24. CHAPTER XXIV.
DEDICATED TO THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS.
By this time Samoa's wounded arm was in such a state,
that amputation became necessary. Among savages, severe
personal injuries are, for the most part, accounted but trifles.
When a European would be taking to his couch in despair,
the savage would disdain to recline.
More yet. In Polynesia, every man is his own barber and
surgeon, cutting off his beard or arm, as occasion demands.
No unusual thing, for the warriors of Varvoo to saw off
their own limbs, desperately wounded in battle. But owing
to the clumsiness of the instrument employed—a flinty, serrated
shell—the operation has been known to last several
days. Nor will they suffer any friend to help them; maintaining,
that a matter so nearly concerning a warrior is far
better attended to by himself. Hence it may be said, that
they amputate themselves at their leisure, and hang up their
tools when tired. But, though thus beholden to no one for
aught connected with the practice of surgery, they never cut
off their own heads, that ever I heard; a species of amputation
to which, metaphorically speaking, many would-be independent
sort of people in civilized lands are addicted.
Samoa's operation was very summary. A fire was
kindled in the little caboose, or cook-house, and so made
as to produce much smoke. He then placed his arm
upon one of the windlass bitts (a short upright timber,
breast-high), and seizing the blunt cook's ax would have
struck the blow; but for some reason distrusting the
precision of his aim, Annatoo was assigned to the task.
Three strokes, and the limb, from just above the elbow,
was no longer Samoa's; and he saw his own bones; which
many a centenarian can not say. The very clumsiness of
the operation was safety to the subject. The weight and
bluntness of the instrument both deadened the pain and
lessened the hemorrhage. The wound was then scorched,
and held over the smoke of the fire, till all signs of blood
vanished. From that day forward it healed, and troubled
Samoa but little.
But shall the sequel be told? How that, superstitiously
averse to burying in the sea the dead limb of a body yet
living; since in that case Samoa held, that he must very
soon drown and follow it; and how, that equally dreading
to keep the thing near him, he at last hung it aloft from
the topmast-stay; where yet it was suspended, bandaged
over and over in cerements. The hand that must have
locked many others in friendly clasp, or smote a foe, was
no food, thought Samoa, for fowls of the air nor fishes of
the sea.
Now, which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high
as Haman? Or the living trunk below? Was the arm
severed from the body, or the body from the arm? The
residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore we say it
was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times
severed worm, is the worm proper?
For myself, I ever regarded Samoa as but a large fragment
of a man, not a man complete. For was he not an
entire limb out of pocket? And the action at Teneriffe
over, great Nelson himself—physiologically speaking—was
but three-quarters of a man. And the smoke of Waterloo
blown by, what was Anglesea but the like? After Saratoga,
what Arnold? To say nothing of Mutius Scævola
minus a hand, General Knox a thumb, and Hannibal an
eye; and that old Roman grenadier, Dentatus, nothing
more than a bruised and battered trunk, a knotty sort of
hemlock of a warrior, hard to hack and hew into chips,
though much marred in symmetry by battle-ax blows. Ah!
but these warriors, like anvils, will stand a deal of hard
hammering. Especially in the old knight-errant times.
For at the battle of Brevieux in Flanders, my glorious old
gossiping ancestor, Froissart, informs me, that ten good
knights, being suddenly unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to
the plain, fatally encumbered by their armor. Whereupon,
the rascally burglarious peasants, their foes, fell to picking
their visors; as burglars, locks; or oystermen, oysters; to
get at their lives. But all to no purpose. And at last
they were fain to ask aid of a blacksmith; and not till
then, were the inmates of the armor dispatched. Now it
was deemed very hard, that the mysterious state-prisoner
of France should be riveted in an iron mask; but these
knight-errants did voluntarily prison themselves in their
own iron Bastiles; and thus helpless were murdered therein.
Days of chivalry these, when gallant chevaliers died
chivalric deaths!
And this was the epic age, over whose departure my late
eloquent and prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund
Burke, so movingly mourned. Yes, they were glorious
times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights,
would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a
heroic bivouac, in a wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty
morning in Normandy; every knight blowing his steel-gloved
fingers, and vainly striving to cook his cold coffee in
his helmet.
