The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
The revolution which, at the critical period of the advent of the Trench
in the valley of the St. Lawrence, in the interval of sixty-eight years
between the visits of Cartier and Champlain, displaced the fortified and
populous Indian capital of Hochelaga and left the surrounding regions a
desolate wilderness, is a mysterious event. Had Champlain been curious
to learn the facts of an occurrence then so recent there could have been
little difficulty in recovering the history of the exodus of the
Hochelagans. But it had no interest for the French adventurers of that
day. The well-fortified Wyandot towns had given place to a few ephemeral
birch-bark wigwams belonging to another race; and the readiest solution
of the mystery has been to ascribe the expulsion of the Wyandots, or
Hurons, from their ancient home in Eastern Canada, to the Algonkins.
This, as already shown, is irreconcilable with the fact that Champlain
found them in friendly alliance with the latter against their common
foe, the Iroquois. If, however, the Wyandot tradition of the expulsion
of the Hurons from the island of Montreal by the Senecas be accepted, it
is in no degree inconsistent with the circumstances subsequently
reported by Champlain; but rather serves to account for some of them, if
it is assumed that the Senecas were, in their turn, driven out by the
Algonkins, and then finally withdrew beyond the St. Lawrence.
But there is another kind of evidence bearing on the question of the
affinities of the people first met with by Cartier in 1535, which also
has its value here. The descriptions of the palisaded towns of the
Hurons on the Georgian Bay very accurately reproduce that which Cartier
gives of Hochelaga. Ephemeral as such fortifications necessarily were,
the construction of a rampart formed of a triple row of trunks of trees,
surmounted with galleries, from whence to hurl stones and other missiles
on their assailants, was a formidable undertaking for builders provided
with no better tools than stone hatchets, and with no other means of
transport than their united labour supplied. But the design had the
advantage of furnishing a self-supporting wall, and so of saving the
greater labour of digging a trench, with such inadequate tools, in soil
penetrated everywhere with the roots of forest trees. It was the
Huron-Iroquois system of military engineering, in which they contrasted
favourably with the Algonkins, among whom the absence of such evidence
of settled habits as those secure defences supplied, was characteristic
of these ruder nomads. But such urban fortifications no less strikingly
contrast with the elaborate and enduring military earthworks to the
south of the great lakes. The pottery and implements found on the site
of Hochelaga are of the same character as many examples recovered from
the Huron ossuaries. On the other hand the peculiar rites, of which
those ossuaries are the enduring memorials, appear to have distinguished
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