Mystery of the White Indians

The Mystery of the White Indians

A Second Article, Giving the Scientific Explanations That Have Been Suggested to Account for This Tribe of Blond Savages in Eastern Panama [First Article]

By Richard O. Marsh

From The World's Work, April 1925, Vol. XLIX, No. 6. Digitized March 2014 by Doug Frizzle

Golden Yellow Hair and Hazel Eyes

“A canoe came toward us, and in the bow stood a naked savage with a white body, whose yellow hair, falling to his shoulders, was held in order by a gold chaplet two inches wide encircling his head at the brow. He was of medium height, but magnificently developed about the chest and arms; and he stood as erect as a king. Behind him were a girl of ten and a boy of four, and in the stern his wife wielded a steering paddle. Not one of the four gave a start when they came suddenly upon us, and the man and woman did not vary a heart-beat in the rhythm of their strokes as they plied the canoe to pass directly by us. The man eyed us with a truly regal pride and disdain, and passed us by without troubling to turn his head to see whether or not we intended to follow. His whole manner said more plainly than words: ‘I am king here; what are you doing in my domain?’ ”

In his first article, which was published in the World’s Work last month, Mr. Marsh told of the discovery of this tribe of White Indians. His present article provides a more complete account of their physical and mental peculiarities and their significance to the science of human origins.

 

WHEN I brought my three specimen White Indians to the United States, they interested many scientists in the government service at Washington and leading scientists elsewhere, because they led to offer a hope of solving several kinds of knotty problems.

First is the fascinating mystery of the ancient civilizations of the Western Hemisphere that disappeared under the impact with Europeans following the discovery of America by Columbus. Cortez found Mexico flourishing under Montezuma, with a highly organized political life, well-developed arts in precious stones and metals and in architecture, a literature of historical records as advanced as that of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, and an astronomical science comparable with that of the ancient Egyptians. Pizarro found the Incas of Peru enjoying an equally high civilization, with the additional blessing of a science of medicine as highly developed as any in Europe and in many respects superior for the Incas had originated the use of quinine, a drug of more general value than any in the Caucasian pharmacopoeia.

Within a century after Columbus’s arrival, these great civilizations had crumbled into dust. The Spaniards destroyed the political unity of these countries, killed or dispersed the men of art and learning, and enslaved the peoples in a servitude that made education impossible. The palaces and monuments fell into decay, and in modern times it is doubtful if a score of men exist who could, if they would, decipher the hieroglyphics left by the Mayas of Central America, for example, which by their variety and quantity undoubtedly hold the key to much lost history and science.

The White Indians may include some of these surviving repositories of the wisdom of the ancients, for the traditions of most of the brown Indian tribes on both continents contain the story of a miraculous white prophet who visited their ancestors, bringing with him knowledge of the arts and sciences, and who gave their people stable and wise government and all they know about nature’s laws. Cortez found White Indians in Mexico City, worshipped as superior beings. The Incas were doubtless partly of white blood. The Mayas may have been—it seems likely from the evidence. Could my White Indians belong to one of these favored tribes?

 

NOT OF MONGOLIAN ORIGIN

THE first step toward finding out was, naturally, to study the language. Dr. John P. Harrington, ethnologist of the Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Paul Vogenitz, translator and language expert of the Post Office Department, undertook this task. The San Blas Indian interpreter, whom I brought also, was the first medium of communication. In a few weeks, the scientists had learned the language themselves. It early appeared that the language was phenomenal, because it was utterly unlike any other Indian tongue in the Western Hemisphere. All other Indians, whatever their dialect, use an agglutinative speech that suggests their Mongolian origin. But the San Blas language—the White Indians and the San Blas use the same—is not Mongolian in structure. On the contrary, it is pure Aryan, and most closely resembles Sanskrit in its syntax.

Now Sanskrit, of course, is the mother of the Aryan tongues, including not only the Greek and Latin and their modern descendent languages such as French and Italian, but also the speech of the prehistoric tribes of northern Europe, from which the Germanic and Scandinavian languages derive. The English language, with its Saxon base and its Norman and Romance superstructure, is, therefore, doubly descended from the Sanskrit. The White Indian tongue is thus more nearly related to the speech of Topeka, Kansas, than it is to the speech of aboriginal Indians who have lived for thousands of years as their neighbors in the Panamanian jungle.

MELODIOUS, NOT GUTTURAL

THE White Indians call their language Tule. It is described by Dr. Harrington as one of the most melodious and smooth sounding tongues in the world. This quality arises chiefly from the fact that no two consonants ever come together in Tule: the words are made up of an alternating flow of consonant and vowel, so that no harsh or guttural or staccato effects mar its melodious beauty. Besides the five vowel sounds and the two semi-vowels W and Y, the language contains only eleven consonant sounds, K, T, Ch, Sh, Ts, S, L, M, N, R, and P, making an alphabet of only eighteen characters in all.

Practically all other Indian languages are guttural, or “agglutinative,” and are consequently harsh by comparison. The Polynesian languages have “choky” or throaty sounds, that make them difficult for a Caucasian to speak. But Tule offers no such difficulties. It is, indeed, probably the easiest of all languages for a Caucasian to learn. The only “tricky” thing about it is this: every sound has two forms, one short and one long. In this way, the number of sounds available for the construction of words is doubled. This device, which is similar to one employed in Finnish, likewise provides the language with sufficient flexibility to furnish the necessary number of roots and affixes to give a rich vocabulary.

