The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

In the Friendly Isles Captain Cook, in 1773, says ‘the canoes are built of several pieces sewed together with bandage in so neat a manner that on the outside it is difficult to see the joints. All the fastenings are on the inside, and pass through kants or ridges, which are wrought on the edges and ends of the several boards which compose the vessel.’ At Otaheite he speaks of the same process, and says that the chief parts are formed separately without either saw, plane, or other tool. La Perouse gives an illustration of an outrigger canoe from Easter Island, the sides of which are formed of drift-wood sewn together in this manner. At Wytoohee, one of the Paumotu, or Low Archipelago, Wilkes, in 1838, says that the canoes are formed of strips of cocoa-nut tree sewed together. Speaking of those of Samoa, he describes the process more fully. ‘The planks are fastened together with sennit; the pieces are of no regular size or shape. On the inside edge of each plank is a ledge or projection, which serves to attach the sennit, and connect and bind it closely to the adjoining one. It is surprising,’ he says, ‘to see the labour bestowed on uniting so many small pieces together, when large and good planks might be obtained. Before the pieces are joined, the gum from the husk of the bread-fruit tree is used to cement them close, and prevent leakage. These canoes retain their form much more truly than one would have imagined; I saw few whose original model had been impaired by service. On the outside the pieces are so closely fitted as frequently to require close examination before the seams can be detected. The perfection of workmanship is astonishing to those who see the tools with which it is effected. They consist now of nothing more than a piece of iron tied to a stick, and used as an adze; this, with a gimlet, is all they have, and before they obtained their iron tools, they used adzes made of hard stone and fish-bone.’ The construction of the Fiji canoe, called drua, is described by Williams in great detail. A keel or bottom board is laid in two or three pieces, carefully scarfed together. From this the sides are built up, without ribs, in a number of pieces varying from three to twenty feet. The edges of these pieces are fastened by ledges, tied together in the manner already described. A white pitch from the bread-fruit tree, prepared with an extract from the coco-nut kernel, is spread uniformly on both edges, and a fine strip of masi laid between. The binding of sennit with which the boards, or vanos, as they are called, are stitched together is made tighter by small wooden wedges inserted between the binding and the wood, in opposite directions. The ribs seen in the interior of these canoes are not used to bring the planks into shape, but are the last things inserted, and are for uniting the deck more firmly with the body of the canoe. The carpenters in Fiji constitute a distinct class, and have chiefs of their own. The Tongan canoes were inferior to those of Fiji in Captain Cook’s time, but they have since adopted Fiji patterns. The Tongans are better sailors than the Fijians. Wilkes describes a similar method of building vessels in the Kingsmill Islands, but with varieties in the details of construction. ‘Each canoe has six or eight timbers in its construction; they are well modelled, built in frames, and have much sheer. The boards are cut from the coco-nut tree, from a few inches to six or eight feet long, and vary from five to seven inches in width. These are arranged as the planking of a vessel, and very neatly put together, being sewed with sennit. For the purpose of making them water-tight they use a slip of pandanus leaf, inserted as our coopers do in plugging a cask. They have evinced much ingenuity,’ he says, ‘in attaching the uprights to the flat timbers.’ It is difficult, without the aid of drawings, to understand exactly the peculiarities of this variety of construction, but he says they are secured so as to have all the motion of a double joint, which gives them ease, and comparative security in a seaway.

Turning now to the Malay Archipelago, Wallace speaks of a Malay prahau in which he sailed from Macassar to New Guinea, a distance of 1,000 miles, and says that similar but smaller vessels had not a single nail in them. The largest of these, he says, are from Macassar, and the Bugi countries of the Celebes and Boutong. Smaller ones sail from Ternate, Pidore, East Ceram, and Garam. The majority of these, he says, have stitched planks. No. 1268 of my collection is a model of a vessel employed in those seas. Wallace says that the inhabitants of Ke Island, west of New Guinea, are the best boat-builders in the archipelago, and several villages are constantly employed at the work. The planks here, as in the Polynesian Islands, are all cut out of the solid wood, with a series of projecting ledges on their edges in the inside. But here we find an advance upon the Polynesian system, for the ledges of the planks are pegged to each other with wooden pegs. The planks, however, are still fastened to the ribs by means of rattans. The principles of construction are the same as in those of the Polynesian Islands, and the main support of the vessel still consists in the planks and their ledges, the ribs being a subsequent addition; for he says that after the first year the rattan-tied ribs are generally taken out and replaced by new ones, fitted to the planks and nailed, and the vessel then becomes equal to those of the best European workmanship. This constitutes a remarkable example of the persistency with which ancient customs are retained, when we find each vessel systematically constructed, in the first instance, upon the old system, and the improvement introduced in after years. I wonder whether any parallel to this could be found in a British arsenal. The psychical aspect of the proceeding seems not altogether un-English.

