The Human Race

Their weapons are, however, manufactured with much cleverness. Their bows, which require a very strong pull, are made of a sort of iron-wood and gracefully shaped. Their arrows are tipped with fine points, some of them barbed, and they shoot them with much skill. They handle expertly their short paddles, marked with red ochre, and hollow their canoes with a rather rude implement formed of a hard and sharp stone fastened to a handle by means of a strong cord made from vegetable fibres.

The Andamans are ichthyophagists, for the seas which wash their islands abound in excellent fish and palatable mollusks. Soles, mullets, and oysters constitute the staple of their food, and when during tempestuous weather fish runs short, they eat the lizards, rats, and mice which swarm in the woods.

Though not cannibals, the Andamans are nevertheless a most savage race, who do not even exist in a state of tribedom, but who are merely gathered into gangs.

The bitterest contempt has been lavished on these rude inhabitants of the islands of Bengal, and people have been willing to consider them as brutes of the worst cruelty, and most extreme ugliness; but more recent observation, and the few facts which we have mentioned, show that this estimate should be somewhat mitigated.

Australian Blacks.– We have arrived at the black people who occupy part of Australia, and take advantage of some valuable information concerning them, found in M. H. de Castella’s “Souvenirs d’un Squatter Français en Australie,” and which was acquired by the author’s personal experience of these uncouth beings.

The wild state in which the aborigines of Australia exist is the result of the poverty of their country, which affords no other source of sustenance than animals. True, these abound there; kangaroos, squirrels, opossums, wild-cats, and birds of all kinds are so numerous, that the natives need, as it were, only stretch out their hands in order to take them. In this mild climate they can live without any shelter.

According to M. de Castella, the Negroes of Australia are not so ugly as they have been represented. Among the men whom he examined, some were tall and well made. Their slow, lounging gait, was not devoid of dignity, and the solemnity of their step reminded one of the strut of a tragedian on the stage.

241. – ENCAMPMENT OF NATIVE AUSTRALIANS.

The Australian blacks recognize family ties. None of them have more than one wife, but they do not marry within their own particular tribe. They live encamped in bands, and now that they are reduced to small numbers, in entire tribes. They do not build permanent huts, but protect themselves in summer from the sun and hot winds merely by a heap of gum-tree branches, piled up against some sticks, thrust in the ground. When winter comes on, they strip from the trees large pieces of bark, eight or ten feet high, and as wide as the whole circumference of the trunk, forming with these fragments a screen, which they place at the side whence the rain is blowing, and alter if the wind happens to change. Squatted on the bare earth, in the opossum skin which serves the double purpose of bed and clothing, each of them is placed before a hearth of his own. Fig. 241 is an engraving taken from a photograph of Australian natives.

The Australian Negroes of the present day have guns, and employ little axes for chopping their wood and cutting bark, but it is not so long since the only weapons they possessed were made of hard wood, and their hatchets consisted of sharp stones fastened to the end of sticks, like the flint instruments used by men before the Deluge. There is in fact little or no difference between the people of the age of stone, and the Negroes of Australia, and consequently an acquaintance with the wild manners and customs of these races has been of great advantage to naturalists of our day in throwing light upon the history of primitive man.

M. H. de Castella was greatly struck by the agility of the Australian blacks in climbing gum-trees whose straight stems are often devoid of branches for twenty or thirty feet from their base, and are besides too thick to be clasped. When by perfect prodigies of acrobatism the native reached the wild cats and opossums’ nests, he seized the animals, and threw them to his wife.

This wife carried everything; her last-born in a reed basket hanging from her neck, the slaughtered game in one hand, and in the other a blazing gum branch, to light the fire when the family took up fresh quarters. The man walked in front, carrying nothing but his weapons; then came the wife, and after her, their children according to height.

A batch of Australian blacks is never, by any chance, to be met walking abreast, even when in great numbers, and if a whole tribe is crossing the plains, only a long black file is to be seen moving above the high grass.

242. – NATIVE AUSTRALIAN.

M. de Castella was a spectator of the curious sight which eel-fishing affords among these natives. Holding a spear in each hand, with which to rake up the bottom, they wade through the water up to their waists, balancing and regulating their movements to the even measure of one of their chants. When an eel is transfixed by a stroke of one lance, they pierce it in another part of the body with the second, and then, holding the two points apart, throw the fish upon the ground, the quantity which they take in this manner being enormous. They dispense with saucepans and cooking utensils of all kinds in the preparation of their meals, simply placing the game or fish on bright coals covered over with a little ashes.

243. – AN AUSTRALIAN GRAVE.

Everyone has heard of the skill with which savages navigate their rivers in bark canoes, but the people of whom we are now speaking render themselves remarkable above all others by their adroitness in guiding their little crafts over the rapids. Only two persons can sit in their boats, while a spear supplies the place of an oar, and is used with astonishing dexterity.

No one acquainted with this kind of barbarous life will be surprised to hear that the blacks of Australia are diminishing at a wonderfully quick rate. Of the whole Varra tribe, formerly a numerous one, M. de Castella could find no more than seventeen individuals.

What most struck the author of an account of a journey from Sydney to Adelaide, which appeared in the “Tour du Monde,” in 1860, was the small number of aborigines which he met in a distance of more than two hundred and fifty miles. Sturt and Mitchell, in the middle of the present century, had visited tribes on the higher tributaries of the Murray river, which then consisted of several hundred persons, but M. de Castella found them only represented by scattered groups of seven or eight famished individuals. Fig. 242 portrays one of the types sketched by this gentleman.

Mitchell has given a description in his “Travels,” of the “groves of death” – those romantic burial-places of the Australians – but the writer in the “Tour du Monde” found them no longer in existence. The tombs of the natives at the present day are as wild and rude as themselves. In the bleak deserts of the land of the West four branches driven into the ground and crossed at the top by a couple more (fig. 243), support the mortal remains of the Australian aboriginal, whose only winding sheet is the skin of a kangaroo.