Boatmen tribes or castes.
In undeveloped countries, where rivers are the chief highways, we occasionally see the survival of a distinct race of boatmen amid an intruding people of different stock, preserved in their purity by their peculiar occupation, which has given them the aloofness of a caste. In the Kwang-tung province of southern China are 40,000 Tanka boat people, who live in boats and pile-dwellings in the Canton River. The Chinese, from whom they are quite distinct, regard them as a remnant of the original population, which was dislodged by their invasion and forced to take refuge on the water. They gradually established intercourse with the conquerors of the land, but held themselves aloof. They marry only among themselves, have their own customs, and enjoy a practical monopoly of carrying passengers and messages between the steamers and the shore at Macao, Hongkong and Canton.[711] In the same way, the middle Niger above Gao possesses a distinct aquatic people, the Somnos or Bosos, who earn their living as fishermen and boatmen on the river. They spread their villages along the Niger and its tributaries, and occupy separate quarters in the large towns like Gao and Timbuctoo. They are creatures of the river rather than of the land, and show great skill and endurance in paddling and poling their narrow dugouts on their long Niger voyages.[712]
Reference has been made before to the large river population of China who live on boats and rafts, and forward the trade of the vast inland waterways. These are people, differentiated not in race, but in occupation and mode of life, constantly recruited from the congested population of the land. Allied to them are the trackers or towing crews whose villages form a distinctive feature of the turbulent upper Yangtze, and who are employed, sometimes three hundred at a time, to drag junks up the succession of rapids above Ichang.[713] Similarly the complex of navigable waterways centering about Paris, as far back as the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, gave rise to the Nautae Parisii or guild of mariners, from whom the city of Paris derived its present coat of arms—a vessel under full sail. These Lutetian boatmen handled the river traffic in all the territory drained by the Seine, Marne, and Oise. Later, in the reign of Louis the Fat, they were succeeded by the Mercatores aquae Parisiaci, and from them sprang the municipal body appointed to regulate the river navigation and commerce.[714]
River islands as protected sites.
The location of the ancient tribe of the Parisii is typical of many other weak riverine folk who seek in the islands of a river a protected position to compensate for their paucity of number. The Parisii, one of the smallest of the Gallic tribes, ill-matched against their populous neighbors, took refuge on ten islands and sandbars of the Seine and there established themselves.[715] Stanley found an island in the Congo near the second cataract of Stanley Falls occupied by five villages of the Baswa, who had taken refuge there from the attacks of the bloodthirsty Bakuma.[716] During the Tartar invasions of Russia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bands of refugees from the surrounding country gathered for mutual defense on the islands of the Dnieper River, and became the nucleus of the Dnieper Cossacks.[717] The Huron tribe of American Indians, reduced to a mere fragment by repeated Iroquois attacks, fled first to the islands of St. Joseph and Michilimackinac in Lake Huron, and in 1856 to the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence. But even this location under the guns of their French allies in Quebec failed to protect them, for the St. Lawrence was a highway for the war fleets of their implacable foe.[718]
River and lake islands as robber strongholds.
A river island not only confers the negative benefit of protection, but affords a coign of vantage for raids on the surrounding country, being to some extent proof against punitive attacks. It offers special facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle, and the island serves as a resting place on the passage. Immunity from punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago, inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi, utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands, under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, till Sebituane, the great Makololo chief, cleaned out their fastnesses and opened the river for trade.[719] The islands in the wide stretches of the Lualaba River in the Babemba country were described to Livingstone as harboring a population of marauders and robbers, who felt themselves safe from attack.[720] The same unenviable reputation attaches to the Budumas of the Lake Chad islands. A weak, timid, displaced people, they nevertheless lose no chance of raiding the herds of the Sudanese tribes inhabiting the shores of the Lake, and carrying off the stolen cattle on their wretched rafts to their island retreats.[721]