Extending our researches northward, we find that Dampier, in 1686, mentions, in the Bashee Islands, the use of vessels in which the planks are fastened with wooden pins. On the Menan, in Siam, Turpin, in 1771, speaks of long, narrow boats, in the construction of which neither nails nor iron are employed, the parts being fastened together with roots and twigs which withstand the destructive action of the water. They have the precaution, he says, to insert between the planks a light, porous wood, which swells by being wet, and prevents the water from penetrating into the vessel. When they have not this wood, they rub the chinks, by which the water enters, with clay. In the India Museum there is a model of a very early form of vessel from Burmah, described as a trading vessel. The bottom is dug out, and the sides formed of planks laced together. A large stone is employed for an anchor. Here we see that an inferior description of craft has survived, upon the rivers, in the midst of a higher civilization which has produced a superior class of vessel upon the seas.

Turning westward, we have the surf-boat of Madras, called massoola, which, on account of its elasticity, is still used on the seashore. Its parts are stitched together in the manner represented in the model, No. 1267 of my collection. On the Malabar coast the ships of the Pardesy, who consisted of Arabs, Persians, and others who have settled in the kingdom of Malabar, are described by Barbosa in 1514. They build ships, he says, of 200 tons, which have keels like the Portuguese, but have no nails. They sew their planks with neat cords, very well pitched, and the timber very good. Ten or twelve of these ships, laden with goods, sail every year in February for the Red Sea, some for Aden and some for Jeddah, the port of Mecca, where they sell their merchandise to others, who transmit it to Cairo, and thence to Alexandria. The ships return to Calicut between August and October of the same year. The earliest description we have of these vessels in this part of the world, in historic times, is in the account of the travels of two Mahomedans in the ninth century. In these travels it is related that there were people in the Gulf of Oman who cross over to the islands that produce coco-nuts, taking with them their tools, and make ships out of it. With the bark they make the cordage to sew the planks together, and of the leaves they make sails; and having thus completed the vessel, they load it with coco-nuts and set sail. Marco Polo, at the commencement of the fourteenth century, confirms this, and says, speaking of the ships at Ormuz, in the Persian Gulf, that they do not use nails, but wooden pins, and fasten them with threads made of the Indian nut. These threads endure the force of the water, and are not easily corrupted thereby. These ships have one mast, one sail, and one beam, and are covered with but one deck. They are not caulked with pitch, but with the oil and fat of fishes. When they cross to India they lose many ships, because the sea is very tempestuous, and they are not strengthened with iron. In the Red Sea, Father Lobo, in 1622, describes the vessels called gelves, which, he says, are made almost entirely of the coco-nut tree. The trunk is sawn into planks, the planks are sewn together with thread which is spun from the bark, and the sails are made of the leaves stitched together. They are more convenient, he says, than other vessels, because they will not split if thrown upon banks or against rocks.

We have now arrived in the region which is usually regarded as the cradle of Western civilization, certainly the land in which Western culture first began to put forth its strong shoots; and we must expect to find that the art of shipbuilding advanced in the same ratio as other trades. But, unlike the Phoenicians, the Egyptians confined their navigation chiefly to the Nile, and had an abhorrence of Typhon, as they termed the sea, because it swallowed up the great river, which, being the chief source of their prosperity, they regarded as a god.

Here it may be desirable to digress for one moment from the chain of continuity which we have been following, in order to say a few words about the most primitive form of vessel used on the Nile, viz. that mentioned by Isaiah (xviii. 2) as being of Ethiopian origin, the vessel of bulrushes to which the mother of Moses entrusted her infant progeny. What the coco-nut tree was to the navigators on the eastern seas, the papyrus was to the Egyptians, and from it every part of the vessel—rope, planks, masts, and sails—was constructed. Adverting to the earliest and simplest of these papyrus vessels, the common use for a bundle of faggots, for such it was, is not, perhaps, one of those coincidences which, viewed by the light of modern culture, we should select as evidence of connexion between distant lands. And yet there are peculiarities of form which make the bulrush float of the Egyptians worthy of comparison with those used in the rivers of Australia.

