slowly and distinctly, the word, "taboo."

When out-of-doors their costume consisted of a piece of cloth which they draped around them not ungracefully; but they did not appear very pretty to the eyes of the voyagers in the _Bonite_.

The governor of Hawaii, Kona-Keni, was a man of goodly presence and pleasing face; his height was almost gigantic and his corpulence enormous, so much so that he could scarcely support himself upon his legs. His wife received M. Vaillant. She reclined on a heap of mats forming a bed raised a foot above the ground, and was covered from head to foot in a loose gown of blue brocaded silk. Her proportions also were immense. Laid heavily on the piled-up mats her prodigious ma.s.s reminded him of a seal basking in the sun. Around the bed of the lady paramount, were ranged, squatted on mats, the numerous dames forming the court of Kona, and who were clad in loose robes of cotton stuff with coloured flowers. Their head-dresses consisted of hair only, in the American style. Two of them were provided with fly-flappers, which they waved incessantly round Kona's head. The governor wore a straw hat, a vest and s.h.i.+rt of printed calico, gray trowsers, and had his neck bare.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

_P. Sellier, p.^{t}_

_Imp. Dupuy, 22, R. des Pet.i.ts Hotels_

_G. Regamey, lith._

ABYSSINIAN

HINDOO

BROWN RACE]

MICRONESIAN FAMILY.

The Micronesian Family inhabits the small islands lying to the north-west of Oceania, that is to say the archipelagos of the Marianne (or Ladrone) Islands, as well as of the Caroline and Mulgrave groups, &c. According to Dumont d'Urville these tribes differ from those dwelling in the east by having a darker skin, thinner face, less widely opened eyes, more slender forms, and altogether distinct dialects, which vary from one group to another. Their manners are gentle. They do not recognize "taboo."

We shall avail ourselves of some interesting details which Lesson has given of the Caroline islands, mentioning in the first place what he has told us concerning the Gilbert group.

A solitary canoe containing three men ventured to approach his corvette, and it was only after prolonged hesitation that these individuals made up their minds to go on board. They had lank and miserable limbs; a dark colour, and broad, coa.r.s.e features; their hair was cut close by means of a sh.e.l.l, and neither beard nor moustache was apparent. The only covering they wore was a little round cap of plaited dry leaves of the cocoa tree, and a roughly-made mat with a hole in the middle, for the protection of the shoulders and breast. Their stomachs were bound round with twists of a rope formed from the husk of cocoa-nuts.

Lesson and his companions were the first Europeans whom the natives of the island of Oualan had seen. They made a ring round the voyagers, touched them with their hands, and overwhelmed them with questions. This race is generally of low stature. The men have high and narrow foreheads, thick eyebrows, small oblique eyes, broad noses, large mouths, white teeth, and bright red gums. Their black unfrizzled hair is long, and their beard far from abundant. They possess rounded and well-formed limbs, and a hard, light bronze-coloured skin. They are spiritless and effeminate.

The women and young girls have agreeable countenances, their black eyes being full of fire, and their mouths furnished with superb teeth; but their figures are badly formed, and they have hips of immoderate size.

They go about in almost complete nudity. Both s.e.xes have a habit of making a large hole in the right ear, for the purpose of placing in it everything that people give them, and sometimes articles very unfit for earrings, such as bottles. Girls usually fill it with bouquets of _pancratium_, a plant of the amaryllis family, and often detach a few of these sweet-smelling flowers, and try to put them into a traveller's ears, while smiling graciously. The men also wear chaplets of brilliant flowers or arum stalks.

These aborigines do not make use of any kind of garments as a protection against the frequent rains of their climate, but they s.h.i.+eld their heads from the sun with a broad arum leaf.

The chiefs seem to try not to expose themselves so much to the influences of the heat, and are whiter and better made than the other islanders. The patterns of their tattooing are their sole mark of distinction; they fasten feathers, however, in the knot which confines their hair, and whenever persons give them nails they stick them around their forehead, arranging them regularly like a diadem. The women appeared chaste; nay more, the men were anxious to keep them out of the strangers' sight, a feeling all the more remarkable because quite at variance with the usual habits of the South Sea Islanders.

Oualan was governed at that time by one chief only, whom the people encompa.s.sed with extraordinary reverence, never p.r.o.nouncing his name without veneration.

The prerogatives of the chiefs appear to rest upon religious ideas. They differ in general from the people by an erect carriage, a more imposing and solemn manner, as well as by the better executed tattooing which indicates their rank. A great many chiefs rule in the districts of the island, and appear to hold absolute rights over property, and, it may be, over persons.

