Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/149

Rh The earliest discoverers of the western coasts of America do not seem to have met with any seagoing tribes, while those who first visited the islands of the Pacific were naturally much surprised at the capabilities and aptitude shown by the islanders to undertake long voyages, their knowledge of navigation, and their fleets of canoes. Captain Cook in 1774 estimated one of their fleets to consist of not fewer than 1700 in number each carrying 40 men, making therefore an armed force of some 7000 men. Nor is this on consideration a matter of any marvel. The inhabitants of a Continent with vast tracts of land on all sides of them had not the same inducements to expose themselves to the waves, as those of the islands. They had sufficient space for such culture as they gave it, for the chace or for refuge from their enemies. But the inhabitants of the islands whose ancestors must have been brought to those islands in canoes, and who must have been nurtured on the seacoasts, could not but be rendered familiar with its nature from their earliest infancy, and navigation became one of their greatest needs, and tribes of the same people found their way from one island to another as is proved by the same language spoken throughout the Pacific with scarcely a dialectic deviation. In the Journal of the voyage of the Endeavour in 1770 p. 105, it is remarked that the people of New Zealand spoke the language of Otaheite, though 2000 miles apart without any land intervening between them, "with not so much difference as is found between many counties in England." Taking merely the doctrine of chances as our guide, we may see clearly that the Continent of America must have been reached frequently by different bands of rovers at different periods, who mingling themselves or their descendants with one another, would form new combinations quite sufficient to account for whatever anomalies were found in the New World. These it will be the task of our successors in Ethnology to unravel and explain. We have not sufficient data before us on which to labor, or at any rate not such as to take us from those other tasks, which lie more distinctly before us as the object of our enquiries. To enter on these enquiries, some local knowledge also may be desirable, and at present I only refer to them in illustration of the theory I advanced in my former paper of the multifarious and heterogeneous character of the American populations. The more widely extended those populations became on the New Continent the more they might be expected to vary in their physical and moral characteristics. Their languages equally would become varied, so as to render it almost impossible to trace