Indiaman

“ We knew many of their present stalwart braves in those days of early life when the Indian and white alike forget disguise, but in the unchecked exuberance of youthful feeling show the real character that policy and habit may afterwards so much conceal; and we know that, under the stolid stoic look he assumes, there is burning in the Indian's nature a heart of fire and feeling, and an all-observing keenness of apprehension, that marks and remembers everything that occurs, and every insult he receives. ”

“ I would encourage the Indians to cultivate them. Let them see how much it adds to their comfort, how it insures to their wives and children abundant subsistence; and then you win the Indian over to civilization; you charm him, and he becomes a civilized man. ”

“ It has been said, and reiterated so frequently as to have obtained the familiarity of household words, that it is the doom of the Indian to disappear—to vanish like the morning dew before the advance of civilization—before those who belong by nature to a different, and by education and circumstances to a superior race; and melancholy is it to us—those doomed ones—that the history of this country, in respect to us, and its civilization, has furnished so much ground for the saying, and for giving credence to it. ”

“ I had read some flaming picture books of Indian life, and I had mixed all my life more or less with the Indians, that is, such as are willing to mix with us on the border, but the real Indian, the brave, simple, silent and thoughtful Indian who retreats from the white man when he can, and fights when he must, I had never before seen or read a line about. ”

“ Such things have been, nay, are, in India, seeming in truth more fantastic when set down in pen and ink than they do when seen in the warm clasp of that Indian sunlight which shines down indifferently on so many a strange anomaly of caste, and creed, and custom. ”

“ What under the sun do the learned world suppose the Indians are made of? A man spending his time painfully to catch a beaver, or entrap an enemy, without stores of thought, without leisure, with nothing often to eat, and nothing to put on but tatters and rags, and, withal, with the whole Anglo-Saxon race treading on his toes and burning out his vitals with ardent spirits. Such is the Indian. ”

“ How quickly their sound arrests the attention of the traveler and stranger? How softly their syllables fall from the lips of beauty. There seems a magic spell about them. May it be their protection from any change. It is but just that the streams that first knew the Indians in their pride and glory should retain the melody of their language.
In many instances, the Indian character has been found capable of great refinement from education, and of the few who have been placed in our colleges, some have evinced superior talents. ”

“ The Indian, on the contrary, free from the restraints and refinements of polished life, and in a great degree a solitary and independent being, obeys the impulses of his inclination or the dictates of his judgment; and thus the attributes of his nature, being freely indulged, grow singly great and striking. ”

“ There is no reason why the Indians should not speedily become civilized. Those who have longest lived amongst them, and who best understand their character, tell me so. I fully believe it. The Indian follows his wild habits because he has been educated to do so. The education of habit, familiar from infancy, and the influence of tradition, lead him to the hunt, and as much to despise manual labor. He does what he has been taught to consider as noble and honorable, and that is what the most enlightened do. ”

“ If so, what inducement could have been placed before them, sufficiently powerful, to break down the barriers of nature, and bring men habitually indolent, to so herculean a task? The Indian, as we see him now, never works. He is the sovereign of the woods, and strides over his heritage with the step of a master, and the wild glance of one who disdains employment. ”

“ Such, nevertheless, is the spectacle which an Indian nation exhibits to the eye of a stranger. I have been a witness to it for a long series of years, and after much observation and reflection to discover the cause of this phenomenon, I think I have reason to be satisfied that it is in a great degree to be ascribed to the pains which the Indians take to instil at an early age honest and virtuous principles into the minds of their children, and to the method which they pursue in educating them. ”

“ Connected with them by a long residence, by the exercise of official duties, and by still more delicate and sacred ties, he has been regarded by them as one identified with their history, and received many marks of their confidence.
The Indians, viewed as a distinct branch of the human race, have some peculiar traits and institutions, from which their history and character may be advantageously studied. They hold some opinions, which are not easily discovered by a stranger, or a foreigner, but which yet exert a powerful influence on their conduct and life. ”

“ And it is a commonplace of history that one of the main streams of this great migration of the pioneers of the world's civilization entered India through her north-western mountain passes to build up her spiritual character, even as the Indus and the Ganges have broken through the Himalayas to create her physical character. For centuries these Indo-Aryans pushed on their work of colonizing India amid struggles and conflicts with the original inhabitants of the country, and developed a civilization that is reflected in the literature they have created. ”

“ And though they are still amongst us, picturesque figures which we value chiefly as relics of a gaily-coloured past, the Indians are the mystery of our continent. They speak to us, they smile at us, they sit within our churches and use our tongue, but for all that they remain forever strangers. What pagan beliefs vibrating through the chain of unrecorded ancestry, what hates, loves, aspirations and bitter griefs, separate from our comprehension as the poles, thrill out of the darkness of yesterday and die unspoken, unformed, beneath those calm, bronze brows? ”

“ My India was not on the surface, but lay many centuries beneath it; and as to paying a globe-trotter’s visit to Calcutta and Bombay, I might as well walk through Oxford 5Street and Bond Street But, though I never stood on the ghats of Benares, and never saw the men, women, and children step down from them into the sacred waters of the Ganges, I have had the good fortune of knowing a number of Indians in Europe, and no doubt some of the best and most distinguished of the sons and daughters of India. ”