The other Indian tongues, of the agglutinative type, build complex words by putting together separate roots and word-elements. The Tule tongue proceeds quite differently: it follows the habit of other analytical languages and invents a distinct new word to express each new idea or to describe each new object.

Perhaps the most curious fact about Tule is that the men and women do not pronounce the language alike. The boys are taught a masculine pronunciation of each word, whereas the girls learn what the scientists have termed a “feminine lisp” for the same word. Thus, where Olo and Chepu, the boys under examination, use the sound Ch, Margarita, the girl, uses Ts. She uses the S sound where they use the masculine Sh, and Y and L where they use K and R. They describe the chieftain as “sakla,” while Margarita calls the word “sayla.” The boys say “chapu” when they mean “white." but Margarita says “tseppi.”

But an even more astonishing development awaited the scientists as they got deeper into the language. At least 2 dozen words turned up in the White Indian vocabulary that are identical in pronunciation and meaning with words that were used by the Norsemen at the time of the Battle of Hastings. Eleventh-century Norwegian in Central America prior to Columbus! The following is a list of these and other surprising words in the San Blas language:

MEANING                 TULE                                            NORSE

IN ENGLISH             WORD                                          WORD

Work                           Arbaedi        Norwegian               Arbeide

Both                            Bogwá          "                                Baade

Yes                              Eye               Anglo-Saxon            Yea

                                    (Ayah)

Music                          Kala              Norwegian               Kole-Kalla

Foot                             Naga             Russian                     Noga

To Throw                    Mette            "                                Metats

Colored                       Parbatti         Indo-Germanic         Parbh

Sack                            Sagi              Norwegian               Saek

Tree                             Sappi            "                                Sappe

To Say                         Soge             German- Icelandic   Sagen (Saga)

Crab                            Suga             Norwegian               Suge

Boat (Hull)                  Ulu               Anglo-Saxon            Hulu

How did the Norse get into the San Blas vocabulary? These words “belong” in these Indians’ language—they are not borrowed nor out of place. They are not modern additions caused by contact with white men, for these Indians, alone all the American tribes, have been able until now to resist the invasions of outsiders and have fiercely maintained the integrity of their race and institutions. Two or three working hypotheses have been advanced to explain the phenomenon.

First of all, it may be that the White Indians are descendants of Norsemen. It is fairly certain that Norse navigators crossed the Atlantic from Iceland to Greenland, and some scientists estimate that they led a migration of as many as one hundred thousand Scandinavians, who settled on the mainland of America, perhaps as much as a thousand years before Columbus. It may ultimately be established that some of these Norse settlers migrated westward along the northern coast of America and became the ancestors of the Blond Eskimos discovered a few ago by Vilhjálmur Stefansson. Others may have followed the Atlantic coastline southward, founding the Mayan civilization of Yucatan (from which that of Mexico was probably derived) and, continuing across the Isthmus of Panama, gone on down the Andes and founded the Incan civilization of Peru.

Remnants of the stragglers from such a migration may be represented by the White Indians, who have lived for centuries in the mountains adjoining the Atlantic shore of the Isthmus, where they would naturally be if they had dropped out of the southward march. The affinity of their language, in syntax and vocabulary, with the Norse language, is one support to this theory. Another support is their assertion (yet to be verified by further explorations that are now in contemplation) that the untouched wilderness of inner Darien contains the ruins of extensive stone cities built by their ancestors and containing hieroglyphic records of their history. If this assertion be true (and personally l have no doubt of it), it may be that among the inhabitants of that region are White Indians who have preserved the knowledge necessary to read these inscriptions. The importance of such a discovery could hardly be overestimated, as it would rival in potential scientific value the rich Mayan remains, which still await anything like complete translation, though enough has been deciphered to assure the experts in that field that these inscriptions contain priceless records of the history and arts of early America.

There is another theory of the origin of the White Indians that holds no less fascinating possibilities before the student of mankind. This theory is that the White Indians are biological “mutations” from the original brown type with which the human race began. To make clear just what this means and how important it may be to science, it is necessary to make a very brief excursion into biology.

Scientists are now pretty well agreed that Darwin’s theory of “the survival of the fittest” describes, not nature’s means for evolving new and higher forms of life, but nature’s sieve, so to speak, to strain out, from new and higher forms, those that can stand the competitive struggle of life. Since Darwin’s day, science has discovered what is probably nature’s method of creating new forms. This method is called “mutation,” and the word describes a phenomenon, frequently observed amongst plants and occasionally in the animal kingdom, whereby an individual of a fixed species suddenly throws off descendants that are strikingly different from the parent and which thereafter “breed true” to their own new characteristics, instead of following the characteristics of their ancestors. Numerous such mutations among garden plants have been observed in the last fifty years, and their authenticity is beyond question. Once these “mutants” appear, the law of survival operates upon them, and only those new forms survive that are adapted to withstand the hardships of the life into which they have been so suddenly and unexpectedly projected.

EMERGENCE OF THE WHITE MAN

MANY scientists believe that the white race is such a mutation from the aboriginal brown species of homo sapiens. Here is where the second theory about the White Indians enters the field of scientific interest. Have we at last an opportunity to see, repeated before our own eyes, the emergence of white men as biological “sports” from a fundamental brown race, the San Blas Indians? Heretofore it has been assumed that the original mutation of this sort transpired in prehistoric times and might never be repeated. But of course what happened once could happen again—as, indeed, in botany it has been known to happen independently in quite remotely separated parts of the world, and more than twice at that. If the San Blas Indians are a segment of the brown race nearing the end of a “life cycle of a species,” it is scientifically quite tenable to believe that they may be throwing off mutated forms, and that the White Indians are the mutants.

