Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/281

Rh made, was that people daubed such combustible vessels as these with clay, to protect them from the fire, till they found that the clay alone would answer the purpose, and thus the art of pottery came into the world. The idea was not a mere effort of his imagination, for he had met with a description of the plastering of wooden vessels with clay in the southern Hemisphere. It is related that a certain Captain Gonneville sailed from Honfleur in 1503, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and came to the Southern Indies (apparently the east coast of South America). There he found a gentle and joyous people, living by hunting and fishing, and a little agriculture, and he speaks of cloaks of mats and skins, feather work, bows and arrows, beds of mats, villages of thirty to eighty huts of stakes and wattles, etc., "and their household utensils of wood, even their boiling-pots, but plastered with a kind of clay, a good finger thick, which prevents the fire from burning them." The theory of the origin of pottery which Goguet founded upon this remarkable account, is corroborated by a quantity of evidence which has made its appearance since his time.

The comparison of two accounts of vessels found, one among the Esquimaux, the other among their neighbours the Unalashkans (whose language contains proofs of intimate contact with them ), may serve to give an idea of the way in which clay may come to supersede less convenient materials, and a gradual approach be made towards the potter's art. When James Hall was in Greenland, in 1605, he found the natives boiling food over their lamps, in vessels with stone bottoms, and sides of whale's fins. In Unalashka, Captain Cook found that some of the natives had got brass kettles from the Russians, but those who had not, made their own "of a flat stone, with sides of clay, not unlike a standing pye." He thought it likely that they had learnt to boil from the Russians, but the Russians could hardly have taught them to make such vessels as these, and the appearance of a kettle with a stone bottom (no doubt potstone),