The Australian float, as represented by a model in the British Museum, consisted of a bundle of bark and rushes, pointed and elevated at the ends, and bound round with girdles of the same material. The only vessel, according to Mr. Calder, used in Tasmania, on the west coast, is thus described by him in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, iii. 22. ‘It was of considerable size, and something like a whale-boat, that is, sharp-sterned, but a solid structure, and the natives, in their aquatic adventures, sat on the top of it. It was generally made by the buoyant and soft, velvety bark of the swamp tea-tree (Melaluca sp.), and consisted of a multitude of small strips bound together.’ Professor Wilson says that the Californian canoe consists of a mere rude float, made of rushes, ‘in the form of a lashed-up hammock.’ A woodcut in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s Ancient Egypt, No. 399 of his work, represents three persons making one of these papyrus floats. It is the baris, or Memphite bark, bound together with papyrus, spoken of by Lucan, and it is of precisely similar form to those above described, elevated and pointed at the ends, and the men are in the act of binding it round with girdles. This is the kind of boat in which Plutarch describes Isis going in search of the body of Osiris through the fenny country; a bark made of papyrus. Pliny attributes the origin of shipbuilding to these vessels (vii. 56); and speaks (vi. 22) of their crossing the sea and visiting the Island of Taprobane (Ceylon, according to Sir G. Wilkinson); but it seems probable that he must refer to a more advanced form of vessel than the mere bulrush float.

The racial connexion between the Australians and the Egyptians, first put forward by Professor Huxley, has hardly met with general acceptance as yet; but, startling as it at first sight appeared, the more we look into the evidence bearing upon it, the less improbable, to say the least, it becomes, when viewed by the light of comparative culture. I have already shown, in another place,[222] how closely some of the Australian weapons correspond to some of those still used on the Upper Nile, and the remarkable resemblance here pointed out in a class of vessels which might well have been used in passing short distances from island to island of the now submerged fragments of land that are supposed to have formerly existed in parts of the southern hemisphere, is, at least, worthy of attention amongst other evidence of the same kind that may be collected, although I fully admit that it is not of a character to stand alone. I will not exceed my province by attempting to defend the theory of the Australioid origin of the Egyptians on physical grounds, preferring to leave the defence of that theory in the hands of its author, who is so well able to support his own views; but I may take this opportunity of commenting on some remarks made by Professor Owen in his valuable paper, published in the last number of our Journal, on the psychical evidence of connexion between them and the black races of the southern hemisphere. Adverting to the fresco painting, in the British Museum, of the ancient Egyptian fowler, who holds in his hand a stick, which he is in the act of throwing at a flock of birds, I am inclined to agree with Professor Owen in thinking there is nothing in its shape to denote that it is a boomerang. Other figures, however, in Rosellini’s Egyptian Monuments, show the resemblance more clearly, and if these are not enough, the specimen of the weapon itself in the glass case in the Egyptian room of the British Museum proves the identity of the weapon beyond possibility of doubt. I have elsewhere stated at length,[223] that having made several facsimiles of this weapon from careful measurements, so as to obtain the exact size, form, and weight of the original, for the purpose of experiment, I found that it possessed all the properties of the Australian boomerang, rising in the air, and returning in some cases to within a few paces of the position from which it was thrown. In fact, it was easier to obtain the return flight from this weapon than from many varieties of the Australian boomerang, with which I experimented at the same time.

But supposing the ancient Egyptian to be ‘convicted of the boomerang’, says the learned professor, ‘common sense repudiates the notion of the necessity of inheritance in relation to such operations.’ Against this I would urge, that the application of the general quality of common sense to the determination of questions of psychical connexion, between races so far removed from us, as the Australians or the predecessors of the earliest Egyptian kings, is inconsistent with all that we know of the phenomena of mental evolution in man, seeing that there must necessarily be many stages of disparity between them and any intelligent member of the Anthropological Institute to whose common sense this appeal was made.

If the common sense of the nineteenth century does not repudiate the fact that the steam engine, the electric telegraph, vaccination, free trade, and a thousand other contrivances for the benefit of our race, have sprung from special centres, and have been inherited, or otherwise received, by the highly cultivated races to which they have spread in modern times, neither would the common sense of the Australian or prehistoric Egyptian, after its kind, bar the likelihood of such contrivances as the boomerang, the parrying-shield, or the ‘baris’ having been handed from one savage people to another in a similar manner. Wherever two or three concurrent chains of connexion, whether of race, language, or the arts, can be traced along the same channel, such evidence is admissible, and is indeed frequently the only evidence available in dealing with prehistoric times.