Color is lent to this theory by the identity of language and institutions of the two tribes, and their similarity in high intellectual powers by comparison all of their neighbors. If this theory should prove to be correct, it would be of epochal importance to science, for it would demonstrate, in the instance most convincing to the human mind, the truth of evolution as a principle of universal application and of current, continuing force. Scientists, of course, have no doubt upon this point now; but the lay mind has an instinctive aversion to accepting it as applied to the human race. But if cases of its truth in this highest field can be demonstrated before our own eyes, it should convince even the Doubting Thomases.

A WHOLE RACE OF ALBINOES?

THE third theory concerning origin of the White Indians is startling, but it is by no means without great scientific value and interest. This theory holds that they are albinoes. The most striking support of this theory lies in a very curious trait that is manifested by albinoes of other races and is common to them all. This trait is a habit of rolling the eyes and is probably associated with nervous impulses set up in the body of the albino by reasons of the irritation caused to the eyes by the actinic rays which, in normally pigmented eyes, are toned down or strained out before they touch the optic nerves. The White Indians have this trait of rolling the eyes.

On the other hand, they have pigment in the retina and cornea, as most albinoes have not. Instead of the characteristic pink eyes of the usual albino, they have hazel eyes, that is to say, blue pigmentation overlaid with patches of brown. Nevertheless, Dr. James B. Davenport, who is one of the great biologists of our time, believes that the White Indians are albinoes. He finds them unique, however, in their numbers. Nowhere else, he says, has so high a percentage of a population been albino—in this case so numerous as to amount to a quasi-race. And if, as he believes, they are an albino side-line of the San Blas Indians, they indicate an extraordinarily interesting field of scientific study of that tribe itself, offering the most favorable opportunity to learn more about a phenomenon of biology that is extremely helpful to that science. Controlled study of albinism in rats and mice and rabbits has been one of the most useful instruments that science has had in working out the laws of heredity, for this characteristic lends itself to positive experimentation capable of easy mathematical analysis. Of how much greater interest and value would it be to follow the corresponding results working out among human beings in the normal course of everyday living.

A fourth explanation of the possible cause of the white color of these Indians been advanced by Major Cuthbert Christy, of England, a specialist in tropical diseases, who thinks it may arise from a pathological physiologic condition that prevents the normal processes of pigmentation from taking place within their bodies.

These four theories cover what seem to be all the possible solutions to the puzzle. Of course I make no pretensions to scientific knowledge, and would not expect my opinion to weigh with those of any of the men quoted above; but speaking purely as a layman whose only qualifications are many years of close contact with aboriginal peoples in many parts of the world, I have from the first felt strongly that the true explanation lies either in heredity from ancient whites who once settled in America, or in biological mutation of white offspring from brown parents. Whatever the final conclusion of the scientists may be, I shall feel that my work in tracing these people to their home land and bringing them to the attention of the world has been worthwhile, especially when a scientist of such distinction as Dr. Ales Hrdlicka says that “the phenomenon deserves a thorough investigation, and Mr. Marsh deserves the thanks of American and British anthropologists for having brought to their attention a subject of considerable scientific interest and importance.”

One curious misapprehension about the San Blas Indians early gained newspaper currency. Soon after I brought the three White children and the five brown San Blas to America, some of the anthropologists who examined them noticed that the children’s heads were larger and of a  different shape from those of the dark adults. The anthropologists asked the Indians a question which the Indians misunderstood, and before the misunderstanding was cleared up and the correct answer given the story appeared in the papers that the brown San Blas Indians massage their children’s heads in infancy, with the result that they are relatively dwarfed and square when grown. A statement which I then gave to the papers corrects this misapprehension. In it I said:

(1)           The difference in size and shape between the skulls of the blond Indians and those of the standard San Blas has been attributed to artificial deformation of those of the dark infants, while those of the white infants are natural. This is wholly untrue. The San Blas Indians do not massage nor in any way alter the heads of their children. The rounder, broader, and higher crania of the whites cannot be explained in that way.

(2)           The timid demeanor of the children and the behavior of their eyes when under inspection by strangers is misleading. They are not mentally deficient or abnormal in any way. On the contrary, they are unusually alert and keen, with excellent memory. They are rapidly learning English.

(3)           The blond Indians do not spring from the normal San Blas Indians but from the larger and more robust type, which occupy the hills back from the coast.

To make clearer the full force of this statement, I should perhaps repeat the exact facts about the eight Indians I brought to America. Two were White Indian boys, aged ten and fourteen years. The other White Indian was Margarita, a girl of fourteen. Two of the five brown San Blas were Margarita's father and mother. This brown mother's mother (that is, Margarita’s maternal grandmother) was a White Indian. Margarita is one of seven children of the same parents, of whom five were white and two were dark—suggesting at once to biologists that here was a typical example of Mendelian inheritance, in which the “recessive” whiteness disappeared in Margarita’s mother but reappeared in five of her children.

Margarita and her family are representatives of a type of larger frame, larger heads, and more vigorous bodies than are characteristic of the ordinary brown San Blas. I feel sure that the blond strain will be found limited to this type, which lives inland from the San Blas coast. These characteristics all relate the White Indians to the Caucasian type, and fit perfectly into the logic of the theory that they are examples of the mutation process by which the Caucasian gained his greater stature and bigger brain than his brown progenitors possessed. The larger brain is not merely a matter of physical bulk; it is the source of higher intellectual powers as well.

