Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/158

146 that these Caribs were not a people connected in any manner by language, habits, character, or personal appearance, with the Indians of North America. On the contrary they exhibited, as I have already shown, every affinity with Africans. Peter Martyr and Fernando Columbus both speak of the savage tribes on the eastern coasts, eaters of human flesh, as being negroes, dark as Africans, and very different, according to their description, from the aboriginals of North America. They were certainly an intrusive people, conquerors of some previous people, having slain the males and enslaved the females, who we find spoke a different language from the men for a subsequent period of at least 250 years.

The next question then is, who were those former inhabitants of the country, and to this we have a reply suggested by one of the traditions handed down by Rochefort, which can be in its deductions reduced to a certainty. Rochefort says that the greatest enemies of the Caribs were the people then as yet known as the Arrawaks, whose principal place of habitation then as yet was in the Guianas. These Arrawaks were at first masters of the Caribs, probably referring to the first comers among them; but when these from new accessions or otherwise became conscious of their strength, they "utterly destroyed that nation, excepting only the women, whom they took to themselves, and by that means repeopled the islands, whence it came that the wives of the Caribs of the islands have a language different from that of the men in many things and in some consonant to that of the Arrawaks of the Continent." The Arrawaks were then, as they are yet, a more peaceable people than the Caribs, the Caribs being, as I said before, an intrusive people, and the Arrawaks the original inhabitants not only of the Carib islands, Guiana and the neighbouring districts, but also of the larger islands Hayti and Cuba, and probably of the Bahamas. In my former paper I stated that there were to be found in Hakluyt 57 words of the language spoken in the island of Trinidad collected there in 1595 by Sir Robert Dudley, of which I could only trace a very few to the Carib as given by Rochefort and Le Breton, I judged then that the words in that list, which were not Carib, might have belonged to the language of the females, and turning to the Arrawak as that language have found my conjecture verified. Of the Arrawak language there is not that I am aware of any Grammar or Dictionary published, but the Moravian Missionary Sheulty translated the Acts of the Apostles into it in the year 1802, and Mr. Brett, an English Clergyman now resident there, has published some other portions of the