Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/157

Rh Vespucci relates that he fell in with a party of Caribs out on one of their marauding expeditions who fled at his approach, leaving their boat to the whites, in the bottom of which were three young men captives who were soon to have served as a repast for their conquerors. Even in 1658 Rochefort writes with complacency, that the Caribs declared they found the French very good eating, the Spaniards not so delectable, but the English perfectly indigestible. The natives of the islands whose women they had taken after devouring the men seem to have been to their particular appetite. Those natives I consider to have been of the people still known as Arrawaks, the original inhabitants of the West India islands, yet found in very considerable numbers in the Guianas. To account for the original habitations of the Caribs, Rochefort had given various traditions, one to which he seemed himself to lean, was that they had come from the mainland, where numbers of their own nation were then as now to be found. But the conclusive answer to this was his own statement that on the Continent they spoke a language similar to that of the women of the islands, which was entirely distinct from the language spoken by the Caribs in the islands. If these Caribs had come from the mainland how could they have forgotten the language spoken on the mainland to adopt another? If they came from elsewhere, as from Africa, they might be expected to have brought another language with them, which language they might keep, though it had been lost by those of their people who settled on the mainland, in the course of the 200 years that had elapsed between their coming there and when Rochefort wrote. This then seems a conclusive answer to their having come from the mainland. Another account Rochefort took from an Englishman named Brigstock, of whom he writes in terms of the highest eulogium, to the effect that they had been driven from Florida by a people whom he calls the Apalachians. This account has been taken up by various other writers down to Washington Irving, but as it appears to me very unadvisedly. The Caribs were not found in the Northern but in the Southern islands of the Western Indian seas, and they were found with different practices and characteristics than the Indians of North America. I do not doubt the correctness of the tradition repeated from Brigstock, that in consequence of disagreements among themselves, some parties of Indians had been at some anterior time driven away by those whom he calls Apalachians, but only dispute the conclusion that these exiles were the progenitors of the Caribs. Every consideration shows