The superior intelligence of these Indians over their neighbors, their more complex and flexible language, their fuller vocabulary, their more humane social customs, their unique and very interesting music, their strict moral code, their well-developed system of law, and their highly organized structure of government, which is both feudal, federal, and constitutional, all evidence their exceptional intellectual capacity. These advanced powers and achievements are characteristic of the evolutionary progress of man.

If scientists finally agree that the White Indians are true examples of the process of mutation, we shall be able not only to see that biological evolution at work, but also to study the origins of our own civilization in the lives of people of our own day.

° ° °

As this article goes to press, an interesting cable has come from Mr. Marsh, who is now in Darien on his second expedition. His cable is dated at Colon, and says in part: “Dr. Harris now on San Blas coast, going into interior with us. Has already studied many White Indians. Harris says positively not albinoes. Offers two theories: first, most probable, Darien Indians formerly extensively mixed with unknown prehistoric white race; second, Darien Indians abnormally susceptible to frequent mutation from brown to white.” As Dr. Reginald Harris, referred to in this cable, is the director of the Long Island Biological Association at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and a biologist of high repute, his opinion is an interesting and important contribution to the discussion of the origin of the White Indians.

Text from the illustrations:

ARTS OF THE SAN BLAS INDIANS The woman is mending a fish trap and the man at the water’s edge is working on his nets.

ORIGINS OF THE WHITE INDIANS From such mothers as these brown San Blas Indians the larger, White Indians may be derived. The possible explanations are discussed in the accompanying text.

A SAN BLAS VILLAGE The warlike inhabitants of the coast have been able to defend it against inroads by outsiders, and have provided a screen for the White Indians who live in the interior and were unknown till the Marsh expedition succeeded in placating the brown tribes.

SAN BLAS MOTHER AND CHILD

OLD AND NEW STYLES The girl at the right is clad in the conservative native costume of the San Blas women. The other girl wears the skirt that has come in with modern contacts with the world. The blouses are of native weave, while the skirt is made of cloth bought from the traders. The leg and arm bands and the arm rings are purely feminine adornments.

GEOMETRY IN VILLAGE PLANNING Both the San Blas and the White Indians lay out their villages upon a geometrical plan, evidencing a higher intelligence and civilization than other Indians, who build casually according to “the lay of the land.”

ALL STAGES OF SAN BLAS DRESS The woman’s skirt and the men’s hats and shirts are modern innovations. The traditional custom of San Blas attire is expressed in the old nursery rhyme, “Shoe the horse and shoe the mare, and let the little colt go bare.”

A "COMMUNITY HOUSE” IN DARIEN These tribal meeting places are frequently built on hillsides in tiers, so that at a distance they give the effect of a three-story building.

PART OF THE SAN BLAS “NAVY” These very heavy but seaworthy canoes are hollowed out of single logs, and are perfectly adapted to navigation among the islands and keys of the San Blas Coast.

FEMININE FINERY The blouses worn by these San Blas girls are of ancient origin and of great scientific interest. Though the patterns are symmetrical in mass, close scrutiny reveals that they are in no two places alike in detail. They are hieroglyphics whose origin and meaning have been forgotten, though some archaeologists believe they are nursery legends like our own “Mother Goose".

A PARADISE FOR CHILDREN This old San Blas chieftain refused to pose for his photograph until his grandchildren could be summoned to stand beside him. Mr. Marsh declares he never saw a child or a woman on the San Blas Coast who did not look happy.

A "STILL" OF A "MOVIE" OPERATOR  Mr. Charles Charlton, in a San Blas shelter. He made the motion pictures of the life of the brown and white Indians of the Darien region of Panama.

THE SAN BLAS COAST  The mountains coming down to the sea, the numerous islands, and the heavy tropical growth have all fostered the Indians’ ambition to keep strangers out of their sanctuary.

A number of people have asked for these two Richard Marsh stories on the Blond (or White) Indians, so I have now collected them both for the blog.

I believe that in the final analysis these people do have a form of albinism similar two piebald deer—I could be wrong. Certainly from Richard Marsh's writing we can see why there was a lot of excitement at that time. His book is prohibitively expensive now.

Verrill was familiar with the White Kuna as he wrote in 'Hunting the White Indians' in 1925.

Blond Indians of the Darien Jungle

Blond Indians of the Darien Jungle

from The World's Work magazine, march 1925. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, Feb. 2014.

A Legend of Centuries Brought to Reality by the Discovery of a Tribe of Indians as White as. Ourselves, and Speaking a Language Related to Ancient Sanskrit. They May Be Descendants of the Early Norwegians

BY R. O. MARSH

TWO years ago, in the jungle of Darien, at a little frontier settlement named Yavisa. I was bargaining with the Negroid Indian chief of the village for a crew to take me up t he Chucunaque River, when I saw three Indian girls appear from behind a hut, cross the village street, and disappear behind another hut on the other side. My sensations were those that a scientist would have if he were melting some lead and saw it suddenly change into gold, for I had as unexpectedly seen a legend of centuries become a reality before my eyes. These girls had white skin and golden yellow hair!

