Read Ebook: The Book of the Sword by Burton Richard Francis Sir

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 537 lines and 80672 words, and 11 pages

FOREWORD ix

INTRODUCTION xi

CONCLUSION 280

INDEX 281

FIG. PAGE

THE BOOK OF THE SWORD.

PREAMBLE: ON THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS.

I will not enlarge upon the imperious interest of Hoplology: the history of arms and armour, their connection and their transitions, plays the most important part in the annals of the world.

I never witnessed this bombardment by monkeys. But when my regiment was stationed at Baroda in Gujar?t, several of my brother officers and myself saw an elephant use a weapon. The intelligent animal, which the natives call H?thi , was chained to a post during the dangerous season of the wet forehead, and was swaying itself in ill-temper from side to side. Probably offended by the sudden appearance of white faces, it seized with its trunk a heavy billet, and threw it at our heads with a force and a good will that proved the worst intention.

According to Captain Hall--who, however, derived the tale from the Eskimos, the sole living representatives of the palaeolithic age in Europe--the polar bear, traditionally reported to throw stones, rolls down, with its quasi-human forepaws, rocks and boulders upon the walrus when found sleeping at the foot of some overhanging cliff. 'Meister Petz' aims at the head, and finally brains the stunned prey with the same weapon. Perhaps the account belongs to the category of the ostrich throwing stones, told by many naturalists, including Pliny , when, as Father Lobo explained in his 'Abyssinia,' the bird only kicks them up during its scouring flight. Similar, too, is the exploded shooting-out of the porcupine's quills, whereby, according to mediaeval 'Shoe-tyes' men have been badly hurt and even killed. On the other hand, the Emu kicks like an Onager and will drive a man from one side of a quarter-deck to the other.

But though Man's first work was to weapon himself, we must not believe with the Cynics and the Humanitarians that his late appearance in creation, or rather on the stage of life, initiated an unvarying and monotonous course of destructiveness. The great tertiary mammals which preceded him, the hoplotherium, the deinotherium, and other -theria, made earth a vast scene of bloodshed to which his feeble powers could add only a few poor horrors. And even in our day the predatory fishes, that have learned absolutely nothing from man's inhumanity to man, habitually display as much ferocity as ever disgraced savage human nature.

Primitive man--the post-tertiary animal--was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his life. Ulysses says pathetically:

No thing frailer of force than Man earth breedeth and feedeth; Man ever feeblest of all on th' Earth's face creeping and crawling.

The same sentiment occurs in the 'Iliad'; and Pliny, the pessimist, writes--'the only tearful animal, Man.'

The career of these wretches, who had neither 'minds' nor 'souls,' was one long campaign against ravenous beasts and their 'brother' man-brutes. Peace was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose. The golden age of the poets was a dream; as Videlou remarked, 'Peace means death for all barbarian races.' The existence of our earliest ancestors was literally the Battle of Life. Then, as now, the Great Gaster was the first Master of Arts, and War was the natural condition of humanity upon which depends the greater part of its progress, its rising from the lower to the higher grade. Hobbism, after all, is partly right: 'Men were by nature equal, and their only social relation was a state of war.' Like the children of our modern day, helpless and speechless, primaeval Homo possessed, in common with his fellow-creatures, only the instincts necessary for self-support under conditions the most facile. Uncultivated thought is not rich in the productive faculty; the brain does not create ideas: it only combines them and evolves the novelty of deduction, and the development of what is found existing. Similarly in language, onomatopoeia, the imitation of natural sounds, the speech of Man's babyhood, still endures; and to it we owe our more picturesque and life-like expressions. But, despite their feeble powers, compulsory instruction, the Instructor being Need, was continually urging the Savage and the Barbarian to evolve safety out of danger, comfort out of its contrary.

Upon the imitative faculty and its exercise I must dwell at greater length. It is regretable that the delicious wisdom of Pope neglected to point out the great lesson of the animal-world in suggesting and supplying the arts of offence and defence:--

Go, from the creatures thy instructions take... Thy arts of building from the bee receive; Learn from the mole to plough, the worm to weave; Learn from the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.

