CHAPTER IV.
AUTOCHTHONES
July 30.—At Hopedale, lat. 55° 30', we come upon an object of first-class interest, worthy of the gravest study,—an original and pre-Adamite man. In two words I give the reader a key to my final conclusions, or impressions, concerning the Esquimaux race.
Original: Shakspeare is a copyist, and England a plagiarism, in comparison with this race. The Esquimaux has done all for himself: he has developed his own arts, adjusted himself by his own wit to the Nature which surrounds him. Heir to no Rome, Greece, Persia, India, he stands there in the sole strength of his native resources, rich only in the traditionary accomplishments of his own race. Cut off equally from the chief bounties of Nature, he has small share in the natural wealth of mankind. When Ceres came to the earth, and blessed it, she forgot him. The grains, the domestic animals, which from the high plateaus of Asia descended with the fathers of history to the great fields of the world, to him came not. The sole domestic animal he uses, the dog, is not the same with that creature as known elsewhere; he has domesticated a wolf, and made a dog for himself.
Not only is he original, but one of the most special of men, related more strictly than almost any other to a particular aspect of Nature. Inseparable from the extreme North, the sea-shore, and the seal, he is himself, as it were, a seal come to feet and hands, and preying upon his more primitive kindred. The cetacean of the land, he is localized, like animals,—not universal, like civilized man. He is no inhabitant of the globe as a whole, but is contained within special poles. His needle does not point north and south; it is commanded by special attractions, and points only from shore to sea and from sea to shore in the arctic zone. Nor is this relation to particular phases of Nature superficial merely, a relation of expedient and convenience; it penetrates, saturates, nay, anticipates and moulds him. Whether he has come to this correspondence by original creation or by slow adjustment, he certainly does now correspond in his whole physical and mental structure to the limited and special surroundings of his life,—the seal itself or the eider-duck not more.
He is pre-Adamite, I said,—and name him thus not as a piece of rhetorical smartness, but in gravest characterization.
The first of human epochs is that when the thoughts, imaginations, beliefs of men become to them objects, on which further thought and action are to be adjusted, on which further thought and action may be based. So long as man is merely responding to outward and physical circumstances, so long he is living by bread alone, and has no history. It is when he begins to respond to himself—to create necessities and supplies out of his own spirit,—to build architectures on foundations and out of materials that exist only in virtue of his own spiritual activity,—to live by bread which grows, not out of the soil, but out of the soul,—it is then, then only, that history begins. This one may be permitted to name the Adamite epoch.
The Esquimaux belongs to that period, more primitive, when man is simply responding to outward Nature, to physical necessities. He invents, but does not create; he adjusts himself to circumstances, but not to ideas; he works cunningly upon materials which he has found, but never on material which owes its existence to the productive force of his own spirit.
In going to look upon the man of this race, you sail, not merely over seas, but over ages, epochs, unknown periods of time,—sail beyond antiquity itself, and issue into the obscure existence that antedates history. Arrived there, you may turn your eye to the historical past of man as to a barely possible future. Palestine and Greece, Moses and Homer, as yet are not. Who shall dare to say that they can be? Surely that were but a wild dream! Expel the impossible fancy from your mind! Go, spear a seal, and be a reasonable being!—Never enthusiast had a dream of the future so unspeakably Utopian as actual history becomes, when seen from the Esquimaux, or pre-Adamite, point of view.
Swiss lakes are raked, Belgian caves spaded and hammered, to find relics of old, pre-historical races. Go to Labrador, and you find the object sought above ground. There he is, preserving all the characters of his extinct congeners,—small in stature, low and smooth in cranium, held utterly in the meshes of Nature, skilled only to meet ingeniously the necessities she imposes, and meeting them rudely, as man ever does till the ideal element comes in: for any fine feeling of even physical wants, any delicacy of taste, any high notion of comfort, is due less to the animal than to the spiritual being of man.
A little sophisticated he is now, getting to feel himself obsolete in this strange new world. He begins to borrow, and yet is unable radically to change; outwardly he gains a very little from civilization, and grows inwardly poorer and weaker by all that he gains. His day wanes apace; soon it will be past. He begins to nurse at the breasts of the civilized world; and the foreign aliment can neither sustain his ancient strength nor give him new. Civilization forces upon him a rivalry to which he is unequal; it wrests the seal from his grasp, thins it out of his waters; and he and his correlative die away together.
