The Eskimo are recognised as presenting the nearest type to the cave-men of Europe’s Post-Glacial era. It is even possible that, like the natives of Labrador, the latter may have occupied winter snow-huts, and only resorted to their cave-shelters during the brief heat of a semi-arctic summer. This, however, is rendered doubtful by the occurrence of reindeer horns and bones of young fawns, along with others of such varying age as to indicate the presence of the hunter during nearly every season of the year. Among a people so situated the industrial arts are called into constant requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and the experience of the hunter directs him to the products of the chase for the easiest supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnished the ready-made dagger, lance head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the larger rodents supplied a more delicately edged chisel than primitive art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the larger mammalia, in order to obtain the prized marrow, produced the splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converted into daggers, bodkins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or elephant is readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less liable to fracture than flint or stone; and all those materials are abundant in the most rigorous winters, when the latter are sealed up under the frozen soil. Implements of horn or bone may therefore be assumed to have preceded all but the rudest flint celts and hammer-stones or unwrought missiles; and although, owing to the nearly indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our ideas of primeval tool-making are chiefly derived, enough has been recovered from contemporary cave deposits to confirm the analogy of their arts to those of the hyperborean workmen of the North American continent.
The necessity which, to a large extent, determined the material of the ancient workers in bone and ivory, was favourable to the development of the imitative faculty. The ingenious ivory and bone carvings of the Tawatins and other tribes of British Columbia, of the Thlinkets of Alaska, and the Eskimo, equally suffice, with the examples of European palæolithic art, to show how favourable such material was to the development of artistic feeling, which must have lain dormant had the artificers been limited to flint and stone. The same influence may be seen in operation in many stages of art: as in massive but bald Gothic structures, such as St. Machar’s Cathedral on the Dee, where the builders were limited to granite, while contemporary architecture in localities where good sandstone or limestone abounds is rich in elaborate details; and, where the soft and easily wrought Caen stone is available, runs to excess in the florid exuberance of its carvings.
The ingenious artist of the Palæolithic era not only ornamented the hafts of his tools and weapons with representations of familiar objects of the chase, but is also accredited with carving, on his mace or baton, symbolic emblems expressing the rank and official duties of the owner. The analogous practice of the Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands at the present day shows that there is nothing inconsistent with primitive thought in the symbolic, significance assigned to some of the carved batons; and, if so, we have there examples of imitative art employed in a way which involved the germ of ideographic graving or picture-writing. The mere fact of pictorial imitation implies the interpretation of its representations. Eskimo implements are to be seen in various collections, as at Copenhagen and Stockholm, in the British Museum, in those of San Francisco and the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, ornamented with representations of adventures incident to their habits of life. An Arctic collection, presented by Captain Beechy to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, furnishes interesting illustrations of the skill of the Eskimo draughtsman. The carvings and linear drawings represent, for the most part, incidents in the life of the polar hunter; and this is so effectively done that, as Captain Beechy says: “By comparing one with another, a little history was obtained which gave us a better insight into their habits than could be elicited from any signs or intimations.”[[88]] Mr. W. H. Dall figures in his Alaska and its Resources, analogous examples of Innuit or Western Eskimo art; and in an interesting communication by Dr J. W. Hoffman to the Anthropological Society of Washington, on Eskimo pictographs as compared with those of other American aborigines, he figures and interprets similar examples.[[89]] One of these, copied from an ivory bow used in making fire, which he examined in the Museum of the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco, depicts three incidents in the Innuit hunter’s experience. In one, the hunter supplicates the Shaman, or native medicine-man, for success in the chase; another group represents the results of the chase; while the third records the incidents of an unsuccessful appeal to another shaman. Another graving from the same locality embodies the incidents of success and failure in a prolonged hunting expedition. In their interpretation, Dr. Hoffman was assisted by a Kadiack half-breed who happened to visit San Francisco at the time. A design of the same class copied from a piece of walrus ivory, carved by a Kiatégamut Indian of Southern Alaska, records a successful feat of the shaman in curing two patients. He is represented in the act of exorcising the demons, who are seen just cast out from the men restored to health by his agency. From the interpretations thus given, it may be inferred that such drawings as those described by Captain Beechy represent in nearly every case actual incidents. The hunter celebrates his return from a successful chase, his experience in the attempt to propitiate the supernatural powers on his behalf, or any other notable event, by recording the impressive incidents on the handle of his hunting knife or his ivory bow, or even in some cases on a tablet of walrus ivory; just as the enthusiastic sportsman will at times enter in his journal the special occurrences of the fox-hunt, or the more adventurous feats of deer-stalking, or commission an artist to perpetuate them on canvas. Incidents of exceptional skill or daring are no doubt recalled, and listened to with eager interest by the home circle in the Arctic snow-hut; and are confirmed in their most thrilling details by appeals to such graven records.
The more durable material employed alike by the ancient cave-dwellers of Europe and by the modern Innuit and Eskimo, has secured their preservation in a form best calculated to command attention. But similar graphic representations of incidents and ideas are common to various tribes of North American Indians. Throughout the wide region of the old Algonkin tribes rock-carvings, such as that of the famous Dighton Bock, abound. The same are no less frequent in the South-West from New Mexico to California; while similar pictographs are executed by the Ojibways in less durable fashion on their grave-posts, or even on strips of birch-bark. In like fashion, the Crees and Blackfeet of the Canadian North-West adorn their buffalo-skin tents with incidents of war and the chase, and blazon on their buffalo robes their personal feats of daring, and the discomfiture of their foes. In this way, the aboriginal draughtsman is seen in his pictorial devices to aim at the like result with that achieved by the old minstrel chronicler or the courtly herald.
