Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/153

Rh a suggestion with Robertson and other earlier writers was an Ethnological fact as to the Caribs of English and Spanish writers and the Galibis of the French being essentially the same people. Their vocabularies have been sufficiently given to prove their identity, and in the comparison which I have myself carefully made between the Carib of Le Breton of 1658, and the Galibi of Paul Boyer, Sicur de Petit Puy, published at Paris in 1654, I am enabled positively to say that they were a kindred people at that date though the two writers now mentioned, writing so contemporaneously as 1654 and 1658 did not seem to be aware of the fact. With reference to this people, the Caribs, the idea was suggested to my mind from my own observation, that they were originally an African people who had been driven or drifted across the Atlantic, and that before I had referred to Bryan Edward's work on Jamaica, in which I then found he had expressed the same conviction from their personal appearance and peculiar manners. In the print he has given of a Carib family which is a faithful representation of the people, any reader may observe the strong traits of resemblance. In the paper I read before this Society on the 14th March 1854 I endeavoured to support this opinion by various arguments and especially by a comparison of some primary words of the Carib language with their equivalents in the language of Western Africa. I have little now to add to those arguments, but every further consideration I have been able to give to the subject, has only tended to strengthen my conviction. Two questions have been suggested in reply to them. First whether the analogies might not have arisen from some admixture of runaway slaves associating themselves with the Caribs, and secondly whether any small vessels, such as savage tribes in Africa could at best be supposed to have possessed, would have been able to survive a voyage across the Atlantic. In reply to the first doubt I gave an answer by anticipation that the Carib Dictionary of Le Breton had been published in 1658, at which period few negro slaves had as yet been brought over to the plantations, so that the few runaways that might have escaped to them could not be considered sufficient in number or consequence to have affected the language of the aborigines. To this I have further to add that when they were brought over in greater numbers, it was soon found that very unfriendly feelings were shown against them by the Caribs, who were readily induced by the planters to assist them in capturing the runaway negroes for very paltry rewards. Consequently no considerable admixture could be