We reached Hopedale, as intimated above, on the morning of the 30th of July, at least a month later than had been hoped. The reader will see by the map that this place is about half way from the Strait of Belle Isle to Hudson's Strait. We were to go no farther north. This was a great disappointment; for the expectation of all, and the keen desire of most, had been to reach at least Cape Chudleigh, at the opening of Hudson's Strait. Ice and storm had hindered us: they were not the only hindrances.
"The Fates are against us," said one.
"It is true," answered the Elder,—"the Fates are against us: I know of nothing more fatal than imbecility."
However, we should be satisfied; for here we have fairly penetrated the great solitudes of the North. Lower Labrador is visited by near forty thousand fishermen annually, and vessels there are often more frequent than in Boston Bay. But at a point not far from the fifty-fifth parallel of latitude you leave all these behind, and leave equally the white residents of the coast: to fishermen and residents alike the region beyond is as little known as the interior of Australia. There their world comes to an end; there the unknown begins. Knowledge and curiosity alike pause there; toward all beyond their only feeling is one of vague dislike and dread. And so I doubt not it was with the ordinary inhabitant of Western Europe before the discovery of America. The Unknown, breaking in surf on his very shores, did not invite him, but dimly repelled. Thought about it, attraction toward it, would seem to him far-fetched, gratuitous, affected, indicating at best a feather-headed flightiness of mind. The sailors of Columbus probably regarded him much as Sancho Panza does Don Quixote, with an obscure, overpowering awe, and yet with a very definite contempt.
On our return we passed two Yankee fishermen in the Strait of Belle Isle. The nearer hailed.
"How far down [up] have you been?"
"To Hopedale."
"Where?"—in the tone of one who hears distinctly enough, but cannot believe that he hears.
"Hopedale."
"H-o-p-e-d-a-l-e! Where the Devil's that?"
"A hundred and fifty miles beyond Cape Harrison." (Cape Weback on the map.)
Inarticulate gust of astonishment in response.
"Where did he say?" inquires some one in the farther schooner.
"——! He's been to the North Pole!"
To him it was all North Pole beyond Cape Harrison, and he evidently looked upon us much as he might upon the apparition of the Flying Dutchman, or some other spectre-ship.
The supply-ship which yearly visits the Moravian stations on this coast anchored in the harbor of Hopedale ten minutes before us: we had been rapidly gaining upon her in our Flying Yankee for the last twenty miles. Signal-guns had answered each other from ship and shore; the missionaries were soon on board, and men and women were falling into each other's arms with joyful, mournful kisses and tears. The ship returned some missionaries after long absence; it brought also a betrothed lady, next day to be married: there was occasion for joy, even beyond wont on these occasions, when, year by year, the missionary-exiles feel with bounding blood the touch of civilization and fatherland. But now those who came on board brought sad tidings,—for one of their ancient colaborers, closely akin to the new comers, had within a day or two died. Love and death the world over; and also the hope of love without death.
Our eyes have been drawn to them; it is time to have a peep at Hopedale.
I had been so long looking forward to this place, had heard and thought of it so much as an old mission-station, where was a village of Christian Esquimaux, that I fully expected to see a genuine village, with houses, wharves, streets. It would not equal our towns, of course. The people were not cleanly; the houses would be unpainted, and poor in comparison with ours. I had taken assiduous pains to tone down my expectations, and felt sure that I had moderated them liberally,—nay, had been philosophical enough to make disappointment impossible, and open the opposite possibility of a pleasant surprise. I conceived that in this respect I had done the discreet and virtuous thing, and silently moralized, not without self-complacency, upon the folly of carrying through the world expectations which the fact, when seen, could only put out of countenance. "Make your expectations zero," I said with Sartor.
I need not put them below zero. That would be too cold an anticipation to carry even to this latitude. Zero: a poor, shabby village these Christian Esquimaux will have built, even after nigh a century of Moravian tuition. Still it will be a real village, not a distracted jumble of huts, such as we had seen below.
The prospect had been curiously pleasing. True, I desired much to see the unadulterated Esquimaux. But that would come, I had supposed, in the further prosecution of our voyage. Here I could see what they would become under loving instruction,—could gauge their capabilities, and thus answer one of the prime questions I had brought.
A real Hopedale, after all this wild, sterile, hopeless coast! A touch of civilization, to contrast with the impression of that Labradorian rag-tag existence which we had hitherto seen, and which one could not call human without coughing! I like deserts and wilds,—but, if you please, by way of condiment or sauce to civilization, not for a full meal. I have not the heroic Thoreau-digestion, and grow thin after a time on a diet of moss and granite, even when they are served with ice. Lift the curtain, therefore, and let us look forthwith on your Hopedale.
"Hopedale? Why, here it is,—look!"
