CALIBAN'S VISITS TO ENGLAND.

BY SIR SIDNEY LEE.

I.

"A strange fish!' exclaims Trinculo when he first catches sight of Caliban. Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted [sc. outside a booth], not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.' Trinculo bears witness to a perennial phase of popular curiosity. A wild man from an unfamiliar country will draw many doits from onlookers at any fair in the world. Shakespeare's contemporaries were singularly eager for new experiences, and Trinculo does not probably underrate Caliban's capacity to make a British showman's fortune.

But there was more literal substance in the jester-sailor's speech than students of Shakespeare realise. Caliban was in a practical sense known in England not on the stage alone. If in his own unique, dramatic shape he had not passed beyond the boards of the theatre, near kindred of his had figured on the highways of English life, and had excited much wild surmise among Shakespeare's contemporaries. Caliban's creation may readily be traced to opportunities which Shakespeare and his countrymen enjoyed in London of studying at first hand the aboriginal temperament. Verbal and written narratives of travel were rich in sketches of strange human or semihuman inhabitants of distant lands. But 'wild' visitors were often in England to supplement the teaching of books. It was a composite portrait which issued in Caliban from Shakespeare's pen. There, detail, which was drawn from very varied quarters, was fused together, at times somewhat capriciously, by his imagination. The occasional presence in person of Caliban or his kindred on English soil clearly whetted Shakespeare's interest in the riddle of uncivilised humanity. The Tempest' enshrines, within its vast bounds of life and poetry, memories of Englishmen's strange encounters at their own doors with wild men from the unmeasured territories of the West.

II.

The curiosity of all Europe was piqued in the 16th century by the mystery enveloping the American aborigines, and the desire. to observe at close quarters specimens of this unaccountable phase of human nature was universal. The appetite sprang into life. with the first discovery in the modern era of new lands and seas, and it grew with every expansion of geographical knowledge. When Portuguese mariners in the 15th century first brought the west coast of Africa within European cognizance, they straightway exhibited negroes to the Court and people of Lisbon. Columbus and his colleagues, on their return to Spain from their voyages across the Atlantic, were always accompanied by a few 'West Indian' natives. Kings welcomed these human prodigies as eagerly as their subjects, and Trinculo laughs lightly at the royal taste when he remarks of Caliban: If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he's a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's leather' (Tempest' II. ii. 65). The practice was charitably condemned by Queen Isabella of Spain as an infliction of needless pain on unoffending persons. But the royal pity was deemed superfluous and many pleas were advanced to reinforce the ceaseless cry of curiosity. It was justly argued that the explorers suffered constant embarrassments from inability to converse with the American aborigines. The creatures might well acquire, on visits to Europe, the explorers' languages, and thereby might serve as future interpreters. Their conversion to Christianity might, too, grow easier when they saw the religion at work in its normal environment; they might themselves become missionaries among their kindred in their own country. There was little practical significance in the arguments but they went someway to reconcile humanitarian sentiment with the habit of publicly exhibiting living Indians to the astonished gaze of the old world.

Here the visits of American Indians to Tudor England alone call for notice. But other countries offer material for a like study. The impressions produced on contemporary France by natives from the West throw indeed a peculiar sidelight on the general experience, and justifies a preliminary word. Although Cartier and the heroic French explorers of the far North brought home Eskimos to the delight of his fellow-countrymen, most of the native visitors to France through the 16th century hailed from Brazil. Portugal exerted a shadowy sway there and professed to exclude all

foreigners, but the brilliant dye-woods and the birds of many-coloured plumage tempted French invasion. The Brazilians were an amiable people; they were reputed to organise their settlements on a communistic basis and to practise certain mechanical arts with greater skill than any of their neighbours in the great continent. The hammock which was fashioned out of the fibres of the palm-tree, first reached Europe from Brazil; the word was pure Brazilian. It was out of vague reports of the native life of Brazil which reached Sir Thomas More at Antwerp that he evolved his conception of his imaginary island of 'Utopia.' The first Brazilian native to arrive in France excited vast curiosity and attracted much public favour. He not merely accepted Christianity, but according to tradition so readily adapted himself to his entertainment that he married his French host's daughter, and founded a French family of some repute. Some years later a troop of his fellow-countrymen devised a spectacle at Rouen before the French King Henri II and his Queen Catherine de Medici. In a mimic forest set on the banks of the Seine a Brazilian chief addressed his followers in their own tongue, and then to the joy of his vast French audience, illustrated in play with his companions the native modes of warfare. Frenchmen of high intelligence interrogated these strangers and eagerly sought from them knowledge of their customs and mental outlook. The great philosopher, Montaigne, was among the questioners. The Brazilians, according to his reports, showed no lack of intelligence. They shrewdly commented on the schism in European communities between rich and poor, and on the respect paid to men of hereditary rank who were neither old in wisdom nor well versed in war. The essayist was drawn to infer that the golden age still flourished in the new world. That sanguine conclusion, which was widely adopted by French writers, enhanced the popular interest in native visitors. Ronsard, the prince of poets of the French Renaissance, saluted the American Indians as innocent dwellers in a Western Arcadia whose voyages across the Atlantic might convince Europe of the numbing sophistications of its current culture.

III.

The fantastic procession of the native Indian began its march across the English arena with almost the first year of the 16th century. The movement saw at the outset occasional interruption, but throughout Shakespeare's lifetime it was in almost continuous activity.

For a long time England's intercourse with the New World was less regular and more spasmodic than that of Portugal, Spain or France. The early incursions into Labrador which John Cabot, the Venetian pilot, inaugurated from Bristol, were abandoned after the first trials. The natural products of the Northern snows, fish and furs, did not tempt sustained exertion. But it was the Bristol pioneers who began the practice of capturing American natives for exhibition at home, and, in 1502, there reached Bristol as many as three American Indians,' the first of the long series of American visitors to Tudor England. The strangers excited more enthusiasm than any other fruit of the voyage. They were clothed in beasts' skin, they ate raw flesh, they spoke an unintelligible tongue, and their faces were thickly covered with pigments. Yet they were of good stature and tractable condition,' and when they were inspected by Henry VII and his court they behaved respectfully. They soon adopted English clothing and English modes of life, and were thought to differ in complexion or bearing little from their hosts. They were obviously Eskimos, with whom Europeans have always found intercourse easy.

Less than thirty years later Henry VIII, the son of Henry VII, enjoyed an experience already familiar to his royal brothers of France. The English king was confronted at Whitehall by a cacique or chieftain of Brazil, whose physique and bearing deepened the wonder of the home-keeping people. He came under the convoy of William Hawkins, of Plymouth, who had been capturing negroes on the coast of Africa and selling them in Brazilian ports. Hawkins's Brazilian guest made it a condition that one of Hawkins's sailors should be left behind with his tribe as hostage. England was hardly behind her French neighbours in friendly hospitality to an envoy from Brazil. His personal adornments fed English curiosity. 'Small bones planted' in holes in his cheeks stood an inch out,' and a precious stone of the size of a pea was fastened to his lower lip. The cacique prolonged his stay for a year, but unhappily died on the homeward voyage. His friends at home were satisfied with his treatment, and the English hostage, the first Englishman to reside for any time on the American continent, came back unharmed. The experience was favourable to friendly relations between Englishmen and Brazilians. No English philosopher nor poet, like the French writers, greeted Brazilians as missionaries of the simple life, but many of these Indians subsequently offered to sail for England with English mariners.

In Queen Mary's reign another aspect of the native problem presented itself to English inquiry and stimulated speculation. From the Guinea Coast of Africa, traders brought, together with elephants' teeth and gold dust, some sturdy negroes. The English climate tried the black men's health, but they proved amenable to English custom. They learnt the language without much difficulty, and some of them promised to teach the tongue to their compatriots on going home. One negro settled permanently in the country and married an Englishwoman. But public feeling was outraged and ethnological science was puzzled by the wife giving birth to a son who proved to be a coal black Ethiopian.'

Eskimos, Brazilians, and African negroes headed the native march into England, but the file is thin until Queen Elizabeth's reign was well advanced and English exploring and colonising enterprise began in earnest. Martin Frobisher inaugurates the great era with his persistent search for the north-west passage in Labrador. Amid the many motives which he alleged for his experiments one was the bringing of inhabitants from unknown lands to England. Queen Elizabeth encouraged his bold endeavours, but she humanely deprecated the capture of natives. You shall not bring,' she wrote to the captain, above three or four persons of that country, the which shall be of divers ages, and shall be taken of such sort as you may best avoid offence of that people.' Frobisher pleaded that the number should be raised to eight or ten. In the event, he failed to realise in full any of his hopes, but the rising tide of English interest in America bred the wildest excitement over his partial successes in trapping human prey.

6

Frobisher, in the frozen north, left no stone unturned to conciliate the North Indians or Eskimos. He tried to learn their language. He constructed native vocabularies and wrote reports on native habits. But they fought shy of his invitations to accompany him home. On his first expedition he managed however to entice one into his ship, and when the Indian arrived with him at Harwich, all England was in an ecstasy. The like of this strange infidel was never seen, read, nor heard of before,' wrote one pamphleteer. 'His arrival was a wonder never known to city or realm. Never like great matter happened to any man's knowledge.' The strangers of Henry VII's time were forgotten. The fellow was described as broad of face and fat of body, with little eyes and scanty beard. His long coal-black hair was tied in a knot above his forehead, and his dark sallow skin, of VOL. XXXIV.-NO. 201, N.S. 22