CHAPTER V.

MAN'S WAR UPON THE RACES OF THE SEA.

On reviewing the whole history of Voyages, we are impressed by two quite contrary feelings:

1. We admire the courage and genius with which man has conquered the seas, and dominated his whole planet.

2. We are astonished to find him so unskilful in all that concerns the conciliation of the inhabitants of the various seas and lands, that he has conquered. Every where, the voyager has gone, as the enemy of the young populations, whether human or brute, whether terrestrial or maritime, which, properly treated, would have been, each in its own limited sphere, so servicable to him. Man, as to the globe on which he has made such grand discoveries, is like a musical novice, before some immense Organ, from which he can produce but a few notes. Emerging from the middle ages, after so much of philosophy and theology, he still remained barbarous; of the sacred instrument, he only knew how to break the keys.

The gold seekers, as we have seen, sought only gold, nothing but that; man they pitilessly crushed. Columbus, though the last of them, shows this with a quite terrible plainness and simplicity, in his own journal. His words make us shudder, anticipating, prophesying, as they do, what would be done by his successors. No sooner has he landed in Haiti, than he enquires, "where is the gold? Who has got gold?" The natives smiled, in their innocent astonishment, at this fierce desire for gold. They promised him that they would search for it for him, and in the mean time, gave their rings and ornaments to satisfy the earlier, that eager appetite.

He gives us a most touching description of that unfortunate race, so interesting for its beauty, its kindness, and its tender confidence. But the Geonese, touchingly as he described that people, had his own mission of avarice, his hard, stern habits of thought. The Turkish wars, the atrocious galleys, and their wretched slaves, piracy and manstealing, were the common life of that day. The sight of that young, unarmed community, those poor, naked children, and lovely and innocent women, inspired him only with the horrible mercantile thought, that they might be very easily enslaved.

He would not, however, consent to have them carried away from the beautiful island; they and it, belonged, said he, to the King and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. But he said these darkly and terribly significant words--"They are timid and well fitted for obedience. They will do whatever they are ordered to do; a thousand of them would retreat before three or four of ours. If your Highnesses give me the order to carry them off or to enslave them here, there is nothing to hinder it; fifty men will suffice to do it." Thus wrote he in his Journal, or Despatch, of 14 and 16, December.

Presently came from Europe the wholesale sentence of that whole poor innocent people. They were ordered to be the slaves of gold--all subjected to compulsory labor, some to seek gold, and others to feed the goldseekers.

Columbus confesses that in twelve years, six sevenths of that once happy population had perished; and Herrera adds that in twenty-five years, that population had fallen from a million of souls to fourteen thousand.

What followed, is only too well known. The gold seeker and the planter exterminated the natives and incessantly replaced them at the expense of the negroes. And what has been the consequence? That in the low, hot, immensely fecund countries, the black race alone, are permanent. America will belong to that race; Europe has achieved precisely the opposite of that which it intended.

Every where, in all directions, the colonizing impotency of Europe has displayed itself in America. The French adventurer has not survived; he took thither no family, and did take thither all the worst vices of his native land. As a natural consequence, instead of civilizing the barbarians, he added their vices to his own, and sank to their barbarous level. With the exception of two temperate countries into which they went _en masse_, and in families, the English have not been much more successful than the French in planting their race permanently and healthily in transmarine colonies. In another century, India will scarcely know that the Englishmen once lived there. Have the Missionaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, made any converts? Dumont, the thoroughly well-informed Dumont, tells me--"_not one_!"

Between them and us, there are thirty centuries and thirty religions. Try to force their intellect, and the result will be that which the truly great Humboldt observed in those American villages which are to this day called "_Missions_;" that, having lost their own native energies and traditions, without acquiring ours, they will sink into a sort of stupefaction, become merely so many children of a larger growth, alive in body, but dead in mind,--all but idiots, useless alike to themselves and to others.

Our voyages, upon which we moderns, and more especially the learned, so plume ourselves, have they been really, or at all, servicable to the savages? I really cannot see it. While, on the one hand, the heroic races of North America have perished of hunger and wretchedness, the soft, effeminate, gentle races of the South, perish, too, to the great shame of our seamen, who, in that distant part of the world, have thrown off even the very mask of decency. Population at once kindly and weak, in whom Bourgainville discerned such excess of complaisance, among whom the English Missionaries have gained much profit, but not a single soul,--kindly and weak people, they are perishing miserably beneath the double scourge of the worst vices and the most loathsome diseases of the old world.

