Part 2

Mr Wilson entitles the chapter which treats on this subject ‘The Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’ and so on. Why this ostentatious use of the term Instinct? Did men hunt after fire even before they had seen it, as an animal might be supposed to hunt after food even before it had eaten? Do men build canoes as birds their nests or beavers their dams? What is the leading idea of Mr Wilson when he thus liberally applies to us the term Instinct? We have desires and we have intelligence suggesting means to an end. Is it the desire that is instinctive, or the apprehension of the means whereby the desire can be gratified? Men have a desire to pass from one side of the river to the other; perhaps the animal they were in chase of has swam the stream; they have observed that wood will float, that a large piece of wood will float with a man on it; they procure such piece of wood, and paddle themselves across. The knowledge which the man displays in all this follows from his previous perceptions. Perception, memory, judgment, are all exercised in a quite normal manner, and the desire to float across the stream has arisen from the peculiar circumstances in which the man was placed. What element of mystery is there in this transaction which calls for the name of Instinct? For the word Instinct is applied to certain actions of animals because the ordinary laws of psychology are, or seem, inadequate to explain them—because a certain mystery hangs over the event which we mark by the name Instinct. When we see animals acting, without the teaching of experience, in the same sort of way in which we act after that teaching of experience, we, perplexed to explain this anomaly, pronounce the action instinctive. The bee and the bird build in this inexplicable manner. Probably a more minute investigation may enable us to resolve whatever we call Instinct into some delicacy of the senses, or some rapidity of the judgment, peculiar to the animal. Meanwhile the term is serviceable as marking a class of unexplained phenomena. But how is it applicable to man in his capacity of boat-builder? The sort of canoe he will build, the materials he will use, the tools he will work with, are all determined for him by existing circumstances, and the actual amount of his knowledge. Or is it the vague desire to put to sea, prompting some manner of boat-building, that Mr Wilson calls our “maritime instinct?” Are we driven to sea like ducks to a pond? The peasantry of an inland country are not conscious of any such instinct, and would be very unfortunate if they possessed it.

We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term.

“_Speech_ is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is enabled to develop it into _language_.” This sounds oracular, but, like most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things, and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless be dignified with the name of an instinct? The _desire_ to speak, or to communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech, man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for things, not for words.

The maritime or boat-building instinct has, at all events, been very much under the control of circumstances. Sometimes the tree was felled and hollowed, sometimes the bark was stretched over wicker-work, or skins of beasts were employed, or planks were made into a raft. The Egyptian bound some of his water-jugs together and made a raft of them. Some tribes have limited themselves to the paddle or the oar; some have spread the sail, and spread it very boldly. The Malay hoists his large sail over a couple of planks of wood sewed together with bark, and balances this fragile craft by means of two long spars fastened athwart and projecting to windward. In such a vessel as this he will scud fearlessly through tempestuous seas from one island to another. We may boast, and very justly, of our steam-engines, our electric telegraphs, and of other triumphant employments of the powers of nature; but even to this day there is not a more pleasing or thrilling spectacle, or a more glorious instance of the powers of nature turned to the service of man, than when some solitary boatman sits, at the helm with sail outspread, borne by the wind along the surface of the sea. The water floats him, the wind speeds him; he is for the moment master of the two great elements. Verily the savage has his joy, his hour of pride and exultation.

It is curious that the natives of North America limited themselves to the oar or the paddle. The Peruvians appear to have been the only people of this continent who, at the time of its discovery by Columbus, employed the sail. This is a striking instance of the very general fact, almost amounting to a law, that when a people have attained to a certain proficiency in the arts, sufficient to render life tolerable, there ensues a long pause in the career of progress. It requires the stimulus of an urgent want to set at work the inventive faculties of the savage; and when his invention has secured to him an agreeable existence, or what he considers such, there intervenes the force of habit and the attachment to familiar customs. Fortunately the differences of climate, or other external circumstances, require or suggest different inventions, even in this early stage of society, and thus one barbarian may be able to teach another. A people who had brought the canoe propelled by oars to perfection, would probably rest contented with it; they could not have invented the sail themselves; they might receive it from another people with whom it had been, from the commencement, their favourite mode of traversing the sea. Our “technological instincts,” as Mr Wilson calls them, go to sleep in the savage when he is no longer pinched by hunger or cold, or other pressing inconvenience. They awake again in the civilised man, with whom invention itself has become an agreeable effort or an intellectual triumph. Some sort of culinary vessels are wanted, and if these have been once shaped out of clay, the same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their _instinct of pottery_ will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with the calabash.

Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of this human art of boat-building:—

“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with which it had been fashioned into shape.”

From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this “allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.

We turn from the rude arts of men to their still ruder thinking—to customs springing from some sentiment or some strange imagination. Of these the most universal and the most significant are customs connected with the burial of the dead. To the habit of interring with the dead man the implements he most valued in life—his tools or weapons—we owe the little knowledge we possess of our very primitive ancestors. It is generally said that these articles were buried with the man, that he might have them ready for use in another world; and, no doubt, some vague idea of this kind has extensively prevailed: but if we may speculate on a subject so obscure as the imaginations of the savage, we should say that this idea grew out of the custom of burying with the dead man his own previous possessions, and that the custom itself at first originated in simple regret and respect for the dead. We cannot have any strong sentiment without feeling the desire in some way to manifest it. The dead man was loudly lamented—wept and wailed over—and the mourners often cut and wounded themselves as an exhibition of their grief. Well, at such a moment, instead of appropriating to themselves the possessions of the deceased, the survivors threw them into the grave with him. They were still in a manner his property. It would manifest a disrespect to the dead if at once, as soon as the hand of his chief was cold, another man had seized upon his spear and carried it to his own hut. Thus this one passionate desire to manifest grief and respect to a late friend or chief would sufficiently account for the act of interring with the body the instruments or weapons he had been in the habit of using. The custom once adopted, superstition would step in and enforce it, and the imagination would invest it with a new significance. Some poet of the land would first suggest that, if the dead man rose from his tomb, he would find himself equipped for the chase or for war. Sometimes the buried arms, vessels, or other implements, were broken before they were deposited in the grave, which does not seem to accord with the idea that they were laid there for any future use. It looks like the interpretation of a subsequent generation when it is said that the savage expected the broken tool or perforated vessel, like the decayed human body, to be restored again and made fit for his use. Here is an Indian, a Chinook, buried in his canoe. Within the canoe a broken sword is deposited. Am I to gather that the Chinook expected a maritime life hereafter, and even to revive floating upon the waters? Does not the whole act seem, at least in its initiation, to be symbolical? All was at an end. The man would float no more—would fight no more. The canoe was buried, the sword was broken.

But whether we are right or not in our supposition as to the origin of this idea—namely, that the articles buried in the tomb with the deceased would be useful to him in an after life—it is plain that such an idea has been entertained, and certainly all our learned writers upon these ancient customs of burial attribute this motive to our imaginative forefathers. When, in the old pagan burrows of the wold of Yorkshire or elsewhere, some British or Saxon charioteer has been exhumed, with the iron wheel-tires and bronzed horse-furniture (the wreck of the decayed war-chariot), and the skeletons of the horses, eloquent antiquarians have not failed to say (as Mr Wilson does) that the dead chief was buried thus “that he might enter the Valhalla of his gods, proudly borne in the chariot in which he had been wont to charge amid the ranks of his foes.” We presume they find themselves justified in this interpretation.

Here, again, we find that the new continent sets almost before the eyes of our traveller scenes similar to those which, as a European archæologist, he had been laboriously endeavouring to reconstruct in some remote antiquity.

“Upwards of forty years since, Black Bird, a famous chief of the Omahaws, visited the city of Washington, and on his return was seized with smallpox, of which he died on the way. When the chief found himself dying, he called his warriors around him, and, like Jacob of old, gave commands concerning his burial, which were as literally fulfilled. The dead warrior was dressed in his most sumptuous robes, fully equipped with his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, and borne about sixty miles below the Omahaw village to a lofty bluff on the Missouri, which towers far above all the neighbouring heights, and commands a magnificent extent of landscape. To the summit of this bluff a beautiful white steed, the favourite war-horse of Black Bird, was led; and there, in presence of the whole nation, the dead chief was placed with great ceremony on its back, looking towards the river, where, as he had said, he could see the canoes of the white men as they traversed the broad waters of the Missouri. His bow was placed in his hand, his shield and quiver, with his pipe and medicine-bag, hung by his side. His store of pemmican and his well-filled tobacco-pouch were supplied, to sustain him on the long journey to the hunting-grounds of the great Manitou, where the spirits of his fathers awaited his coming. The medicine-men of the tribe performed their most mystic charms to secure a happy passage to the land of the great departed; and all else being completed, each warrior of the chiefs own band covered the palm of his right hand with vermilion, and stamped its impress on the white sides of the devoted war-steed. This done, the Indians gathered turfs and soil, and placed them around the feet and the legs of the horse. Gradually the pile arose under the combined labour of many willing hands, _until the living steed and its dead rider were buried together under the memorial mound_; and high over the crest of the lofty tumulus which covered the warrior’s eagle plumes a cedar post was reared, to mark more clearly to the voyagers on the Missouri the last resting-place of Black Bird, the great chief of the Omahaws.”