Of the ornamented handles of implements recovered from the abodes of the ancient cave-dwellers of Europe, the most notable examples are far in advance of any Eskimo carvings. One of those, from the cave at Laugerie Basse, has been repeatedly engraved. It is fashioned from a piece of reindeer’s horn. The carver has so modified his design, and availed himself of the natural contour of his material, as to adapt it admirably to its purpose as the handle of a poignard. It was apparently intended to include both handle and blade; but probably broke in the process of manufacture, and was flung aside unfinished. The design is a spirited adaptation to the special requirements. The horns are thrown back on the neck, the fore legs doubled up, and the hind legs stretched out, as if in the act of leaping. Another finely finished example of a dagger-handle, from Montastrue, Peccadeau de l’Isle, figured by Professor de Quatrefages in his Hommes fossiles, also represents the deer with its horns thrown back; but from its fractured condition the position of the limbs can only be surmised to have corresponded to the example from Laugerie Basse. With those may be classed such carvings as the pike, so characteristically represented on a tooth of the cave-bear, recovered from a refuse heap in the cave of Durntly in the Western Pyrenees, and other similar sports of primitive artistic skill.
Such carvings had no other aim, we may presume, than the decoration of a favourite weapon, or the beguiling of a leisure hour. But they show the fruits of skill, and the observation of a practised eye, by the ingenious workmen whose drawings and etchings merit our careful study. Considerable taste and still more ingenuity are exhibited by many of the American aborigines, in their decorative carvings, and the ornamentation both of their weapons and dress. The characteristics of Eskimo art have been noted. The Thlinkets of Alaska, lying on their western border, manifest a like skill, making ladles and spoons from the horns of the deer, the mountain sheep, and goat, and carving them with elaborate ingenuity. They also work in walrus ivory, fashioning their bodkins, combs, and personal ornaments with varied ornamentation; decorate their knife-handles of bone, their paddles, and other implements; and carve grotesque masks, with much inventive ingenuity in the variety of the design, though scarcely in a style of high art. But it is interesting to note the different phases of this imitative faculty. Some tribes, such as the Algonkins, confine their art mainly to literal reproductions of natural objects; while others, such as the Chimpseyans or Babeens, the Tawatins, and the Clalam Indians of Vancouver Island, have developed a conventional style of art, often exhibiting much ingenious fancy in its grotesque ornamentation. This is specially apparent in the claystone pipes of the Chimpseyans, in carving which they rival the ingenious Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands in exuberance of detail. But while the art has become conventional, where it is not displaced by imitations of the novel objects brought under their notice in their intercourse with Europeans its combinations are in most cases referable to native myths.
In many of the elaborately carved Chimpseyan pipes, their special purpose seems to be lost sight of in the whimsical profusion of ornament, embracing every native or foreign object that has chanced to attract the notice of the sculptor. Nevertheless, it may help us to do justice to the true aim of the Indian artist, if we call to remembrance how much of Christian symbolism was embodied in many a mediæval sculpturing of what, to the unsympathetic observer, seem now only conventional vines and lilies, or a mere fanciful grouping of dragons and snakes, with apples, figs, grapes, and thorns. This has to be kept in view while noting in the pipe sculptures human figures in strangest varieties of posture, intertwined with zoomorphic devices, in which the bear and the frog have a prominent place; and, as will be seen, a mythic significance. It is no less suggestive to note, alike in the Chimpseyan and in the Tawatin and Haidah carvings, curious analogies to the sculptures of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America. This resemblance has been noticed, independently, by many observers.
Marchand, a French navigator who visited the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1791, after having recently seen the Mexican sculpture and paintings, formed the opinion that the Haidah works of art could be distinctly traced to Aztec origin.[[90]] He remarks of their paintings and carvings: “The taste for ornament prevails in all the works of their hands; their canoes, their chests, and different little articles of furniture in use among them, are covered with figures which might be taken for a species of hieroglyphics; fishes and other animals, heads of men, and various whimsical designs, are mingled and confounded in order to compose a subject. It undoubtedly will not be expected that these figures should be perfectly regular and the proportions in them exactly observed, for here every man is a painter and sculptor; yet they are not deficient in a sort of elegance and perfection.”
The imitative faculty thus manifested so generally among a people still in the condition of savage life, shows itself no less strikingly in the modern claystone carvings of objects of foreign introduction. The collection formed by the United States Exploring Expedition, and largely augmented since, includes numerous carvings in which representations of log and frame houses, forts, boats, horses, and fire-arms, are introduced; and where cords, pulleys, anchors, and other details copied from the shipping which frequent the coasts, furnish evidence of a practised eye, and considerable powers of imitation. To the unfamiliar observer, the result presents, in many cases, a very arbitrary and even incongruous jumble of miscellaneous details. But, most probably, the native designer had, in every case, a special meaning, and even some specific incident in view.
The interest awakened by such manifestations of observant accuracy and artistic skill among savage tribes is not diminished by the fact that in nearly all other respects they are devoid of culture. Notwithstanding the absence in most of them of the very rudiments of civilisation, experience proves that among the tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains distinguished by artistic capacity, there is an aptitude for industrious and settled habits, the want of which is so noticeable in the nomad tribes of the prairies. Their linear patterns are often singularly graceful; and they employ colour lavishly, and with some degree of taste, in decorating their masks, boats, and dwellings. This is specially noticeable among the Haidahs, in the different dialects of whose language we find not only names for nearly all the primary colours, but also the word kigunijago, “a picture.” The symbolical and mythological significance of many of their carvings is indisputable; while the affinities, traceable at times to the ornamentation most characteristic of the architectural remains in the principal seats of native American civilisation in Central America, confer on them a peculiar interest and value.