Formerly, the long coast of Siberia was well peopled. Under that terribly hard climate, the nomadic natives hunted the richly, the preciously, furred animals which at once fed and clothed them. The Russian despotism, at once strong and senseless, compelled them to adopt the settled life of agriculturists, in a climate, and upon a soil, where agriculture is an absurdity, an impossibility. The consequence is that these peoples have gradually died off. On the other hand, the trading spirit, that greedy and insatiable devourer, has refused to spare the brutes in their breeding seasons, and as a necessary consequence, the brutes have disappeared with the men; and now, for a thousand miles along that coast, you have a terrible solitude, where man hunts not, and where the brutes are not. The winds may whistle shrilly, the frost may be bitter and biting as ever, but there is neither man nor beast to listen to the one or to shudder beneath the other.

Had our voyagers to the North been truly wise, their very first care should have been to form a good, firm friendship with the Esquimaux, to mitigate their miseries, to adopt some of their children and have them well instructed in Europe, and thus lay the foundation of a great indigenous race of discoverers. We learn from Captain John Ross, and from not a few others, that they are very intelligent, and very readily acquire the knowledge and the arts of Europe. Marriages would have been contracted between European sailors and the native women; a mixed population would thus have sprung up, to which all that northern portion of the American continent would have been "native and to the manor born." And that would have been the, at once, safe and sure way of discovering the much coveted North-western passage. Thirty years--a single generation--would have done it effectually--and in three hundred years it has been done only uselessly because you have terrified those poor savages; because you have destroyed alike the man of the soil and the _Genius Loci_. What is the use of merely seeing that desert, when, in the very act of seeing it you make it either depopulated or hostile?

We may be quite sure that if man, civilized man, has thus ill treated his uncivilized brother man, he has been neither more friendly nor more merciful for the brutes. He has converted the gentlest and the most affectionate of them forever, irreclaimably, into savage and merciless foes to man. And man, civilized man, has done this. All the old authors concur in telling us that when these poor brutes first (most unluckily for themselves!) made the acquaintance of man, they exhibited nothing but the most confident and inquisitive sympathy. He could walk past and through whole families of Sea Cows and Seals, and they never fled from him. The Penguins, and their kindred species, followed him, begged a share of his shelter, yea, even nestled at night beneath his garments.

Our forefathers, quite justly, believed that, to a very great extent, the animals feel and love, even as we do. Certain it is that they have a singular and very decided taste for music. The very Shad, simple as they seem, will follow you to the sound of bells; Valence tells us; and Noël tells us that he has often seen the poor Whale, the Joubarde roll and frolic around the bark, delighted with the music, and, fearless of the _man_!

What the poor, dumb creatures most enjoy; what they most possess of intelligent life; what they have most been deprived of by dint of human and very cruel persecution;--is the right, the security, the sanctity of marriage! Fugitive and isolated, they now only retain that which we, most cruelly, have left to them; temporary concubinage, that miserable temporary concubinage which makes sterile every creature that is subjected to it.

Marriage, fixed, settled, faithful, is the very life of nature,--and we find it in even the poorest living tribes on which man's tyranny has not yet imposed unnatural laws. The Roebuck, the Pigeon, that prettiest of the Parrot family, the "Love Bird," and hundreds of other species, which we, in our profound ignorance and fancied learning, despise, have this instinctive love of marriage. You may notice that, even among the other and wilder birds and beasts, the matrimonial tie is inseparable, at least, until the young family is old enough to take care of itself.

The Hare, in its timid and ever anxious life, the Bat, that strange prowler in the dark night hours, are very very tender of their families. The Crustaceæ, even, nay, even the very Poulpes have their marital affection; take the female and the male is sure to be there, to combat vainly, and to be taken with her.

How much more, then, shall Love, the Family, _Marriage_, in the true sense of that word, exist among our gentle, truly gentle, till brutally persecuted, amphibious creatures! Slow, sedentary, attached to home, how natural, how inevitable it is, that, the male should be true to his mate,--and she to him! Among them the husband will die for, or with, the wife, either for the young one. And, among them, too, we find what we too often, only in vain look for among what we presumptuously term the higher animals, the young one will boldly leave its shelter and fight for the mother that has previously rescued him.

Steller and Hartwig mention a strange, an almost human scene enacted in the family of the Otarie, another amphibious creature. The female had allowed her young to be stolen from her. The male, furious, beat her severely, and she grovelled and wept.

