The Nomadic Alternative – Page 131

They were never miserable for long, depressed a bit when the winter returned, but always looking forward to the return of spring. They suffered none of our diseases, the cause of their subsequent ruin. Life was hard but they bore it with cheerfulness and lived to be seventy or eighty. Sometimes they quarrelled and fought, usually over women, but murder was unknown. To call a man a murderer was a terrible insult. The harrowing death of Captain Cook in Hawaii helped perpetrate a myth among 19th Century thinkers that the more savage a savage looked the more likely he was to eat you. But the Yaghan thought cannibalism far more horrifying than we do. The very idea of the Sacrament would have appalled them, and they refused to touch the meat of any carrion feeder for fear it might have helped itself to a human corpse. Cannibals they knew about. They were Bogey-Men who lived over the western horizon and who preyed on the unwary in dreams.

As Darwin saw correctly their lack of a sense of property barred their progress in technology; for without property the Society of Equals could not be changed. The Yaghan flatly refused to accumulate any sort of surplus. [illegible] Button's fashionable English clothes were ripped off his back by his relations and parcelled out among them in strips. A man owned what he could carry; the rest was fair game. Furthermore he was careful to exhibit all his possessions; hiding or hoarding of any kind was antisocial - not to say anti-human - behaviour, which gave rise to the envy everyone was anxious to avoid.

For this reason the Supreme Being charged death duties at the rate of 100%. A dead man's family burned all his possessions, and this eliminated the battle of squabbling heirs. Nor did the State benefit by his demise because there was no State.

This refusal to hoard possessions did not inhibit individual displays of finery. Captain Cook, a more sympathetic observer of the Yaghan than Darwin, remarked on their body painting, "Although they are content to be naked they are very ambitious to be fine. Their faces were painted in various forms; the region of the eye was in general white, and the rest of the face adorned with horizontal (or vertical) red lines."