That was my first view of the now famous White Indians. A year later, following a second expedition, I came out of the same jungle, having seen four hundred of them, and bringing back to civilization two boys and a girl as living specimens for the scientists to study. For the last six months they have lived part of the time at my camp in Canada and part of the time in a home in Washington, D. C. where government experts and scientists in anthropology, biology, and genetics have been trying. to decide whether they are biological "mutations” from brown Indians or are descendants of Norwegians who came to America long before Columbus's voyage. When this article is published, I shall be in that region again, with several of these scientists, equipped to study these strange phenomena in their native land, and to explore their country, where they promise me we shall find stone ruins of cities their ancestors inhabited.

My astonishment at my first view of White Indians may be better imagined when I explain that Yavisa is at the head of navigation of the Chucunaque River in Darien, or Eastern Panama, and the farthest outpost of anything like civilization. in an unexplored tropical wilderness. Yavisa is peopled by Negroid Indian half-breeds, and is a trading post to which "tame" jungle Indians come to barter. The only white men that ever visit the place are a very occasional trader, or, as in my case, an engineer looking for rubber. I had as little reason to expect to see a white woman in Yavisa as David Livingstone would have had to meet Queen Victoria in equatorial Africa. And I had seen three! And savages, at that; for they wore only loin cloths, and stepped the jungle path with the free, natural grace of the Indian.

They had come and gone so quickly that I had only the one glimpse of them. But that glimpse was enough to excite my eager interest, for the legend of the White Indians is as old as American history, and in twenty years as a civil engineer, practising my profession up and down both hemispheres. I had heard it on many occasions and in many lands from frontiersmen and natives. Columbus himself declared that he had seen them. Cortez found a hundred of them imprisoned in Montezuma's palace in Mexico City and venerated as "the children of the sun." Vancouver saw them on Vancouver Island in 1792, and Commander Stiles of our own Navy claimed to have seen the remnants of the same group in 1848. Humboldt saw about a hundred White Indians in Colombia.

STRANGERS MAY NOT ENTER

BUT like every one else. I did not really believe in White Indians. I attributed the stories to hallucination, or to the mistaking of albinoes or half-breeds for really white people. But the girls I had seen were not, I was convinced, any of these. I have seen thousands of half-breeds, of many mixtures, and there is an unmistakable something about them that reveals their hybrid origin. These girls gave no such impression. I asked the village chief about them, and he told me they lived in a hut outside his village, with a man of the same appearance. They did not mingle with his people, and he explained that no one would dare molest them, for fear of the vengeance of their tribe. They came, he said, from far inland, up the Chucunaque River, where no Negro or tame Indian dared to go, for the savages there had forbidden it and were warriors of such prowess that their edict was respected. No white man, even, had ever gone into that country and returned. A detachment of the Panamanian army had tried it and had been exterminated. The White Indians were a numerous tribe, he added, and were allies of the savage Wallas, Mortis, and Cunas Bravos.

I resolved to call upon the strangers. I followed the path the chief indicated, and in half a mile came on a little clearing, in which was a pole-and-palm hut. with its floor several feet above the ground and its "doorsteps" a log with notches cut in it for a foothold in ascending to the entrance. After much calling in English and Spanish, the three girls appeared; and after many signs of my good intentions, they ventured to the ground and accepted the present of a handful of freshly minted ten-cent pieces. They let me look at their golden locks closely enough for me to be certain they were not dyed, and I was equally sure that the whiteness of their skin was not an artificial calcine. Their eyes were not black, but a light brown, proving that they were not the usual kind of Indian, nor, on the other hand, albinoes either. It was growing dusk, but I managed to get some snapshots of them. They spoke neither English nor Spanish.

Returning to the boat, in which I had come from Panama to Yavisa, I told my two comrades of my find, but found them unimpressed. I might think what I pleased, but no White Indians for them. My invitation to join me in a visit to the clearing after dinner, to call on the man of the family, was greeted with emphatic refusal. I might go and get myself killed if I liked. And, indeed, their judgment on that point was better than mine. I went to the hut in the moonlight and called, and the man came out, not to greet me but to rush into the jungle. A little reflection convinced me that he would probably circle behind me and put an arrow into my back, so I lost no time in returning to the boat, no wiser than I had left.

BEAUTY OF PHYSIQUE

THE next morning, we made a one-day journey up the river beyond Yavisa. By noon we had come into a region that promised to disclose just such a valley of rubber lands as I had dreamed was there. I urged my companions to go farther. But they had had enough of jungles, and we turned back.

And, then, rounding a bend in the Chucunaque, we came head-on upon the most startling apparition I have ever seen. A canoe came toward us, and in the bow stood a naked savage with a white body, whose yellow hair, falling to his shoulders, was held in order by a gold chaplet two inches wide encircling his head at the brow. He was of medium height, but magnificently developed about the chest and arms; and he stood as erect as a king. Behind him were a girl of ten and a boy of four, and in the stem his wife wielded a steering paddle. Not one of the four gave a start when they came suddenly upon us, and the man and woman did not vary a heart-beat in the rhythm of their strokes as they plied the canoe to pass directly by us. The man eyed us with a truly regal pride and disdain, and passed us by without troubling to turn his head to see whether or not we intended to follow. His whole manner said more plainly than words: "I am king here; what are you doing in my domain?"

This uncanny vision settled any doubts my companions had about exploring further. The tales of the Negroid chief, about the savages upstream, had been given a most startling confirmation. They had seen enough. "We are no jungle rats." they exclaimed, "and we didn't come down here to get ourselves struck in the back with a poisoned arrow. Our business is law and rubber. There's neither here, and we're going home—to-night!"

And homeward we headed. It was a bitter disappointment to me to have my Panama rubber lands remain undiscovered, after such an incomplete exploration. And my disappointment was doubled at my inability to follow the trail of the White Indians who, I now felt sure, were no mirage of fanciful pioneers but a scientific fact.