Well, I have been doing nothing less for the last half-hour. If looking could make a village, I should begin to see one. There, to be sure, is the mission-house, conspicuous enough, quaint and by no means unpleasing. It is a spacious, substantial, two-story edifice, painted in two shades of a peculiar red, and looking for all the world as if a principal house, taken from one of those little German toy-villages which are in vogue about Christmas, had been enormously magnified, and shipped to Labrador. There, too, and in similar colors, is the long chapel, on the centre of whose roof there is a belfry, which looks like two thirds of immense red egg, drawn up at the top into a spindle, and this surmounted by a weathercock,—as if some giant had attempted to blow the egg from beneath, and had only blown out of it this small bird with a stick to stand on! Ah, yes! and there is the pig-sty,—not in keeping with the rest, by any means! It must be that they keep a pig only now and then, and for a short time, and house it any way for that little while. But no, it is not a piggery; it is not a building at all; it is some chance heap of rubbish, which will be removed to-morrow.
The mission-station, then, is here; but the village must be elsewhere. Probably it is on the other side of this point of land on which the house and chapel are situated; we can see that the water sweeps around there. That is the case, no doubt; Hopedale is over there. After dinner we will row around, and have a look at it.
After dinner, however, we decide to go first and pay our respects to the missionaries. They are entitled to the precedence. We long, moreover, to take the loving, self-sacrificing men by the hand; while, aside from their special claims to honor, it will be so pleasant to meet cultivated human beings once more! They are Germans, but their head-quarters are at London; they will speak English; and if their vocabulary prove scanty, we will try to eke it out with bits of German.
We row ashore in our own skiff, land, and—Bless us! what is this now? To the right of the large, neat, comfortable mission-house is a wretched, squalid spatter and hotch-potch of—what in the world to call them? Huts? Hovels? One has a respect for his mother-tongue,—above all, if he have assumed obligations toward it by professing the function of a writer; and any term by which human dwellings are designated must be taken cum grano salis, if applied to these structures. "It cannot be that this is Christian Hopedale!" Softly, my good Sir; it can be, for it is!
Reader, do you ever say, "Whew-w-w"? There were three minutes, on the 30th of July last, during which that piece of interjectional eloquence seemed to your humble servant to embody the whole dictionary!
To get breath, let us turn again to the mission-mansion, which now, under the effect of sudden contrast, seems too magnificent to be real, as if it had been built by enchantment rather than by the labor of man. This is situated half a dozen rods from the shore, at a slight elevation above it, and looks pleasantly up the bay to the southwest. The site has been happily chosen. Here, for a wonder, is an acre or two of land which one may call level,—broader toward the shore, and tapering to a point as it runs back. To the right, as we face it, the ground rises not very brokenly, giving a small space for the hunch of huts, then falls quickly to the sea; while beyond, and toward the ocean, islands twenty miles deep close in and shelter all. To the left go up again the perpetual hills, hills. Everywhere around the bay save here, on island and main, the immitigable gneiss hills rise bold and sudden from the water, now dimly impurpled with lichen, now in nakedness of rock surface, yet beautified in their bare severity by alternating and finely waving stripes of lightest and darkest gray,—as if to show sympathy with the billowy heaving of the sea.
Forward to the mansion. In front a high, strong, neat picket-fence incloses a pretty flower-yard, in which some exotics, tastefully arranged, seem to be flourishing well. We knock; with no manner of haste, and with no seeming of cordial willingness, we are admitted, are shown into a neat room of good size, and entertained by a couple of the brethren.
One of these only, and he alone among the missionaries, it appeared, spoke English. This was an elderly, somewhat cold and forbidding personage, of Secession sympathies. He had just returned from Europe after two years' absence, was fresh from London, and put on the true Exeter-Hall whine in calling ours "a n-dreadful n-war." He did not press the matter, however, nor in any manner violate the rôle of cold courtesy which he had assumed; and it was chiefly by the sudden check and falling of the countenance, when he found us thorough Unionist, that his sympathies were betrayed. Wine and rusks were brought in, both delicious,—the latter seeming like ambrosia, after the dough cannon-balls with which our "head cook at the Tremont House" had regaled us. After a stay of civil brevity we took our leave, and so closed an interview in which we had been treated with irreproachable politeness, but in which the heart was forbidden to have any share.
