See Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1905); also Japan: Army.
BUSHIRE, or Bander Bushire, a town of Persia, on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf, in 28° 59′ N., 50° 49′ E. The name is pronounced Boosheer, and not Bew-shire, or Bus-hire; modern Persians write it Bushehr and, yet more incorrectly, Abushehr, and translate it as "father of the city," but it is most probably a contraction of Bokht-ardashir, the name given to the place by the first Sassanian monarch in the 3rd century. In a similar way Riv-ardashir, a few miles south of Bushire, has become Rishire (Reesheer). In the first half of the 18th century, when Bushire was an unimportant fishing village, it was selected by Nadir Shah as the southern port of Persia and dockyard of the navy which he aspired to create in the Persian Gulf, and the British commercial factory of the East India Company, established at Gombrun, the modern Bander Abbasi, was transferred to it in 1759. At the beginning of the 19th century it had a population of 6000 to 8000, and it is now the most important port in the Persian Gulf, with a population of about 25,000. It used to be under the government of Fars, but is (since about 1892) the seat of the governor of the Persian Gulf ports, who is responsible to the central government, and has under his jurisdiction the principal ports of the Gulf and their dependencies. The town, which is of a triangular form, occupies the northern extremity of a peninsula 11 m. long and 4 broad, and is encircled by the sea on all sides except the south. It is fortified on the land side by a wall with 12 round towers. The houses being mostly built of a white conglomerate stone of shells and coral which forms the peninsula, gives the city when viewed from a distance a clean and handsome appearance, but on closer inspection the streets are found to be very narrow, irregular, ill-paved and filthy. Almost the only decent buildings are the governor's palace, the British residency and the houses of some well-to-do merchants. The sea immediately east of the town has a considerable depth, but its navigation is impeded by sand-banks and a bar north and west of the town, which can be passed only by vessels drawing not more than 9 ft. of water, except at spring tides, when there is a rise of from 8 to 10 ft. Vessels drawing more than 9 ft. must anchor in the roads miles away to the west. The climate is very hot in the summer months and unhealthy. The water is very bad, and that fit for drinking requires to be brought from wells distant 1½ to 3 m. from the city wall.
Bushire carries on a considerable trade, particularly with India, Java and Arabia. Its principal imports are cotton and woollen goods, yarn, metals, sugar, coffee, tea, spices, cashmere shawls, &c., and its principal exports opium, wool, carpets, horses, grain, dyes and gums, tobacco, rosewater, &c. The importance of Bushire has much increased since about 1862. It is now not only the headquarters of the English naval squadron in the Persian Gulf, and the land terminus of the Indo-European telegraph, but it also forms the chief station in the Gulf of the British Indian Steam Navigation Company, which runs its vessels weekly between Bombay and Basra. Consulates of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Turkey and several European mercantile houses are established at Bushire, and
notwithstanding the drawbacks of bad roads to the interior, insufficient and precarious means of transport, and want of security, the annual value of the Bushire trade since 1890 averaged about £1,500,000 (one-third being for exports, two-thirds for imports), and over two-thirds of this was British. Of the 278,000 tons of shipping which entered the port in 1905, 244,000 were British.
During the war with Persia (1856-57) Bushire surrendered to a British force and remained in British occupation for some months. At Rishire, some miles south of Bushire and near the summer quarters of the British resident and the British telegraph buildings, there are extensive ruins among which bricks with cuneiform inscriptions have been found, showing that the place was a very old Elamite settlement.
(A. H.-S.)
BUSHMEN, or Bosjesmans, a people of South Africa, so named by the British and Dutch colonists of the Cape. They often call themselves Saan [Sing. Sá], but this appears to be the Hottentot name. If they have a national name it is Khuai, probably "small man," the title of one group. This Khuai has, however, been translated as the Bushman word for tablier égyptien (see below), adopted as the racial name because that malformation is one of their physical characteristics. The Kaffirs call them Abatwa, the Bechuana Masarwa (Maseroa). There is little reason to doubt that they constitute the aboriginal element of the population of South Africa, and indications of their former presence have been found as far north at least as the Nyasa and Tanganyika basins. "It would seem," writes Sir H.H. Johnston (British Central Africa, p. 52), "as if the earliest known race of man inhabiting what is now British Central Africa was akin to the Bushman-Hottentot type of negro. Rounded stones with a hole through the centre, similar to those which are used by the Bushmen in the south for weighting their digging-sticks (the graaf stock of the Boers), have been found at the south end of Lake Tanganyika." The dirty yellow colour of the Bushmen, their slightly slanting eyes and prominent cheek-bones had induced early anthropologists to dwell on their resemblance to the Mongolian races. This similarity has been now recognized as quite superficial. More recently a connexion has been traced between the Bushmen and the Pygmy peoples inhabiting the forests of Central Africa. Though the matter cannot be regarded as definitely settled, the latest researches rather tend to discredit this view. In fact it would appear that the two peoples have little in common save diminutive proportions and a nomadic and predatory form of existence. Owing to the discovery of steatopygous figurines in Egyptian graves, a theory has been advanced that the Egyptians of the early dynasties were of the same primitive pygmy negroid stock as the Bushmen. But this is highly speculative. The physical characteristics of Egyptian skulls have nothing of the Bushman in them. Of the primitive pygmy negroid stock the Hottentots (q.v.), once considered the parent family, are now regarded as an offshoot of mixed Bantu-Bushman blood from the main Bushman race.
