According to Nadenltoc, Sitting Bull’s band of Sioux Indians opened the breasts and devoured the hearts of the soldiers slain by them. The Creek and Blackfeet tribes are also said by Farrand, a missionary for fifteen years among them, to have eaten their prisoners on the field of battle.
The charge of cannibalism against the members of the Greeley expedition, and the horrors of Cape Sabine are yet fresh in our memory, and the sufferings of the men during that long, bitter winter of 1884 have not half been told. A leading journal in its graphic description of their privations, makes use of this language: “After the game gave out early in February, we have good reason to believe the men were kept alive on human flesh. When the rescuing party discovered the half-starved survivors, their first duty was to look to the two men who were insensible from cold and privation even to the point of death. One of them, a German, was wild in his delirium. ‘Oh!’ he shrieked, as the sailors took hold of him to lift him tenderly, ‘don’t let them shoot me as they did poor Henry! Must I be killed and eaten as poor Henry was? Don’t let them do it! Don’t! Don’t!’ The sailors were horrified, but at once reported the man’s words to Commander Schley. After a brief investigation he felt satisfied that the poor fellow was speaking the truth, and that some of the men who perished had been stripped of their flesh to keep their starving companions alive. When the horrible reality was brought out before an investigating committee, it was not allowed to rest solely on this poor sufferer’s oral testimony. A critical investigation was made by Dr. Ames, the surgeon of the Bear, and others, who made reports in writing, which are now in the Navy Department at Washington. Lieut. Greeley was adverse to having the bodies of the buried dead disturbed, but Commander Schley had a different opinion. The bodies were dug from their graves in the little hill just back of the permanent camp, established in 1883. Most of the blankets contained nothing but heaps of white bones, many of them picked clean. The remains could be identified only by the marks on the blankets.
From inquiries it is said that Commander Schley discovered that many of the seventeen men who perished from starvation had been eaten by their famishing comrades. It is reported that the only men who escaped the knife were those who died of scurvy. The amputated limbs of men who afterwards perished were eagerly devoured as food. The death of Charles B. Henry was particularly tragic. As he was a young German without any relatives in this country, he joined Company E, Fifth Cavalry, at Cincinnati. His friends, however, tried to dissuade him from enlisting in this expedition, but as his spirit of adventure was aroused by tales of arctic exploits, he determined to go. Driven to despair by his frightful hunger, Henry saw an opportunity to steal a little more than his share of rations, and he succeeded; but he was found out and shot for his guilt. When the body was discovered, his hands and face though shrunken were intact and recognizable; but nearly everywhere else the skin had been removed and the flesh picked from his bones. Even his heart and lungs were eaten by his comrades. One rib was found shattered by a bullet, and to another small fragments of lead were attached. A bullet hole was also found in the skin.”
We have now come to the end of the story which we have been endeavoring to trace. It is very ghastly, containing nothing specially inviting, with little or no credit to our common nature. Tradition and history, ancient and modern, record in substance the same truth, and show what man early engaged in has been practiced up indeed to the present period. In fact, there are indications whose trend is to make it apparent that the same unholy and unnatural food was indulged in by prehistoric man.
It is not the purpose of the writer, however, here to enter into any discussion concerning the age or origin of the human race. This question will form a subject for a separate paper now being prepared, the title of which will be
PREHISTORIC MAN.
Whewell calls the problems involved in the study of man the palætiological sciences, in which we reason from effect to cause, seeking from phenomena actually existing, to ascertain their origin and causes. Early investigators, like Buffon and Blumenbach, first devoted themselves to a survey of the elements which distinguish him. They laid a basis in carefully classified facts, and their method of study has been fruitful in the science of geology. The subject is truly said to be one of the broadest which can engage the human mind, and man, by his intellectual and moral being, stands above every other form of animal nature, dwelling in a world apart from them all.
With some naturalists the moral and intellectual are sunk into the physical, and those elements which so widely separate man from beast are considered as simply developments of the animal instincts. Many psychologists and linguists, while confining themselves to their own specialties as bearing on man’s nature and origin, have undervalued the labors of their compeers, and neglected the results of each other’s inquiries in drawing their conclusions.
Light is shed on the early history of man, from his relation to the glacial period by Lyell, who contends that there were two ice-ages, with a milder interval between them, covering a period of not less than many thousands of years; while Professor Braun gives to the first ice-age a period of about ten thousand years.
“We measure life by years, but not so God.