First the missionaries; now the natives. The squat and squalid huts, stuck down upon the earth without any pretence of raised foundation, and jumbled together, corner to side, back to front, any way, as if some wind had blown them there, did not improve on acquaintance. The walls, five feet high, were built of poles some five inches in diameter; the low roof, made of similar poles, was heavily heaped with earth. What with this deep earth-covering, and with their grovelling toward the earth in such a flat and neighborly fashion, they had a dreadfully under-foot look, and seemed rather dens than houses. Many were ragged and rotten, all inconceivably cheerless. No outhouses, no inclosures, no vegetation, no relief of any kind. About and between them the swardless ground is all trodden into mud. Prick-eared Esquimaux dogs huddle, sneak, bark, and snarl around, with a free fight now and then, in which they all fall upon the one that is getting the worst of it. Before the principal group of huts, in the open space between them and the mansion, a dead dog lies rotting; children lounge listlessly, and babies toddle through the slutch about it. Here and there a full-grown Esquimaux, in greasy and uncouth garb, loiters, doing nothing, looking nothing.
I, for one, was completely overcrowed by the impression of a bare and aimless existence, and could not even wonder. Christian Hopedale! "Leave all hope, ye that enter here!"
At 5 p. m. the chapel-bell rings, and at once the huts swarm. We follow the crowd. They enter the chapel by a door at the end nearest their dens, and seat themselves, the women at the farther, the men at the hither extreme, all facing a raised desk at the middle of one side. Behind them, opposite this pulpit, is an organ. Presently, from a door at the farther end, the missionaries file in, some twelve in number; one enters the pulpit, the others take seats on either side of him, facing the audience, and at a dignified remove. The conductor of the service now rises, makes an address in Esquimaux a minute and a half long, then gives out a hymn,—the hymns numbered in German, as numbers, to any extent, are wanting to the Esquimaux language. All the congregation join in a solid old German tune, keeping good time, and making, on the whole, better congregational music than I ever heard elsewhere,—unless a Baptist conventicle in London, Bloomsbury Chapel, furnish the exception. After this another, then another; at length, when half a dozen or more have been sung, missionaries and congregation rise, the latter stand in mute and motionless respect, the missionaries file out with dignity at their door; and when the last has disappeared, the others begin quietly to disperse.
This form of worship is practised at the hour named above on each weekday, and the natives attend with noticeable promptitude. There are no prayers, and the preliminary address in this case was exceptional.
Sunday, July 31.—I had inquired at what hour the worship would begin this day, and, with some hesitancy, had been answered, "At half past nine." But the Colonel also had asked, and his interlocutor, after consulting a card, said, "At ten o'clock." At ten we went ashore. Finding the chapel-door still locked, I seated myself on a rock in front of the mission-house, to wait. The sun was warm (the first warm day for a month); the mosquitoes swarmed in myriads; I sat there long, wearily beating them off. Faces peeped out at me from the windows, then withdrew. Presently Bradford joined me, and began also to fight mosquitoes. More faces at the windows; but when I looked towards them, thinking to discover some token of hospitable invitation, they quickly disappeared. After half an hour, the master of the supply-ship came up, and entered into conversation; in a minute one of the brethren appeared at the door, and invited him to enter, but without noticing Bradford and myself. I took my skiff and rowed to the schooner. Fifteen minutes later the chapel-bell rang.
I confess to some spleen that day against the missionaries. When I expressed it, Captain French, the pilot, an old, prudent, pious man, "broke out."
"Them are traders," said he. "I don't call 'em missionaries; I call 'em traders. They live in luxury; the natives work for 'em, and get for pay just what they choose to give 'em. They fleece the Esquimaux; they take off of 'em all but the skin. They are just traders!"
My spleen did not last. There was some cause of coldness,—I know not what. The missionaries afterwards became cordial, visited the schooner, and exchanged presents with us. I believe them good men. If their relation to the natives assume in some degree a pecuniary aspect, it is due to the necessity of supporting the mission by the profits of traffic. If they preserve a stately distance toward the Esquimaux, it is to retain influence over them. If they allow the native mind to confound somewhat the worship of God with the worship of its teachers, it is that the native mind cannot get beyond personal relations, and must worship something tangible. That they are not at all entangled in the routine and material necessities of their position I do not assert; that they do not carry in it something of noble and self-forgetful duty nothing I have seen will persuade me.
August 1.—We go to push our explorations among the Esquimaux, and invite the reader to make one of the party. Enter a hut. The door is five feet high,—that is, the height of the wall. Stoop a little,—ah, there goes a hat to the ground, and a hand to a hurt pate! One must move carefully in these regions, which one hardly knows whether to call sub- or supra-terranean.
