The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies Part 1

The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies.

by Robert Gordon Latham.

PREFACE.

The following pages represent a Course of Six Lectures delivered at the Royal Inst.i.tution, Manchester, in the months of February and March of the present year; the matter being now laid before the public in a somewhat fuller and more systematic form than was compatible with the original delivery.

ETHNOLOGY OF THE BRITISH DEPENDENCIES.

CHAPTER I.

DEPENDENCIES IN EUROPE.

HELIGOLAND AND THE FRISIANS.--GIBRALTAR AND THE SPANISH STOCK.--MALTA.--THE IONIAN ISLANDS.--THE CHANNEL ISLANDS.

_Heligoland._--We learn from a pa.s.sage in the _Germania_ of Tacitus, that certain tribes agreed with each other in the worship of a G.o.ddess who was revered as _Earth the Mother_; that a sacred grove, in a sacred island, was dedicated to her; and that, in that grove, there stood a holy wagon, covered with a pall, and touched by the priest only. The G.o.ddess herself was drawn by heifers; and as long as she vouchsafed her presence among men, there was joy, and feasts, and hospitality; and peace amongst otherwise fierce tribes instead of war and violence. After a time, however, the G.o.ddess withdrew herself to her secret temple--satiated with the converse of mankind; and then the wagon, the pall, and the deity herself were bathed in the holy lake. The administrant slaves were sucked up by its waters. There was terror and there was ignorance; the reality being revealed to those alone who thus suddenly pa.s.sed from life to death.

Now we know, by name at least, five of the tribes who are thus connected by a common worship--mysterious and obscure as it is. They are the Reudigni, the Aviones, the Eudoses, the Suardones, and the Nuithones.

Two others we know by something more than name--the Varini and the Langobardi.

The eighth is our own parent stock--the _Angli_.

Such is one of the earliest notices of the old creed of our German forefathers; and, fragmentary and indefinite as it is, it is one of the fullest which has reached us. I subjoin the original text, premising that, instead of _Herthum_, certain MSS. read _Nerthum_.

"----Langobardos paucitas n.o.bilitat: plurimis ac valentissimis nationibus cincti, non per obsequium sed prliis et peric.l.i.tando tuti sunt. Reudigni deinde, et Aviones, et _Angli_, et Varini, et Eudoses, et Suardones, et Nuithones, fluminibus aut silvis muniuntur: nec quidquam notabile in singulis, nisi quod in commune Herthum, id est, Terram matrem colunt, eamque intervenire rebus hominum, invehi populis, arbitrantur. Est in insula Oceani Castum nemus, dicatumque in eo vehiculum, veste contectum, attingere uni sacerdoti concessum. Is adesse penetrali deam intelligit, vectamque bobus feminis multa c.u.m veneratione prosequitur. Laeti tunc dies, festa loca, quaec.u.mque adventu hospitioque dignatur. Non bella ineunt, non arma sumunt, clausum omne ferrum; pax et quies tunc tantum nota, tunc tantum amata, donec idem sacerdos satiatam conversatione mortalium deam templo reddat; mox vehiculum et vestes, et, si credere velis, numen ipsum secreto lacu abluitur. Servi ministrant, quos statim idem lacus haurit. Arca.n.u.s hinc terror, sanctaque ignorantia, quid sit id, quod tantum perituri vident."--"De Moribus Germanorum," 40.

What connects the pa.s.sage with the ethnology of Heligoland? Heligoland is, probably, the _island of the Holy Grove_. Its present name indicates this--_the holy land_. Its position in the main sea, or _Ocean_, does the same. So does its vicinity to the country of Germans.

At the same time it must not be concealed from the reader that the Isle of Rugen, off the coast of Pomerania, has its claims. It is an island--but not an island of the _Ocean_. It is full of religious remains--but those remains are _Slavonic_ rather than _German_.

I believe, for my own part, that the seat of the worship of _Earth the Mother_, was the island which we are now considering.

In respect to its inhabitants, it must serve as a slight text for a long commentary. A population of about two thousand fishers; characterized, like the ancient Venetians, by an utter absence of horses, mules, ponies, a.s.ses, carts, wagons, or any of the ordinary applications of animal power to the purposes of locomotion, confined to a small rock, and but little interrupted with foreign elements, is, if considered in respect to itself alone, no great subject for either the ethnologist or the geographer. But what if its relations to the population of the continent be remarkable? What if the source of its population be other than that which, from the occupants of the nearest portion of the continent, we are prepared to expect? In this case, the narrow area of an isolated rock a.s.sumes an importance which its magnitude would never have created.

