The First Landing on Wrangel Island Part 3

[Ill.u.s.tration: _No. 4._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _No. 5._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _No. 6._]

In none of the skulls of the collection is there observable the heavy superciliary ridges alleged to be common in lower races, but which exist in many of the best-formed European crania--shall we say as anomalies or as individual variations? Nor is the convexity of the squamo-parietal suture such as characterizes the low-typed cranium of the chimpanzee or the Mound Builder. On the contrary, the orbits are cleanly made and the suture is well curved. Besides, a low degree of intelligence is not shown by observing the index of the foramen magnum, which is about the same as that found in European crania; and the same may be said of the internal capacity of the cranium. To ill.u.s.trate the latter remark is appended a tabular statement made up from Welcker, Broca, Aitken and Meigs:

Cubic centimeters.

Australian 1,228 Polynesian 1,230 Hottentot 1,230 Mexican 1,296 Malay 1,328 Ancient Peruvian 1,361 French 1,403 to 1,461 German 1,448 English 1,572

An average of the Eskimo skull, some of which measure as much as 1,650 and 1,715 c.c., will show the brain capacity to be the same as that of the French or of the Germans. None of them, however, approaches the anomalous capacities of two Indian skulls on exhibition at the Army Medical Museum, one of which shows 1,785 c.c., and the other the unprecedented measurement of 1,920 c.c.

If the foregoing means for estimating the mental grasp and capacity for improvement be correct, then we must accord to the most northern nation of the globe a fair degree of brain energy--potential though it be.

Aside from the mere physical methods of determining the degree of intelligence, it is urged by some writers, among them the historian Robertson, that tact in commerce and correct ideas of property are evidence of a considerable progress toward civilization. The natural inference from this is that they are tests of intellectual power, since mind is a combination of all the actual and possible states of consciousness of the organism, and an examination of the Eskimo system of trade draws its own conclusion. Their fondness for trade has been known for a long time, as well as the extended range of their commercial intercourse. They trade with the Indians, with the fur companies, the whalers and among themselves across Bering straits. Many of them are veritable Shylocks, having a through comprehension of the axiom in political economy regarding the regulation of the price of a thing by the demand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _No. 7._]

THE MORAL SENSE AND THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT.

With the apt.i.tudes and instincts of our common humanity Eskimo morals, as manifested in truth, right and virtue, also admit of remark. Except where these people have had the bad example of the white man, whose vices they have imitated, not on account of defective moral nature, but because they saw few or no virtues, they are models of truthfulness and honesty. In fact their virtues in this respect are something phenomenal.

The same cannot be said, however, for their s.e.xual morals, which, as a rule, are the contrary of good. Even a short stay among the hyperboreans causes one to smile at Lord Kames's "frigidity of the North Americans,"

and at the fallacy of Herder who says, "the blood of man near the pole circulates but slowly, the heart beats but languidly; consequently the married live chastely, the women almost require compulsion to take upon them the troubles of a married life," etc. Nearly the same idea expressed by Montesquieu, and repeated by Byron in "happy the nations of the moral North," are statements so at variance with our experience that this fact must alone excuse a reference to the subject. So far are they from applying to the people in question that it is only necessary to mention, without going into detail, that the women are freely offered to strangers by way of hospitality, showing a decided preference for white men, whom they believe to beget better offspring than their own men. In this regard one is soon convinced that salacious and prurient tastes are not the exclusive privilege of people living outside of the Arctic Circle; and observation favors the belief in the existence of pederasty among Eskimo, if one may be allowed to judge from circ.u.mstances, which it is not necessary to particularize, and from a word in their language signifying the act.

Since morality is the last virtue acquired by man and the first one he is likely to lose, it is not so surprising to find outrages on morals among the undeveloped inhabitants of the north as it is to find them in intelligent Christian communities among people whose moral sense ought to be far above that of the average primitive man in view of their a.s.sociations and the variations that have been so frequently repeated and acc.u.mulated by heredity; and where there is no hierarchy nor established missionaries it is still more surprising to find any moral sense at all among a people whose vague religious belief does not extend beyond Shamanism or Animism, which to them explains the more strange and striking natural phenomena by the hypothesis of direct spiritual agency.

