CHAPTER IV.
AUTOCHTHONES
July 30.—At Hopedale, lat. 55° 30', we come upon an object of first-class interest, worthy of the gravest study,—an original and pre-Adamite man. In two words I give the reader a key to my final conclusions, or impressions, concerning the Esquimaux race.
Original: Shakspeare is a copyist, and England a plagiarism, in comparison with this race. The Esquimaux has done all for himself: he has developed his own arts, adjusted himself by his own wit to the Nature which surrounds him. Heir to no Rome, Greece, Persia, India, he stands there in the sole strength of his native resources, rich only in the traditionary accomplishments of his own race. Cut off equally from the chief bounties of Nature, he has small share in the natural wealth of mankind. When Ceres came to the earth, and blessed it, she forgot him. The grains, the domestic animals, which from the high plateaus of Asia descended with the fathers of history to the great fields of the world, to him came not. The sole domestic animal he uses, the dog, is not the same with that creature as known elsewhere; he has domesticated a wolf, and made a dog for himself.
Not only is he original, but one of the most special of men, related more strictly than almost any other to a particular aspect of Nature. Inseparable from the extreme North, the sea-shore, and the seal, he is himself, as it were, a seal come to feet and hands, and preying upon his more primitive kindred. The cetacean of the land, he is localized, like animals,—not universal, like civilized man. He is no inhabitant of the globe as a whole, but is contained within special poles. His needle does not point north and south; it is commanded by special attractions, and points only from shore to sea and from sea to shore in the arctic zone. Nor is this relation to particular phases of Nature superficial merely, a relation of expedient and convenience; it penetrates, saturates, nay, anticipates and moulds him. Whether he has come to this correspondence by original creation or by slow adjustment, he certainly does now correspond in his whole physical and mental structure to the limited and special surroundings of his life,—the seal itself or the eider-duck not more.
He is pre-Adamite, I said,—and name him thus not as a piece of rhetorical smartness, but in gravest characterization.
The first of human epochs is that when the thoughts, imaginations, beliefs of men become to them objects, on which further thought and action are to be adjusted, on which further thought and action may be based. So long as man is merely responding to outward and physical circumstances, so long he is living by bread alone, and has no history. It is when he begins to respond to himself—to create necessities and supplies out of his own spirit,—to build architectures on foundations and out of materials that exist only in virtue of his own spiritual activity,—to live by bread which grows, not out of the soil, but out of the soul,—it is then, then only, that history begins. This one may be permitted to name the Adamite epoch.
The Esquimaux belongs to that period, more primitive, when man is simply responding to outward Nature, to physical necessities. He invents, but does not create; he adjusts himself to circumstances, but not to ideas; he works cunningly upon materials which he has found, but never on material which owes its existence to the productive force of his own spirit.
In going to look upon the man of this race, you sail, not merely over seas, but over ages, epochs, unknown periods of time,—sail beyond antiquity itself, and issue into the obscure existence that antedates history. Arrived there, you may turn your eye to the historical past of man as to a barely possible future. Palestine and Greece, Moses and Homer, as yet are not. Who shall dare to say that they can be? Surely that were but a wild dream! Expel the impossible fancy from your mind! Go, spear a seal, and be a reasonable being!—Never enthusiast had a dream of the future so unspeakably Utopian as actual history becomes, when seen from the Esquimaux, or pre-Adamite, point of view.
Swiss lakes are raked, Belgian caves spaded and hammered, to find relics of old, pre-historical races. Go to Labrador, and you find the object sought above ground. There he is, preserving all the characters of his extinct congeners,—small in stature, low and smooth in cranium, held utterly in the meshes of Nature, skilled only to meet ingeniously the necessities she imposes, and meeting them rudely, as man ever does till the ideal element comes in: for any fine feeling of even physical wants, any delicacy of taste, any high notion of comfort, is due less to the animal than to the spiritual being of man.