At the same time their sense of pecuniary obligation would seem not to extend over long periods. Of the missionaries in winter they buy supplies on credit, but show little remembrance of the debt when summer comes. All must be immediate with them; neither their thought nor their moral sense can carry far; they are equally improvident for the future and forgetful of the past. The mere Nature-man acts only as Nature and her necessities press upon him; thought and memory are with him the offspring of sensation; his brain is but the feminine spouse of his stomach and blood,—receptive and respondent, rather than virile and original.
Partly, however, this seeming forgetfulness is susceptible of a different explanation. They evidently feel that the mission-house owes them a living. They make gardens, go to church and save their souls, for the missionaries; it is but fair that they should be fed at a pinch in return.
This remark may seem a sneer. Not so; my word for it. I went to Hopedale to study this race, with no wish but to find in them capabilities of spiritual growth, and with no resolve but to see the fact, whatever it should be, not with wishes, but with eyes. And, pointedly against my desire, I saw this,—that the religion of the Esquimaux is, nine parts in ten at least, a matter of personal relation between him and the missionaries. He goes to church as the dog follows his master,—expecting a bone and hoping for a pat in return. He comes promptly at a whistle (the chapel-bell); his docility and decorum are unimpeachable; he does what is expected of him with a pleased wag of the tail; but it is still, it is always, the dog and his master.
The pre-Adamite man is not distinctively religious; for religion implies ideas, in the blood at least, if not in the brain, as imagination, if not as thought; and ideas are to him wanting, are impossible. His whole being is summed and concluded in a relationship to the external, the tangible, to things or persons; and his relation to persons goes beyond animal instinct and the sense of physical want only upon the condition that it shall cling inseparably to them. The spiritual instincts of humanity are in him also, but obscure, utterly obscure, not having attained to a circulation in the blood, much less to intellectual liberation. Obscure they are, fixed, in the bone, locked up in phosphate of lime. Ideas touch them only as ideas lose their own shape and hide themselves under physical forms.
Will he outgrow himself? Will he become post-Adamite, a man to whom ideas are realities? I desire to say yes, and cannot. Again and again, in chapel and elsewhere, I stood before a group, and questioned, questioned their faces, to find there some prophecy of future growth. And again and again these faces, with their heavy content, with their dog-docility, with their expression of utter limitation, against which nothing in them struggled, said to me,—"Your quest is vain; we are once and forever Esquimaux." Had they been happy, had they been unhappy, I had hoped for them. They were neither: they were contented. A half-animal, African exuberance, token of a spirit obscure indeed, but rich and effervescent, would open for them a future. One sign of dim inward struggle and pain, as if the spirit resented his imprisonment, would do the same. Both were wanting. They ruminate; life is the cud they chew.
The Esquimaux are celebrated as gluttons. This, however, is but one half the fact. They can eat, they can also fast, indefinitely. For a week they gorge themselves without exercise, and have no indigestion; for a week, exercising vigorously, they live on air, frozen air, too, and experience no exhaustion. Last winter half a dozen appeared at Square-Island Harbor, sent out their trained dogs, drove in a herd of deer, and killed thirteen. They immediately encamped, gathered fuel, made fires, began to cook and eat,—ate themselves asleep; then waked to cook, eat, and sleep again, until the thirteenth deer had vanished. Thereupon they decamped, to travel probably hundreds of miles, and endure days on days of severe labor, before tasting, or more than tasting, food again.
The same explanation serves. These physical capabilities, not to be attained by the post-Adamite man, belong to the primitive races, as to hawks, gulls, and beasts of prey. The stomach of the Esquimaux is his cellar, as that of the camel is a cistern, wherein he lays up stores.
August 4.—This day we sailed away from Hopedale, heading homeward,—leaving behind a race of men who were, to me a problem to be solved, if possible. All my impressions of them are summed in the epithet, often repeated, pre-Adamite. In applying, this, I affirm nothing respecting their physical origin. All that is to me an open question, to be closed when I have more light than now. It may be, that, as Mr. Agassiz maintains, they were created originally just as they are. For this hypothesis much may be said, and it may be freely confessed that in observing them I felt myself pressed somewhat toward the acceptance of it as a definite conclusion. It may be that they have become what they are by slow modification of a type common to all races,—that, with another parentage, they have been made by adoption children of the icy North, whose breath has chilled in their souls the deeper powers of man's being. This it will be impossible for me to deny until I have investigated more deeply the influence of physical Nature upon man, and learned more precisely to what degree the traditions of a people, constituting at length a definite social atmosphere, may come to penetrate and shape their individual being. I do not pronounce; I wait and keep the eyes open. Doubtless they are God's children; and knowing this, one need not be fretfully impatient, even though vigilantly earnest, to know the rest.
In naming them pre-Adamite I mean two things.
First, that they have stopped short of ideas, that is, of the point where human history begins. They belong, not to spiritual or human, but to outward and physical Nature. There they are a great success.