Dr. Morton says of the modern Peruvians, | ward of Arica, and about one hundred and that "they differ little in person from the eighty-five leagues south-east of Lima. This Indians around them, being of the middle plain is formed of silicious sand and marl, stature, well-limbed, and with small feet slightly impregnated with common salt, and and hands. Their faces are round, their ingly light, fine, and dry; and such is its prenitrate and sulphate of soda. It is exceedeyes small, black, and rather distant from servative nature, that even bodies interred in each other; their noses are small, the it without any previous preparation have not mouth somewhat large, and the teeth re- entirely lost the fleshy covering from their remarkably fine. Their complexion is dark- mains. In the cemeteries of this vast arid plain, brown, and their hair, long, black, and the objects which, in all probability, were most rather coarse." But if we compare this highly prized by their owners, were deposited description with the features of the ancient paring the body for interment appears to have beside them, and every article required in prePeruvians, as preserved in their mummied been preserved with it. Thus the needles used bodies, we shall find some very striking for sewing the garments and wrappings of the differences. But it is only in the case of dead, the comb employed in dressing the hair, Peru that a full comparison can be made and even the loose hair removed in this last betwen the ancient and the modern popu- process of the toilet, are all found deposited lation; and as several important ethno- in the grave. logical inferences are suggested by the comparison, we shall let Dr. Wilson describe the materials upon which it is based: "On a recent visit to Boston, I had an opportunity of minutely examining and measuring an interesting collection of crania and mummied bodies in the possession of John H. Blake, Esq., which were brought by him from ancient Peruvian cemeteries on the shore of the Bay of Chacota, near Arica, in latitude 18° 30' S.; and since then I have been favored with his own carefully elaborated notes on the subject. The desert of Atacama, betweeen the eighteenth and twenty-fifth degrees of south latitude, has been the site of sepulture for ancient Peruvian races through a period of unknown duration, and numerous cemeteries have been opened and despoiled. The mode of sepulture, and the articles deposited with the dead, present so uniform a resemblance, that, excepting in one point, Mr. Blake observes, a description of one may suffice for the whole. The difference noted arises from the varying soil. The greater number are interred in the dry sand, which generally covers the surface to a sufficient depth; but in some instances the excavations have been made in a soft rock (gypsum) which here and there approaches the surface. In this arid district, such is the nature of the soil and climate, that articles which speedily perish in a damp soil and a humid atmosphere, are found in perfect preservation after the lapse of centuries. Added to the facilities which nature has thus provided for perpetuating the buried traces of the ancient Peruvians, they themselves practiced the art of embalming their dead. One of the largest cemeteries referred to is situated on a plain at the base of a range of low hills in lat. 18° 30' S., and long. 70° 13' W. It is on the shore of the Bay of Chacota, a little south 66 The following is Mr. Blake's description of the cemeteries explored by him on the Bay of Chacota: The tombs or graves are near to each other, and cover a large extent of ground in two places, distant the one from the other about an eighth of a mile. A few of them are marked by circles of stones, while others are readily discovered by slight concavities in the soil above them. They are all circular, from three to five feet in diameter, and from four to five feet deep. Some of them are walled with stone, and all are lined with a coarse matting of flags. The bodies in them are always found in a sitting posture, with the knees elevated toward the chin and the arms crossed upon the breast. They are generally seated upon flat stones, under which are the articles of food, and part of the implements found with them. They are closely wrapped in woolen garments which are sewed about them; and the needles of thorn used for this purpose are found thrust into the outer covering, often with thread remaining in them. These garments are of various degrees of fineness, color, and pattern of figures in which they are woven. Many are of a uniform brown color, while in others the colors are diversified and have retained in a remarkable manner their brightness, particularly the red and scarlet, showing that the art of dyeing was well understood. Some of the bodies have been carefully embalmed, the flesh being saturated with a gum rosin; others appear to have been subjected to careful desiccation without the employment of any preservative; while those of which scarce any parts but the skeletons remain were probably subjected to no process for their preservation. There is no record or tradition concerning this and similar cemeteries, of the period when they were made use of; and it is by no means certain that they contain the remains of the ancestry of the Indians who now occupy the country.'” [TO BE CONCLUDED.] From Chambers's Journal. A SAVAGE ARCHIPELAGO. ONE of the most striking scenes in that | Mincopie, as these exclusive people are most charming of books, the Adventures called; a certain Brahmin Sepoy mutineer, of Robinson Crusoe, is the first gunfire in the forest, when all the feathered creatures rise and screech as at a performance truly awful and unparalleled. There is always something sublime about that which occurs for the first time, whether it be the first view of the sea, or the first whisper of love, or the first sight of death, as it lays its ghastly finger on a fellow-creature. The most solemn and awe-inspiring of all scenes is perhaps an uninhabited island, upon which no foot, as far as you can tell, has been set by man before your own; a land which has been left to itself since God created it, and whereon the sun has risen morning after morning for countless ages, to gladden only bird and beast. who, being sent as a convict to the penal settlement established on the South Andaman in 1858, escaped, and fled to the natives, who did not eat him. His very curious adventures have been already detailed in this Journal, No. 325. Otherwise, absolutely nothing was known of them, nor, indeed, is known now, notwithstanding Dr. Mouat's highly interesting volume.