Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/201

Rh the expedition of Narvaez, and then had lived for those years among them. But he could speak only the Floridian language; and we are told, that, in a council or talk with a company of natives of the Chickasaws, the Georgians, the Coosas, and the Mobilians, he had to address himself to a Chickasaw who knew the Floridian, while he passed the words to a Georgian, and the Georgian to a Coosan, the Coosan to a Mobilian, and the Mobilian to a Chickasaw; and so for each reply the process was inverted.

The exigencies imposed by the variety and the peculiar qualities of the Indian languages, have from the first coming hither of Europeans made the office of interpreters a prime necessity. Circumstances have facilitated the appearance from time to time of a class of men with very different degrees of fitness for that office. One is puzzled to imagine how the early navigators who reached and landed on these coasts, and had transient converse with the natives, managed to hold such intelligible intercourse with them as is reported in their narratives. It must have been by signs and gestures. The second set of voyagers and visitors here occasionally found some help in communicating with the savages through one or another waif who had been kidnapped and kept on board the vessel of a previous comer to the coast. In a few cases such kidnapped savages had been taken to Europe for a while, and then brought back, — like Samoset, the Pilgrims' friend at Plymouth, and those transported from Acadia and Canada by the French explorers, to be soon referred to. This was a natural and indeed a necessary resource of the Europeans; not requiring any violence or cruelty, if properly explained, and affording the only possibility for facilitating intercourse. The European navigators could generally obtain willing Indian passengers for visiting Europe.

The necessity of the case soon furnished the skill of interpretation so far as immediately required. It is observable, however, that all effective and really intelligible