“ As yet I am inclined to think that the idea of the Indians becoming what we call a civilised people seems quite hopeless; those who entertain such benevolent anticipations should come here, and behold the effect which three centuries of contact with the whites have produced on the nature and habits of the Indian. The benevolent theorists in England should come and see with their own eyes that there is a bar to the civilisation of the Indians, and the increase or even preservation of their numbers, which no power can overleap. ”

“ THE character of the Indians, like that of other uncivilized nations, is composed of a mixture of ferocity and gentleness. They are at once guided by passions and appetites, which they hold in common with the fiercest beasts that inhabit their woods, and are possessed of virtues which do honour to human nature. ”

“ Inseparable from the Indian character, wherever he is to be met with, is his remarkable taciturnity, his deep dissimulation, the perseverance with which he follows his plans of revenge or conquest, his concealment and apparent lack of curiosity, his stoical courage when in the power of his enemies, his cunning, his caution, and last, but not least, the wonderful power and subtlety of his senses. In studying the Indian character, while shocked and disgusted by many of his traits and customs, I find much to be admired, and still more of deep and unvarying interest. ”

“ It would perhaps be impossible to find two peoples who are farther removed from each other in temperament and training—whose nature and antecedents are more irreconcilable at all points. While the Anglo-Indian is bold, frank and just, even to harshness, the Hindu is subtle, affable, practiced to dissimulation, with ready susceptibilities to temporize and to barter justice for expediency. ”

“ The Indian, however, performs the menial labor of the country—and there is an appearance of apathy in his looks and actions, which seems to carry with it the signs of a broken, or at least a subdued spirit—resting upon 31him like a melancholy vision, a dreamy remembrance, of better days. For, say what we please of him, he is the humble descendant of a once great and powerful people—the “children of the sun,” who were lords of that soil on which their offspring are now held in humiliating vassalage. ”

“ I like ’em better than most foreigners that have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own vices for them of the pale-faces—and he retains all his own virtues. ”

“ Among the many distinguished Indians of the century there was none whose name was more widely known in Europe and throughout the East, and none who exercised a greater influence in stemming the tide of irreligion and immorality, and awakening his fellow-countrymen to a sense of their moral, social, and intellectual responsibilities. ”

“ I was quite satisfied with that ideal India which I had built up for myself, whether from their books or from those who had come to see me at Oxford. If my India, as I am often told, is an ideal India, is it more so than Greece as seen through the poems of Homer, or Italy as seen through the verses of Virgil? What is ideal is not necessarily unreal, it is only like a landscape seen in sunshine. Look at a landscape on a brilliant summer’s day bathed in light and verdure, and again on a bleak day of March with its bitter winds and cloudy sky. ”

“ We had met with some strange adventures, and I had had another opportunity for observing the intelligence and shrewdness of my men, and their quickness in arriving at right conclusions from very little data. Many think of the Indians as savages and uncivilised, yet in some respects they are highly educated, and are gifted with a quickness of perception not excelled by any other people in the world. ”

“ I have already, in other chapters, commented upon some of these things, as revealed in the light of the Indian’s life. Their lives are, perforce, models of simplicity, devoid of luxuries and also of superfluities. It is not my intent to suggest that we should revert to their method of living a simple and unluxurious life, but I do long with all my heart that we might take lesson from them, and find the golden mean between their life and our too complex and superfluity-laden life. ”

“ In vain his monitor tried to impress on his mind the truth of the chronicles, and the fact that generations ago the Indian could be truly called a noble man, until his child-like faith in the straight tongue of the interloper had made a net for his feet, to escape which they had recourse only to treachery and the tomahawk, thus carving in history a character that in the beginning was not his, but one into which he was educated by the godly people who came with their churches and guns, their religion and whisky, to civilize the credulous people of the forests. ”

“ His tall dignified figure, familiar at court and in the highest circles of society, welcomed alike by the English Church and non-conformists, and equally at home in every circle of society, became in the eyes of those, who for the most part had never before seen an Indian at all, the embodiment of the Indian Empire. ”

“ DOMESTIC AND SOCIAL MANNERS OF THE INDIANS, WHILE ON THEIR WINTERING GROUNDS.
The Indian, who takes his position as an orator, in front of his people, and before a mixed assemblage of white men, is to be regarded, in a measure, as an actor, who has assumed a part to perform. He regards himself as occupying a position in which all eyes are directed upon him, in scrutiny, and he fortifies himself for the occasion, by redoubled efforts in cautiousness and studied stoicism. ”

“ But all this seems to flit through the Indian mind as a dream, and furnishes him rather the source of a pleasing secret retrospection than any spring to present and future exertions. He pines away as one that is fallen, and despairs to rise. He does not seem to open his eyes on the prospect of civilization and mental exaltation held up before him, as one to whom the scene is new or attractive. ”

“ The patience, the gentleness, the tenderness with which these white-robed swarthy Indians attend the little children of their European masters, surpass even the love of women. You may see them sitting for hour after hour, with their little infantine charges, amusing them with toys, fanning them when they slumber, brushing away the flies, or pacing the verandah with the little ones in their arms, droning the low monotonous lullaby which charms them to sleep ”

“ One imagines these men, hardened with intolerable toil, skilled in all the lore of wild life, brave, adventurous, picking up here and there a word or two of Indian speech, adopting Indian names for places which they had no time to name themselves, handing on these strange syllables to those who came after them to settle and to build. ”