* He describes the place, but not the people; the Andamans, but not the Andamen. He was commissioned to survey those inhospitable shores, with a view to founding the penal colony, and he did his work well-so far as it went; he surveyed the shores. As for getting inland, notwithstanding his twelve Burmese convicts, accustomed to find their way in the dense and tangled jungles of their native land, and placed at his service as pioneers, and furnished with axes and boring-rods, it was not to be done. The trees were enormous, but yet so closely packed as to appear to be dwarfed for want of elbow room. Their individual immensity was hidden from view by the immense growth of parasites which twined about them, cramping them in their efforts to strike out their branches, which got tangled and involved among the overwhelming mass of foliage. Opportunities of this sort are growing very rare; even such spectacles as men like Captain Cook beheld again and again -luxuriant lands inhabited by savages only, with scarce an idea beyond those implanted in the breasts of their earliest progenitors are now only to be seen here and there. Commerce traverses every sea, and leaves her unmistakable mark wherever she touches. It is unusual, indeed, to find a nation so barbarous as to altogether isolate itself, and shrink from the stretched-out hand of civilization. Such cases, however, are even now to be The great trunks were festooned with met with. The Andaman Archipelago, flowers and plants, which circled round in the Bay of Bengal, is an example of them in endless forms, in all the unstudied this. The inhabitants of this group have grace and rich profusion of nature. The ever shown themselves not only untam-air-plant clasped the boles and branches able but unapproachable. The appearance in its graceful folds, and orchids of rarest of a ship in their harbors, no matter with beauty grew in lavish abundance. The what peaceful intent it may have come, variety of creepers was endless, from the has always driven the stunted but agile natives well-nigh frantic with rage. They have always enjoyed the reputation of being cannibals, and they do not wish any nearer intercourse to do away with the healthy awe which that rumor generally inspires. One and only one individual has had any personal experience of the * Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders. By FREDERICK MOUAT. One of these trees was selected at random A Burmese convict was sent up for measurement. with a chain to the top, and its measurement there being taken, it was found to be seventy-six feet in girth, its mighty stem being supported by the smaller trees around, which propped it up as a buttress. twining tendrils of the convolvulus to the boa-constrictors of the forest, the dimensions of which were as thick as the body of a full grown man. The trunks and branches of the great trees were thus so completely interlaced, that even when severed from their roots they were still maintained in their position by the grasp of their parasites. "The mangroves, with their long hanging branches falling to the earth, and again taking root, grew in an almost impervious line of forest along the shore, and even projecting far into the water, at high tide; we penetrated their shady recesses, and found ourselves protected from the dazzling rays of a burning sun by the thick foliage, forming beautiful arches, beneath the shade of which we felt as though we were housed in some fairy bower of the most delightful evergreens. At low tide, their gnarled roots were seen spreading to an endless distance along the ground, and so closely and intricately interlaced together, that any one could walk securely upon them, the footing they afforded was so close and firm." As far as the eye could see extended an ocean of vegetation, the closeness of which may be inferred from the fact, that not only the lithe Burmese but the robust English walked with out the assistance of their hands almost to the tops of the very tallest trees, the path they took being over the trunks of the creepers. "To the very verge of the horizon this astonishing exuberance of vegetation extended. All that we heard was the rustling of innumerable leaves, slightly moved by the gentle breeze of evening; all that we saw was this ocean of green, in which not even an opening the size of a man's hand could be discovered after the longest, closest, and most searching observation." Nature has thus wondrously seconded the Mincopie in their desire for isolation. "Two troop-ships, the Briton and the Runnymede, with detachments of the Fif tieth and Eightieth regiments of foot on board, were driven close to the islands by stress of weather; and all the means that were taken either to keep them out at sea, or to obtain timely entrance into a secure haven, proving unsuccessful, they were driven hopelessly, at the mercy of the waves, toward the shore of one of the isl ands of the Andaman Archipelago, where, despite all the efforts that were made to avert such a fate, it appeared impossible