Before noting the means of attack and protection which Nature suggested, we may distribute Hoplology, the science of arms and weapons of offence and defence, human and bestial, into two great orders, of which the latter can be subdivided into four species:--

Colonel A. Lane Fox thus classifies the weapons of 'Animals and Savages':--

Use eke the cast of stone with slynge or honde; It falleth ofte, yf other shot there none is, Men harneys?d in steel may not withstonde The multitude and mighty cast of stonys.

The sword-fish , although a vegetable feeder, is mentioned by Pliny as able to sink a ship. It is recorded to have killed a man when bathing in the Severn near Worcester. It attacks the whale, and it has been known to transfix a vessel's side with its terrible weapon. The narwhal or sea-unicorn carries a formidable tusk, a Sword-blade of the same kind similarly used.

Here may be offered a single proof how Man, living among, and dependent for food upon, the lower animals, borrowed from their habits and experience his earliest practice of offence and defence. The illustration represents a 'Singhauta,' 'M?du' or 'M?ru' , made from the horns of the common Indian antelope, connected by crossbars. In its rude state, and also tipped with metal, it is still used as a weapon by the wild Bh?ls, and as a crutch and dagger by the Jogis and Fakirs , both orders of religious mendicants who are professionally forbidden to carry secular arms. It also served for defence, like the parrying-stick of Africa and Australia, till it was fitted with a hand-guard, and the latter presently expanded into a circular targe of metal. This ancient instrument, with its graceful curves, shows four distinct stages of development: first, the natural, and, secondly, the early artificial, with metal caps to make it a better thrusting weapon. The third process was to forge the whole of metal; and the fourth and final provided it with a straight, broad blade, springing at right angles from the central grip. This was the 'Adaga' of mediaeval writers.

The offensive weapon of the sting-ray, and of various insects, as well as the teeth of all animals, man included, furnish models for serrated or saw-edged instruments. Hence Colonel A. Lane Fox observes: 'It is not surprising that the first efforts of mankind in the construction of trenchant instruments should so universally consist of teeth, or flint-flakes, arranged along the edge of staves.' But evidently the knife preceded the saw, which is nothing but a knife-blade jagged. Other familiar instances would be the multibarb stings of insects, especially that of the common bee. Again, we have the mantis, an orthopter of the Temperates and the Tropics, whose fights, enjoyed by the Chinese, are compared with the duels of sabrers. For the rasping blow and parry they use the forearm, which carries rows of strong sharp spines; and a happy stroke beheads or bisects the antagonist. To this category belongs the armature of the saw-fish , a shark widely distributed and haunting the arctic, temperate, and tropical seas. Its mode of offence is to spring high from the water and to fall upon the foe, not with the point, but with either edge of its formidable arm: the row of strong and trenchant barbs, set like teeth, cuts deeply into the whale's flesh. Hence, in New Guinea, the serrated blade becomes a favourite Sword, the base of the snout being cut and rounded so as to form a handle.

Thus man, essentially a tool-making animal, and compelled by the conditions of his being to one long battle with the brute creation, was furnished by his enemies, not only with models of implements and instruments, and with instructions to use them, from witnessing the combats of brutes, but actually with their arms, which he converted to his own purposes. Hence the weapon and the tool were, as a rule, identical in the hands of primaeval man; and this forms, perhaps, the chief test of a primitive invention. The earliest drift-flints 'were probably used as weapons both of war and the chase, to grub roots, to cut down trees, and to scoop out canoes.' The Wat?si of Eastern Africa make their baskets with their sharpened spear-heads; and the so-called K?firs still shave themselves with the assegai. Hence, too, as like conditions engender like results, the arms and implements of different races resemble one another so closely as to suggest a common origin and actual imitation, even where copying was, so to speak, impossible.

Let us take as an instance two of the most widespread of weapons. The blow-pipe's progressive form has been independently developed upon a similar plan, with distinctly marked steps, in places the most remote. Another instance is the chevaux-de-frise, the spikes of metal familiar to the classics. They survive in the caltrops or bamboo splints planted in the ground by the barefooted Mpangwe of Gaboon-land and by the Rangos of Malacca.

