of the Cape. Between South Africa and Australia the waters
form a part of the great west wind drift. The waters of this drift
are, in general, of very low temperature, but it is remarkable that
the interdigitation just mentioned continues far to the eastward,
at least as far as Kerguelen. This fact is probably due partly to
the actual intrusion of warm water from the Mascarene current
east of Madagascar, and partly to the circumstance that the different
temperatures of the waters are so compensated by their differences
of salinity that they have almost precisely the same specific gravity
in situ. The west wind drift sends a stream northwards along the
west coast of Australia, the West Australia current, the homologue
of the Benguela current in the South Atlantic. The principal feature
in the circulation in the depths of the Indian Ocean is a slow movement
of Antarctic water northwards along the bottom to take the
place of that removed from the surface by evaporation, and by
currents in the lower latitudes. Little is known beyond the bare
fact that such movement does take place. (H. N. D.)
INDIANOLA, a city and the county-seat of Warren county,
Iowa, U.S.A., about 18 m. S. by E. of Des Moines. Pop. (1890)
2254; (1900) 3261; (1905) 3396; (1910) 3283. It is served
by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and the Chicago, Rock
Island & Pacific railways. Indianola is the seat of Simpson
College (coeducational, Methodist Episcopal, 1867), with a
college of liberal arts, an academy, a school of education, a
school of business, a school of shorthand and typewriting, a
conservatory of music, a school of oratory, a school of art and
a military academy. In 1908 the college had 32 instructors
and 905 students. The city lies in a rich farming region, and
has a considerable trade in butter and eggs, vegetables and
fruits, and in coal, lumber and live stock from the surrounding
country. Indianola was laid out and was selected as the county seat
in 1849, and building began in the following year; it was
incorporated as a town in 1864, and was chartered as a city of
the second class in 1884.
INDIANS, NORTH AMERICAN. The name of “American
Indians” for the aborigines of America had its origin in the
use by Columbus, in a letter (February 1493) written
soon after the discovery of the New World, of the
term Indios (i.e. natives of India) for the hitherto
The name
“American Indians.”
unknown human beings, some of whom he brought
back to Europe with him. He believed, as did the people of
his age in general, that the islands which he had discovered
by sailing westward across the Atlantic were actually a part
of India, a mistaken idea which later served to suggest many
absurd theories of the origin of the aborigines, their customs,
languages, culture, &c. From Spanish the word, with its
incorrect connotation, passed into French (Indien), Italian and
Portuguese (Indio), German (Indianer), Dutch (Indiane), &c.
When the New World came to be known as America, the natives
received, in English especially, the name “American Indians,”
to distinguish them from the “Indians” of south-eastern Asia
and the East Indies. The appellation “Americans” was for
a long time used in English to designate, not the European
colonists, but the aborigines, and when, in 1891, Dr D. G.
Brinton published his notable monograph on the Indians he
entitled it The American Race, recalling the early employment
of the term. The awkwardness of such a term as “American
Indian,” both historically and linguistically, led Major J. W.
Powell, the founder of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to
put forward as a substitute “Amerind,” an arbitrary curtailment
which had the advantage of lending itself easily to
form words necessary and useful in ethnological writings, e.g.
pre-Amerind, post-Amerind, pseudo-Amerind, Amerindish,
Amerindize, &c. Purists have objected strenuously to
“Amerind,” but the word already has a certain vogue in both
English and French. Indeed, Professor A. H. Keane does
not hesitate, in The World’s Peoples (London, 1908), to use
“Amerinds” in lieu of “American Indians.” Other popular
terms for the American Indians, which have more or less currency,
are “Red race,” “Red men,” “Redskins,” the last not in such
good repute as the corresponding German Rothäute, or French
Peaux-rouges, which have scientific standing. The term
“American Indians” covers all the aborigines of the New
World past and present, so far as is known, although some
European writers, especially in France, still seek to separate
from the “Redskins” the Aztecs, Mayas, Peruvians, &c., and
some American authorities would (anatomically at least) rank
the Eskimo as distinct from the Indian proper. When the
name “Indian” came to be used by the European colonists
and their descendants, they did not confine it to “wild men,”
but applied it to many things that were wild, strange,
non-European in the new environment (see Journ. Amer. Folk-Lore,
1902, pp. 107-116; Handbook of Amer. Inds., 1907, pt. i. pp.
