Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

The other generalities of North America are those of Brazil, Peru, and Patagonia repeated. The Algonkins have an area like the Guarani, their coast-line only extending from Labrador to Cape Hatteras. The Iroquois of New York and the Carolinas—a broken and discontinuous population—indicate encroachment and displacement; they once, however, covered perhaps as much space as the Caribs. The Sioux represent the Chaco and Pampa tribes. Their country is a hunting-ground, with its relations to the northern Tropic and the Arctic Circle, precisely those of the Chaco and Pampas to the Southern and Antarctic.

The western side of the Rocky Mountains is more Mexican than the eastern; just as Chili is more Peruvian than Brazil.

I believe that if the Pacific coast of America had been the one first discovered and fullest described, so that Russian America, New Caledonia, Queen Charlotte’s Archipelago, and Nutka Sound, had been as well known as we know Canada and New Brunswick, there would never have been any doubts or difficulties as to the origin of the so-called Red Indians of the New World; and no one would ever have speculated about Africans finding their way to Brazil, or Polynesians to California. The common-sense primâ facie view would have been admitted at once, instead of being partially refined on and partially abandoned. North-eastern Asia would have passed for the fatherland to North-western America, and instead of Chinese and Japanese characteristics creating wonder when discovered in Mexico and Peru, the only wonder would have been in the rarity of the occurrence. But geographical discovery came from another quarter, and as it was the Indians of the Atlantic whose history first served as food for speculation, the most natural view of the origin of the American population was the last to be adopted—perhaps it has still to be recognized.

The reason for all this lies in the following fact. The Eskimo, who form the only family common to the Old and the New World, stand in a remarkable contrast to the unequivocal and admitted American aborigines of Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada, the New England States, New York, and the other well-known Indians in general. Size, manners, physical conformation, and language, all help to separate the two stocks. But this contrast extends only to the parts east of the Rocky Mountains. On the west of them there is no such abruptness, no such definitude, no such trenchant lines of demarcation. The Athabascan dialects of New Caledonia and Russian America are notably interspersed with Eskimo words, and vice versâ. So is the Kolúch tongue of the parts about New Archangel. As for a remarkable dialect called the Ugalents (or Ugyalyackhmutsi) spoken by a few families about Mount St. Elias, it is truly transitional in character. Besides this, what applies to the languages applies to the other characteristics as well.

The lines of separation between the Eskimo and the non-Eskimo Americans are as faint on the Pacific, as they are strong on the Atlantic side of the continent.

What accounts for this? The phænomenon is by no means rare. The Laplander, strongly contrasted with the Norwegian on the west, graduates into the Finlander on the east. The relation of the Hottentot to the Kaffre has been already noticed. So has the hypothesis that explains it. One stock has encroached upon another, and the transitional forms have been displaced. In the particular case before us, the encroaching tribes of the Algonkin class have pressed upon the Eskimo from the south; and just as the present Norwegians and Swedes now occupy the country of a family which was originally akin to the Laps of Lapland (but with more southern characters), the Micmacs and other Red Men have superseded the southerly and transitional Eskimo. Meanwhile, in North-western America no such displacement has taken place. The families still stand in situ; and the phænomena of transition have escaped obliteration.

Just as the Eskimo graduate in the American Indian, so do they pass into the populations of North-eastern Asia—language being the instrument which the present writer has more especially employed in their affiliation. From the Peninsula of Aliaska to the Aleutian chain of islands, and from the Aleutian chain to Kamskatka is the probable course of the migration from Asia to America—traced backwards, i.e. from the goal to the starting-point, from the circumference to the centre.

Then come two conflicting lines. The Aleutians may have been either Kamskadales or Curile Islanders. In either language there is a sufficiency of vocables to justify either notion. But this is a mere point of minute ethnology when compared with the broader one which has just preceded it. The Japanese and Corean populations are so truly of the same class with the Curile islanders, and the Koriaks to the north of the sea of the Okhotsk are so truly Kamskadale, that we may now consider ourselves as having approached our conventional centre so closely as to be at liberty to leave the parts in question for the consideration of another portion of the circumference—another extreme point of divergence.

II. From Van Diemen’s Land to the South-Eastern parts of Asia.—The aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, conveniently called Tasmanians, have a fair claim, when considered by themselves, to be looked upon as members of a separate species. The Australians are on a level low enough to satisfy the most exaggerated painters of a state of nature; but the Tasmanians are, apparently, lower still. Of this family but a few families remain—occupants of Flinders’ Island, whither they have been removed by the Van Diemen’s Land Government. And here they decrease; but whether from want of room or from intermarriage is doubtful. The effects of neither have been fairly investigated. From the Australians they differ in the texture of their hair—the leading diagnostic character. The Tasmanian is shock-headed, with curled, frizzy, matted and greased locks. None of their dialects are intelligible to any Australian, and the commercial intercourse between the two islands seems to have been little or none. Short specimens of four mutually unintelligible dialects are all that I have had the opportunity of comparing. They belong to the same class with those of Australia, New Guinea, and the Papua islands; and this is all that can safely be said about them.

It is an open question whether the Tasmanians reached Van Diemen’s Land from South Australia, from Timor, or from New Caledonia—the line of migration having, in this latter case, wound round Australia, instead of stretching across it. Certain points of resemblance between the New Caledonian and Tasmanian dialects suggest this refinement upon the primâ facie doctrine of an Australian origin; and the texture of the hair, as far as it proves anything, goes the same way.