Racial purity amongst these survivors is not to be expected. There had been a considerable mixture of blood between North, South, and the Transandine groups before the Spanish entry, brought about not only by wars and migrations, but by the custom prevailing among the indigenous folk of Central Chile of seeking wives outside the tribe. During the colonial period numbers of white women were systematically seized and held by the Indians, the resulting admixture of blood accounting for the comparatively blond strain seen in some of the Araucanian families.
Correspondingly, there was a certain absorption of native blood into the Spanish towns and settlements, Indian girls and children having passed into the possession of the Europeans from time to time: but racial traits have in both cases yielded a great deal to environment, and the mixed-blood youth of the Spanish sphere of influence is not remarkable for sympathy with the dwindling remnants of the Araucanian tribes. The child of the soil appears to be doomed here for very much the same reasons as the Red Indian is doomed in the states of the North American Union: he is irreconcilable and sullenly proud; has been conquered by slow pressure plus the spread of alcoholism and disease; and in spite of honestly-meant legislation on the part of the present rulers of the country, is progressively stripped of his remaining property. During a session of the National Congress in Santiago in early 1921, the Deputy for Temuco, Dr. Artemio Gutierrez, made a strong protest against the “constant victimisation” of the Indians by grasping exploiters. He attacked the municipal authorities for failing to defend the Araucanians, declaring that spoliation, even the robbing of the native huts, was permitted, and complained that although the State Government exempts the Indian from taxes the municipalities do not. “The Indians are not even masters of the two, four, five or ten hectares they operate, for they are only in control through the grace of the State,” he declared, adding that many of these folk cross to the Argentine to escape their home troubles. Conditions of the kind seem almost unavoidable in a country rapidly filling up with a new population, against which the old resolutely sets its face; nothing perhaps is more typical of this attitude than an incident occurring at the ceremony in connection with the opening of the railway into Temuco town some years ago. Amongst the personages of the vicinity invited to attend the entry of the first train were the local Indian chiefs: they came, with an entourage of followers, bedecked in feathers, with fine ponchos, mounted upon fast horses, and were placed in a long double row, facing the line from either side. The assembly waited, fidgeted, talked; but the Araucanians sat motionless on motionless steeds, their swarthy, strong-featured faces set like wood. Presently the smoke of the engine was seen in the distance, and with a piercing shriek of the whistle Temuco’s first railway train rushed forward. The people swayed, applauded, crowded to the rail’s edge, exclaimed excitedly: but not an Araucanian moved so much as his eyes to glance at the steel monster. It thundered forward and passed; the crowd pushed across the track, waved hands and shouted; the Araucanians sat their horses, did not turn their heads to send a look at the people or the train, and in a few moments turned off and without a word or a change of expression galloped away. The ancient rebel refused to take the least outward interest in the white men’s doings.
One sees in Chile a mirror of what is happening or has already happened in the major part of the Americas—the gradual extinction of an embryo civilization. Whatever beginnings the Chilean race had made towards the development of a social system, the evolution of a tongue and a cult, have been fruitless. In other continents the impression is given, very frequently, that the existing culture is built upon an older form, that it is the first seed of an ancient civilisation that has eventually flowered through whatever inner struggles and changes: in the Americas the developing civilisation has been introduced and superimposed, the young shoot of earliest native growth cut short and fatally withered.
The archæology of Chile does not offer a field for study comparable with that of Mexico, Peru or Central America, with their splendid ruins of temples and burial grounds containing ceramic treasures, textiles and human remains. Because there is less that is spectacular, the Chilean area has been less adequately studied, and there is much work still to be done. Valuable researches have been made by the indefatigable José Toribio Medina, author of “Aborigines de Chile,” published in 1888, and by R. E. Latcham, author of “Anthropologia Chilena,” while the devoted energy of Dr. Aureliano Oyarzún in the field of physical anthropology is of the highest interest. Dr. Oyarzún has published many ethnological monographs and directs an excellent ethnographical Museum at Moneda 602, Santiago. A second collection in Santiago, containing much Peruvian pottery obtained during the War of the Pacific, is housed by the State, while a third is in the University buildings, possessing many specimens from Easter Island. Concepción owns a small but well-kept archæological museum, but the scarcity of purely Chilean specimens displays the gap in present knowledge.
CHAPTER XVII
EASTER ISLAND
A Lost Culture.—Fate of the Islanders.—The Statues.—The Bird Cult.—Wooden Carvings.
Chile is the only South American country owning territory situated at a considerable distance from her shores; it was picked up, in fact, in 1888 as a kind of derelict child of Spain in whom nobody had much interest.
For Easter Island has little commercial importance; it has never yielded precious metals, includes no fair widespread lands inviting agricultural settlers, and has no woodlands nor a single river. The sheep and cattle bred upon the island are the property of one company, a British enterprise, and the natives are but a couple of hundred in number. The island lies in a lonely position, at the extreme west of the South Pacific series, and measures but thirteen miles in length and about seven in width. The hues of the land are sand and tawny; the sea is a faithful mirror of the turquoise sky; the dreamy heat of Polynesia endures throughout the year. Easter Island is lonely, lazy, unproductive, a little speck upon the broad breast of the Pacific.
But shut within its tiny compass, it holds one of the great mysteries of the world. It contains one of the keys to Polynesian culture, although it bears no apparent connection, as was once believed, with ancient American civilization. The strange, almost incredible evidence upon Easter Island speaks of a culture at once more advanced and more primitive than that which should be most intimately connected with it. For instance, the Easter Islanders speak a language which is a branch of a Polynesian tongue; in certain aspects, the culture of the old people is clearly allied to that of Polynesia in general. But—here is the problem of the ethnologists—Easter Island possessed a written language: the early European visitors put it upon record that the learned men of the territory could read the script of the wooden tablets of which specimens still exist. But Polynesia never had a written language, and pre-Spanish South America, the nearest mainland, was equally ignorant; the nearest country to the east with any idea of such script was Central America, in the Maya culture-area, and the nearest to the west was Sumatra.
The striking and eloquent evidence of Easter Island is fast disappearing. Two hundred years ago, when it was first visited by Europeans, stone statues stood, with their tawny headdresses, as a thick fringe upon the coast, and there were perhaps a couple of thousand natives, divided into tribes spread over the land, among whom were the small clan of “wise men” who chanted from the script of the wooden tablets.