Military Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

Among the early English settlers it soon came to be thought, says Mather, a religious act to kill an Indian. In the latter half of the seventeenth century both the French and English authorities adopted the custom of scalping and of offering rewards for the scalps of their Indian enemies. In 1690 the most healthy and vigorous Indians taken by the French ‘were sold in Canada, the weaker were sacrificed and scalped, and for every scalp they had a premium.’[225] Caleb Lyman, who afterwards became an elder of a church at Boston, left an account of the way in which he himself and five Indians surprised a wigwam, and scalped six of the seven persons inside, so that each might receive the promised reward. On their petition to the great and general court they received 30l. each, and Penhallow says not only that they probably expected eight times as much, but that at the time of writing the province would have readily paid a sum of 800l. for a similar service.[226] Captain Lovewell, says the same contemporary eulogist of the war that lasted from July 1722 to December 1725, ‘from Dunstable with thirty volunteers went northward, who marching several miles up country came on a wigwam where were two Indians, one of whom they killed and the other took, for which they received the promised bounty of 100l. a scalp, and two shillings and sixpence a day besides.’ (December 19, 1724.)[227] At the surprise of Norridjwock ‘the number of dead which we scalped were 26, besides Mr. Rasle the Jesuit, who was a bloody incendiary.’[228] It is evident that these very liberal rewards must have operated as a frequent cause of Indian wars, and made the colonists open-eared to tales of native outrages; indeed the whites sometimes disguised themselves like Indians, and robbed like Indians, in order, it would appear, the more effectually to raise the war-cry against them.[229]

Since the Spaniards first trained bloodhounds in Cuba to hunt the Indians, the alliance between soldiers and dogs has been a favourite one in barbarian warfare. The Portuguese used them in Brazil when they hunted the natives for slaves.[230] And an English officer in a treatise he wrote in the last century as a sort of military guide to Indian warfare suggested coolly: ‘Every light horseman ought to be provided with a bloodhound, which would be useful to find out the enemy’s ambushes and to follow their tracks. They would seize the naked savages, and at least give time to the horsemen to come up with them.’[231] In the Molucca Islands the use of two bloodhounds against a native chief was the cause of a great confederacy between all the islands to shake off the Spanish and Portuguese yoke.[232] And even in the war waged by the United States in Florida from 1838 to 1840, General Taylor was authorised to send to Cuba for bloodhounds to scent out the Indians; nor, according to one account, was their aid resorted to in vain.[233]

Poison too has been called in aid. Speaking of the Yuta Indians, a traveller assures us that ‘as in Australia, arsenic and corrosive sublimate in springs and provisions have diminished their number.’[234] And in the same way ‘poisoned rum helped to exterminate the Tasmanians.’[235]

But there is worse yet in this direction. The Portuguese in Brazil, when the importation of slaves from Africa rendered the capture of the natives less desirable than their extermination, left the clothes of persons who had died of small-pox or scarlet fever to be found by them in the woods.[236] And the caravan traders from the Missouri to Santa Fé are said by the same method or in presents of tobacco to have communicated the small-pox to the Indian tribes of that district in 1831.[237] The enormous depopulation of most tribes by the small-pox since their acquaintance with the whites is one of the most remarkable results in the history of their mutual connection; nor is it likely ever to be known to what extent the coincidence was accidental.

It is pleasant to turn from these practical illustrations of the theory that no laws of war need be regarded in hostilities with savage tribes to the only recorded trial of a contrary system, and to find, not only that it is associated with one of the greatest names in English history, but also that the success it met with fully justifies the suspicion and disfavour with which the commoner usage is beginning to be regarded. The Indians with whom Penn made his famous treaty in 1682 (of which Voltaire said that it was the only treaty that was never ratified by an oath, and the only treaty that was never broken), were of the same Algonquin race with whom the Dutch had scarcely ever kept at peace, and against whom they had warred in the customary ruthless fashion of those times. The treaty was based on the principle of an adjustment of differences by a tribunal of an equal number of Red men and of White. ‘Penn,’ says the historian, ‘came without arms; he declared his purpose to abstain from violence, he had no message but peace, and not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian’[238] For more than seventy years, from 1682 to 1754, when the French war broke out, in short, during the whole time that the Quakers had the principal share in the government of Pennsylvania, the history of the Indians and Whites in that province was free from the tale of murders and hostilities that was so common in other districts; so that the single instance in which the experiment of equal laws and forbearance has been patiently persevered in, can at least boast of a success that in support of the contrary system it were very difficult to find for an equal number of years in any other part of the world.

