Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/160

148 and are now an industrious and thriving community having several villages in British Honduras, though more further to the South. A few are still in Ruatan, but the principal population of this beautiful and important island are now British subjects from the Caymans and other British settlements. I may not be considered wandering from my subject by adverting to this island as unquestionably calculated to be the great emporium of commerce for that part of the world, and I trust that the British Government will never be so neglectful of national interests as to waive the claims which from long occupation they possess over it, while the Spanish Government and that which has succeeded it, cannot claim any right, inasmuch as they have never pretended to colonize it, and allege no other right than that of propinquity to their coasts. This right, however, is utterly untenable, for thus Guernsey and Jersey might as well be claimed by France, and Bermuda and the Bahamas by the United States. There are at present at Ruatan about 2000 inhabitants, who have voluntarily asked of the British Government a legislative system, and bound themselves to pay in return a land tax of one shilling per acre. The neighbouring island of Bonacca which is nearly as large as Ruatan, had at the time of my visit in 1857, only one solitary Scotchman resident there with a few Indians in his employ, while cattle ranged wild over the island, free for any one to come and kill them at pleasure, as I understood masters of vessels were frequently in the habit of doing. Traces of ancient civilization abounded in this island, but into the question of that civilization I do not at present enter, leaving it for a future occasion, while my present enquiry refers only to the native tribes found on those coasts. I have already intimated the opinion that those natives before the arrival of the Caribs were Arrawaks, whose language, as now existing in British and Dutch Guiana, I have referred to. The evidences I have to adduce. On comparing the Scripture translations of Mr. Brett of the first and those by the Moravian Missions of the latter, I find only dialectic differences, as the use of the vowel u by the one uniformly where the other has o. In other respects I find little or no difference. I have already referred to the words in Hakluyt as proving incontestably that this same language was spoken in Trinidad in 1595, and we have another corroboration of this in a word handed down by Sir Walter Raleigh who says that Kairix in the language of that country meant island. This word still remains in Arrawak for island. But beyond that part of the coast we have great reason for believing that Arrawak was the lan-