This door opens into a sort of porch occupying one end of the den; the floor, earth. Three or four large, dirty dogs lie dozing here, and start up with an aspect of indescribable, half-crouching, mean malignity, as we enter; but a sharp word, with perhaps some menace of stick or cane, sends the cowardly brutes sneaking away. In a corner is a circle of stones, on which cooking is done; and another day we may find the family here picking their food out of a pot, and serving themselves to it, with the fingers. Save this primitive fireplace, and perhaps a kettle for the dogs to lick clean, this porch is bare.
From this we crouch into the living-room through a door two and a half or three feet high, and find ourselves in an apartment twelve feet square, and lighted by a small, square skin window in the roof. The only noticeable furniture consists of two board beds, with skins for bed-clothes. The women sit on these beds, sewing upon seal-skin boots. They receive us with their characteristic fat and phlegmatic good-nature, a pleasant smile on their chubby cheeks and in their dark, dull eyes,—making room for us on the bedside. Presently others come in, mildly curious to see the strangers,—all with the same aspect of unthinking, good-tempered, insensitive, animal content. The head is low and smooth; the cheekbones high, but less so than those of American Indians; the jowl so broad and heavy as sometimes to give the ensemble of head and face the outline of a cone truncated and rounded off above. In the females, however, the cheek is so extremely plump as perfectly to pad these broad jaws, giving, instead of the prize-fighter physiognomy, an aspect of smooth, gentle heaviness. Even without this fleshy cheek, which is not noticeable, and is sometimes noticeably wanting, in the men, there is the same look of heavy, well-tempered lameness. The girls have a rich blood color in their swarthy cheeks, and some of them are really pretty, though always in a lumpish, domestic-animal style. The hands and feet are singularly small; the fingers short, but nicely tapered. Take hold of the hand, and you are struck with its cetacean feel. It is not flabby, but has a peculiar blubber-like, elastic compressibility, and seems not quite of human warmth.
See them in their houses, and you see the horizon of their life. In these fat faces, with their thoughtless content, in this pent-up, greasy, wooden den, the whole is told. The air is close and fetid with animal exhalations. The entrails and part of the flesh of a seal, which lie on the floor in a corner,—to furnish a dinner,—do not make the atmosphere nor the aspect more agreeable. Yet you see that to them this is comfort, this is completeness of existence. If they are hungry, they seek food. Food obtained, they return to eat and be comfortable until they are again hungry. Their life has, on this earth at least, no farther outlook. It sallies, it returns, but here is the fruition; for is not the seal-flesh dinner there, nicely and neatly bestowed on the floor? Are they not warm? (The den is swelteringly hot.) Are they not fed? What would one have more?
Yes, somewhat more, namely, tobacco,—and also second-hand clothes, with which to be fine in church. For these they will barter seal-skins, dog-skins, seal-skin boots, a casual bear-skin, bird-spears, walrus-spears, anything they have to vend,—concealing their traffic a little from the missionaries. Colored glass beads were also in request among the women. Ph—— had brought some large, well-made pocket-knives, which, being useful, he supposed would be desired. Not at all; they were fumbled indifferently, then invariably declined. But a plug of tobacco,—ah, that now is something!
The men wear tight seal-skin trousers and boots, with an upper garment of the same material, made like a Guernsey frock. In winter a hood is added, but in summer they all go bareheaded,—the stiff, black hair chopped squarely off across the low forehead, but longer behind. The costume of the females is more peculiar,—seal-skin boots, seal-skin trousers, which just spring over the hips, and are there met by a body-garment of seal-skin more lightly colored. Over this goes an astonishing article of apparel somewhat resembling the dress-coat in which unhappy civilization sometimes compels itself to masquerade, but—truth stranger than fiction!—considerably more ugly. A long tail hangs down to the very heels; a much shorter peak comes down in front; at the sides it is scooped out below, showing a small portion of the light-colored body-garment, which irresistibly suggests a very dirty article of lady-linen whereon the eyes of civilized decorum forbear to look, while an adventurous imagination associates it only with snowy whiteness. The whole is surmounted by an enormous peaked hood, in which now and then one sees a baby carried.
This elegant garment was evidently copied from the skin of an animal,—so Ph—— acutely suggested. The high peak of the hood represents the ears; the arms stand for the fore legs; the downward peak in front for the hind legs sewed together; the rear dangler represents the tail. I make no doubt that our dress-coat has the same origin, though the primal conception has been more modified. It is a bear-skin plus Paris.