The nearest part of the opposite continent is German--Cuxhaven, Bremen, and Hamburg, being all German towns. And what the towns are the country is also--or nearly so. It is German--which Heligoland is _not_.

The Heligolanders are no Germans, but _Frisians_. I have lying before me the Heligoland version of _G.o.d save the Queen_. A Dutchman would understand this, easier than a Low German, a Low German easier than an Englishman, and (I _think_) an Englishman easier than a German of Bavaria. The same applies to another sample of the Heligoland muse--_the contented Heligolander's wife_ (_Dii tofreden Hjelgelunnerin_), a pretty little song in Hettema's collection of Frisian poems; with which, however, the native literature ends. There is plenty of Frisian verse in general; but little enough of the particular Frisian of Heligoland.

A difference like that between the Frisians of Heligoland and the Germans of Hanover, is always suggestive of an ethnological alternative; since it is a general rule, supported both by induction and common sense, that, except under certain modifying circ.u.mstances, islands derive their inhabitants from the nearest part of the nearest continent.

When, however, the populations differ, one of two views has to be taken.

Either some more distant point than the one which geographical proximity suggests has supplied the original occupants, or a change has taken place on the part of one or both of the populations since the period of the original migration.

Which has been the case here? The latter. The present Germans of the coast between the Elbe and Weser are not the Germans who peopled Heligoland, nor yet the descendants of them. Allied to them they are; inasmuch as Germany is a wide country, and German a comprehensive term; but they are not the same. The two peoples, though like, are different.

Of what sort, then, were the men and women that the present Germans of the Oldenburg and Hanoverian coast have displaced and superseded? Let us investigate. Whoever rises from the perusal of those numerous notices of the ancient Germans which we find in the cla.s.sical writers, to the usual tour of Rhenish Germany, will find a notable contrast between the natives of that region as they _were_ and as they _are_. His mind may be full of their _golden_ hair, expecting to find it _flaxen_ at least.

Blue and grey eyes, too, he will expect to preponderate over the black and hazel. This is what he will have read about, and what he will _not_ find--at least along the routine lines of travel. As little will there be of ma.s.sive muscularity in the limbs, and height in the stature. Has the type changed, or have the old records been inaccurate? Has the wrong part of Germany been described? or has the contrast between the Goth and the Italian engendered an exaggeration of the differences? It is no part of the present treatise to enter upon this question. It is enough to indicate the difference between the actual German of the greater part of Germany in respect to the colour of his hair, eyes, and skin, and the epithets of the cla.s.sical writers.

But all is not bare from Dan to Beersheba. The German of the old Germanic type is to be found if sought for. His locality, however, is away from the more frequented parts of his country. Still it is the part which Tacitus knew best, and which he more especially described. This is the parts on the Lower rather than the Upper Rhine; and it is the parts about the Ems and Weser rather than those of the Rhine at all--sacred as is this latter stream to the patriotism of the Prussian and Suabian. It is Lower rather than Upper Germany, Holland rather than Germany at all, and Friesland rather than any of the other Dutch provinces. It is Westphalia, and Oldenburg, as much, perhaps, as Friesland. The tract thus identified extends far into the Cimbric Peninsula,--so that the Jutlander, though a Dane in tongue, is a Low German in appearance.

The preceding observations are by no means the present writer's, who has no wish to be responsible for the apparent paradox that the _Germans in Germany are not Germanic_. It is little more than a repet.i.tion of one of Prichard's,[1] in which he is supported by both Niebuhr and the Chevalier Bunsen. The former expressly states that the yellow or red hair, blue eyes, and light complexion has now become uncommon, whilst the latter has "often looked in vain for the auburn or golden locks and the light cerulean eyes of the old Germans, and never verified the picture given by the ancients of his countrymen, till he visited Scandinavia; there he found himself surrounded by the Germans of Tacitus."

For _Scandinavia_, I would simply subst.i.tute the _fen districts of Friesland, Oldenburg, Hanover, and Holstein_--all of them the old area of the Frisian.

Such is the physiognomy. What are the other peculiarities of the Frisian? His language, his distribution, his history.

The Frisian of Friesland, is not the Dutch of Holland; nor yet a mere provincial dialect of it. Instead of the infinitive moods and plural numbers ending in -_n_ as in Holland, the former end in -_a_, the latter in -_ar_. And so they did when the language was first reduced to writing,--which it has been for nearly a thousand years. So they did when the laws of the Old Frisian republic were composed, and when the so-called _Old_ Frisian was the language of the country. So they did in the sixteenth century, when the popular poet, Gysbert j.a.picx, wrote in the _Middle_ Frisian; and so they do now--when, under the auspices of Postumus and Hettema, we have Frisian translations of Shakespeare's "As You Like it," "Julius Caesar," and "Cymbeline."

