Marchand, a French navigator who visited the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1791, after having recently seen the Mexican sculpture and paintings, formed the opinion that the Haidah works of art could be distinctly traced to Aztec origin.[90] He remarks of their paintings and carvings: “The taste for ornament prevails in all the works of their hands; their canoes, their chests, and different little articles of furniture in use among them, are covered with figures which might be taken for a species of hieroglyphics; fishes and other animals, heads of men, and various whimsical designs, are mingled and confounded in order to compose a subject. It undoubtedly will not be expected that these figures should be perfectly regular and the proportions in them exactly observed, for here every man is a painter and sculptor; yet they are not deficient in a sort of elegance and perfection.”
The imitative faculty thus manifested so generally among a people still in the condition of savage life, shows itself no less strikingly in the modern claystone carvings of objects of foreign introduction. The collection formed by the United States Exploring Expedition, and largely augmented since, includes numerous carvings in which representations of log and frame houses, forts, boats, horses, and fire-arms, are introduced; and where cords, pulleys, anchors, and other details copied from the shipping which frequent the coasts, furnish evidence of a practised eye, and considerable powers of imitation. To the unfamiliar observer, the result presents, in many cases, a very arbitrary and even incongruous jumble of miscellaneous details. But, most probably, the native designer had, in every case, a special meaning, and even some specific incident in view.
The interest awakened by such manifestations of observant accuracy and artistic skill among savage tribes is not diminished by the fact that in nearly all other respects they are devoid of culture. Notwithstanding the absence in most of them of the very rudiments of civilisation, experience proves that among the tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains distinguished by artistic capacity, there is an aptitude for industrious and settled habits, the want of which is so noticeable in the nomad tribes of the prairies. Their linear patterns are often singularly graceful; and they employ colour lavishly, and with some degree of taste, in decorating their masks, boats, and dwellings. This is specially noticeable among the Haidahs, in the different dialects of whose language we find not only names for nearly all the primary colours, but also the word _kigunijago_, “a picture.” The symbolical and mythological significance of many of their carvings is indisputable; while the affinities, traceable at times to the ornamentation most characteristic of the architectural remains in the principal seats of native American civilisation in Central America, confer on them a peculiar interest and value.