I lingered in Panama after my companions had gone on to the States. I told my friends in the Canal Zone Government about my White Indians, and I got the incredulous sympathy usually paid to a respected citizen who has gone a little off his head. They all believed that I honestly thought I had seen them, but they thought it was cither "a touch o' sun" or that I had seen albinoes or half-breeds. The only exception to the chorus of doubt was General Babbitt, of our Military Service at the Zone. He said he was inclined to believe me, because one of his aviators had brought back a similar story. Lost in a fog bank south of the Canal, this flier had swung low to get his bearings and had come out of the cloud right above a big village in the jungle, and had seen dozens of white savages scurry to cover when this roaring monster from the skies had emerged into their sight. The General had always doubted the aviator's story until be heard mine confirm it.

A SCIENTIFIC SEARCH

RETURNING to the States, I interested new capital in a second expedition—the backers of my first one were polite but skeptical. I was now determined not only to prove that there were good rubber lands in Darien, but also that there were White Indians there. I am not a scientist, and I did not intend to have the credibility of this discovery rest upon my own unscientific observations. I therefore made the following proposition in identical terms to the University of Rochester, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution: "If you will detail a scientist to accompany me on a thorough trip of exploration of interior Darien. I will deposit cash to your credit, before I start, sufficient to pay his salary and expenses for the entire time we are gone, and you will pay him yourselves from this fund. He will then be solely responsible to you. Furthermore. I will guarantee that he may leave the party at any moment that he feels the results of the trip do not justify him in continuing, or if he feels that any deception is being practiced."

All three institutions declared that this was a proposal that could not be refined. Especially so, because Darien is a sort of "missing link" in the scientists' knowledge of American fauna and flora. The animal and vegetable life of North and Central America is sharply differentiated from the corresponding life of South America, and scientists have long hoped that unexplored Darien would some day reveal the transitional forms that would bridge this gap in natural history. The University of Rochester, therefore, detailed Prof. H. L. Fairchild, to study the geology and biology of this region; the American Museum of Natural History sent Dr. C. M. Breeder, to study the snakes, fish, and invertebrates; and the Smithsonian Institution sent Prof. J. U. Baer, to study the men and apes from the viewpoint of the trained anthropologist.

I secured also the cooperation of the War Department and the Department of Commerce at Washington, the Canal Zone Administration, and the Panama Government. These connections added to my party Major Omer Malsbury, topographer; Major H. B. Johnson, naturalist; Lieutenants Townsend and Rosebaum; and Dr. Raoul Brin, botanist and soil expert, detailed by President Porras of Panama. I took along also a newspaperman, and Mr. Charles Charlton, representing the Pathé motion picture people. Altogether, my party numbered eleven whites and thirteen Negro laborers obtained at Panama.

The War Department placed at my disposal two airplanes, with which I made a reconnaissance flight from Panama City, ascending the Bayano River to its headwaters, and descending the Chucunaque River to a point near its mouth. In less than one day I covered in the air more territory than the expedition later covered in four months through the jungle. I traveled in the first plane as pathfinder, and the second plane followed about half a mile in the rear. When I saw something I wished to base photographed. I got my pilot to sweep low and circle over the spot, which was a signal for the second plane, containing the photographer, to follow our example and take the pictures. An army topographer, in my plane, made notes of the geography of the country as we raced along. In this way we got a very fair record of the mountain ranges and water systems of the whole region.

The first fruit of this flight delighted me very much, for it proved my surmise about the nature of the interior to be correct. There were two mountain ranges, one paralleling the Atlantic coastline and the other the Pacific. Between them lay a level valley, twenty-five miles wide and nearly one hundred and fifty miles long.

But I was even more excited by the evidences of human habitations of a much higher type than those of any Indians I had ever seen before. Time after time we would see a village below us, not a few huts carelessly huddled together but many dwellings set in orderly rows upon a geometric pattern and dominated by a great communal house big enough to foregather all the hundreds of inhabitants of the village. Some of these tribal assembly places were built on hillsides, so that they were in effect three stories high. In several villages, the inhabitants appeared much fairer than Indians I had known; though we never got a close view of them, for when we swooped from a thousand feet to two hundred above ground, they disappeared like gophers into their holes, going doubtless into the jungle to escape this fearsome apparition from the skies. Months later. I talked to inhabitants of these villages, whose recollection of my aèrial visit was still a fresh memory of terror.

A HAZARDOUS JOURNEY

I SHALL only sketch the long, disheartening, toilsome journey that led at the very end to the White Indians. We made friends with the Chocoi Indians near Yavisa, and learned much about their customs. We also learned that our coming on this second expedition had been broadcast by word of mouth throughout the interior, and that we should be opposed at every step of the way. The reason for this antagonism is a high tribute to the character of the Indians. Except for the Chocois themselves, all the tribes of Darien are monogamous, and they have, besides, quite the highest standard of sexual morality I have encountered anywhere in the world. When I say this, I do not except the white men of the United States. These savages rigidly apply the "single standard" of morals, and the only punishment for infidelity is death. Proof, or even reasonable circumstantial evidence of it, is invariably followed by the punishment. The result is that the offense is very rarely given. The story that had preceded us into the jungle was that we were coming to kidnap their women; and the opposition that dogged us all the way through the country was based on this report. After we left the friendly and polygamous Chocoi, no member of our party saw a single native woman until after we had reached the Atlantic Coast, and then only after all but three of us had gone on back to Panama and I had proved to the head chief that I was genuinely interested in the welfare of his people.