It must not be understood by this, however, that these people have no religion, as many travellers have erroneously believed; that would be almost equivalent to stating that races of men exist without speech, memory or knowledge of fire. A purely ethnological view of religion which regards it as "the feeling which falls upon man in the presence of the unknown," favors the idea that the children of the icy north have many of the same feelings in this respect as those experienced by ourselves under similar conditions, although there is doubtless a change in us produced by more advanced thought and nicer feeling. On the other hand, how many habits and ideas that are senseless and perfectly unexplainable by the light of our present modes of life and thought can be explained by similar customs and prejudices existing among these distant tribes. Is there no fragment of primitive superst.i.tion or residue of bygone ages in the supposed influence of the "Evil Eye" in Ireland, or in the habit of "telling the bees" in Germany? Is there not something of intellectual fossildom in the popular notion about Friday and thirteen at table, and in the ancient rite of exorcising oppressed persons, houses and other places supposed to be haunted by unwelcome spirits, the form of which is still retained in the Roman ritual? And is not our enlightened America "the land of spiritualists, mesmerism, soothsaying and mystical congregations"?

When the native of Saint Michael's invokes the moon, or the native of Point Barrow his crude images previously to hunting the seal, in order to bring good luck, is not the mental and emotional impulse the same as that which actuates more civilized men to look upon "outward signs of an inward and spiritual grace," or not to start upon any important undertaking without first invoking the blessing of Deity? And are not the rites observed by the natives on the Siberian coast, when the first walrus is caught, the counterpart of our Puritan Thanksgiving Day?

Perhaps the untutored Eskimo has the same fear of the dangerous and terrible, the unknown, the infinite, as ourselves, and parts with life just as reluctantly: but it cannot be said that our observation favors the fact of his longevity, although long life seems to prevail among some of the circ.u.mpolar tribes, the Laps, for instance, who, according to Scheffer, in spite of hard lives enjoy good health, are long-lived, and still alert at eighty and ninety years.--(De Medecina Laponum.)

Owing to his hard life, the conflict with his circ.u.mstances and his want of foresight, the Eskimo soon becomes a physiological bankrupt, and his stock of vitality being exhausted, his bodily remains are covered with stones, around which are placed wooden masks and articles that have been useful to him during life, as I have seen at Nounivak island, or they are covered with driftwood as observed in Kotzebue sound, or as at Tapkan, Siberia, where the corpse is lashed to a long pole and is taken some distance from the village, when the clothes are stripped off, placed on the ground and covered with stones. The cadaver is then exposed in the open air to the tender mercies of crows, foxes and wolves. The weapons and other personal effects of the decedent are placed near by, probably with something of the same sentiment that causes us to use chaplets of flowers and immortelles as funeral offerings--a custom that Schiller has commemorated in "Bringet hier die letzen Gaben."

The future destiny of these people is a question in which the theologian and politician are not less interested than the man of science. Some observers seem to think that their numbers are diminishing under the evil influence of so-called civilization. But as every race partic.i.p.ates in the same moral nature, and the entire history of humanity, according to Herder, is a series of events pointing to a higher destiny than has yet been revealed, there is no reason why the sum of human happiness, under proper auspices, should not be increased among the Innuit race.

Arch-deacon Kirkby, a Church of England clergyman who has lately visited them in a missionary capacity as far as Boothia, speaks in the highest terms of their intelligence and capacity for improvement. Here, then, is a brilliant opportunity for some one full of propagandism and charity to repeat the acts of the modern apostles and extend the influence of civilization to the gay, lively, curious and talkative hyperboreans whose home is under the midnight sun and on the borders of the Icy Sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WRANGEL ISLAND.

Journal, American Geographical Society, Vol. XV, 1883.

Bulletin N. 3. Rosse.]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: In November, 1882, while in London, I met Mr. Gilder, the _Herald_ correspondent, who accompanied the U.S. ship _Rodgers_, and he showed me this record and paper which he had taken from the cairn during a subsequent visit to the island.]

[Footnote 2: De Virginibus velandis. Lutetiae Parisiorum. 1675 f., p.

178.]

[Footnote 3: See Guy's Hospital Report, XIX, 1874; also "Histoire Medicale du Tatouage," in Archives de Medecine Navale, Tom. 11 and 12, Paris, 1869.]

[Footnote 4: Retzius, Finska Kranier, Stockholm: 1878.]