Deane’s capacities and activities were now required for the navy. In 1649 the office of lord high admiral was put into commission. The first commissioners were Edward Popham, Robert Blake and Deane, with the title of generals-at-sea. His command at sea was interrupted in 1651, when as major-general he was brought back to the army and took part in the battle of Worcester. Later he was made president of the commission for the settlement of Scotland, with supreme command of the military and naval forces. At the end of 1652 Deane returned to his command as general-at-sea, where Monck had succeeded Popham, who had died in 1651. In 1653 Deane was with Blake in command at the battle off Portland and later took the most prominent and active part in the refitting of the fleet on the reorganization of the naval service. At the outset of the three days’ battle off the North Foreland, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of June 1653, Deane was killed. His body lay in state at Greenwich and after a public funeral was buried in Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster Abbey, to be disinterred at the Restoration.
See J. Bathurst Deane, The Life of Richard Deane (1870).
DEANE, SILAS (1737-1789), American diplomat, was born in Groton, Connecticut, on the 24th of December 1737. He graduated at Yale in 1758 and in 1761 was admitted to the bar, but instead of practising became a merchant at Wethersfield, Conn. He took an active part in the movements in Connecticut preceding the War of Independence, and from 1774 to 1776 was a delegate from Connecticut to the Continental Congress. Early in 1776 he was sent to France by Congress, in a semi-official capacity, as a secret agent to induce the French government to lend its financial aid to the colonies. Subsequently he became, with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, one of the regularly accredited commissioners to France from Congress. On arriving in Paris, Deane at once opened negotiations with Vergennes and Beaumarchais, securing through the latter the shipment of many vessel loads of arms and munitions of war to America. He also enlisted the services of a number of Continental soldiers of fortune, among whom were Lafayette, Baron Johann De Kalb and Thomas Conway. His carelessness in keeping account of his receipts and expenditures, and the differences between himself and Arthur Lee regarding the contracts with Beaumarchais, eventually led, in November 1777, to his recall to face charges, of which Lee’s complaints formed the basis. Before returning to America, however, he signed on the 6th of February 1778 the treaties of amity and commerce and of alliance which he and the other commissioners had successfully negotiated. In America he was defended by John Jay and John Adams, and after stating his case to Congress was allowed to return to Paris (1781) to settle his affairs. Differences with various French officials led to his retirement to Holland, where he remained until after the treaty of peace had been signed, when he settled in England. The publication of some “intercepted” letters in Rivington’s Royal Gazette in New York (1781), in which Deane declared his belief that the struggle for independence was hopeless and counselled a return to British allegiance, aroused such animosity against him in America that for some years he remained in England. He died on shipboard in Deal harbour, England, on the 23rd of September 1789 after having embarked for America on a Boston packet. No evidence of his dishonesty was ever discovered, and Congress recognized the validity of his claims by voting $37,000 to his heirs in 1842. He published his defence in An Address to the Free and Independent Citizens of the United States of North America (Hartford, Conn., and London, 1784).
The Correspondence of Silas Deane was published in the Connecticut Historical Society’s Collections, vol. ii.; and The Deane Papers, in 5 vols., in the New York Historical Society’s Collections (1887-1890). See also Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History, vol. vii. chap, i., and Wharton’s Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (6 vols., Washington, 1889).
DEATH, the permanent cessation of the vital functions in the bodies of animals and plants, the end of life or act of dying. The word is the English representative of the substantive common to Teutonic languages, as “dead” is of the adjective, and “die” of the verb; the ultimate origin is the pre-Teutonic verbal stem dau-; cf. Ger Tod, Dutch dood, Swed. and Dan. död.
For the scientific aspects of the processes involved in life and its cessation see [Biology], [Physiology], [Pathology], and allied articles; and for the consideration of the prolongation of life see [Longevity]. Here it is only necessary to deal with the more primitive views of death and with certain legal aspects.
