Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/123

Rh reports; and when he arrived at Guadaloupe, on his second voyage, he found there the poop of a vessel which had been very probably wrecked in the neighbourhood. We know, also, that, only five years after Columbus had achieved his great discovery, the Portuguese admiral, Cabral, on his way to the East Indies, was driven by strong winds on to the coast of Brazil, which casualty would thus have given the knowledge of a new continent to the civilized world, even if the energies of Columbus had not been previously directed to that object. The like circumstances have driven many vessels, in more modern times, from the old world to the new; and the same must have frequently occurred in former ages, as, indeed, we may judge from the positive statement of various authors to that effect, equally in the cases of people proficient in the art of navigation, and those possessing the most limited knowledge of it. The same events, again, before referred to with regard to the causes of migrations, must be expected to have arisen in all parts of the world; and as we have contended that the main body of the American Indians proceeded from Asia, though admitting the probability of some of them being associated with descendants of stray Europeans, we may, on the same grounds, assent to the probability of some African nations or tribes also having found their way across the Atlantic, to mingle their race and languages with the people they might happen to meet there.

The older writers on the origin of the American nations, such as Garcia, Horn, and De Laet, have laid very great stress on the probability of the new continent being, in a considerable degree, peopled from Africa. They maintained that America was in reality, from very early times, known to the Phœnicians, or at any rate to the Carthaginians; and that the ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands, generally designated Guanches, and other African tribes down the western coasts of Africa, had been, some of them, from time to time driven or drifted across to Brazil and other eastern coasts of South America. As before observed, these opinions may be received as probable, on the same principles which we have acknowledged to be just with regard to the other wanderers from the Old World to the New: and much as some later writers have discredited the idea of the new continent having been known to the ancients, I feel bound to say, that I feel as much assured of the fact as of any event in history. The Greeks and Romans certainly are not to be included in this supposition, and much less the Jews or Egyptians, who were not sea-going people;