But there is one passage in Mr Wilson’s book which, we think, to the student of the ancient myth or religious legend must be replete with interest. It occurs in the chapter which treats on the use of tobacco and that custom of smoking which we have imported from the savage, much to the delectation, no doubt, of those who inhale the fumes of what they are pleased to call the fragrant weed, and much, assuredly, to the disgust and suffering of those who are involved, most unwillingly, in the smoke which others are _ex_haling around them. Never were two parties more sharply divided than the smokers and the non-smokers. The first will doubtless agree with the Indian in the belief that tobacco was of divine origin. Did not two hunters of the Susquehannas share their venison with a lovely squaw who mysteriously appeared before them in the forest? and did they not, “on returning to the scene of their feast thirteen moons after, find the tobacco-plant growing where she had sat?” and do not Indians tell us that the Great Spirit freely indulges in the intoxicating fumes which they themselves love so well? The non-smokers hold a different faith. They see no celestial gift in this black, fuliginous amusement; and if they do not ascribe to it a devilish origin, they assert that it is enjoyed with a devilish indifference to those to whom their beloved smoke is but stench and sickness. Into this custom of tobacco-smoking Mr Wilson enters at large, and bestows much learning on the inquiry; but it is especially to the institution of the pipe of peace amongst the Indians that we would now direct the attention of the reader.

We have, as Mr Wilson tells the story, the complete _dissection_ of a myth; we see how a legend arises, or may arise, partly from the most trivial causes, and partly from generous impulses and high imaginations. Between the Minnesota and the Missouri rivers there stands a bold perpendicular cliff, “beautifully marked with distinct horizontal layers of light grey and rose or _flesh-coloured_ quartz.” Near this a famous red pipe-stone is procured; a material, we presume, better fitted than any other for making pipes. Traces of both ancient and modern excavation prove that it has been the resort, during many generations, of Indian tribes, seeking this famous red pipe-stone. A spot to which independent tribes came for this purpose, and for this only, became neutral ground; became a spot on which they might meet in peace—perhaps to discuss their points of difference. But in process of time it became a sacred spot, and the peace between hostile tribes was preserved by a religious sanction. There are marks on the rock resembling the track of a large bird. These were converted into the footsteps of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit, therefore, at one time descended upon the rock and taught—what else could he be supposed to teach?—the sacred neutrality of the spot, and the privilege and duty of all tribes to renew their pipes there, and especially the calumet, or pipe of peace. The last version of the tradition runs thus:—

“Many ages,” say the Sioux, “after the red men were made, when all the different tribes were at war, the Great Spirit called them all together at the Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the rocks, and the red nations were assembled in infinite numbers in the plain below. He took out of the rock a piece of the red stone, and made a large pipe. He smoked it over them all; told them that it was part of their flesh; that though they were at war they must meet at this place as friends; that it belonged to them all; that they must make their calumets from it, and smoke them to him whenever they wished to appease him or get his goodwill. The smoke from his big pipe rolled over them all, and he disappeared in the cloud.”

The Sioux, notwithstanding this good teaching of the very tradition which they still repeat to the stranger, have, by the right of the strongest, taken possession of the sacred neutral ground; and they, and all other tribes of the red race, are either being absorbed into the white population or exterminated by it. The development of the myth and the people of the myth has been therefrom alike arrested. But how clearly we see its growth and formation! To what a mystical faith that flesh-coloured quartz was conducting! And what mingling of the divine and human would have been suggested by the act recorded of the Great Spirit! If these Indian tribes had finally coalesced in one nation, the myth would have been exalted, and the Great Spirit would have taught them an eternal bond of peace and brotherhood. If civilisation and culture had still further advanced, this peace and brotherhood would have embraced all mankind, and assumed the form of the highest moral teaching.