Ethnology.—To the savage, death from natural causes is inexplicable. At all times and in all lands, if he reflects upon death at all, he fails to understand it as a natural phenomenon; nor in its presence is he awed or curious. Man in a primitive state has for his dead an almost animal indifference. The researches of archaeologists prove that Quaternary Man cared little what became of his fellow-creature’s body. And this lack of interest is found to-day as a general characteristic of savages. The Goajiros of Venezuela bury their dead, they confess, simply to get rid of them. The Galibis of Guiana, when asked the meaning of their curious funeral ceremony, which consists in dancing on the grave, replied that they did it to stamp down the earth. Fuegians, Bushmen, Veddahs, show the same lack of concern and interest in the memory of the dead. Even the Eskimos, conspicuous as they are for their intelligence and sociability, save themselves the trouble of caring for their sick and old by walling them up and leaving them to die in a lonely hut; the Chukches stone or strangle them to death; some Indian tribes give them over to tigers, and the Battas of Sumatra eat them. This indifference is not dictated by any realization that death means annihilation of the personality. The savage conception of a future state is one that involves no real break in the continuity of life as he leads it. If a man dies without being wounded he is considered to be the victim of the sorcerers and the evil spirits with which they consort. Throughout Africa the death of anyone is ascribed to the magicians of some hostile tribe or to the malicious act of a neighbour. A culprit is easily discovered either by an appeal to a local diviner or in torturing some one into confession. In Australia it is the same. Mr Andrew Lang says that “whenever a native dies, no matter how evident it may be that death has been the result of natural causes, it is at once set down that the defunct was bewitched.” The Bechuanas and all Kaffir tribes believe that death, even at an advanced age, if not from hunger or violence, is due to witchcraft, and blood is required to expiate or avenge it. Similar beliefs are found among the Papuans, and among the Indians of both Americas. The history of witchcraft in Europe and its attendant horrors, so vividly painted in Lecky’s Rise of Rationalism, are but echoes of this universal refusal of savage man to accept death as the natural end of life. Even to-day the ignorant peasantry of many European countries, Russia, Galicia and elsewhere, believe that all disease is the work of demons, and that medicinal herbs owe their curative properties to their being the materialized forms of benevolent spirits.
This animistic tendency is a marked characteristic of primitive Man in every land. The savage explains the processes of inanimate nature by assuming that living beings or spirits, possessed of capacities similar to his own, are within the inanimate object. The growth of a tree, the spark struck from a flint, the devastating floods of a river, mean to him the natural actions of beings within the tree, stone or water. And thus too he explains to himself the phenomena of human life, believing that each man has within him a mannikin or animal which dictates his actions in life. This miniature man is the savage’s conception of the soul; sleep and trance being regarded as the temporary, death as the permanent, absence of the soul. Each individual is thus deemed to have a dual existence. This “subliminal” self (in modern terminology) has many forms. The Hurons thought that it possessed head, body, arms and legs, in fact that it was an exact miniature of a man. The Nootkas of British Columbia regard it as a tiny man, living in the crown of the head. So long as it stands erect, its possessor is well, but if it falls from its position the misfortunes of ill-health and madness at once assail him. The ancient Egyptian believed in the soul or “double.” The inhabitants of Nias, an island to the west of Sumatra, have the strange belief that to everyone before birth is given the choice of a long and heavy or short and light soul (a parallel belief may be found in early Greek philosophy), and his choice determines the length of life. Sometimes the soul is conceived as a bird. The Bororos of Brazil fancy that in that shape the soul of a sleeper passes out of the body during night-time, returning to him at his awakening. The Bella Coola Indians say the soul is a bird enclosed in an egg and lives in the nape of the neck. If the shell bursts and the soul flies away, the man must die. If however the bird flies away, egg and all, then he faints or loses his reason. A popular superstition in Bohemia assumes that the soul in the shape of a white bird leaves the body by way of the mouth. Among the Battas of Sumatra rice or grain is sprinkled on the head of a man who returns from a dangerous enterprise, and in the latter case the grains are called padiruma tondi, “means to make the soul (tondi) stay at home.” In Java the new-born babe is placed in a hen-coop, and the mother makes a clucking noise, as if she were a hen, to attract the child’s soul. It is regarded by many savage peoples as highly dangerous to arouse a sleeper suddenly, as his soul may not have time to return. Still more dangerous is it to move a sleeper, for the soul on its return might not be able to find the body. Flies and butterflies are forms which the souls are believed by some races to take, and the Esthonians of the island of Oesel think that the gusts of wind which whirl tornado-like through the roads are the souls of old women seeking what they can find.