150 HUNTING AND FISHING EACES 



tribes, but we have no trustworthy information as to their charac- 

 ter. 1 Of conditions in Australia we have abundant evidence ; the 

 literature has been recently studied by Wheeler. 2 He distinguishes 

 between regulated and unregulated warfare, of which the latter is 

 rare. 3 By regulated warfare is meant not only that the use of 

 heralds, messengers, and preliminary negotiations is recognized, 

 but also that the fighting itself is regulated in such a manner as to 

 restrict bloodshed. Most commonly, if it comes to fighting, the 

 two opposing sides meet and throw boomerangs until one or two 

 men are knocked down. Then, before further damage is done, 

 fighting stops and peace is re-established not a single life perhaps 

 having been lost. 4 Unregulated warfare is a more serious matter ; 

 a war party may attack and destroy a local group of some other 

 tribe without observing any of the formalities described above. 5 

 In the latter case women are sometimes slain, although this never 

 happens in regulated warfare. 6 On the whole the loss of life owing 

 to warfare in Australia must be very small. 



The Bushmen gained the reputation of being vigorous fighters 

 during the wars with the colonists and managed to inspire terror 

 throughout a large part of Africa. We have, however, but little 

 information as to their habits before they were so rudely disturbed 

 and, it must be said, so barbarously treated. ' They never 

 appear ', says Stow, ' to have had great wars against each other ; 

 sudden quarrels among rival huntsmen, ending in lively skirmishes, 

 which owing to their nimbleness and presence of mind, caused 

 little damage to life or limb, appear to have been the extent of 

 their individual and tribal differences.' 7 Of the Eskimos about the 

 Behring Strait Nelson says that * an almost continuous inter- 

 tribal warfare ' formerly existed ; 8 such a state of things is 

 clearly uncommon ; in Greenland, for instance, we are told that war 

 is rare, 9 whereas among the Central Eskimos real wars have never 

 happened. 10 Nevertheless a good deal of fighting seems often to 

 occur between the Eskimos and the Tinneh, whom they hate and 

 fear. ' Along the line of contact with the Tinneh tribes of the 



than females. Out of sixty-six cases in which there was the relevant information 

 investigated by Professor Hobhouse and his collaborators, men only were slain 

 in twenty cases (Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg, Simpler Peoples, p. 232). 



1 Ling Both, loc. cit., p. 83. 2 Wheeler, Tribe in Australia. 3 Ibid., 



pp. 116 ff. * Curr (Recollections, p. 309) says that he never heard of any one 



being killed in a regular battle. 6 Wheeler, loc. cit., p. 151. 6 Ibid., 



p. 154. 7 Stow, loc. cit., p. 38. Letourneau, however, says that war was 



common (La Guerre, p. 54). 8 Nelson, loc. cit., p. 327. Nansen, 



Eskimo Life, p. 162. 10 Boas, loc. cit., p. 466. 



