My own ideas of Pygmies were gathered originally only from books, but the time seemed now to have come when their existence should be demonstrated in actual life.
CLASSICAL WITNESS TO PYGMIES.
Legends of Pygmies had mingled themselves already with the earliest surviving literature of the Greeks, and the poet of the Iliad, it will be remembered, mentions them as a race that had long been known:—
“To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,
With noise, and order, through the midway sky;
To pygmy nations wounds and death they bring,
And all the war descends upon the wing.”
Pope’s ‘Homer’s Iliad,’ iii. 6-10.
But not the classic poets alone; sober historians and precise geographers have either adopted the poetic substance of the tradition or have endeavoured, by every kind of conjecture, to confirm its accuracy. Nothing, for instance, can be more definite than the statement of Herodotus about the Nasamonians after they had crossed the Libyan deserts: “They at length saw some trees growing on a plain, and having approached they began to gather the fruit that grew on the trees; and while they were gathering it some diminutive men, less than men of middle stature, came up and seized them and carried them away.”[30] The testimony of Aristotle is yet more precise when he says plainly: “The cranes fly to the lakes above Egypt, from which flows the Nile; there dwell the Pygmies, and this is no fable but the pure truth; there, just as we are told, do men and horses of diminutive size dwell in caves;”[31] a quotation this, which would seem to imply that the learned Stagyrite was in possession of some exact and positive information, otherwise he would not have ventured to insist so strongly upon the truth of his assertion. Very likely, however, we should be justified in surmising that Aristotle mentions cranes and Pygmies together only because he had the passage of the Iliad floating in his memory, and because he was aware of the fact that cranes do pass the winter in Africa. For my own part, I should be inclined to doubt whether cranes ever reach the Victoria and Albert Nyanza; on the Red Sea I saw them in latitude 20° N., and Brehm observed them in Sennaar; on the White Nile, however, and farther inland, I only found the native Balearic crane, which could hardly have been the species mentioned by Aristotle. But whether cranes were really capable of fighting with Pygmies or not, or whether (as Pauer attempts to prove) the Homeric tradition was derived from ancient Egyptian symbolism, and so was an emblematic representation of the cranes battling with the falling waters of the Nile stream, this is now immaterial; all that concerns us, with regard to the present topic, is that three or four centuries before the Christian era the Greeks were aware of the existence of a people inhabiting the districts about the sources of the Nile, who were remarkable for their stunted growth. The circumstance may warrant us, perhaps, in employing the designation of “pygmy,” not for men literally a span long, but in the sense of Aristotle, for the dwarf races of Equatorial Africa.
Throughout the time that I had resided in the Seribas of the Bongo territory, of course I had frequent opportunities of enlarging my information, and I was continually hearing such romantic stories that I became familiarised in a way with the belief that the men about me had really been eye-witnesses of the circumstances they related. Those who had been attached to the Niam-niam expeditions, whenever they described the variety of wonders about the splendour of the courts of the cannibal kings, never omitted to mention the dwarfs who filled the office of court buffoons; every one outvying another in the fantastic embellishment of the tales they told. The general impression that remained upon my mind was that these must be some extraordinary specimens of pathological phenomena that had been retained by the kings as natural curiosities. The instance did not escape my recollection that Speke had given the description and portrait of a dwarf, Kimenya, with whom he had become acquainted at the court of Kamrasi;[32] but that there could be a whole series of tribes whose average height was far below an average never really found a reception in my understanding, until at the court of Munza the positive evidence was submitted to my eyes.