The Lenape Stone; or, The Indian and the MammothMercer, Henry C.
History
The Lenape Stone; or, The Indian and the Mammoth
Mercer, Henry C.
Delaware Indians; Mammoths; Picture-writing, Indian
Dr. Abbott, who, in his "Prehistoric Industry," has given a wood-cut
of the curious egg-shaped stone found at Lake Winnipissiogee, and upon
which there are several carvings of spears, quotes in the same work, by
way of the nearest approach to an allusion to the spear among the early
writers, a description from Josselyn of an elk-hunt among the early
Massachusetts Indians, in which the writer describes a lance made of a
staff a yard and a half long and pointed with fish-bone. But a passage
in Bernal Diaz del Castillo ("Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la
nueva Espana," Madrid, 1638), kindly pointed out to the writer by Dr.
Rau, seems to furnish conclusive evidence on the subject. Bernal Diaz,
among several instances in his works, speaks (chapter vi.) of an attack
upon the Spaniards in Florida by Indians "armed with immense-sized
bows, sharp arrows, and spears, among which some were shaped like
swords" ("y lanzas y unas ā manera de espadas").
Furthermore there is fig. 5 (plate xiv. from De Bry's "Brevis
Narratio," published in Latin in Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1591),
representing Indians holding spears, for which likewise the writer is
indebted to Dr. Rau. It was drawn from life by one Jacques Le Moyne, a
French artist, in 1564. He had come to Florida with the French Admiral
Laudonnière, and having been left by the expedition for some months at
a fort upon the St. John's River, frequently made sketching expeditions
among the neighboring tribes. Many similar drawings by him of warriors
armed with spears are to be found among the numerous illustrations in
De Bry.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Picture of North American Indians carrying
spears, drawn from life by Jacques Le Moyne, in 1564.]
Passing over the mysterious animal on one of the Davenport tablets,
sometimes taken for a mammoth, and the pictograph on a boulder near
the Gila River seen by Colonel W. H. Emory in 1846 in a military
reconnaissance,[F] and which, he says, "may with some stretch of the
imagination be supposed to be a mastodon," we come to the supposed
traces of the elephant noticed by numerous writers in the mural
paintings and architecture of Mexico and Central America.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Elephant Trunk (Uxmal).]
Figures 6 and 7, reduced from Catherwood's "Atlas" to Stephens'
"Yucatan," are fair specimens of the remarkable architectural ornaments
from Central America known as elephant trunks, and which, placed
between two eyes and a mouth-like cavity, seem at first, as Waldeck and
other travellers have remarked, to bear a striking resemblance to the
trunk of a proboscidean.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account