The quite circular form of an extensive mound or earthwork is thought to imply a knowledge of geometry or trigonometry, because a modern surveyor would proceed in a certain scientific manner to lay out such a circle. But the slow process of measuring a number of radii from a given centre, and connecting their terminal points, would probably have sufficed for all that these early geometers executed. Or they might have drawn a smaller circle, in the first instance, by a movable radius, and then traced a larger and a larger one outside of this, till they had obtained one of the requisite magnitude. Time and labour will accomplish much, and with very little help from art or science. But where imagination seems to play the subtlest tricks with our antiquarians is in their appreciation of the beautiful in such relics of the fine arts as are discovered in these mounds and cities. We have prints given us here of carved pipes found in the tombs, which we are told are very beautiful. To our eye they do not look beautiful at all, and very little in advance of other prints which represent pipes carved by the present race of Red Indians. But it is when the antiquarian critic finds himself amongst the remains of the rude sculptures of Central America that he shows himself most under the influence of this glamour. If we had not the pictures or engravings by which to check the text, we should think that Thebes and Memphis had been long ago outrivalled on the other side of the Atlantic.
Our readers, we are sure, have not forgotten Mr Stephens’s book of travels; they will remember how he entered with his guide into what seemed an untrodden forest at Copan, apparently undisturbed from its very creation; and how, as he made his way with his axe through the brushwood, he found himself face to face with an upright column of stone elaborately carved. In the centre of this a human face of gigantic proportions stared out upon him. Some of these monuments had been overpowered by the vigorous growth of the surrounding trees, and displaced from their upright position by huge branches that half encircled them; others lay upon the ground, as if bound down by the vines and other great creepers of the American forest. Nothing disturbed the solitude of the scene except a grimacing procession of monkeys, who from the branches of the trees were looking alternately at the traveller, and at the mysterious objects which had attracted the traveller’s attention. As he proceeded he came upon a truncated pyramid, with a flight of steps leading to a broad surface, on which evidently some other structure had been raised; and then again he entered a square enclosure with steps, which might have been intended for seats, running up on all sides, reminding him of a Roman amphitheatre. No books had told him of the existence even of this ruined city. Who had built it, who had lived in it, no one could say. The people of the country could only answer him with their “Quien sabe?” who knows?—an answer always sufficient for themselves. There was not even a tradition, not even a palpable lie, to be heard. Men were as silent about these cities as the forest itself.
What wonder that the enthusiasm of the traveller should be excited, and that he should see more than the eye—as a simple optical instrument—disclosed to him? Assuredly his enthusiasm as to the beauty of the sculpture is not supported by the drawings he has given us. He commends to us these drawings of the artist as being, “next to the stones themselves,” the most perfect materials on which to form our judgment. And of one thing we may be certain, that a modern artist, trained to the correct representation of the human figure, would err, if he erred at all, by improving the drawing in these grotesque sculptures. It would require a distinct effort in the modern artist to depart from the true outline and proportions of the human form; and whenever his attention relaxed, he would infallibly become more correct than his original. Well, we see in the delineation here given us a mere pillar, in the centre of which is carved a human face, and lower down two fat arms, which the imagination is to connect with the unmeaning face above them; and we are told in the text “that the character of this image is grand, and it would be difficult to exceed the richness of the ornament.” We turn the page and see another gigantic head, with huge saucer eyes, such as a child would draw, and we are told that “the style is good,” and that “the great expansion of the eyes seems intended to inspire awe.” So are the masks sold in our toy-shops to mischief-loving boys. But very silly savages must those have been in whom such absurd figures could have inspired awe. Mr Stephens is constantly being “arrested by the beauty of the sculpture.” The bas-reliefs at Palenque are indeed superior to anything he met with at Copan, and some drawings from these exhibit an unexpected grace, and an outline perhaps unconsciously improved by the hand of the artist. But here also we are startled at the discrepancy between the description of the enraptured traveller and the representation in the engravings. We have, in one of them, a figure sitting cross-legged upon a narrow bench; his legs are tucked up under him painfully tight, and his balance must be preserved with great difficulty; his large nose is in manifest danger of breaking itself upon the floor. We are told that this figure sits “on a couch, ornamented with two leopards’ heads,” and that “the attitude is easy, and the expression calm and benevolent.” The first discoverer must evidently have looked with something of a lover’s eye.
The learned antiquarian has been nowhere more exposed to delusion than in this New World. Mr Wilson gives us an amusing account of the inscription on the Dighton Rock, which has received so many various interpretations. It stands in New England; and at a time when it was a favourite speculation of its theologians, that the Phœnicians had been the earliest colonists of America, and that the accursed race of Canaan had been banished there, this inscription was decided to be Punic. Dr Stiles, President of Yale College, when preaching in 1783 before the Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven, as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language, in proof that the Indians were of the cursed seed of Canaan, and were to be displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet! “The Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles, “charged the Dighton and other rocks in Narraganset Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large, as did Professor Sewell. He has lately transmitted a copy of this inscription to M. Gebelin of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, who, comparing them with the Punic palæography, judges them to be Punic, and has interpreted them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians once visited these distant regions.”
Various copies, all professing to be most carefully executed, of this inscription, were sent to antiquarian societies, to museums, to colleges, as well in Europe as in America. A learned Colonel Vallency, of the London Antiquarian Society, undertook to prove that the inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Then it became the fashion to look upon the Danes and the Northmen as the first discoverers of America, or its first colonists, and the Punic was changed into a Runic inscription. The names of Thorfinn and other Norse heroes were plainly read in this wild scrawl upon the Dighton Rock. Learned Danes themselves found no difficulty in deciphering the name at least of the chief hero who conducted the expedition of which this is a memorial, though they confess that the names of his associates are not quite so legible.
“Surely no inscription,” continues Mr Wilson, “ancient or modern, not even the Behistun cuneatics or the trilingual Rosetta Stone, ever received more faithful study. But the most curious matter relating to this written rock is, that after being thus put to the question by learned inquisitors for a hundred and fifty years, it did at length yield a most surprising response. Mr Schoolcraft tested the origin and significance of the Dighton Rock inscription, by submitting a copy of it to Chingwauk, an intelligent Indian chief, familiar with the native system of picture-writing. The result was an interpretation of the whole as the record of an Indian triumph over some rival native tribe, and the conviction on Mr Schoolcraft’s part that the graven rock is simply an example of Indian rock-writing, attributable to the Wabenakies of New England.... And such is the conviction reluctantly formed in the mind of the most enthusiastic believer in the discovery and colonisation of New England by the Northmen.”
We are in danger of losing our way entirely amongst the multitude of interesting subjects which Mr Wilson’s two thick volumes present to us—and present, it must be confessed, in a somewhat confused array. A rather pleasant effect is produced by the bringing together the knowledge of the European archæologist with the observations of the modern traveller; but this leads to a discursive style. In spite of the distinct titles of the several chapters, we never know precisely what we are discussing, and where to look for anything a second time which we may remember to have read. We are now engaged with the wild Indians, and are reminded of such human curiosities as the “Flatheads,” who glory in producing a deformed skull by a distressing pressure on the infant’s head, of which process we have a gilded picture strangely ornamenting our learned volumes. These Flatheads are plainly uninjured in their intellects by this distortion of the skull; so as there is room left for the development of the cerebrum, all seems right; and even when nature keeps the formation of the skull in her own hands, we apprehend this is all that is wanted. These Flatheads contrive to make slaves of the neighbouring round-headed Indians,—who, by the way, are not permitted to flatten the heads of their children, this being jealously guarded as a sign of freedom and aristocratic privileges. They are said to look with contempt on the whites, as bearing in the shape of their heads the hereditary mark of slaves. After contemplating for a time these unprogressive natives, some railroad car comes whizzing past, or the posts of the electric telegraph remind the author of the go-ahead American who is gradually appropriating all the soil to himself. We have a highly characteristic trait mentioned of the new race. Not only does he cut down forests and break up the prairie, but he trades in water-lots—in land still covered with water; appropriates and sells half the soil of a lake which has yet to be reduced to the economical proportion he intends to allow it.
The two races cannot plainly long reside on the same continent; but Mr Wilson brings before us a fact which will probably be new to most English readers. It is almost as much an absorption into the white race as a process of extinction that is now going on amongst the Red Indians. Wherever the whites, whether they are French, or English, or Scotch, have been long settled in the neighbourhood of Indian tribes, there has grown up a mixed race or half-breed. This half-breed, in some instances, remains in the settlement of the whites, but in others it still follows the mode of life of its Indian parent, and a race grows up that is neither European nor Indian. Whole tribes seem now to be constituted of this half-breed, and they are distinguished for their power of endurance and their greater faculty for social organisation. But in proportion as they approximate to the European, the less likelihood is there that they will long remain distinct and separated from the European by their mode of life.
“The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American race will not, I am aware, meet with a ready acceptance, even from those who dwell where its traces are most perceptible; but fully to appreciate its extent, we must endeavour to follow down the course of events by which the continent has been transferred to the descendants of its European colonists. At every fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering into the wild west, the work has necessarily been accomplished by the hardy youths, or the hunters and trappers of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with them their wives or daughters; but where they found a home amongst savage-haunted wilds, they took to themselves wives of the daughters of the soil. To this mingling of blood, even in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian presented little obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux, says, ‘One of the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.’ The fact is unquestionable that all along the widening outskirts of the newer clearings, and wherever an outlying trading or hunting post is established, we find a fringe of half-breed population, marking the transitional border-land which is passing away from its aboriginal claimants.... At all the white settlements near those of the Indians the evidence of admixture is abundant, from the pure half-breed to the slightly-marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the eye, not unlike that of the English gypsy. There they are to be seen, not only as fishers, trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place. In this condition the population of all the frontier settlements exists; if, as new settlers come in, the mixed element disappears, it does so purely by absorption.
“Nor are such traces confined to the frontier settlements. I have recognised the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a Canadian Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of the Legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and mingling in the selectest social circles. And this is what has been going on in every new American settlement for upwards of three centuries, under every diversity of circumstance.”