As regards industry, the only manufactures for which the natives of Oualan are remarkable are cloth and canoes. They draw threads from the leaves or the stems of the wild banana tree (_Musa textilis_), which they know how to dye in red, yellow, or black, and with which they make stuffs that are not greatly inferior to European textures.

They build their boats with hatchets formed of stone or sh.e.l.l, and notwithstanding the imperfection of these implements, give to their work a finish of finical nicety. The body of the canoe is hollowed from a single tree, sometimes a very big one. They polish the wood with trachyte, or by means of large rasps made from the skin of the sea-devil. These little vessels are propelled by oars, without either sails or masts.

Lesson, in alluding to the people of the Mac-Askill Islands, who bear the closest a.n.a.logy to the inhabitants of Oualan both in physical characteristics and the state of their industry, remarks on the taste which some savages display for flowers as an adornment of the person.

There were young females in these islands who wore on their heads crowns of _Ixora_, the corollas of which are a brilliant crimson; a few had pa.s.sed through the holes in their ears leaves of flowers exhaling the fragrant odour of violets, and white blossoms were twined in the hair of others. These ornaments, adds the learned traveller, possessed a charm more easy to feel than to express.

THE RED RACE.

This race is sometimes designated as the American, because in the fifteenth century it formed in itself alone almost the whole population of the two Americas. But Europeans, and especially the English of the United States, const.i.tute, at present, the greatest part of the inhabitants of America. They have to a certain extent monopolised the name of "Americans," so much so that people generally call the nations of the Red Race _Indians_, a t.i.tle which was given to them by the Spaniards, in the time of Christopher Columbus, in consequence of that strange mistake of the great Genoese navigator, who discovered the New World without knowing it, that is to say, while imagining that he had simply found a new pa.s.sage by which to reach the "Great Indies," in Asia.

The denomination of _Red Race_ is, besides, a defective one, in so much that several tribes ranked in this group have no shade of red in their colour. This division is, in fine, rather imperfect from an ethnological point of view, but it possesses the advantage of fixing geographically the _habitat_ of the nations included in it.

The _American Indians_ approach closely to the Yellow Race belonging to Asia, in their hair, which is generally black, rough, and coa.r.s.e, in the scarceness of their beard, and in their complexion, which varies from yellow to a red copper colour. Among one portion of them the very prominent nose and large open eyes recall to mind the White Race. Their forehead is extremely retreating, but no other race have the back part of the head more developed, or broader eye-sockets. Though usually hospitable and generous, they are cruel and implacable in their resentments, and make war for the most frivolous causes. Two of these nations, the primitive Mexicans and Peruvians, had formerly founded wide empires, and had attained a somewhat advanced civilization, though lower than that of Europeans of the same epoch. But these monarchies having been swept away by their Spanish conquerors, progress was checked. The Indians who escaped the destruction of their race, and submitted to the victors, are now no better than husbandmen or artisans, while as for those that remained independent, they wander in the woods and the prairies, and are the last representatives of man in the savage or semi-savage state. They live in the forests and savannahs, on the produce of their hunting and fis.h.i.+ng; their wives are kept by them in a state of the greatest abjectness, and are loaded with the heaviest labour; while certain tribes still continue to offer human sacrifices to their idols.

A fact which deserves notice is, that the Indians who were already settled and who were husbandmen when the Spaniards arrived, speedily submitted to the strangers, but never has it been found possible to tame those who have shown themselves, from the fifteenth century to this day, rebels to foreign influence, and who have preferred to become masters of the forest solitudes rather than accept the yoke and customs of the Europeans. Moreover, the number and population of the wild tribes of the two Americas diminish every year, especially in the north, a result attributable to their continual wars, the ravages of the small-pox, and, above all, to the fatal pa.s.sion of these savage nations for brandy.

Anthropologists have taken great trouble to discover the real origin of the Indians of America, and to establish their affinity with the other human families, but up to the present their studies have led to no satisfactory result. The Indians cannot be accurately brought into connection with either the White, Yellow, or Brown Race; nor on the other hand can the mingling of these three groups be explained, nor the American Indian be recognized as a determinate original type.

The great differences, both in the shape of the skull and the colour of the skin, which are known to exist among the Indian tribes, proclaim numerous crossings. Many circ.u.mstances prove that in very remote times some Europeans made their way into America by the north, and that they found there one or many native races, whom they partially overcame, and with whom they are mingled to the present day. The degree of civilization that had been reached by the Mexicans and Peruvians of old, when Columbus landed in the New World; the American tradition which holds that the founders of their empires were foreigners; the existence on the Northern continent of ruins announcing a state of things at least as far advanced as that of the _Nahuath_ and the _Quichuas_, (the former Mexicans and Peruvians); such are the facts which establish that a blending formerly took place between the primitive Indians and Northern Europeans.