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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
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CHAP. XIII. THE ISLAND 01' AN SAMANAIN
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The description of the natives of the Andaman Islands in the early Arab Relations
has been often quoted, but it is too like our traveller's account to be omitted : The
inhabitants of these islands eat men alive. They are black with woolly hair, and in
their eyes and countenance there is something quite frightful They go naked,
and have no boats. If they had they would devour all who passed near them. Sometimes ships that are wind-bound, and have exhausted their provision of water, touch here and apply to the natives for it ; in such cases the crew sometimes fall into the hands of the latter, and most of them are massacred " (p. 9).
The traditional charge of cannibalism against these people used to be very persistent, though it is generally rejected since our settlement upon the group in 1858. Mr. Logan supposes the report was cherished by those who frequented the islands for edible birds' nests, in order to keep the monopoly. Of their murdering the crews of wrecked vessels, like their Nicobar neighbours, I believe there is no doubt ; and it has happened in our own day. Cesare Federici, in Ramusio, speaks of the terrible fate of crews wrecked on the Andamans; all such were killed and eaten by the natives, who refused all intercourse with strangers. A. Hamilton mentions a friend of his
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The Cynocephali. (From the Livre des Merveilles.
who was wrecked on the islands ; nothing more was ever heard of the ship's company, " which gave ground to conjecture that they were all devoured by those savage cannibals."
They do not, in modern times, I believe, in their canoes, quit their own immediate coast, but Hamilton says they used, in his time, to come on forays to the Nicobar Islands ; and a paper in the Asiatic Researches mentions a tradition to the same effect as existing on the Car Nicobar. They have retained all the aversion to intercourse anciently ascribed to them, and they still go naked as of old, the utmost exception being a leaf-apron worn by the women near the British Settlement.
The Dog-head feature is at least as old as Ctesias. The story originated, I imagine, in the disgust with which " allophylian " types of countenance are regarded, kindred to the feeling which makes the Hindus and other eastern nations represent the aborigines whom they superseded as demons. The Cubans described the Caribs to Columbus as man-eaters with dogs' muzzles ; and the old Danes had tales of Cynocephali in Finland. A curious passage from the Arab geographer Ihn Said pays an ambiguous compliment to the forefathers of Moltke and Von Roon : " The Borús
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