In the early days of anthropological study we read complaints that 'it is impossible to establish, amongst the implements of modern savages, a perfectly true sequence,' although truth may be arrived at in points of detail; and that 'in regard to the primary order of development, much must still be left open to conjecture.' But longer labour and larger collections have lately added many a link to the broken chain of continuity. We can now trace with reasonable certainty the tardy progress of evolution which, during a long succession of ages, led to the systematised art of war. The conditions of the latter presently allowed society periods of rest, or rather of recovery; and more leisure for the practice which, in weapons as in other things, 'maketh perfect.' And man has no idea of finality: he will stop short of nothing less than the absolutely perfect. He will labour at the ironclad as he did the canoe; at the fish-torpedo as he did the petard.

From the use of arms, also, arose the rudimentary arts of savage man. Music began when he expressed his joy and his sorrow by cries of emotion--the voice being the earliest, as it is still the best, of music-makers. It was followed by its imitations, which pass through three several stages, and even now we know nothing more in the way of development. When the savage clapped together two clubs he produced the first or drum-type; when he hissed or whistled he originated the pipe-type ; and the twanging of his bow suggested the lyre-type, which we still find--'tickling the dried guts of a mewing cat.' Painting and sculpture were the few simple lines drawn and cut upon the tomahawk or other rude weapon-tool. 'As men think and live so they build,' said Herder; and architecture, which presently came to embrace all the other arts, dawned when the Savage attempted to defend and to adorn his roost among the tree branches or the entrance to his cave-den.

After this preamble, which has been longer than I expected, we pass to the first or rudest forms of the Weapons Proper used by Savage Man.

MAN'S FIRST WEAPONS--THE STONE AND THE STICK. THE EARLIEST AGES OF WEAPONS. THE AGES OF WOOD, OF BONE, AND OF HORN.

What, then, was Man's first weapon? He was born speechless and helpless, inferior to the beasts of the field. He grew up armed, but badly armed. His muscles may have been stronger than they are now; his poor uneducated fisticuff, however, could not have compared with the kick of an ass. As we see from the prognathous jaw, he could bite, and his teeth were doubtless excellent; still, the size and shape of the maxilla rendered it an arm inferior to the hyaena's and even to the dog's. He scratched and tore, as women still do; but his nails could hardly have been more dangerous than the claws of the minor felines.

He had, however, the hand, the most perfect of all prehensile contrivances, and Necessity compelled him to use it. The stone, his first 'weapon,' properly so called, would serve him in two ways--as a missile, and as a percussive instrument. Our savage progenitor, who in days long before the dawn of history, contracted the extensor and relaxed the flexor muscles of his arm when flinging into air what he picked up from the ground, was unconsciously lengthening his reach and taking the first step in the art and science of ballistics. His descendants would acquire extraordinary skill in stone-throwing, and universal practice would again make perfect. Diodorus of Sicily , who so admirably copied Herodotus, says that the Libyans 'use neither Swords, spears, nor other weapons; but only three darts and stones in certain leather budgets, wherewith they fight in pursuing and retreating.' The W?nshi Libyan or Berber peoples of the Canarian Archipelago, according to C? da Mosto , confirmed by many, including George Glas, were expert stone-throwers. They fought their duels 'in the public place, where the combatants mounted upon two stones placed at the opposite sides of it, each stone being flat at top and about half a yard in diameter. On these they stood fast without moving their feet, till each had thrown three round stones at his antagonist. Though they were good marksmen, yet they generally avoided those missive weapons by the agile writhing of their bodies. Then arming themselves with sharp flints in their left hands, and cudgels or clubs in their right, they fell on, beating and cutting each other till they were tired.' An instance is mentioned in which a Guanche brought down with a single throw a large palm-frond, whose mid-rib was capable of resisting the stroke of an axe. Kolben, who wrote about a century and a half ago, gives the following account of the ape-like gestures of the Khoi-Khoi or Hottentots:--'The most surprising strokes of their dexterity are seen in their throwing of a stone. They hit a mark to a miracle of exactness, though it be a hundred paces distant and no bigger than a halfpenny. I have beheld them at this exercise with the highest pleasure and astonishment, and was never weary of the spectacle. I still expected after repeated successes, that the stone would err; but I expected in vain. Still went the stone right to the mark, and my pleasure and astonishment were redoubled. You could imagine that the stone was not destined to err, or that you were not destined to see it. But a Hottentot's unerring hand in this exercise is not the only wonder of the scene; you would be equally struck perhaps with the manner in which he takes his aim. He stands, not still with a lift-up arm and a steady staring eye upon the mark, as we do; but is in constant motion, skipping from one side to another, suddenly stooping, suddenly rising; now bending on this side, now on that; his eyes, hands, and feet are in constant action, and you would think that he was playing the fool, and minding anything else than his aim; when on a sudden, away goes the stone with a fury, right to the heart of the mark, as if some invisible power had directed it.'