Is the reader sure of his ribs and waistcoat-buttons? If so, he may venture to look upon an Esquimaux woman walking,—which I take to be the most ludicrous spectacle in the world. Conceive of this short, squat, chunky, lumpish figure in the costume described,—grease ad libitum being added. The form is so plump and heavy as very much to project the rear dangler at the point where it leaves the body, while below it falls in, and goes with a continual muddy slap, slap, against the heels. The effect of this, especially in the profile view, is wickedly laughable, but the gait makes it more so. The walk is singularly slow, unelastic, loggy, and is characterized at each step by an indescribable, sudden sag or slump at the hip. As she thus slowly and heavily churns herself along, the nether slap emphasizes each step, as it were, with an exclamation-point; while, as the foot advances, the shoulder and the whole body on the same side turn and sag forward, the opposite shoulder and side dragging back,—as if there were a perpetual debate between the two sides whether to proceed or not. It was so laughable that it made one sad; for this, too, was a human being. The gait of the men, on the contrary, is free and not ungraceful.
August 3.—An Esquimaux wedding! In the chapel,—Moravian ceremony,—so far not noticeable. Costume same as above, only of white cloth heavily embroidered with red. Demeanor perfect. Bride obliged to sit down midway in the ceremony, overpowered with emotion. She did so with a simple, quiet dignity, that would not have misbecome a duchess.
When the ceremony was ended, the married pair retired into the mission-house, and half an hour later I saw them going home. This was the curious part of the affair. The husband walked before, taking care not to look behind, doing the indifferent and unconscious with great assiduity, and evidently making it a matter of serious etiquette not to know that any one followed. Four rods behind comes the wife, doing the unconscious with equal industry. She is not following this man here in front,—bless us, no, indeed!—but is simply walking out, or going to see a neighbor, this nice afternoon, and does not observe that any one precedes her. Following that man? Pray, where were you reared, that you are capable of so discourteous a supposition? It gave me a malicious pleasure to see that the pre-Adamite man, as well as the rest of us, imposes upon himself at times these difficult duties, toting about that foolish face, so laboriously vacant of precisely that with which it is brimming full.
To adjust himself to outward Nature,—that, we said, is the sole task of the primitive man. The grand success of the Esquimaux in this direction is the kayak. This is his victory and his school. It is a seal-skin Oxford or Cambridge, wherein he takes his degree as master of the primeval arts. Here he acquires not only physical strength and quickness, but self-possession also, mental agility, the instant use of his wits,—here becomes, in fine, a cultivated man.
It is no trifling matter. Years upon years must be devoted to these studies. Oxford and Cambridge do not task one more, nor exhibit more degrees of success. Some fail, and never graduate; some become illustrious for kayak-erudition.
This culture has also the merit of entire seriousness and sincerity. Life and death, not merely a name in the newspapers, are in it. Of all vehicles, on land or sea, to which man intrusts himself, the kayak is safest and unsafest. It is a very hair-bridge of Mohammed: security or destruction is in the finest poise of a moving body, the turn of a hand, the thought of a moment. Every time that the Esquimaux spears a seal at sea, he pledges his life upon his skill. With a touch, with a moment's loss of balance, the tipsy craft may go over; over, the oar, with which it is to be restored, may get entangled, may escape from the hand, may—what not? For all what-nots the kayaker must preserve instant preparation; and with his own life on the tip of his fingers, he must make its preservation an incidental matter. He is there, not to save his life, but to capture a seal, worth a few dollars! It is his routine work. Different from getting up a leading article, making a plea in court, or writing Greek iambics for a bishopric!
Probably there is no race of men on earth whose ordinary avocations present so constantly the alternative of rarest skill on the one hand, or instant destruction on the other. And for these avocations one is fitted only by a scholarship, which it requires prolonged schooling, the most patient industry, and the most delicate consent of mind and body to attain. If among us the highest university-education were necessary, in order that one might live, marry, and become a householder, we should but parallel in our degree the scheme of their life.
Measured by post-Adamite standards, the life of the Esquimaux is a sorry affair; measured by his own standards, it is a piece of perfection. To see the virtue of his existence, you must, as it were, look at him with the eyes of a wolf or fox,—must look up from that low level, and discern, so far above, this skilled and wondrous creature, who by ingenuity and self-schooling has converted his helplessness into power, and made himself the plume and crown of the physical world.
In the kayak the Esquimaux attains to beauty. As he rows, the extremes of the two-bladed oar revolve, describing rhythmic circles; the body holds itself in airy poise, and the light boat skims away with a look of life. The speed is greater than our swiftest boats attain, and the motion graceful as that of a flying bird. Kayak and rower become to the eye one creature; and the civilized spectator must be stronger than I in his own conceit not to feel a little humble as he looks on.