After we left Yavisa for our plunge into the jungle, we were subjected to continual surveillance of the most trying kinds. Every night our ears were filled with weird forest cries from upstream and below—whistlings that we mistook for bird-calls until we observed that they came in mathematical combinations which clearly proved their human origin and that they were signals between unseen observers. In the morning, we would find their footprints on the river banks, and we would also find wild turkey feathers stuck in patterns in the mud, as witchcraft magic to hinder our progress.

At the mouth of the Tuquesa River, we surprised a party of Cunas Bravos who had camped there to ambush us, and of whom we had received warning from a friendly Chocoi chief.

DEATH IN THE EXPEDITION

THEN we had sickness to contend with, Dr. Brin got malaria and I sent him back to Yavisa with one canoe and its crew. He returned to Panama and died the day after his arrival. Farther upstream, Dr. Baer was infected by flies that bit his arm after they had settled on a tumor in a monkey he was disecting. We were now too far inland to send him back, and for weeks his sufferings were a drain on our sympathies and his helpless weight an additional burden to be carried across portages in the tropical heat. Often the shallow water and the fallen tree trunks across the stream made travel so difficult that two miles was a hard day's journey. Our difficulties daily increased. and our store of supplies fell lower. When we pitched camp at the mouth of the Sucubti River, we decided that we must strike across the mountains to the Atlantic Coast and end our travels as soon as possible. We established relations with a native sub-chief, who spoke English. His one anxiety was to get us out of the country. If we had not been so heavily armed, we learned afterward. we should have been rushed and massacred; but the natives knew every detail of our equipment, even to the dynamite we carried, and were afraid to try it. He guaranteed safe conduct to the coast if we would promise to leave. I sent a scouting party of three men under native escort, to the coast to explore the trail and to telegraph Panama for medical aid and supplies. One of these men deserted at the coast. The others came back, and led us over the trail. Dr. Baer died soon after we sighted salt water. The Government ordered the soldiers with me back to the Zone, and I was left at Caledonia Bay with only Charlton and Johnson. Not one White Indian had we seen, and we were regarded with suspicion and hatred by the natives. Except that I had pretty well assured myself that the interior was suitable for rubber plantations, and that Dr. Baer's and Dr. Breeder’s researches had been productive, the expedition was a pretty sad wreck.

But from this point on, the luck turned. I had learned from the sub-chief of the Sucubti that all the tribes of Darien held allegiance to a head chief whose title, in their language, is Ina Paguina. He is the latest of a long line of hereditary overlords who have ruled the country as feudal chiefs for many centuries. His seat of government is at Sasardi, an island on the San Blas coast. I got word to him that I wanted an audience with him. This was arranged, and accompanied by Charlton and Johnson. I sailed over to his island.

CONVINCING THE HEAD CHIEF

THROUGH an interpreter, he asked me why I had come to his country. I determined to drop all effort to be diplomatic and to try the effect of blunt frankness. I told him that I had come to look for rubber lands in the interior and that I had been opposed at every step. I told him I was the friend of his people and would treat them fairly, but that he was mistaken in trying to keep the white men out of his country, because when they got ready to come nothing could stop them.

I had learned to admire the high intelligence and character of his people, and if he would cooperate with me in the scientific work I wanted to do, I would do my best at Panama and Washington to have his country set apart as an inviolate home of the Indians, under the protection of America and Panama. He liked my frankness, and explained why I had been opposed. The Panama Government had seized some of his islands nearest the Zone, and had instituted "schools” and local "government.” under Negroid police supervision, that were really cloaks to enslave the men and debauch the women. He resented the degradation of his people, and he and they had resolved that all white and black men were evil and to fight their coming to the death.

After long negotiations, he became convinced of my good faith, and called a congress of his chieftains to discuss my plan for an Indian sanctuary. The chieftains came from all parts of the Atlantic coast of Darien, and I was astonished to learn of the high level of political organization they had achieved. Not only did they have an hereditary feudal government, but courts of law with a recognized code of precedents. Every tribe also sent at least one young man forth to see the world, and these youths had traveled as sailors to New York, San Francisco, London, and some of them, around the world. The Ina Paguina even had a secret service in the City of Panama that kept him advised of the intentions of the Panamanian Government toward his people. He knew all about the progress of the white men in the arts of war and peace, and had foreseen the approach of the day when his own domain would face exploitation and his people the common fate of the Indian. The congress of chiefs approved my plan to enlist aid for the preservation of their country.

Then I asked to see the White Indians. At first they denied their existence, but I proved to them that I knew better. I also explained their scientific importance, and their value in creating American interest in all the Indians, by their demonstration of the reality of the links connecting the Indian to the white man by the ties of blood. This argument won them, and word was sent out to bring them in.

OUT OF THEIR FASTNESSES

WHITE Indians now appeared, to see us by the score. They came from the mountains of the San Blas coast, from the interior, and some even from the islands themselves. Within a few weeks I had seen four hundred of them—men, women, and children. I talked to them through interpreters, photographed them with the motion picture camera, examined them carefully and assured myself that they were neither painted nor dyed, and learned a good deal about their customs, local status, and biological character. Like all the Indians of the San Blas coast, brown as well as white, they proved far superior in intelligence and character to any other Indians had ever encountered, either in North or South America, and not excepting the Pueblos of our own Southwest. Their civilization was far more advanced, and their political practices, ethical standards, and practical arts more perfected. Their treatment of women and children alone would set them apart. I never saw a woman or child among them who did not look happy. They speak of their women as "flowers," and their manner toward them is as gentle and considerate as one would expect from that poetical idea. When I persuaded an old chief to be photographed, he insisted that I wait till his little granddaughter could be brought to stand with him, and the picture of his affectionate pride in her and of her happiness to be beside him would do credit to the heart of any people in the world.