to avoid utter destruction. According to all accounts, the night was intensely dark, and, from the impossibility of making out where they were, their position appeared hopeless. The tempest, too, before which they were driven was one of those tremendous hurricanes, the fury of which mariners must occasionally face in navigating these tropical seas. Most must have seen that an ocean-death was their unavoidable doom, for what hope could men entertain, driven before a tempest loud enough almost to wake the dead, and in a darkness so intense that they could not see each other's faces, or their own hands held up close before their eyes? In one of the ships, on board of which was the narrator of this calamity, the deck was crowded with bands of soldiers, useless in such circumstances; to move was impracticable, and the men were therefore sent to their berths, to await in silence and resignation what appeared to be their certain doom, for from the dashing noise caused by the terrific strife of the elements, no human sound could be heard. The soldiers, seeing that their fate was to all appearance inevitable, submitted with the implicit obedience of military discipline, and each one was allowed to give himself up to those meditations with which he thought it most becoming to meet death. Suddenly, what appeared to be a tremendous lurch was made by the vessel, then all movement ceased. After a moment of anxious expectation, a deep awe fell upon every one, for it was believ Ships were often driven by stress of weather upon these islands, but rarely left them, if they left them at all, without some of their crews being captured and dragged into the interior, to encountered some unknown fate. One vessel absolutely witnessed the going to pieces of her consort upon this dreadful shore, and although the crew of the latter were seen to reach the land, not one of them escaped from the aborigines. A very curious adventure, with no such tragical end, happened in this archipelago in 1844. that the doomed ship was foundering. This, however, was a mistake. The vessel remained still and motionless, as if suddenly arrested in her headlong career to destruction. Most thought that daylight would never appear to them again, and yet with what trembling anxiety was it awaited by all! Those only who have lived through such a night of peril can imagine what their feelings must have him luxuries which he could never have been the alternations of hope and despair imagined in his dreams. But no sooner | that by turns reigned paramount. The did an opportunity to escape present itself, first streak of dawn enabled them to see a than off went the savage, plunging into sight the reality of which they could the sea and swimming to shore in his scarcely credit, so different was it from all newly-acquired habiliments of jacket and they had imagined-from the appalling trowsers. His Mincopie friends, standing death they had dreaded. The vessel ap- with bent bows, as usual, upon the beach, peared to be surrounded, not by an ocean were at first inclined to welcome him in of waves, but by an ocean of leaves. The their usual homicidal fashion; but when branches of the giants of the primeval for- he flung off his clothes, and appeared like ests, interlaced with each other, spread themselves in puris naturalibus, he was over the deck of the motionless ship, warmly welcomed, as, indeed, a brand which, as they afterwards discovered, had snatched from the burning-one of nabeen driven right over a dangerous reef ture's gentlemen who had been within a into that interminable jungle, in the midst very little of becoming a civilized being. of which there is safety even from the They put on their full-dress suit at night, mighty force of the tornado. Presently like the fashionable world among ourthe curtain of night was altogether with- selves, and it consists of a thick covering drawn by the rosy fingers of morning. of yellow earth, which dries hard upon The spars of another vessel, hard and fast their body, and defends them from the on the outer edge of the reef, were per- musquitoes and other abominable creaceived, and unspeakable was their joy tures which are the unfailing drawbacks when her decks were seen to be crowded of luxuriant vegetation and tropical scenby the daring warriors who afterwards ery. This is their only notion of attire. shared with them the scarcely less deadly Widowed ladies, instead of wearing crape perils of the great battle-fields of the Sut-in memory of their deceased husbands, lej." Although the troops on board these ships were some hundreds in number, yet the natives did not hesitate to attack them, and effected considerable damage with their long arrows. suspend their skulls around their necks. This is their only notion of ornament. Hostile as these aborigines were found to be, yet they were not so formidable as the climate, before which, as I have said, The ample vegetation which was the the settlers under Captain Blair had to means of safety in the above case, is one succumb. The laws of health and sickof the causes which render these islands ness were not then so thoroughly underalmost uninhabitable; the miasmata from stood as now, and the pestilence walked their fetid swamps have proved fatal to in the noonday as at night invisible to at least one colony which strove to take their unpracticed eyes. An immense saltaway the reproach of primeval barbarity marsh, in the direction of the prevailing from the Andamans. The settlement at winds, was discovered by Dr. Mouat to Port Cornwallis, established in 1792, on be the cause of the evil. The bottom of the North Andaman, was abandoned after it was left uncovered by the tide twice in four years' struggle with disease. Cap-every twenty-four hours, and disclosed tain Blair, who commanded that expedi- such a dark, muddy, festering