It may also be said against Sepulveda’s doctrine, that the habits of a higher civilisation, where they are really worth spreading, spread more easily and with more permanent effect among barbarous neighbours by the mere contagion of a better example than by the teaching of fire and sword. Some of the Dyak tribes in Borneo are said to have given up human sacrifices from the better influences of the Malays on the coast district.[239] The Peruvians, according to Prescott, spread their civilisation among their ruder neighbours more by example than by force. ‘Far from provoking hostilities, they allowed time for the salutary example of their own institutions to work its effect, trusting that their less civilised neighbours would submit to their sceptre from a conviction of the blessings it would secure to them.’ They exhorted them to lay aside their cannibalism, their human sacrifices, and their other barbarities; they employed negotiation, conciliatory treatment, and presents to leading men among the tribes; and only if all these means failed did they resort to war, but to war which at every stage was readily open to propositions of peace, and in which any unnecessary outrage on the persons or property of their enemy was punished with death.

Something will have been done for the cause of this better method of civilising the lower races, if we forewarn and forearm ourselves against the symptoms of hostilities with them by a thorough understanding of the conditions which render such hostilities probable. For as an outbreak of fever is to some extent preventable by a knowledge of the conditions which make for fevers, so may the outbreak of war be averted by a knowledge of the laws which govern their appearance. The experience which we owe to history in this respect is amply sufficient to enable us to generalise with some degree of confidence and certainty as to the causes or steps which produce wars or precede them; and from the remembrance of our dealings with the savage races of South Africa we may forecast with some misgivings the probable course of our connection with a country like New Guinea.

A colony of Europeans in proximity with barbarian neighbours naturally desires before long an increase of territory at the expense of the latter. The first sign of such a desire is the expedition of missionaries into the country, who not only serve to spy it out for the benefit of the colony, but invariably weaken the native political force by the creation of a division of feeling, and of an opposition between the love of old traditions and the temptation of novel customs and ideas. The innovating party, being at first the smaller, consisting of the feeblest and poorest members of the community, and of those who gladly flock to the mission-stations for refuge from their offences against tribal law, the missionaries soon perceive the impossibility of further success without the help of some external aid. The help of a friendly force can alone turn the balance of influence in their favour, and they soon learn to contemplate with complacency the advantages of a military conquest of the natives by the colony or mother-country. The evils of war are cancelled, in their eyes, by the delusive visions of ultimate benefit, and, in accordance with a not uncommon perversion of the moral sense, an end that is assumed to be religious is made to justify measures that are the reverse.

When the views and interests of the colonial settlers and of the missionaries have thus, inevitably but without design, fallen into harmony, a war is certain to be not far distant. Apparently accidental, it is in reality as certain as the production of green from a mixture of blue and yellow. Some dispute about boundaries, some passing act of violence, will serve for a reason of quarrel, which will presently be supported by a fixed array of collateral pretexts. The Press readily lends its aid; and in a week the colony trembles or affects to tremble from a panic of invasion, and vials of virtue are expended on the vices of the barbarians which have been for years tolerated with equanimity or indifference. Their customs are painted in the blackest colours; the details of savage usages are raked up from old books of travel; rumours of massacres and injuries are sedulously propagated; and the whole country is represented as in such a state of anarchy, that the majority of the population, in their longing for deliverance from their own rulers, would gladly welcome even a foreign conqueror. In short, a war against them comes speedily to be regarded as a war in their behalf, as the last word of philanthropy and beneficence; and the atrocities that subsequently ensue are professedly undertaken, not against the unfortunate people who endure them, but to liberate them from the ruler of their choice or sufferance, in whose behalf however they fight to the death.

To every country, therefore, which would fain be spared from these discreditable wars with barbarian tribes on the borders of its colonies, it is clear that the greatest caution is necessary against the abuses of missionary propagandism. The almost absolute failure of missions in recent centuries, and more especially in the nineteenth, is intimately associated with the greater political importance which the improved facilities of travel and intercourse have conferred upon them. Everyone has heard how Catholicism was persecuted in Japan, till at last the very profession of Christianity was made a capital crime in that part of the world. But a traveller, who knew the East intimately at the time, explains how it was that the Jesuits’ labours resulted so disastrously. On the outbreak of civil dissensions in Japan, ‘the Christian priests thought it a proper time for them to settle their religion on the same foundation that Mahomet did his, by establishing it in blood. Their thoughts ran on nothing less than extirpating the heathen out of the land, and they framed a conspiracy of raising an army of 50,000 Christians to murder their countrymen, that so the whole island might be illuminated by Christianity such as it was then.’[240] And in the same way, a modern writer, speaking of the very limited success of missions in India, has asserted frankly that ‘in despair many Christians in India are driven to wish and pray that some one, or some way, may arise for converting the Indians by the sword.’[241]