Читать книгу A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie онлайн

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Doubtless many of the representations in the following narrative are somewhat influenced by peculiarities in the mental constitution, and the accidental circumstances of the narrator; yet making all admissible allowances, they present but a gloomy picture of the condition of uncivilized men. Having acquired some idea of those things considered most reprehensible among us, it would be surprising if he should not have felt some reluctance to giving an explicit detail of all his adventures, in a community whose modes of thinking are on many subjects so different from ours. Traits, which must in our estimation constitute great blemishes, he has freely confessed; whether other or greater faults remain undivulged is unknown; but it should not be forgotten, that actions considered among us not only reprehensible, but highly criminal, are among them accounted shining virtues. In no part of his narrative will he probably appear in a more unfavourable light than when he details his severity to an unfortunate captive girl, through whose negligence his lodge, and all his little property, was consumed by fire in the midst of winter. This kind of cruelty, as well as the abandonment of the sick, the aged, and the dying, practised so extensively by the Chippewyans, and other northern Indians, and more or less by all the tribes, remind us how much even in what seem spontaneous and natural courtesies, we owe to the influence of civilization. The conduct of the Indians in all these cases, however we may see fit to call it, is certainly not unnatural, being in strict and implicit obedience to that impulse of nature which prompts so irresistibly to self-preservation. How admirable is that complicated machinery which in so many instances avails to overcome and control this impulse—which postpones the interest, the happiness, or the life of the individual to the good of the associated whole!