mass of tion, was inclined somewhat to excuse vegetable compound as was sufficient the excessive hostility of the natives, to impregnate the atmosphere far and upon the ground of their ill-treatment at wide with disease and death. The doctor the hands of the Malays, with whose kid- recommended for the new penal colony napping propensities they, in his charita- Port Blair, in the South Andaman, rather ble view, associated all strange faces than Port Cornwallis, but he believes that whatsoever. In the rare interviews with modern agricultural science could transwhich he was favored by them, wherein form the marsh itself into a scene of harmarrows were not the sole medium of com- less fertility. munication on their side, they certainly evinced a great disinclination to be approached too nearly, or to have their retreat into the jungle at all cut off. He captured one of them in a skirmish, and treated him with every kindness, giving The fetid swamp, that separates the North from the Middle Andaman will, however, be probably a destroyer of life until the end of time. Dr. Mouat held it his duty to discover whether, with the light draught of the ship's cutter, a passage could not be found through it, but the expedition was dangerous indeed. Wherever they chanced to be stationed off these islands, both officers and men took large doses of quinine with their breakfasts; but upon the occasion in question, these doses were doubled in the case of the crew of the cutter, and a large supply of excellent grog was taken on board. Nothing could exceed the natural beauties of the position which the ship occupied prior to the departure of these brave men, into what they well knew might be the very jaws of death. They had been trying experiments of the effects of sound on the previous night; the firing of a cannon had evoked a volume of thunder quite overwhelming, reverberating fourteen times, and dying away in a grand hushed murmur; while the flash had lit up, "with an effulgence that displayed every object clearly and distinctly, as if it had been evoked from the womb of mystery by some magician's wand," one of the most glorious scenes on earth. It was in this locality, too, that, looking over the sides of the ship, they gazed on the magnificent illumination of the coralbanks, "which, it is no exaggeration to say, transcended in luster and beauty all we had ever seen described in the most alluring of fairy tales." The members of the swamp expedition, however, were bound for another scene. The water through which they had to pass was so putrid, and the exhalations arising from it so nauseous, that with every dip of the oar they grew deadly sick. They actually rowed through sixteen miles of this abomination; at least the mangrove swamps became "so fetid, that," says Dr. Mouat, "it is fortunate for our readers I have no language adequately to describe it." The water, too, grew thicker and thicker, more pervaded with deadly decaying vegetable matter, until it was nothing but mud, the foulest in appearance it is possible to imagine. It was with considerable difficulty that they got their boat round, and weary indeed was their journey back. "We hailed the sight of our ship and the open water like men delivered from purgatory." The intercourse, if it deserve the name, between Dr. Mouat and his men and the aborigines was of a most unsatisfactory character. Civilization was anxious enough to shake hands, but Barbarism resented all her advances. The first apVOL. LX.-NO. 3 pearance of the steamer seemed absolutely to paralyze them with astonishment; and when they had succeeded in shaking off their torpor, their conversation and gestures became animated beyond all description; but as soon as they perceived there were men on board, this wonder, every other sentiment seemed merged in hatred, in defiance. They yelled like demons from the pit, and by every possible contortion of savage pantomime, displayed their hostile feelings. Every attempt at ingratiation on the part of the visitors terminated in a skirmish; every present was mistaken for a snare, every gesture translated into an insult. In one of these broils Dr. Mouat's party captured an Andaman about two-and-twenty years of age. The subsequent history of this young gentleman-who was of course christened by the sailors Jack-is so pathetic, that if the voyage of the Pluto had ended in nothing else save in supplying us with that romance, we should scarcely regret that it was undertaken. The Jack did not take to his new messmates kindly at first, but the medium of conciliation was at length found in the unconscious person of a Newfoundland dog, who, as the friend of both parties, induced at length a genuine friendship. Andaman had never seen any quadruped larger than a wild pig, but Carlo's manners inspired confidence. It was evidently with a sad heart, however, that the poor islander watched from the deck the gradual disappearance of his native shores, when the ship took her final departure; and the face that had once seemed entirely possessed by hostile passion, became sad and wistful enough. On the Pluto's reaching Calcutta, Lord Canning, who was delighted with Dr. Mouat's report of the feasibility of a penal colony being established at Port Blair, expressed a great desire to see the living specimen she had brought home from the almost unknown archipelago. Jack was accordingly attired in a becoming manner, and taken to Government House, where he attempted to salute Lady Canning in the native manner, "by blowing in her hand with a cooing murmur ;" an attention which she kindly but firmly declined. His great delight was contemplating his figure in the great looking-glasses; repeating to himself, with a leer and a chuckle: "Jack, Jack;" and then bursting into a roar of laughter. So great, however, was the change soon 20 |