The White Indians occupy a peculiar status among their brown kinsmen. They are as proud and war-like as the San Blas themselves, and they maintain their feudal independence with as savage fearlessness. Both races try hard to maintain the integrity of the racial strains. Where propinquity over-rides the racial barrier and a White Indian marries a Brown Indian, the children are light brown and the grandchildren sometimes are white and sometimes are brown—apparently following the Mendelian Law of inheritance in this respect, by which the normal expectation would be that one child in two of such a union would be white, if any occur at all. But at the age of puberty, the white children of these mixed unions are required to go to the tribe of their white parent and are there raised as White Indians, while the brown children are raised with the brown tribe. This practice explains why the White Indians have persisted down the ages as a homogeneous white race in the midst of the overwhelming preponderance of reds and yellows and browns that numerically dominated the Western Hemisphere.

In the next article I shall deal more at length with the fact that the White Indians have always dominated the other Indians intellectually, and have created all the real civilizations that flourished in prehistoric times in Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Brazil. Incidentally, these Indians speak a language which, I am told, is closely related to the ancient Sanskrit.

In appearance, the White Indians duplicate the characteristics of the three I first saw at Yavisa. Their skin is a true white, and shows the pink glow of the blood beneath, as no pigmented skin of any colored race does. Their hair is literally the yellow of yellow gold. It would give a wrong impression to describe it as red or as tow. It is the true blond of the northern Caucasian. Their eyes are hazel, which means that they show light brown on a blue ground.

These positive characteristics dispose of the old theory that they are albinoes. The eyes of albinoes are pink, because they have no pigment in the iris or retina, and consequently the blood in the capillaries of the retina shows through. The hair of albinoes is white, because here again all pigment is absent.

One characteristic of the White Indians does immediately suggest the albino. This is the squinting of the eyes. But any American who has traveled our own Western deserts knows how quickly he himself adopts this habit to protect his eyes from the glare of the unclouded sun. And in the tropics, the actinic rays, which provoke the irritation of the eye nerves that causes this habit, are much more intense than they are in Arizona. Even a black-eyed Caucasian finds them distressing, even when he wears a helmet. It is no cause for surprise, then, that the hazel-eyed White Indians, living near the Equator and going about bare-headed, should develop a drooped head and a squint of the eyes to protect them from the sun. When I took my three specimen White Indian children to Canada last summer, they soon got rid of the habit and showed no more evidence of it than do the natives of Canada.

VISITORS TO AMERICA

FOLLOWING the congress of Indian chiefs on my plan to help them form an Indian sanctuary, they provided me with three children to bring back to America for scientific study. These are a girl of sixteen and two boys of ten and fourteen. They provided also an adult couple of brown Indians to act as their guardians, an English-speaking San Blas Indian to act as interpreter, and two leading young chiefs. This is the party I brought back with me to Washington. The Ina Paguina himself planned to come, but the Panamanian Government refused him a passport on the ground that his resistance to the "pacification" of the San Blas islands made him legally an outlaw.

Next month I shall have a second article in the WORLD'S WORK. In that I shall describe the language and traditions and music of the San Blas Indians, and the reasons for the two theories the scientists advance to explain their origin.

I shall also describe more fully my plan to persuade the American Government to acquire by purchase the territory occupied by the White Indians, the San Blas, the Cunas Bravos, the Mortis, and the Wallas, and to have it set aside as a permanent and inviolate sanctuary for these remnants of the most advanced aborigines of the Western Hemisphere. Their lands are of little industrial value, so that no loss to the economic progress of the world will be entailed by segregating them from exploitation. These Indians, on the other hand, offer the most promising field yet opened up for finding the answers to two of the most fascinating mysteries of science: first, how white men evolved from the primeval brown race, and second, what the facts are behind the still undeciphered remains of at least two great white-influenced civilizations that once flourished in our continents, the early Mayan of Central America and the Pre-Incan of Peru. It behooves us to keep intact these few tribes whose culture marks them as probably the only remaining inheritors of the traditions that can unravel the mystery. If, as now seems possible, we can work out the answer through a study of them, we shall be able largely to write the authentic story of those prehistoric Americans, who wrote hieroglyphics as complex as the Egyptian, who were astronomers of the first order, who built walled cities, practiced mummification, performed delicate surgical operations on the skull, had a systematic science of pharmacy, originated the use of quinine, cocaine, valerian, and a dozen other standard drugs, wrought gold into beautiful ornaments, cut and polished and wore diamonds and other precious stones, and altogether were a people of as high development as were the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians.

WHITE INDIANS with YELLOW HAIR

While he was bargaining with a native chief in the Darien jungle, R. O. Marsh had his first astounded glimpse of a white skinned girl with golden hair, an Indian girl. Half incredulous, yet hopeful, he headed an expedition to confirm the legend of centuries. In the following pages are his photographs.

Sorry about the quality of the images; it was the best I could do with my sources. There are more stories about the White Indians on this blog; use the search tools. I will be adding Marsh's second story about these Indians at a later date; it's on order!/drf