AFRICAN CANNIBALISM IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 69

AFRICAN CANNIBALISM IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

In turning over Pigafetta's version of the narrative of Lopez,

which I have quoted

above, I came upon so curious and unexpected an anticipation, by some two centuries and a half, of one of the most startling parts of M. Du Chaillu's narrative, that I cannot refrain from drawing attention to it. in a note, although I must confess that the subject is not strictly relevant to the matter in hand.

In the fifth chapter of the first book of the "Descriptio, "Concerning the northern part of the Kingdom of Congo and its boundaries, is mentioned a people whose king is called 'Maniloango,' and who live under the equator, and as far westward as Cape Lopez. This appears to be the country now inhabited by the Ogobai and Bakalai according to M. Du Chaillu. "Beyond these dwell another people

called 'Anziques,' of incredible ferocity, for they eat one another, sparing neither friends nor relations."

70 AFRICAN CANNIBALISM IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

These people are armed with small bows bound tightly round with snake skins, and strung with a reed or rush. Their arrows, short and slender, but made of hard wood, are shot with great rapidity. They have iron axes, the handles of which are bound with snake skins, and swords with scabbards of the same material; for defensive armour they employ elephant hides. They cut their skins when young, so as to produce scars. "Their butchers' shops are filled with human flesh instead of that of oxen or sheep. For they eat the enemies whom they take in battle. They fatten, slay, and devour their slaves also, unless they think they shall get a good price for them; and, moreover, sometimes for weariness of life or desire for glory (for they think it a great thing and the sign of a generous soul to despise life), or for love of their rulers, offer themselves up for food."

“There are indeed many cannibals, as in the Eastern Indies and in Brazil and elsewhere, but none such as these, since the others only eat their enemies, but these their own blood relations."

The careful illustrators of Pigafetta have done their best to enable the reader to realize this account of the 'Anziques,' and the unexampled butcher's shop represented in fig. 12, is a facsimile of part of their Plate XII.

M. Du Chaillu's account of the Fans accords most singularly with what Lopez here narrates of the Anziques. He speaks of their small crossbows and little arrows, of their axes and knives, “ingeniously sheathed in snake skins." "They tattoo themselves more than any other tribes I have met with north of the equator." And all the world knows what M. Du Chaillu says of their cannibalism-" Presently we passed a woman who solved all doubt. She bore with her a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we should go to market and carry thence a roast or steak." M. Du Chaillu's artist cannot generally be accused of any want of courage in embodying the statements of his author, and it is to be regretted that, with so good an excuse, he has not furnished us with a fitting companion to the sketch of the brothers De Bry.

II.

ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE

LOWER ANIMALS.

Multis videri poterit, majorem esse differentiam Simiæ et Hominis, quam diei et noctis; verum tamen hi, comparatione instituta inter summos Europæ Heroës et Hottentottos ad Caput bonæ spei degentes, difficillime sibi persuadebunt, has eosdem habere natales; vel si virginem nobilem aulicam, maxime contam et humanissimam, conferre vellent cum homine sylvestri et sibi relicto, vix augurari possent, hunc et illam ejusdem esse speciei.-Linnai Amanitates Acad. "Anthropomorpha."

THE question of questions for mankind-the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting. than any other-is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world. Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to these riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build

on a secure foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth-tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.

In a well-worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just. as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many.

Since the revival of learning, whereby the Western

races of Europe were enabled to enter upon that progress towards true knowledge, which was commenced by the philosophers of Greece, but was almost arrested in subsequent long ages of intellectual stagnation, or, at most, gyration, the human larva has been feeding vigorously, and moulting in proportion. A skin of some dimension was cast in the 16th century, and another towards the end of the 18th, while, within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent. But this is a process not unusually accompanied by many throes and some sickness and debility, or, it may be, by graver disturbances; so that every good citizen must feel bound to facilitate the process, and even if he have nothing but a scalpel to work withal, to ease the cracking integument to the best of his ability.

In this duty lies my excuse for the publication of these essays. For it will be admitted that some knowledge of man's position in the animate world is an indispensable preliminary to the proper understanding of his relations to the universe and this again resolves itself, in the long run, into an inquiry into the nature and the closeness of the ties which connect him with those singular creatures whose history* has been sketched in the preceding pages.

The importance of such an inquiry is indeed intuitively manifest. Brought face to face with these blurred copies of himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain shock, due, perhaps, not so much to disgust at the aspect of what looks like an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time

* It will be understood that, in the preceding Essay, I have selected for notice from the vast mass of papers which have been written upon the manlike Apes, only those which seem to me to be of special moment.