We had racing one calm evening. Three kayaks competed: the prize—O Civilization!—was a plug of tobacco. How the muscles swelled! How the airy things flew! "Hi! Hi!" jockey the lookers-on: they fly swifter still. Up goes another plug,—another!—another!—and the kayaks half leap from the water. It was sad withal.
The racing over, there was a new feat. One of the kayakers placed himself in his little craft directly across the course; another stationed himself at a distance, and then, pushing his kayak forward at his utmost speed, drove it directly over the other! The high sloping bow rose above the middle of the stationary kayak on which it impinged, and, shooting up quite out of water, the boat skimmed over.
The Esquimaux is an honest creature. I had engaged a woman to make me a pair of fur boots, leaving my name on a slip of paper. L——, next day, roaming among the huts, saw her hanging them out to dry. Enamored of them, and ignorant of our bargain, he sought to purchase them; but at the first token of his desire, the woman rushed into the hut, and brought forth the slip of paper, as a sufficient answer to all question on that matter. L—— having told me of the incident, and informed me that he had elsewhere bargained for a similar pair, I was wicked enough to experiment upon this fidelity, desirous of learning what I could. Taking, therefore, some clothes, which I knew would be desired, and among them a white silk handkerchief bordered with blue, which had been purchased at Port Mulgrave, all together far exceeding in value the stipulated price, I sought the hut, and began admiring the said boots, now nearly finished. Instantly came forth the inevitable slip with L——'s name upon it. Making no sign, I proceeded to unroll my package. The good creature was intensely taken with its contents, and gloated over them with childish delight. But though she rummaged every corner to find somewhat to exchange with me for them, it evidently did not even enter her thoughts to offer me the boots. I took them up and admired them again; she immediately laid her hand on the slip of paper. So I gave her the prettiest thing I had, and left with a cordial okshni (good-bye).
This honesty is attributed to missionary instruction, and with the more color as the untaught race is noted for stealing from Europeans everything they can lay hands on. It is only, however, from foreigners that they were ever accustomed to steal. Toward each other they have ever been among the most honest of human beings. Civilization and the seal they regarded as alike lawful prey. The missionaries have not implanted in them a new disposition, but only extended the scope of an old and marked characteristic.
At the same time their sense of pecuniary obligation would seem not to extend over long periods. Of the missionaries in winter they buy supplies on credit, but show little remembrance of the debt when summer comes. All must be immediate with them; neither their thought nor their moral sense can carry far; they are equally improvident for the future and forgetful of the past. The mere Nature-man acts only as Nature and her necessities press upon him; thought and memory are with him the offspring of sensation; his brain is but the feminine spouse of his stomach and blood,—receptive and respondent, rather than virile and original.
Partly, however, this seeming forgetfulness is susceptible of a different explanation. They evidently feel that the mission-house owes them a living. They make gardens, go to church and save their souls, for the missionaries; it is but fair that they should be fed at a pinch in return.
This remark may seem a sneer. Not so; my word for it. I went to Hopedale to study this race, with no wish but to find in them capabilities of spiritual growth, and with no resolve but to see the fact, whatever it should be, not with wishes, but with eyes. And, pointedly against my desire, I saw this,—that the religion of the Esquimaux is, nine parts in ten at least, a matter of personal relation between him and the missionaries. He goes to church as the dog follows his master,—expecting a bone and hoping for a pat in return. He comes promptly at a whistle (the chapel-bell); his docility and decorum are unimpeachable; he does what is expected of him with a pleased wag of the tail; but it is still, it is always, the dog and his master.
The pre-Adamite man is not distinctively religious; for religion implies ideas, in the blood at least, if not in the brain, as imagination, if not as thought; and ideas are to him wanting, are impossible. His whole being is summed and concluded in a relationship to the external, the tangible, to things or persons; and his relation to persons goes beyond animal instinct and the sense of physical want only upon the condition that it shall cling inseparably to them. The spiritual instincts of humanity are in him also, but obscure, utterly obscure, not having attained to a circulation in the blood, much less to intellectual liberation. Obscure they are, fixed, in the bone, locked up in phosphate of lime. Ideas touch them only as ideas lose their own shape and hide themselves under physical forms.
