The advances made by the Kanakas of New Caledonia in drawing are illustrated by the bamboo staves covered with engraved drawings, which they carry about as objects of fashion, somewhat as we do our walking sticks, and a number of which are preserved in the ethnographic museum of Paris (Trocadero). They have been described by E. T. Hamy. In these finely incised drawings ornaments of the simplest kind (straight lines and zigzag models) are combined with figures and tree groups. The artistic execution is a rather primitive one, yet the figures by no means lack character and vividness. There are seen on the bamboo the pointed-roofed huts of the chieftains, turtles, fowl, lizards, and between them scenes from the life of the Kanakas. A man beats his wife, men discharge their bows, others stand idle in rank and file, adorned with the cylindric straw hat described by Cook, which at this day has almost entirely disappeared.
The explanation of many peculiar forms of Indian drawing and painting is to be found in the stage of mythologic sophiology reached by the several tribes. For instance, Mr. W. H. Holmes, op. cit., discovered that in Chiriqui all the decorations originated in life forms of animals, none being vegetal and none clearly expressive of the human figure or attempting the portrayal of physiognomy. This peculiarity doubtless arose from the exclusively zoomorphic character of the religion of the people. Other mythologic concepts have given a special trend to the art of other tribes and peoples. This results in conventionalism. The sculptures of Persia chiefly express the power and glory of the God-King, and the Egyptian statues are canonical idealizations of an abstract human being, type of the race. It is to be noticed that Indians also show conservatism and conventionalization in their ordinary pictures. Within what may be called a tribal, or more properly stock, system, every Indian draws in precisely the same manner. The figures of a man, of a horse, and of every other object delineated are made by everyone who attempts to make any such figure, with seeming desire for all the identity of which their mechanical skill is capable, thus showing their conception and motive to be the same. In this respect the drawing of the Indians may be likened to that of boys at a public school, who are always drawing, and drawing the same objects and with constant repetition of the same errors from one school generation to another.
In discussing artistic skill only in its relation to picture-writing the degree of its excellence is not intrinsically important, though it may be so for comparison and identification. The figures required were the simplest. Among these were vertical and horizontal straight lines and their combinations, circles, squares, triangles, a hand, a foot, an ax or a bow, a boat or a sledge. Both natural and artificial objects were drawn by a few strokes without elaboration. The fewer the marks the more convenient was the pictograph, if it fulfilled its object of being recognized by the reader. The simple fact without esthetic effect was all that the pictographic artists wanted to show, and when an animal was represented it was not by imitation of its whole form, but by emphasis of some characteristic which must be made obvious, even if it distorted the figure or group and violated every principle of art as now developed.
CHAPTER XXI.
MEANS OF INTERPRETATION.
The power of determining the authorship of pictographs made on materials other than rocks, by means of their general style and type, can be estimated by a comparison of those of the Abnaki, Ojibwa, Dakota, Haida, Innuit, Shoshoni, Moki, etc., presented in various parts of this paper.
Fig. 1257.—Typical character. Guiana.
Everard F. im Thurn (k), in reference to Fig. 1257, remarks:
Wherever a peculiar, complex, and not very obvious figure occurs in many examples it is legitimate to assume that this had some ulterior object and meaning. Now this figure, occurring in the shallow engravings of Guiana, is of such kind. It is not a figure which an Indian would be likely to invent in an idle moment even once, for such a man very seldom, probably never, except in these particular figures, has been known to draw straight lines. Moreover, even if it were a figure that one Indian might idly invent, it is certainly highly improbable that this would be copied by many other Indians in various places. And, lastly, a figure strikingly like the one in question, if, indeed, it is not identical, occurs in certain Mexican picture writings. For example, in the Mexican MSS. [reproduced in Kingsborough, op. cit., I, from Sir Thomas Bodley’s MSS., pp. 22, 23, and from the Selden MSS., also in the Bodleian, p. 3] several figures occur so like that of the shallow engravings of Guiana that there can be but little doubt of their connection. The recurrence of this peculiar figure in these writings is surely sufficient evidence of the fact that they are not without intention. If it were possible to obtain a clue to the meaning of the Mexican figures it might serve as a key to decipher the hieroglyphic writings of Guiana.