605-607). Thus more than one hundred popular names of plants
in use in American English (e.g. “Indian corn,” “Indian pink,”
&c.) contain references to the Indian in this way; also many
other things, such as “Indian file,” “Indian ladder,” “Indian
gift,” “Indian pudding,” “Indian summer.” The Canadian-French,
who termed the Indian sauvage (i.e. “savage”),
remembered him linguistically in botte sauvage (moccasin), traîne
sauvage (toboggan). The term “Siwash,” in use in the Chinook
jargon of the North Pacific coast, and also in the English of
that region, for “Indian” is merely a corruption of this Canadian-French
appellation. In the literature relating to the Pacific
coast there is mention even of “Siwash Indians.” Throughout
Canada and the United States the term “Indian” occurs in
hundreds of place-names of all sorts (“Indian River,” “Indian
Head,” “Indian Bay,” “Indian Hill,” and the like). There
are besides these Indiana and its capital Indianapolis. In
Newfoundland “Red Indian,” as the special term for the
Beothuks, forms part of a number of place-names. Pope’s
characterization of the American aborigine,
| “ | Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind |
| Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind,” |
is responsible for the creation in the mind of the people of a “Mr Lo,” who figures in newspaper lore, cartoons, &c. The reputations, deserved and undeserved, of certain Indian tribes north of Mexico have been such that their names have passed into English or into the languages of other civilized nations of Europe as synonyms for “ruffian,” “thug,” “rowdy,” &c. Recently “les Apaches” have been the terror of certain districts of Paris, as were the “Mohocks” (Mohawks) for certain parts of London toward the close of the 18th century.
The North American Indians have been the subject of numerous popular fallacies, some of which have gained world-wide currency. Here belongs a mass of pseudo-scientific and thoroughly unscientific literature embodying absurd and extravagant theories and speculations as to the origin of the aborigines Popular fallacies. and their “civilizations” which derive them (in most extraordinary ways sometimes), in recent or in remote antiquity, from all regions of the Old World Egypt and Carthage, Phoenicia and Canaan, Asia Minor and the Caucasus, Assyria and Babylonia, Persia and India, Central Asia and Siberia, China and Tibet, Korea, Japan, the East Indies, Polynesia, Greece and ancient Celtic Europe and even medieval Ireland and Wales. Favourite theories of this sort have made the North American aborigines the descendants of refugees from sunken Atlantis, Tatar warriors, Malayo-Polynesian sca-farers, Hittite immigrants from Syria, the “Lost Ten Tribes of Israel,” &c., or attributed their social, religious and political ideas and institutions to the advent of stray junks from Japan, Buddhist votaries from south-eastern Asia, missionaries from early Christian Europe, Norse vikings, Basque fishermen and the like.
Particularly interesting are the theories of “Welsh (or white) Indians” and the “Lost Ten Tribes.” The myth of the “Welsh Indians,” reputed to be the descendants of a colony founded about A.D. 1170 by Prince Madoc (well known from Southey’s poem), has been studied by James Mooney (Amer. Anthrop. iv., 1891, 393-394), who traces its development from statements in an article in The Turkish Spy, published in London about 1730. At first these “Welsh Indians,” who are subsequently described as speaking Welsh, possessing Welsh Bibles, beads, crucifixes, &c., are placed near the Atlantic coast and identified with the Tuscaroras, an Iroquoian tribe, but by 1776 they had retreated inland to the banks of the Missouri above St Louis. A few years later they were far up the Red river, continuing, as time went on, to recede farther and farther westward, being identified successively with the Mandans, in whose language Catlin thought he detected a Welsh element, the Moqui, a Pueblos tribe of north-eastern Arizona, and the Modocs (here the name was believed to re-echo Madoc) of south-western Oregon, until at last they vanished over the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The theory that the American Indians were the “Lost Ten Tribes of Israel” has not yet entirely disappeared from ethnological literature. Many of the identities and resemblances in ideas, customs and institutions between the American Indians and the ancient Hebrews, half-knowledge or distorted views of which
