Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/134

122 whatever might have been the impelling causes, they had only to submit themselves to the winds and waves to be carried with little difficulty to the islands on the other side. We know, from Peter Martyr and other writers, that they had no small means and skill of so transporting themselves to great distances. He says, "They sailed in fleets of canoes to hunt after men, as others go to the forests to kill deer;" and that they had sufficient energy to undergo great enterprises was shewn from their resistance to the Spaniards, of whom, the same writer says, "they had overthrown and slain whole armies." From their appetite for human flesh, learned not improbably in Africa, they would have been able to obtain sufficient sustenance for the long voyage across; and if only acquired by the necessities of that voyage, or strengthened by it, we need not be surprised at their systematic hunting after it in their new abodes. Under the influence of a long communication with the whites, though so harshly begun, they have long since abandoned that horrible practice, and all the later accounts of them represent them now as of docile and amiable dispositions. There are a few families of them, I understand, yet surviving in the islands of St. Vincent and Trinidad; and on the mainland there are several villages, for whom, as I have already stated, the Gospel of St. Matthew has been translated into their present jargon. In this I find comparatively few words of the language of the fathers: the greater part consists of those of the mothers' race, with a number of others from the French, Spanish, and English languages, and perhaps some of other neighbouring people.

In the third volume of Hakluyt, p. 577, are fifty-seven words of a language recorded as collected by Sir Robert Dudley in Trinidad in the year 1595. Of these I can only find a small number agreeing with those given by the French writers as being Carib. I have no decided opinion to offer on this diversity, and only mention the circumstance to point it out to other inquirers for such explanation as they may be able to offer. I have compared them with the neighbouring languages, the Maya and Musquito, and find them entirely distinct. I suspect they were in reality Carib, but incorrectly written down.

In conclusion, returning to the coincidences which have been laid before you, if it has been satisfactorily shewn you that there was a widely extended nation of savages in America of manifestly African origin, this fact must be acknowledged to be a warranty for the arguments being well founded, that the other nations of America had also