Charles Dicken’s on the Noble Savage
I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire- water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don’t care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.
It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird’s feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage – cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.
Yet it is extraordinary to observe how some people will talk about him, as they talk about the good old times; how they will regret his disappearance, in the course of this world’s development, from such and such lands where his absence is a blessed relief and an indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very first seeds of any influence that can exalt humanity;
Source: http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2529/
An Arresting Account Of The Jamestown Settlement
The following is excerpted from Vigilantes of Christendom: The History of the Phineas Priesthood, by Richard Kelly Hoskins (1990, The Virginia Publishing Company of Lynchburg, Lynchburg, VA 24505; pp. 65-67)
Chapter 3: Virginia
Shortly after the settlement at Jamestown in 1607, a ship from England was sailing up the James River to Jamestown Island bringing settlers and supplies.
The passengers and crew observed a canoe, which was being frantically paddled by an Indian woman and seven children, emerging from behind a point of land. Behind the canoe was a ship’s boat, manned by husky White men who were just as furiously rowing their craft… which was steadily gaining.
The ship’s boat caught up with the canoe almost under the bow of the ship, and the interested passengers and crew gasped as a sailor in the bow of the ship’s boat leaned over and with his pistol shot the Indian woman. The ship’s boat rammed the fragile canoe and rode up over it, forcing it down into the water and throwing the children into the river. They watched in horror as the sailors used their oars to hold the children under water until they drowned.
The incoming ship landed at Jamestown and its passengers disembarked, full of protests and condemnation at the brutal sight they had just witnessed. Then they were told the rest of the story.
The Indians’ god was named Okee, or Kiwassa. He was a mighty and terrible god, a god the Indians feared. He spoke to the Indians in thunder and lightning. Night, blackness, and pain bespoke his presence.
His food was pain. The more the pain, the longer and more excruciating the pain, the more satisfied and happy was Okee. To turn this consuming wrath from themselves, the Indians did all they could to give their god what he wanted – pain- from someone else.
As to a “good” god, there was no such being. If there were, there was no reason to worship or conciliate such a deity, since he would not injure them. This Okee was another matter entirely. He had to be pacified or he would turn on the Indian for the pain he craved.
Once a year, twenty of the handsomest children, aged 10 to 15, were painted white and placed at the foot of a tree. Then, savages armed with clubs formed a narrow corridor through which five men were to pass, carrying off the children. As the braves passed through the corridor with the children in their arms, they were severely beaten by the multitude to elicit pain, but the carriers carefully shielded the children. The childrens’ turn was to come. The children were then cast into a heap in a valley. The actual things that were done to the children were well-kept secrets, but this much we do know: Okee sucked their blood until they were dead. The god Okee loved pain and sucked blood [Virginia, John Esten Cooke, New York, 1883, p. 28].
The pain of someone good was better than the pain of someone bad; that of the strong and brave better than that of one weak. But pain of any sort was demanded. Indian women and children were the ones delegated to administer this pain. Their craft was state-of-the-art. They were past-experts at their allotted tasks.
The pain of a White man was, in the eyes of the Indians, better than the pain of an Indian. Therefore, every White settler was eyed as a potential gift to Okee. When fate, trust, cupidity, or stupidity delivered a White captive into Indian hands, he was imprisoned but treated with kindness and was well cared for. He was carefully fed to build his strength to withstand the trials to come.
When at last judged to be in his strongest physical condition, he was taken to meet Okee. He was bound, usually to a stake in the center of an Indian village. The Indian women and children were released to practice their carefully-learned craft on him. They were masters at their work.
The skin on the prisoner’s face, eyelids, lips, tongue, and private parts was slowly and excruciatingly removed. Splinters the size of toothpicks were inserted into the bare muscle tissue and lighted. With care and patience, a White man could be kept alive sometimes for three excruciating days. Then his entrails, those that would not cause immediate death, were removed.
On rare occasions when tortured prisoners were recaptured while undergoing torture, they always begged for a quick and merciful death – never for release. What was left of the man was a ragged screaming bundle of scorched and burnt nerves and flesh – the perfect meal that satisfied Okee best.
The Indian woman and her children executed under the bow of the incoming ship below Jamestown Island had been surprised torturing a White captive in the manner described above. They fled by boat, were caught, and were given a quick, merciful death.. something they had not given their victim.
The passengers and crew quickly came to understand that Indians were not sunburned White men. They were savages bred to their way of life for a thousand generations by a god that demanded that different laws be obeyed. The colonists made quick adjustments in their thinking to improve their chances of survival in a strange land, a land made savage by inhabitants as cruel and evil as anything encountered by the children of Israel when they went into the promised land.
The men in the longboat acted as Phineas [Numbers 25:1-12] would have acted.
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