Will he outgrow himself? Will he become post-Adamite, a man to whom ideas are realities? I desire to say yes, and cannot. Again and again, in chapel and elsewhere, I stood before a group, and questioned, questioned their faces, to find there some prophecy of future growth. And again and again these faces, with their heavy content, with their dog-docility, with their expression of utter limitation, against which nothing in them struggled, said to me,—"Your quest is vain; we are once and forever Esquimaux." Had they been happy, had they been unhappy, I had hoped for them. They were neither: they were contented. A half-animal, African exuberance, token of a spirit obscure indeed, but rich and effervescent, would open for them a future. One sign of dim inward struggle and pain, as if the spirit resented his imprisonment, would do the same. Both were wanting. They ruminate; life is the cud they chew.
The Esquimaux are celebrated as gluttons. This, however, is but one half the fact. They can eat, they can also fast, indefinitely. For a week they gorge themselves without exercise, and have no indigestion; for a week, exercising vigorously, they live on air, frozen air, too, and experience no exhaustion. Last winter half a dozen appeared at Square-Island Harbor, sent out their trained dogs, drove in a herd of deer, and killed thirteen. They immediately encamped, gathered fuel, made fires, began to cook and eat,—ate themselves asleep; then waked to cook, eat, and sleep again, until the thirteenth deer had vanished. Thereupon they decamped, to travel probably hundreds of miles, and endure days on days of severe labor, before tasting, or more than tasting, food again.
The same explanation serves. These physical capabilities, not to be attained by the post-Adamite man, belong to the primitive races, as to hawks, gulls, and beasts of prey. The stomach of the Esquimaux is his cellar, as that of the camel is a cistern, wherein he lays up stores.
August 4.—This day we sailed away from Hopedale, heading homeward,—leaving behind a race of men who were, to me a problem to be solved, if possible. All my impressions of them are summed in the epithet, often repeated, pre-Adamite. In applying, this, I affirm nothing respecting their physical origin. All that is to me an open question, to be closed when I have more light than now. It may be, that, as Mr. Agassiz maintains, they were created originally just as they are. For this hypothesis much may be said, and it may be freely confessed that in observing them I felt myself pressed somewhat toward the acceptance of it as a definite conclusion. It may be that they have become what they are by slow modification of a type common to all races,—that, with another parentage, they have been made by adoption children of the icy North, whose breath has chilled in their souls the deeper powers of man's being. This it will be impossible for me to deny until I have investigated more deeply the influence of physical Nature upon man, and learned more precisely to what degree the traditions of a people, constituting at length a definite social atmosphere, may come to penetrate and shape their individual being. I do not pronounce; I wait and keep the eyes open. Doubtless they are God's children; and knowing this, one need not be fretfully impatient, even though vigilantly earnest, to know the rest.
In naming them pre-Adamite I mean two things.
First, that they have stopped short of ideas, that is, of the point where human history begins. They belong, not to spiritual or human, but to outward and physical Nature. There they are a great success.
Secondly, in this condition of mere response to physical Nature, their whole being has become shapen, determined, fixed. They have no future. Civilization affects them, but only by mechanical modification, not by vital refreshment and renewal. The more they are instructed, the weaker they become.
They change, and are unchangeable.
Unchangeable: if they assume in any degree the ideas and habits of civilization, it is only as their women sometimes put on calico gowns over their seal-skin trousers. The modification is not even skin-deep. It is a curious illustration of this immobility, that no persuasion, no authority, can make them fishermen. Inseparable from the sea-shore, the Esquimaux will not catch a fish, if he can catch a dinner otherwise. The missionaries, both as matter of paternal care and as a means of increasing their own traffic,—by which the station is chiefly sustained,—have done their utmost to make the natives bring in fish for sale, and have failed. These people are first sealers, then hunters; some attraction in the blood draws them to these occupations; and at last it is an attraction in the blood which they obey.
Yet on the outermost surface of their existence they change, and die. At Hopedale, out of a population of some two hundred, twenty-four died in the month of March last! At Nain, where the number of inhabitants is about the same, twenty-one died in the same month; at Okkak, also twenty-one. More than decimated in a month!
The long winter suffocation in their wooden dens, which lack the ventilation of the igloe that their untaught wit had devised, has doubtless much to do with this mortality. But one feels that there is somewhat deeper in the case. One feels that the hands of the great horologe of time have hunted around the dial, till they have found the hour of doom for this primeval race. Now at length the tolling bell says to them, "No more! on the earth no more!"
Farewell, geological man, chef-d'[oe]uvre, it may be, of some earlier epoch, but in this a grotesque, grown-up baby, never to become adult! As you are, and as in this world you must be, I have seen you; but in my heart is a hope for you which is greater than my thought,—a hope which, though deep and sure, does not define itself to the understanding, and must remain unspoken. There is a Heart to which you, too, are dear; and its throbs are pulsations of Destiny.: