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Updated: June 7, 2025
They have a Supreme Being, and the 'distinctive attributes of Deity' are not by them assigned to other beings, further than as Christianity assigns them to Angels, Saints, the Devil, and, strange as it appears, among savages, to mediating 'Sons. It is not known that, among the Andamanese and other tribes, this last notion is due to missionary influence.
The horrible idea of the Man who is the God, and is eaten in the God's honour, occurs among polytheistic Aztecs, on a high level of material culture, not among Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, or Fuegians.
I heard read once at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, an eloquent paper on the Natives of the Andaman Islands, in which the lecturer, after shewing that the Andamanese were suspicious, treacherous, blood-thirsty, ungrateful and untruthful, concluded by giving it as his opinion that they were very good fellows and in many ways superior to white man.
Even the Andamanese, one of the lowest of human communities, have a division of Powers into one who is friendly and two who are unfriendly. In all these cases we have to recognize simply the expression of the perception of two sets of physical agencies in the world.
We now arrive at a theory of the Supreme Being among a certain African race which would be entirely fatal to my whole hypothesis on this topic, if it could be demonstrated correct in fact, and if it could be stretched so as to apply to the Australians, Fuegians, Andamanese, and other very backward peoples. It is the hypothesis that the Supreme Being is a 'loan-god, borrowed from Europeans.
In Tahiti, Atuas are gods, Oramutuas tiis are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors. Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen, the Andamanese, and so on.
So far we have been considering the law of blood-revenge as purely an affair between the clans concerned; the rest of the tribal public keeping aloof, very much in the style of the Andamanese bystanders who retire into the jungle when there is a prospect of a row.
Among the Andamanese, while the men go into the jungle to hunt pigs, the women fetch drinking water and firewood, catch shell-fish, make fishing nets and baskets, spin thread, and cook the food ready for the return of the men. The Moki women of America have fifty ways of preparing corn for food.
If Protestants have almost as crude an idea of the religion of their Catholic fellow-Christians with whom they live side by side, and converse in the same language, if they are so absolutely dominated by their own form of religious thought, as to be as helpless as idiots in the presence of any other, can we expect that the ordinary British traveller, "brandishing his Bible and his bath," strong in the smug conviction of his mental, moral, and religious preeminence, will be a very sympathetic, conscientious, and reliable interpreter of the religion of the Zulu or the Andamanese?
As regards slander, though it might seem a slight matter, it must be remembered that the savage cannot stand up for a moment again an adverse public opinion; so that to rob him of his good name is to take away all that makes life worth living. To shout out, Long-nose! Sunken-eyes! or Skin-and-bone! usually leads to a fight in Andamanese circles, as Mr. Man informs us.
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