Nearer home the modern Syrians still preserve their old dexterity: I have often heard the tale, and have no reason to doubt its truth, of a brown bear being killed in the Libanus by a blow between the eyes. When the Arab Bedawin are on the raid and do not wish to use their matchlocks, they attack at night, and 'rain stones' upon the victim. The latter vainly discharges his ammunition against the shadows flitting ghost-like among the rocks; and, when his fire is drawn, the murderers rush in and finish their work. The use of the stone amongst the wild tribes of Asia, Africa, and America is almost universal. In Europe, the practice is confined to schoolboys; but the wild Irish, by beginning early, become adepts in it when adults. As a rule, the shepherd is everywhere a skilful stone-thrower.

Turner makes the 'Kawas' of Tanna, New Hebrides, a stone as long as, and twice as thick as, an ordinary counting-house ruler: it is thrown with great precision for a distance of twenty yards. The same author mentions stones rounded like a cannon-ball, among the people of Savage Island and Eromanga. Commander Byron notices the stones made into missiles by the Disappointment Islanders. Beechey, whose party was attacked by the Easter Islanders, says that the weapons, cast with force and accuracy, knocked several of the seamen under the boat-thwarts. Crantz tells us that Eskimo children are taught stone-throwing at a mark as soon as they can use their hands. The late Sir R. Schomburg describes a singular custom amongst the Demarara Indians. When a child enters boyhood he is given a hard round stone which he is to hand-rub till it becomes smooth, and he often reaches manhood before the task is done. Observers have suggested that the only use of the practice is a 'lesson in perseverance, which quality, in the opinion of many people, is best inculcated by engaging the minds of youths in matters that are devoid of any other incentive in the way of practical utility or interest.'

Herodotus, the father of ancient history in its modern form, a travelled student and a great genius, whose prose poem--for such it is--has proved incomparably more useful to us than any works of his successors, when describing a rock-sculpture of Sesostris-Ramses makes him carry in his right hand a spear , and in his left a bow . Hence some writers on Hoplology have held that he considered these to be the oldest of weapons. But the ancients did not study prehistoric man beyond confounding human bones with those of extinct mammals. Augustus Caesar was an early collector, according to Suetonius . 'Sua vero ... excoluit rebusque vetustate ac raritate notabilibus; qualia sunt Capraeis immanum belluarum ferarumque membra praegrandia, quae dicuntur gigantum ossa et arma heroum.' The Emperor preferred these curiosities to statues and pictures. The ancients also, like Marco Polo and too many of the moderns, spoke of the world generally after studying a very small part in particular. The Halicarnassian here evidently alludes to an epoch which had made notable advances upon the Quaternary Congener of the Simiads. We must return to a much earlier age. Lucretius, whose penetrating genius had a peculiar introvision, wrote like a modern scientist:--

Arma antiqua manus, ungues dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides et item sylvarum fragmina rami; Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, Sed prius aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus.

Gentleman Horace is almost equally correct:--

Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris, Mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter Unguibus et pugnis, dein fustibus, atque ita porro Pugnabant armis quae post fabricaverat usus.

How refreshing is the excellent anthropology of these pagans after the marvel-myths of man's Creation propounded by the so-called 'revealed' religions.

For the better distribution of the subject I shall here retain the obsolete and otherwise inadmissible, because misleading, terms--Age of Stone, Age of Bronze, Age of Iron. From the earliest times all the metals were employed, without distinction, for weapons offensive and defensive: besides which, the three epochs intermingle in all countries, and overlap one another; they are, in fact, mostly simultaneous rather than successive. As a modern writer says, like the three principal colours of the rainbow, these three stages of civilisation shade off the one into the other; and yet their succession, as far as Western Europe is concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours, though the proportion of the spectrum may vary in different countries. And, as a confusion of ideas would be created, especially when treating of the North European Sword, by neglecting this superficial method of classification, I shall retain it while proceeding to consider the development of the White Arm under their highly conventional limits.

Foreshafts and heads of bone are still applied to the arrows of the South African Bushmans. They alternate with wood, chert, and metal throughout the North American continent, from Eskimo-land to California. A notable resemblance has been traced between the bone-club of the Nootka Sound 'Indians,' and the jade Pattu-Pattu or Meri of New Zealand. Hence it has been suspected that this short, flat weapon, oval or leaf-shaped, and made to hold in the hand, as if it were a stone celt, was originally an imitation of the os humeri. Like the celt, also, is the stone club found by Colonel A. Lane Fox in the bed of the Bawn river, north Ireland.

The long bones of animals, with the walls of marrow-holes obliquely cut and exposing the hollow, were fastened upon sticks and poles, forming formidable darts and spears. The shape thus suggests the bamboo arrow-heads of the North Americans, whose cavity also served to carry poison. They would, moreover, easily be fashioned by fracture, and by friction upon a hard and rough-grained substance, into Swords and daggers. The Fenni, or Finns, of Tacitus , having no iron, used bone-pointed arrows. The Innuits, or Eskimos, of Greenland and other parts of the outer north, form with the ribs of whales their shuttles as well as their Swords. In 'Flint Chips' we find that the ancient Mexicans had bone-daggers. Wilde gives a unique specimen of such a weapon found in the bed of the River Boyne 'in hard blue clay, four feet under sand, along with some stone spear-heads.' Formed out of the leg-bone of one of the large ruminants, it measures ten and a sixth inches long, the rough handle being only two and a half inches; the blade is smooth, and wrought to a very fine point. This skeyne looks like a little model of a metal cut-and-thrust blade . Equally interesting is the knife-blade found with many other specimens of manufactured bone in the Ballinderry 'Crannog' : the total length is eight inches, and the handle is highly decorated. Other bone knives are mentioned in the 'Catalogue' . Bone prepared for making handles, and even ferules, for Swords and daggers is also referred to : the material, being easily worked and tolerably durable, has, indeed, never fallen into disuse. In the shape of ivory, walrus-tusk, and hippopotamus-tooth it is an article of luxury extensively used in the present day for the hafts of weapons and domestic implements. Lastly, bone served as a base to carry mere trenchant substances. The museum of Professor Sven Nilsson shows a smooth, sharp-pointed splinter, some six inches long, grooved in each side to about a quarter of an inch deep. In each of these grooves, fixed by means of cement, was a row of sharp-edged and slightly curved bits of flint. A similar implement is represented in the illustrated catalogue of the Museum of Copenhagen. Of this contrivance I shall speak at length when treating of the wooden Sword.

While bone was extensively used by primitive Man, horn was the succedaneum in places where it was plentiful. The Swiss lake-dwellings have yielded stag's horn and wooden hafts or helves, with bored holes and sockets; borers, awls or drills; mullers, rubbers, and various other instruments. The caverns of the Reindeer period in the south of France are not less rich. Stag-horn axes are common in Scandinavia, and one preserved by the Stockholm Museum bears the spirited outline of a deer. Beads, buttons, and other ornaments are found in England. This material, when taken from the old stag, is of greater density than osseous matter and of almost stony hardness, as the cancellated structure contains carbonate of lime; moreover it was easily worked by fire and steam.