It seems probable that the Bushmen must be regarded as having extended considerably to the north of the area occupied by them within the memory of white men. Evidence has been produced of the presence of a belated Hottentot or Hottentot-Bushman group as far north as the district between Kilimanjaro and Victoria Nyanza. They were probably driven south by the Bantu tribes, who eventually outflanked them and confined them to the less fertile tracts of country. Before the arrival of Europeans in South Africa the Bushman race appears to have been, what it so essentially is to-day, a nomadic race living in widely scattered groups. The area in which the Bushmen are now found sporadically may be defined as extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert to near Lake Ngami, and thence north-westward to the districts about the Ovambo river north of Damaraland. In short, they have been driven by European and Kaffir encroachments into the most barren regions of South Africa. A few remain in the more inaccessible parts of the Drakensberg range about the sources of the Vaal. Only in one or two districts are they found in large numbers, chiefly in Great Bushman Land towards the Orange river. A regularly planned and wholesale destruction of the Bushmen on the borders of Cape Colony in the earlier years of European occupation reduced their numbers to a great extent; but this cruel hunting of the Bushmen has ceased. In retaliation the Bushmen were long the scourge of the farms on the outer borders of the colony, making raids on the cattle and driving them off in large numbers. On the western side of the deserts they are generally at enmity with the Koranna Hottentots, but on the eastern border of the Kalahari they have to some extent fraternized with the earliest Bechuana migrants. Their language, which exists in several dialects, has in common with Hottentot, but to a greater degree, the peculiar sounds known as "clicks." The Hottentot language is more agglutinative, the Bushman more monosyllabic; the former recognizes a gender in names, the latter does not; the Hottentots form the plural by a suffix, the Bushmen by repetition of the name; the former count up to twenty, the latter can only number two, all above that being "many." F.C.Selous records that Koranna Hottentots were able to converse fluently with the Bushmen of Bechuanaland.
The most striking feature of the Bushman's physique is shortness of stature. Gustav Fritsch in 1863-1866 found the average height of six grown men to be 4 ft. 9 in. Earlier, but less trustworthy, measurements make them still shorter. Among 150 measured by Sir John Barrow during the first British occupation of Cape Colony the tallest man was 4 ft. 9 in., the tallest woman 4 ft. 4 in. The Bushmen living in Bechuanaland measured by Selous in the last quarter of the 19th century were, however, found to be of nearly average height. Few persons were below 5 ft.; 5 ft. 4 in. was common, and individuals of even 6 ft. were not unknown. No great difference in height appears to exist between men and women. Fritsch's average from five Bushman women was one-sixth of an inch more than for the men. The Bushmen, as already stated, are of a dirty yellow colour, and of generally unattractive countenance. The skull is long and low, the cheek-bones large and prominent. The eyes are deeply set and crafty in expression. The nose is small and depressed, the mouth wide with moderately everted lips, and the jaws project. The teeth are not like badly cut ivory, as in Bantu, but regular and of a mother-of-pearl appearance. In general build the Bushman is slim and lean almost to emaciation. Even the children show little of the round outlines of youth. The amount of fat under the skin in both sexes is remarkably small; hence the skin is as dry as leather and falls into strong folds around the stomach and at the joints. The fetor of the skin, so characteristic of the negro, is not found in the Bushman. The hair is weak in growth, in age it becomes grey, but baldness is rare. Bushmen have little body-hair and that of a weak stubbly nature, and none of the fine down usual on most skins. On the face there is usually only a scanty moustache. A hollowed back and protruding stomach are frequent characteristics of their figure, but many of them are well proportioned, all being active and capable of enduring great privations and fatigue. Considerable steatopygy often exists among the women, who share with the Hottentot women the extraordinary prolongation of the nymphae which is often called "the Hottentot apron" or tablier. Northward the Bushmen appear to improve both in general condition and in stature, probably owing to a tinge of Bantu blood. The Bushman's clothing is scanty: a triangular piece of skin, passed between the legs and fastened round the waist with a string, is often all that is worn. Many men, however, and nearly all the women, wear the kaross, a kind of pelisse of skins sewn together, which is used at night as a wrap. The bodies of both sexes are smeared with a native ointment, buchu, which, aided by accretions of dust and dirt, soon forms a coating like a rind. Men and women often wear sandals of hide or plaited bast. They are fond of ornament, and decorate the arms, neck and legs with beads, iron or copper rings, teeth, hoofs, horns and shells, while they stick feathers or hares' tails in the hair. The women sometimes stain their faces with red pigment. They carry tobacco in goats' horns or in the shell of a land tortoise, while boxes of ointment
or amulets are hung round neck or waist. A jackal's tail mounted on a stick serves the double purpose of fan and handkerchief. For dwellings in the plains they have low huts formed of reed mats, or occupy a hole in the earth; in the mountain districts they make a shelter among the rocks by hanging mats on the windward side. Of household utensils they have none, except ostrich eggs, in which they carry water, and occasionally rough pots. For cooking his food the Bushman needs nothing but fire, which he obtains by rubbing hard and soft wood together.