The Whales, which have not the fixed abode of the amphibii, yet cross the Ocean in couples. Duhamel and Lacepede say, that in 1723, two Whales being attacked kept firmly side by side. One of them being killed, the other, with terrible moanings of mingled despair and grief, of sympathy and rage, threw itself upon the dead body of its mate and died, rather than retreat. If there was in the world one being which, even more than any other ought to have been spared, it was the free Whale, that admirable creature so abounding in value; that most inoffensive of all the creatures of the Ocean whose very food is different from that of man. Excepting its terribly strong tail, this creature has not even a weapon of defence. And, then, the poor thing has such a host of enemies! Every one and everything seems to be hostile to it. Its parasites establish themselves, not only on, but in its vast gnawing, even its very tongue. The Narvel, with its terrible tusks pierces it, the Dolphins gnaw it, and the bold, ever hungry, swiftly swimming, Shark tears huge bleeding morsels from it.

And, then, there are two blinded and ferocious foes that, in most dastardly fashion, thin that inoffensive race even anticipatively; killing the pregnant mother. First, there is the horrible Cachalot, whose head makes a full third of its entire frame. This horrid creature, with its crushing jaws, armed with forty-eight teeth, literally eats the unborn young one. Man, still more cruel, causes the poor creature a more prolonged suffering. The cruel harpoon, plunged again and again into that quivering and sensitive body inflicts suffering, such as we cannot even think of, without blushing for that human nature of which we so often and so unblushingly boast.

Dying slowly, and in the long agony of many wounds, and of many convulsions, she writhes, shudders, lashes the sea into a mad foam with her terrible tail, and, even as she dies, feels about with her poor hand-fins, as though striving once more to embrace and caress her little one. Something dreadfully human, as it seems to me, is that death scene of the poor Whale!

At this day we can scarcely even imagine what were the scenes of butchery some two hundred years ago; while the Whales swam in shoals and every shore swarmed with the amphibii. The enormous massacres polluted the ocean with blood to an extent such as our human battles, from the earliest day, cannot even begin to compare with. In a single day, from fifteen to twenty Whales were killed, and fifteen hundred Sea Elephants! And this was mere killing for the sake of killing. For what was to be done with so many of those huge creatures, each of which had so much blood and so much oil? What was the meaning of all this cruel slaughter? What the result? Just simply, to redden and pollute so many miles of the pure Ocean! To have the cold and cruel enjoyment of most brutal tyrants; to watch, with cruel eye, the lingering agonies and the fierce, but impotent struggles, of one of God's noblest and most inoffensive creatures! Peron relates, with a disgust which does him honor, that he saw a brutal sailor thus slowly and brutally butcher a female Seal. She groaned and writhed like something human; and whenever she opened her poor, bleeding mouth, he dashed the oar into it, breaking her poor teeth at every thrust.

Durville tells us that at the new Shetland isles, in the South Seas, the English and Americans actually exterminated the Seals in four years; killing, in their blind rage, alike the newly born and parturient female, and often they killed only for the skin, losing the vast and very precious amount of oil.

Such slaughter as that is really a disgrace to our common humanity; such butchery reveals a terrible, a loathsome, instinct, that makes us shudder as we look around upon even our best and kindliest, and reflect how soon and upon what slight temptation they, too, may become cruel! On a smiling shore and among a notably amiable people, we remember one of these murderous massacres to have taken place. Some five or six hundred Tunnies were driven into a lovely bay that they might be ignominiously murdered in a single day. The drag nets, so vast that the capstan and the bars had to be brought into requisition, to _heave_, rather than draw them in, brought the poor creatures into that beautiful bay, to them, a veritable _chamber of death_, and all around were bronzed, hardy, and cruel men, armed with harpoons and pikes. And from distances of even twenty leagues around, fair women--shame to our nature!--yea, women sat or stood to witness that truly brutal butchery. The signal is given and the dastardly butchers strike, and the pierced and bleeding victims writhe, bound, agonize--as though they were human, and pitiless woman applauds the prowess--Godwot!--of pitiless man! The waters, agitated by the vain, though mighty struggle of the victims, is polluted and discolored with blood and foam, and woman--Woman looks on this horrid scene and, when the last victim has given its last gasp, sighs deeply and departs, wearied, but not satisfied, and whispers--Is that all? And yet we call ourselves only, "a little lower than the angels!"