Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/125

Rh Yucatan, as detailed by the Spanish conquerors, were very distinguishable from those of the Mexicans, and shewed a different origin. When visited by the Spaniards, the descendants of the earliest settlers had evidently much degenerated, and, shut out from all later knowledge of modern arts, could not make head against the firearms and weapons of their invaders. Their race, accordingly, was soon extirpated, even if it had not been extirpated previously, at least in effect; and the opportunity of learning their traditions having been lost, we have it now only left us to judge from the remains of their cities, as from the foot of Hercules, the proportionate extent of their former civilization. The full consideration of this topic would require a volume much beyond the limits for which I can claim your attention; but this much may be allowed me, in discussing the subject before us, to account for what so many writers have been fancying a mysterious aboriginal civilization of an extinct race peculiar to America. Civilization, it is indubitable, flourished there in a remarkable degree; and as myself an eye-witness of its traces, and humbly venturing an opinion the result of considerable study and research, I feel no hesitation in submitting it, even thus incomplete, to your judgment, as owing to Carthaginian colonization of about eighteen hundred years date back from the time of the Spanish invasion, degenerating gradually until that time, when the few who could have explained it were extirpated unheard.

After this civilized intercourse with the New World, and before the time of Columbus, there were probably many cases of African tribes or fugitives finding their way to America, as Asiatics had done on the other coasts. When Columbus first arrived at the islands he found them generally inhabited by a timid people, who seem to have been of the same nation as those inhabiting Yucatan, from the fact of their all speaking a language dialectically different, but intelligible to one another. This fact we learn from Peter Martyr, the most intelligent and fullest of the cotemporary historians. Though he never visited America himself, yet he sought out most sedulously all the information possible from the various adventures who returned thence, to be repeated to the Pope and other princes of Italy, for whom he seems to have been an agent in Spain. His letters, accordingly, are among the most minute and trustworthy records of the times, written in the way such important events deserved to be communicated; and as he died in 1526, having shortly before returned to his native Italy, we have from