Now the oldest Frisian is older than the oldest Dutch; in other words, of the two languages it was the former which was first reduced to writing. Yet the doctrine that it is the mother-tongue of the Dutch, is as inaccurate as the opposite notion of its being a mere provincial dialect. I state this, because I doubt whether the Dutch forms in -_n_, could well be evolved out of the Frisian in -_r_, or -_a_. The -_n_ belongs to the older form,--which at one time was common to both languages, but which in the Frisian became omitted as early as the tenth century; whereas, in the Dutch, it remains up to the present day.

If the Frisian differ from the Dutch, it differs still more from the proper Low German dialects of Westphalia, Oldenburg, and Holstein; all of which have the differential characteristics of the Dutch in a greater degree than the Dutch itself.

The closest likeness to the Frisian has ceased to exist as a language.

It has disappeared on the Continent. It has changed in the island which adopted it. That island is Great Britain.

No existing nation, as tested by its language, is so near the Angle of England as the Frisian of Friesland. This, to the Englishman, is the great element of its interest.

The history of the Frisian Germans must begin with their present distribution. They const.i.tute the present agricultural population of the province of Friesland; so that if Dutch be the language of the towns, it is Frisian which we find in the villages and lone farm-houses. And this is the case with that remarkable series of islands which runs like a row of breakwaters from the Helder to the Weser, and serves as a front to the continent behind them. Such are Ameland, Tersch.e.l.ling, w.a.n.geroog, and the others--each with its dialect or sub-dialect.

But beyond this, the continuity of the range of language is broken.

Frisian is _not_ the present dialect of Groningen. Nor yet of Oldenburg generally--though in one or two of the fenniest villages of that duchy a remnant of it still continues to be spoken; and is known to philologists and antiquarians as the _Saterland_ dialect.

It was spoken in parts of East Friesland as late as the middle of the last century--but only in parts; the Low German, or Platt-Deutsch, being the current tongue of the districts around.

It is spoken--as already stated--in Heligoland.

And, lastly, it is spoken in an isolated locality as far north as the Duchy of Sleswick, in the neighbourhood of Husum and Bredsted.

It was these Frisians of Sleswick who alone, during the late struggle of Denmark against Germany, looked upon the contest with the same indifference as the frogs viewed the battles of the oxen. They were not Germans to favour the aggressors from the South, nor Danes to feel the patriotism of the Northmen. They were neither one nor the other--simply Frisians, members of an isolated and disconnected brotherhood.

The epithet _free_ originated with the Frisians of Friesland Proper, and it has adhered to them. With their language they have preserved many of their old laws and privileges, and from first to last, have always contrived that the authority of the sovereigns of the Netherlands should sit lightly on them.

Nevertheless, they are a broken and disjointed population; inasmuch, as the natural inference from their present distribution is the doctrine that, at some earlier period, they were spread over the whole of the sea-coast from Holland to Jutland, in other words, that they were the oldest inhabitants of Friesland, Oldenburg, Lower Hanover, and Holstein.

If so, they must have been the _Frisii_ of Tacitus. No one doubts this.

They must also have been the _Chauci_ of that writer, the German form of whose names, as we know from the oldest Anglo-Saxon poems, was _Hocing_.

This is not so universally admitted; nevertheless, it is difficult to say who the Chauci were if they were not Frisians, or why we find Frisians to the north of the Elbe, unless the population was at one time continuous.

When was this continuity disturbed? From the earliest times the sea-coast of Germany seems to have been Frisian, and from the earliest times the tribes of the interior seem to have moved from the inland country towards the sea. Their faces were turned towards Britain; or, if not towards Britain, towards France, or the Baltic. I believe, then, that as early as 100 B.C. the displacement of some of the occupants of the Frisian area had begun; this being an inference from the statement of Caesar, that the Batavians of Holland were, in his own time, considered to have been an immigrant population. From these Batavians have come the present Dutch, and as the present Dutch differ from the Frisians of A.D. 1851, so did their respective great ancestors in B.C.

100--there, or thereabouts. But the encroachment of the Dutch upon the Frisian was but slow. The map tells us this. Just as in some parts of Great Britain we have _Shiptons_ and _Charltons_, whereas in others the form is _Skipton_ and _Carlton_; just as in Scotland they talk of the _kirk_, and in England of the _church_;[2] and just as such differences are explained by the difference of dialect on the part of the original occupants, so do we see in Holland that certain places have the names in a Dutch, and others in a Frisian form. The Dutch compounds of _man_ are like the English, and end in -_n_. The Frisians never end so. They drop the consonant, and end in -_a_; as _Hettema_, _Halberts-ma_, &c.