The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
This language, which is popularly known as Aztec, he strongly commends to the study of American philologists. It is one of the most completely organised of Indian languages, has a literature of considerable extent and variety, and is still in use by upwards of half a million of people. It is from this area, southward through Central America, and in the great seat of native South American civilisation, that we can alone hope to recover direct evidence of ancient intercourse between the Old and the New World. But, here again, the complexities of language seem to grow apace. In Dr. Brinton’s Notes on the Mangue, an extinct Language formerly spoken in Nicaragua, he states, as a result of his later studies, that the belief which he once entertained of some possible connection between this dialect and the Aymara of Peru, has not been confirmed on further examination. This, therefore, tends to sustain the prevailing opinion of scholars that there is no direct affiliation between the languages of North and South America. All this is suggestive either of an idea, such as that which Agassiz favoured in his system of natural provinces of the animal world, in relation to different types of man, on which he based the conclusion that the diverse varieties of American man originated in various centres, and had been distributed from them over the entire continent; or we must assume immigration from different foreign centres. Accepting the latter as the more tenable proposition, I long ago sketched a scheme of immigration such as seemed to harmonise with the suggestive, though imperfect evidence. This assumed the earliest current of population, in its progress from a supposed Asiatic cradleland, to have spread through the islands of the Pacific, and reached the South American continent before any excess of population had diffused itself into the inhospitable northern steppes of Asia. By an Atlantic oceanic migration, another wave of population occupied the Canaries, Madeiras, and the Azores, and so passed to the Antilles, Central America, and probably by the Cape Verdes, or, guided by the more southern equatorial current, to Brazil. Latest of all, Behring Strait and the North Pacific Islands may have become the highway for a migration by which certain striking diversities among nations of the northern continent, including the conquerors of the Mexican plateau, are most easily accounted for.
It is not necessary to include in the question here discussed, the more comprehensive one of the existence of man in America contemporary with the great extinct animals of the Quaternary Period; though the acknowledged affinities of Asiatic and American anthropology, taken in connection with the remoteness of any assignable period for migration from Asia to the American continent, renders it far from improbable that the latest oscillations of land may here also have exercised an influence. The present soundings of Behring Strait, and the bed of the sea extending southward to the Aleutian Islands, entirely accord with the assumption of a former continuity of land between Asia and America. The idea to which the speculations of Darwin, founded on his observations during the voyage of the ‘Beagle’ gave rise, of a continuous subsidence of the Pacific Ocean, also favoured the probability of greater insular facilities for trans-oceanic migration at the supposed period of the peopling of America from Asia. But more recent explorations, and especially those connected with the ‘Challenger’ expedition, fail to confirm the old theory of the origin of the coral islands of the Pacific; and in any view of the case, we must be content to study the history of existing races, alike of Europe and America, apart from questions relating to palæocosmic man. If the vague legend of the lost Atlantis embodies any trace of remotest historical tradition, it belongs to a modern era compared with the men either of the European drift, or of the post-glacial deposits of the Delaware and the auriferous gravels of California. When resort is had to comparative philology, it is manifest that we must be content to deal with a more recent era than contemporaries of the Mastodon, and their congeners of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer periods, notwithstanding the fact that the modern representatives of the latter have been sought within the American Arctic circle.
Such evidence as a comparison of languages thus far supplies, lends more countenance to the idea of migration through the islands of the Pacific, than to such a route from the Mediterranean as is implied in any significance attached to the legend of Atlantis. As to the Behring Strait route, present ethnology and philology point rather to an overflow of Arctic American population into Asia. Gallatin was the first to draw attention to certain analogies in the structure of Polynesian and American languages, as deserving of investigation; and pointed out the peculiar mode of expressing the tense, mood, and voice of the verb, by affixed particles, and the value given to place over time, as indicated in the predominant locative verbal form. Such are to be looked for with greater probability among the languages of South America; but the substitution of affixed particles for inflections, especially in expressing the direction of action in relation to the speaker, is common to the Polynesian and the Oregon languages, and has analogies in the Cherokee. The distinction between the inclusive and exclusive pronoun we, according as it means “you and I,” or “they and I,” etc., is as characteristic of the Maori as of the Ojibway. Other observations of more recent date have still further tended to countenance the recognition of elements common to the languages of Polynesia and America; and so to point to migration by the Pacific to the western continent.
But this idea of a migration through the islands of the Pacific receives curious confirmation from another source. In an ingenious paper on “The Origin of Primitive Money,”[1] originally read at the meeting of the British Association at Montreal in 1884, Mr. Horatio Hale shows that there is good reason for believing that the most ancient currency in China consisted of disks and slips of tortoise shell. The fact is stated in the great Chinese encyclopædia of the Emperor Kang-he, who reigned in the early years of the eighteenth century; and the Chinese annalists assert that metal coins have been in use from the time of Fuh-he, about b.c. 2950. Without attempting to determine the specific accuracy of Chinese chronology, it is sufficient to note here that the most ancient form of Chinese copper cash is the disk, perforated with a square hole, so as to admit of the coins being strung together. This, which corresponds in form to the large perforated shell-disks, or native currency of the Indians of California, and with specimens recovered from ancient mounds, Mr. Hale regards as the later imitation in metal of the original Chinese shell money. A similar shell-currency, as he shows, is in use among many islanders of the Pacific; and he traces it from the Loo-Choo Islands, across the vast archipelago, through many island groups, to California; and then overland, with the aid of numerous disclosures from ancient mounds, to the Atlantic coast, where the Indians of Long Island were long noted for its manufacture in the later form of wampum. “The natives of Micronesia,” says Mr. Hale, who, it will be remembered, records the results of personal observation, “in character, usages, and language, resemble to a certain extent the nations of the southern and eastern Pacific groups, which are included in the designation of Polynesia, but with some striking differences, which careful observers have ascribed, with great probability, to influences from north-eastern Asia. They are noted for their skill in navigation. They have well-rigged vessels, exceeding sixty feet in length. They sail by the stars, and are accustomed to take long voyages.” To such voyagers, the Pacific presents no more formidable impediments to oceanic enterprise than did the Atlantic to the Northmen of the tenth century.
Throughout the same archipelago, modern exploration is rendering us familiar with examples of remarkable stone structures and colossal sculptured figures, such as those from Easter Island now in the British Museum. Rude as they undoubtedly are, they are highly suggestive of an affinity to the megalithic sculptures and cyclopean masonry of Peru. Monuments of this class were noted long ago by Captain Beechy on some of the islands nearest the coasts of Chili and Peru. Since then the megalithic area has been extended by their discovery in other island groups lying towards the continent of Asia.
Another subsidiary class of evidence of a different kind, long since noted by me, gives additional confirmation to this recovered trail of ancient migration through the islands of the Pacific to the American continent. The practice to which the Flathead Indians of Oregon and British Columbia owe their name, the compressed skulls from Peruvian cemeteries, and the widely diffused evidence of the prevalence of such artificial malformation among many American tribes, combine to indicate it as one of the most characteristic American customs. Yet the evidence is abundant which shows it not only as a practice among rude Asiatic Mongol tribes of primitive centuries; but proves that it was still in use among the Huns and Avars who contended with the Barbarians from the Baltic for the spoils of the decaying Roman empire. Nor was it merely common to tribes of both continents. It furnishes another