Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Fig. 50.—Clyde Stone Axe.

In this view of the case, the canoe of America is the type of a developed instinct pregnant with many suggestive thoughts for us; and the traces of the primeval ship-builder’s art accumulate wonderfully so soon as attention is drawn to it. On the banks of the Clyde, the voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure for us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the fore-hammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron ship-building, tell of the modern era of steam; but, meanwhile, underneath these very ship-builders’ yards lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back, up the stream of human history, far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St. Enoch’s croft. It was hewn out of a single oak, and within it, near the prow, lay a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, represented here (Fig. 50), doubtless one of the simple implements with which this primitive ship of the Clyde had been fashioned into shape. At least sixteen other canoes have been since brought to light; some of them buried many feet underneath sites occupied by the most ancient structures of the city of Glasgow. It is difficult to apply any satisfactory test whereby to gauge the lapse of centuries since this primitive fleet plied in the far-inland estuary that then occupied the area through which the Clyde has wrought its later channel; but that the changes in geological, no less than in technological, aspects indicate a greatly prolonged interval, cannot admit of doubt. Yet primitive man, alike in Africa and in the New World, is still practising the rude ingenuity of the same boat-builder’s art which the allophylian of the Clyde pursued in that remote dawn.

The vessel in which Captain Speke explored Lake Tanganyika was a long narrow canoe, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree. “These vessels,” he says, “are mostly built from large timbers, growing in the district of Ugubha, on the western side of the lake. The savages fell them, lop off the branches and ends to the length required, and then, after covering the upper surface with wet mud as the tree lies upon the ground, they set fire to, and smoulder out its interior, until nothing but a case remains, which they finish by paring out with roughly constructed hatchets.”

Fig. 51.—Clalam Stone Adze.

The islanders of the Southern Ocean, the natives of many parts of the African continent, and the canoe-builders of the New World, all employ the agency of fire to supplement their imperfect tools. The stone axe of the St. Enoch’s croft canoe is formed of highly polished dark greenstone. It measures five and a half inches in length by three and a half in breadth; and an unpolished band round the centre indicates where it had been bound to its haft, leaving both ends disengaged, as is frequently the case with the stone hatchets of the American Indians and the Polynesians. But the accompanying woodcut (Fig. 51) drawn from one brought by Mr. Paul Kane from the Strait of De Fuca, shows a more ingenious mode of hafting the stone adze. Such implements are in use by the Clalam Indians for constructing out of the trunks of cedar trees, large and highly ornamented canoes, in which they fearlessly face the dangers of the Pacific Ocean. Some of their canoes, made out of a single tree, measure upwards of fifty feet long, and are capable of carrying thirty as a crew. They have thwarts from side to side, about three inches thick, and their gunwales curve outwards so as to throw off the waves. The bow and stern rise in a graceful sweep, sometimes to a height of five feet, and are decorated with grotesque figures of men and animals. The Indian crew kneel two and two along the bottom, and propel the canoe rapidly with paddles from four to five feet long, while a bowman and steersman sit, each with his paddle, at either end, and thus equipped these savages venture in their light bark upon the most tempestuous seas. One of their most coveted prizes is the whale, the blubber of which is eaten along with dried fish, and esteemed no less highly by them than by the Esquimaux. Since the encroachments of European settlements on their territories their game has greatly diminished, and few whales approach the coast; but, when an opportunity offers, the Indians are enthusiastic in the chase, and the process by which their prize is secured furnishes an interesting illustration of native ingenuity and daring. When a whale is seen blowing in the offing, they rush to their canoes and push off, furnished with a number of large sealskin bags filled with air, each attached by a cord to a barbed spear-head, in the socket of which is fitted a handle five or six feet long. Upon coming up with the whale, the barbed heads are driven into it, and the handles withdrawn; until the whale, no longer able to sink from the buoyancy of the air-bags, is despatched and towed ashore. By just such a process may the whale have been stranded at the base of Dunmyat, in times when an ancient ocean washed the foot of the Ochil hills, and the old Scottish whaler revelled in spoils such as now reward the enterprise of the savages of the North Pacific coast.

