FIG. 82.—Method of tree-climbing in India.
(After B. Hurst.)
Primitive Vehicles.—Most uncivilised peoples are unacquainted with any form of vehicle. This is so among the Australians, Melanesians, and most of the natives of Africa and America. But there are also a number of populations pretty well advanced in civilisation whom their special circumstances do not permit the use of chariots or other vehicles on wheels; such are the Eskimo and other Hyperboreans, the Polynesians, etc. The sledges of the former, the canoes of the latter, fitly take the place of the carriage. Nomadic peoples have a kind of aversion to every sort of vehicle; they prefer to carry things on the backs of camel, ass, or horse. The earliest vehicle must have been something of the same description as that seen among the Prairie Indians of the present day—two tree branches attached to the sides of a horse, that is to say, inclined shafts, the ends of which drag on the ground; on them is laden the luggage, which is used by these Indians as a seat. Let us suppose that one day this primitive vehicle happens to break, but incompletely, so that one portion of the branch drags horizontally on the ground, and we shall understand the advantage which men must have taken of this mishap. He must have understood at once that traction is made easier by joining at an obtuse angle one pair of horizontal branches to another serving as shafts. From this point to placing pieces of wood transversely on horizontal branches there is only a step, and the sledge, as we see it still among the Finns and Russian peasants, was invented. Primitive as is this vehicle, it is admirably adapted to primitive roads, and still remains to-day the sole means of locomotion, winter as well as summer, in the forest regions of northern Russia, where no wheeled carriage would be able to pass, the pathways being scarcely visible across the dense virgin forest, when the ground is covered with a thick bed of moss and grass. It is only later, and in less wooded countries, that man thought of putting rollers under the horizontal branches of the sledge, contrivances which afterwards became transformed into true wheels. If this genesis of the vehicle be accepted, the appearance of sledges in funeral rites, even at the time when wheeled carriages were already invented, is explained quite simply as the survival of a custom the more venerated the greater its antiquity.[322]
The two-wheeled chariot was known in Asia from the most remote antiquity; it was used either in war (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians) or for purposes of transport. Even at the present day in India, Ceylon, Indo-China, the light waggon drawn by zebras or asses is much more common than the four-wheeled cart drawn by buffaloes. In the far East, where man is employed for draught purposes, the wheel-barrow takes the place of the car, and the Japanese jinrickshaw, as well as the Indo-Chinese pousse-pousse, are only adaptations of modern carriages to this mode of transport by men. It is only to the north of the Yang-tse-Kiang that one comes across Chinese cars with two cogged wheels, and heavy waggons, a sort of tumbrel without springs, with massive and sometimes solid wheels, drawn by buffaloes. It is perhaps such vehicles that served as the type for the Russian tarantass, a box fixed on long parallel shafts which rest on the axles. It was likewise from Asia that the Greeks and Romans, and perhaps the Egyptians, brought back the models of their elegant and light war-chariots. As to four-wheeled waggons, the populations of Europe must have known them at least from the bronze age, to judge from the remains found in the lake-dwellings of Italy and the tombs of Scandinavia. The waggons of the ancient Germanic peoples, also employed in war, resembled those which are still met with at the present day among the peasants of central and western Europe. The same kind of conveyances have been transported by the Dutch Boers as far as South Africa, and by the colonists of the Latin race even into the solitudes of the Pampas.
Navigation.—Transport by water has undergone more important transformations than vehicular transport. From the air-filled leather bottle, on which, after the manner of the ancient Assyrians, rivers are still crossed in Turkestan and Persia,[323] to elegant sailing yachts; from the primitive reed rafts of the Egyptians and the natives of lake Lob-Nor (Chinese Turkestan) to the great ocean liners, there are numberless intermediate forms. Australian canoes made from a hollowed-out tree-trunk, Fuegian canoes made of pieces of bark joined together by cords of seal’s sinews, the effective Eskimo “kayaks” made with seal skins, the elegant skiffs of the Polynesians with their outriggers or balancing beams which defy the tempests of the ocean (Fig. [83]), heavy Chinese junks, etc. We cannot enter into the details of this subject; let us merely observe that there is a great difference in the aptitude of various peoples for navigation. It is not enough to live by the sea-shore to become a good sailor; take for example the case of the Negroes who have never been able to go far away from their coasts, and who often have not even an elementary knowledge of navigation, while the Polynesians and the Malays make bold and perilous voyages of several thousand miles across the Pacific and Indian oceans; canoes of the Malay type are seen from Honolulu and Easter Island to Ceylon and Madagascar. With the taste for navigation and voyages migrations become more numerous, and the intellectual horizons widen perceptibly. It is thus one of the great means of bringing peoples into closer relationship.
FIG. 83.—Malayo-Polynesian canoe with outrigger (seventeenth century).
(After O. Mason.)