In Cardinal Bembo’s History of Venice, I find a narrative to the effect that in 1508 a French ship captured near the English coast a small boat, with seven persons of a strange and foreign appearance. The description suits extremely well with Esquimaux, (homines erant septem mediocri statura, colore subobscuro, lato et patente vultu, cicatriceque una violacea signato.) No one understood their language. Their clothing was composed of fish skins sewn together. On their heads they wore “coronam e culmo pictam, septem quasi auriculis intextam.” They ate raw flesh, and drank blood as we would wine. Six of the men died during the passage of the vessel, on board which they had been taken; but the seventh, a youth, was presented to the king of France, who was then at Orleans. (Bembo, Historia Venetæ, ed. 1718, lib. vii. p. 257).
The appearance of men called Indians on the western coasts of Germany, under the Othos, and under Frederic Barbarossa, in the 10th and 12th centuries, and even, as is related by Cornelius Nepos, (ed. Van Staveren, cur. Bardili, T. ii., 1820, p. 356), Pomponius Mela, (lib. iii. cap. 5, § 8), and Pliny, (Hist. Nat., T. ii. p. 67), when Quintus Metellus Celer was Pro-consul in Gaul, may be explained by similar effects of currents and north-west winds of long continuance. A king of the Boii, others say of the Suevi, gave the shipwrecked dark-coloured men to Metellus Celer. Gomara, in his Historia Gen. de las Indias, (Saragossa, 1553, fol. vii.), refers to this account, and considers the Indians spoken of in it to have been natives of Labrador. “Si ya no fuesen de Tierra del Labrador, y los tuviesen, los Romanos por Indianos engañados en el color.” The appearance of Esquimaux on the northern coasts of Europe may be believed to have occurred more often in earlier times, because we know, from the researches of Rask and Finn Magnusen, that in the 11th and 12th centuries this race extended in considerable numbers, under the name of the Skrälinges of Labrador, even as far south as the “good Vinland;” i. e., the coast of Massachusets and Connecticut. (Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 270; English ed. p. 234; Examen critique de l’Hist. de la Géographie, T. ii. p. 247–278.)
As the winter cold of the most northern parts of Scandinavia is softened by the influence of the Gulf Stream, by which American tropical fruits (cocoa nuts, and seeds of the Mimosa scandens and the Anacardium occidentale) are cast upon the shore beyond the 62nd degree of latitude, so does Iceland also occasionally enjoy the beneficial influence of the extension of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream far to the northward. The coasts of Iceland as well as those of the Färoe Islands, receive a great deal of drift-wood, which, coming formerly in greater abundance, was cut into beams and planks and used for building timber. Fruits of tropical plants, collected on the coast of Iceland, between Raufarhavn and Vapnafiord, testify the movement of the waters from the southward. (Sartorius von Waltershausen, physisch-geographische Skizze von Island, 1847, S. 22–35.)
[25] p. 12.—“Neither Lecideas nor other Lichens.”
In northern countries, the earth, if left bare, soon becomes covered with Bæomyces roseus, Cenomyce rangiferinus, Lecidea muscorum, L. icmadophila, and similar Cryptogameæ, which prepare the way for the growth of grasses and herbaceous plants. In the tropics, where mosses and lichens only abound in shady places, some species of succulent plants take their place.
[26] p. 13.—“The care of animals yielding milk, ... ... The ruins of the Aztec fortress.”
The two kinds of cattle alluded to, and subsequently spoken of,—the Bos americanus and Bos moschatus,—are peculiar to the American continent. But the natives—
Queis neque mos, neque cultus erat, nec jungere tauros.
Virgil, Æn. i. 316.
—drink the fresh blood, not the milk, of these animals. Single exceptions have indeed been found, but only among tribes who at the same time cultivated maize. I have before remarked, (p. [54]), that Gomara speaks of a people in the north-west of Mexico who possessed herds of tame bisons, and derived from these animals clothing, meat, and drink. The drink may have been the blood, (Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, vol. iii. p. 416) for, as I have more than once remarked, the dislike to milk, or at least the absence of its use, appears, before the arrival of Europeans, to have been, generally speaking, a feature common to all the natives of the New Continent,—and one which they possess in common with the inhabitants of China and Cochin China, who yet were near neighbours to true pastoral nations. The herds of tame lamas, found in the highlands of Quito, Peru, and Chili, belonged to a settled population, who cultivated the ground and did not follow a nomadic life. Pedro de Cieça de Leon, (Chronica del Peru, Sevilla, 1553, cap. 110, p. 264) seems to imply, though certainly as a rare and exceptional case, that in the Peruvian mountain plateau of Collao lamas were used for drawing the plough. (Compare Gay, Zoologia de Chile, Mamiferos, 1847, p. 154.) The usual custom in Peru was to plough with men only. (See the Inca Garcilaso’s Commentarios reales, P. i. lib. v. cap. 2, p. 133; and Prescott, Hist. of the Conquest of Peru, 1847, vol. i. p. 136.) Mr. Barton has made it appear probable that, among some of the tribes of Western Canada, the buffalo was from early times made an object of care for the sake of its flesh and skin. (Fragments of the Nat. Hist. of Pennsylvania, P. i. p. 4.) In Peru and Quito the lama is now nowhere found in a state of original wildness. I was told by the natives that the lamas on the western declivity of the Chimborazo had become wild when the ancient residence of the rulers of Quito “Lican” was laid in ashes. In the same manner the oxen in the Ceja de la Montaña, in Middle Peru, have become perfectly wild: they are a small and daring race, and often attack the Indians. The natives call them Vacas del Monte, or Vacas cimarronas. (Tschudi, Fauna Peruana, S. 256.) Cuvier’s opinion, that the lama had descended from the still wild Guanaco, has been unfortunately still further disseminated by the meritorious traveller Meyen, (Reise um die Erde, Th. iii. S. 64), but has been completely refuted by von Tschudi.