The First Landing on Wrangel Island: With Some Remarks on the Northern InhabitantsRosse, Irving C. (Irving Collins)
History
The First Landing on Wrangel Island: With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants
Rosse, Irving C. (Irving Collins)
Eskimos; Saint Lawrence Island (Alaska); Wrangel Island (Russia)
The play impulse manifests itself among these people in various ways.
They have such mimetic objects as dolls, miniature boats, etc. I have
seen a group of boys, sailing toy boats in a pond, behave under the
circumstances just as a similar group has been observed to do at
Provincetown, Cape Cod, and the same act, as performed in the Frog Pond
of the Boston Common, may be called only a differentiated form of the
same tendency. Their dolls, of ivory and clothed with fur, seem to
answer the same purpose that they do in civilized communities--namely,
the amusement of little girls--for at one place where we landed a number
of Eskimo girls, stopping play on our approach, sat their dolls up in a
row, evidently with a view to giving the dolls a better look at the
strange visitors. Spinning tops, essentially Eskimo and unique in their
character, are held in the hand while spinning; on the Siberian coast
football is played, and among other questionable things acquired from
contact with the whalemen, a knowledge of card-playing exists. We were
very often asked for cards, and at one place where we stopped and
bartered a number of small articles with the natives they gave evidence
of their aptitude at gaming. The game being started, with the bartered
articles as stakes, one fellow soon scooped in everything, leaving the
others to go off dead-broke, amid the ridicule of some of our crew, and
doubtless feeling worse than dead, for among no people that I have seen,
not even the French, does ridicule so effectually kill.
PERSONAL ORNAMENTATION.
Among the means taken by these people to produce personal ornamentation
that of tattooing the face and wearing a labret is the most noticeable.
The custom of tattooing having existed from the earliest historical
epochs is important, not only from an ethnological but from a medical
and pathological point of view, and even in its relation to medical
jurisprudence in cases of contested personal identity.
Without going into the history of the subject, it may not be irrelevant
to mention that tattooing was condemned by the Fathers of the Church,
Tertullian, among others, who gives the following rather singular reason
for interdicting its use among women: "Certi sumus Spiritum Sanctum
magis masculis tale aliquid subscribere potuisse si feminis
subscripsisset."[2]
In addition to much that has been written by French and German writers,
the matter of tattoo-marks has of late claimed the attention of the law
courts of England, the Chief-Justice, Cockburn, in the Tichbourne case,
having described this species of evidence as of "vital importance," and
in itself final and conclusive. The absence of the tattoo-marks in this
case justified the jury in their finding that the defendant was not and
could not be Roger Tichbourne, whereupon the alleged claimant was proved
to be an impostor, found guilty of perjury, and sentenced to penal
servitude.[3]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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