Fig. 52.—Grangemouth Skull.

It is thus seen to how large an extent the primitive canoe may have sufficed for remote ocean expeditions. The old navigators of the Clyde were probably not a whit less fearless than the native whalers of the Oregon coast; and they had to face dangers fully equal to any of those to which voyagers of the Pacific are exposed, whenever they navigated the lochs and island channels towards its mouth, or ventured beyond it, to face the gales and currents of the Irish Sea. The Clyde has supplied an unusually rich store of illustrations of primitive ship-carpentry; but the disclosures of another Scottish locality also merit notice here. The carse of Falkirk is intimately associated with some very memorable events of Scottish history. It is traversed by the vallum and chain of forts reared by Lollius Urbicus the Roman proprætor of Antoninus Pius in the early part of the second century, and is rich in memorials of many later incidents. But underneath lie far older records. In the year 1726, a sudden rise of the river Carron undermined a portion of its banks, and exposed to view a canoe of unusually large dimensions, fashioned with care from a single oak tree, and lying at a depth of fifteen feet beneath successive strata of clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel. The Statistical Accounts record the discovery, in the vicinity of Falkirk, of another ancient boat buried thirty feet below the surface, in the same carse from which the remains of a mammoth were exhumed in excavating the Union Canal in 1821. Those traces of primitive human art have already been referred to in the Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, but a further discovery in the same locality confers a fresh interest upon them. Soon after the publication of that work, when on a visit to Falkirk, I was shown by Dr. G. Hamilton a human skull, which at once attracted my attention from its marked correspondence to the brachycephalic crania of ancient British graves. It is figured here, Fig. 52, from a careful drawing executed at a later date. The facial bones and the whole of the base are wanting, but enough remains to show that it is well developed, according to a type of crania of the early Scottish tumuli. But what confers a special interest on it is, that it was found in the same alluvial carse-land as the ancient canoes and the fossil bones of the Elephas primigenius, twenty feet below the surface, in a bed of shell and gravel, when digging the area of the large Grangemouth lock of the Union Canal, on the 29th of June 1843. Buried at such a depth in the detritus of the river-valley, it may be regarded as a record of the men of the period when the valleys of the Forth and Carron were navigable arms of the sea; and may even belong to the epoch when their shores were peopled by a race of fishermen contemporaneous with the whalers of Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss, and with the monoxylous boatmen of the Clyde.

Among many of the islands of the Southern Ocean the boats are simple wooden canoes, pointed at either end, and propelled through the water with the paddle; but the barks of the true Polynesians are more elaborate and ingenious. They frequently are double, with a raised platform or quarter-deck; and are invariably provided with an outrigger, an article seemingly of Malay origin. So essential, indeed, is the latter deemed for safe navigation, that the most remarkable characteristic recognised by the Tahitians, when Captain Cook’s vessels first revealed to them the wonders of European civilisation, was the want of the indispensable outrigger. Throughout the mythology of oceanic Polynesia, Mawai, the upholder of the earth, and the revealer of the secrets of the future, plays a prominent part. In one of his prophecies, Mawai foretold that a ship such as had never been seen before, a canoe without outriggers, should in process of time come out of the ocean. But to the mind of a Tahitian, an ocean canoe without an outrigger was so impossible a thing that they laughed their prophet to scorn: whereupon Mawai launched his wooden dish on the waters, which swam without outrigger, and the Tahitians thenceforward looked for the strange marvel of the outriggerless canoe. Cook’s ship was regarded as the fulfilment of Mawai’s prediction, and still English vessels are frequently called Mawai’s canoes. The mythic prophecy seems in reality one of those vague traditions of ancestral intercourse with other members of the human family, such as, among the Aztecs, led to the belief that the ships of Cortes had returned from the source of the rising sun with Quetzalcoatl, the divine instructor of their forefathers in the arts of civilisation.