Diodorus describes the Ichthyophagi as using antelopes' horns in their fishing, 'for need teacheth all things.' The earliest mention of a horn-arm is by Homer , who describes Pandarus, the Lycian, son of Lycaon, using a bow made of the six-spans-long spoils of the 'nimble mountain-goat.' The weapon may have retained the original form. The early Greek types were either simple or composite. The Persians preferred, and till lately used, wood and horn, stained, varnished, and adorned as much as possible. Duarte Barbosa describes the Turkish bow at Hormuz Island as 'made of buffalo-horn and stiff wood painted with gold and very pretty colours.' The 'Hornboge' occurs in the 'Nibelungenlied,' and the Hungarians appeared in Europe with horn-bows and poisoned arrows.

The bows of the Sioux and Yutahs are of horn, backed with a strip of raw hide to increase the spring. The Blackfoot bow is made from the horn of the mountain-sheep , and the Shoshone of the Rocky Mountains shape it by heating and wetting the horn, which is combined with wood . The Eskimos of Polar America, where nothing but drift-timber is procurable, are compelled to build their weapons with several bits of wood, horn, and bone, bent into form by smoking or steaming.

Prehistoric finds are still common in the Laibacher moorground . Lauerza, a hamlet on the edge of the swamp, supplied a large stone-axe , pierced and polished, of the quartzose conglomerate common in the adjacent highlands. This article was exceptional, most of the stone implements being palaeolithic. At Aussergoritz appeared remnants of pottery and Roman tiles, a broken hairpin of bronze, a spear of Roman type, and a 'palstab,' also of bronze: the latter is the normal chisel-shaped hatchet with the flanges turned over for fitting to the handle; it measures 16?5 cent. long by 3?5 of diameter at the lower part. The sands of Grosscup also yielded sundry fine bronze armlets of Etruscan make found upon embedded skeletons. All the finds have been deposited in the Provincial Museum at Laibach.

The use of horn, like that of bone, has survived to the present day, and still appears in the handles of knives, daggers, and swords. It is of many varieties, and it fetches different prices according to the texture, the markings, and other m?nutiae known to the trade.

THE WEAPONS OF THE AGE OF WOOD: THE BOOMERANG AND THE SWORD OF WOOD; OF STONE, AND OF WOOD AND STONE COMBINED.

The 'Age of Wood' began early, lasted long, and ended late. As the practice of savages shows, the spear was originally a pointed stick hardened in the fire; and arrows, the diminutives of the spear, as daggers are of the Sword, were tipped with splinters of bamboo, whose Tab?shir or silicious bark acted like stone. The Peruvians, even after they could beat out plates of gold and silver, fought with pikes having no iron tips, but with the points hardened in the fire. The same was the case with the Australians, who, according to Mr. Howard Spensley, also fashioned Swords of very hard wood: the Arabs of the Tih?mat or Lowlands of Hazramaut are still compelled by poverty to use spears without metal. I pass over the general use of this world-wide material to the epoch when it afforded a true Sword.

The wooden Sword, as we see from its wide dispersion, must have arisen spontaneously among the peoples who had reached that stage of civilisation where it became necessary. These weapons were found in the hands of the Indians of Virginia by the well-known Captain John Smith. Writing in 1606, Oldfield describes swords of heavy black wood in the Sandwich Islands, and Captain Owen Stansley in New Guinea. Mr. Consul Hutchinson notes the wooden swords used by the South American Itonanamas, a sub-tribe of the Maxos. Those preserved in Ireland and others brought from the Samoa Islands will be noticed in a future page. They may mostly be characterised as flat clubs sharpened at the edge, and used like our steel blades.

The shape of the wooden sword greatly varies, and so does its origin. Mr. Tylor fell into the mistake, so common in these classifying, generalising, and simplifying days, of deriving the sabre, because it is a cutting tool, from the axe, and the tuck or rapier from the spear because it thrusts. Wooden sword-blades alone have three prototypes, viz.:--

The Dublin Museum also shows the transitional forms between the club and the Sword. The weapon numbered 143 is some twenty-five inches long: the second is labelled 'No. 144, wooden club-shaped implement, twenty-seven inches long.'

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet