AT THE BACK OF BEYOND
Pygmies and Bushmen of the Kalahari. An Account of the hunting tribes inhabiting the great arid plateau of the Kalahari desert, their precarious manner of living, their habits, customs and beliefs ; with some reference to Bushman art, both early and of recent date, and to the neighbouring African tribes. By S. S. Dornan, F.R.G.S. Illustrated. (Seeley, Service and Co. 21s.)
WHERE are the Falkland Islands, Easter Island, and the Kalahari desert ? and what do you know about them ? Only Macaulay's schoolboy could be expected to cope with such a question in a geography paper. Three books of consider- able bulk may be recommended to those desirous of answering it—and more particularly Mr. Boy-son:a volume on the Falklands, a model of what such a thing- should be. The situation, of the Falklands is, of course, .known (if vaguely) to a considerable number of persons—but not the series of chances which decided that at a critical moment of 1914 Great Britain should possess a harbour and coaling station off the south-east coast of America. Or was it chance ? The British have had a way for some three centuries of picking up unconsidered trifles which somehow work into the fabric of sea power. Acquisition has been generally slow and apparently reluctant—never more so than in this instance. First sighted in 1501 by Portuguese and next year by French, the Falklands were vaguely charted on maps from 1507 onwards, under various names : they were reconnoitred from shipboard by successive captains, but till 1689 no man seems to have set foot among their population of penguins and other birds still fearless of man. Now and then a ship watered there, in the eighteenth century ; but only in Chatham's day was settlement attempted, by a Frenchman, Bougainville, -Montealm's aide-de-camp, who carried thither a couple of families from the lost Arcadia. The expedition was manned mostly from St. Malo, and the name used by the French was les ales maloaines. Next year, 1765. Commodore, afterwards Admiral, Byron, was sent out to survey the islands. He entered and named Port Egmont on West Falkland, sailed round the islands, naming headlands, and went away without discovering the French colony fully established at Port Louis on East Falkland in the bight of a deep bay whose opening he recorded. A second British expedition under MacBride put up a block house at Port Egmont and was almost a year in the islands before it dis- covered the French. Then began the first of many diplomatic quarrels over possession. Spain claimed ownership and negotiated France out—a pity for colonization had been well started ; and for ten years Spain held one port, Britain the other, each periodically giving the other notice to quit. In 1770 the Spanish put the English out and there was talk of war, arising from what Johnson called in a pamphlet' " the empty sound of an ancient title to a Caribbean rock . . . which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation." Those English and Spaniards alike who had the task of occupation showed one common desire.: to get out. England got out first—leaving nothing at Port Egmont but a notice that trespassers would be prosecuted. When South America broke away from Spain it claimed this appanage, and there was an Argentine rule up to 1834, under which the action of governors and their right to govern was disputed, sometimes by Britain, sometimes by the United States. When the Argentines departed, after the murder of their -last governor, Britain took up the charge, as a matter of ocean police : whalers and sealers were now numerous on the shores. It took nearly fifty years of in- decision to transform the occupation into a colony ; but in 1914 there was a formally organised colony there, thirty- four years old with a wireless installation. It was self- supporting from 1880 onwards, and if it had cost Great Britain from fifty to a hundred thousand before that, it was a good bargain when Von Spee had to be dealt with. Now, with its population of two thousand, it is a headquarters of whaling and in a modest way a potential source of food supply : but probably its contribution to history has been made.
Mr. Rupert Vallentin, a- naturalist who can write as well as observe, adds some delightful chapters about bird, life —penguin, goose, skuas, and the rest of them. Apparently the skua was designed to prevent other birds from becoming: too numerous in natural conditions. It looks as if a case could be made for suppression of this now unnecessary pirate.,
Life is more interesting than death and so less space must be given here to Mr. Macmillan Brown's fascinating study of Easter Island, a thousand miles from the nearest land, seven, thousand from the nearest considerable civilisation, inhabited) by a handful of natives who would be miserable if they were. not so cheerful ; and filled with funereal monuments of a grandeur that rivals the Pyramids. These stone platforms constructed with gigantic blocks, accurately planned and squared to their emplacement, and these vast statues, some of them seventy feet high, cannot, he thinks, be the work of such folk as now live, there ; and by a process of reasoning (into which a good deal of imagination enters), working on the suggestions of local legend and mythology, Mr. Macmillan Brown infers that an island empire in the Pacific disappeared. under water within the last few centuries. Mr. Brown, who is Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, writes as becomes his office with deep knowledge of the immediate object, illustrated by such study of perhaps related antiquity among the Peruvian remains.
The antiquities which Mr. Dornan has studied among the inhabitants of the Kalahari desert are contemporary. Man himself is here the survival. The bushmen of South Africa are in his judgment one with the pygmies of Central African forests—differing only, as beasts also differ, according to the conditions of life in forest or plain. So primitive are they that even to-day they make paintings and drawings like those of cave man r their art is as instinctive as their reading of a spoor. Practically we have in them an extant document upon the begizmings of human civilisation : the mere Bushman, a hunter, who does not even domesticate animals,. precedes the herdsman, and is beaten out by him, as the herdsman in turn is beaten out by the tiller of the soil. Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu are still extant types and their impact on each other is almost even now in progress. This is the book's main interest ; but it is full of ethnological detail, and also of field craft. Which of us knew that these primitives could actually run down a giraffe or eland
—surely the final proof that determination is always stronger in the pursuer than in. the pursued.
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