Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/168

156 This word Cannibal therefore being clearly the Indian name of the people afterwards better known as Caribs, how ridiculous it is to suggest for it a derivation from the Latin, as if the Indians had known Latin, and taken their names from that language. Yet in one of our Dictionaries the derivation suggested is from caro, carnis, and both in Todd's Johnson and Richardson we have it suggested as from Canis a dog. Richardson says "perhaps a canine appetite from Lat. Canis a dog," but adds more sensibly "though by some suspected to be a corruption of Caribal from Caribes the name of the people among whom Cannibalism was (Hakluyt learned) practised. This word (he goes on to say) is not in our older Lexicographers though used by so early a writer as Hakluyt (Voyages, Vol. 3. p. 576.) "The Caribes I learned to be men eaters or canibals, and great enemies of the islanders of Trinidad." (Voyage of Sir R. Dudley, who returned to England in 1595.) The suggestion of the word being a corruption of the name Caribe, or rather a varied pronunciation, is I consider the correct definition, judging that the natives of the different West India islands from whom the Spaniards received it had pronounced it sometimes one way and sometimes the other. Peter Martyr as before observed uses the two words conjointly, and I think the explanation may be made thus; Caribe was the true name which they themselves recognized, but the other natives with whom the Spaniards came first in contact were of the Maya race, inhabitants of Yucatan and the islands between that peninsula and Cuba, and perhaps that island also. P. Martyr says they spoke the same language, and if that language were the same as the Maya now spoken in Yucatan, then I am enabled to say there can be no doubt of the correctness of the supposition. The Mayas of the present day have not the letter R in their language, any more than the Chinese with whom the Mayas seem to have a great affinity in language, manners, and personal characteristics. They could not therefore pronounce the word Caribe, but would pronounce it probably Canibali, and so have delivered it to the Spaniards. As I have no authority to quote for this description of the Maya language and people, I must state it on my own, having been myself among them in Yucatan, and having begun to learn the language previously to going there from a native of that peninsula in Havana.

Canoe is another Indian word we have adopted, and as such it ought to have been noted in our Dictionaries. P. Martyr, whom I prefer quoting as two translations of his Decades have been published in England, says "as soone as