which they were estimated when the Spaniards arrived amongst them.
Let us not, however, undervalue the means of transport possessed even by very barbarous people over those seas which they had to traverse in the more benignant climates of our globe. The accounts of our voyagers abound with notices of the vast numbers of canoes with which they were surrounded on reaching newly-discovered shores. Mr. Squier records a statement of one of the first settlers in New Hampshire, that the tribe of the Penacooks, at the time of their destruction by the Maquaas or Mohawks, had three hundred birch canoes in Little Bay, and that they had seen as many there at that time (p. 148). These three hundred canoes we may certainly calculate could have carried off a thousand persons, if the owners had chosen to fly instead of staying to encounter their enemies to their extermination, and thus they might have found refuge in some of the West-Indian islands. But some of the canoes are represented to have been of really astonishing dimensions. Without referring to the fleets of vessels, some of four hundred tons burden, mentioned by the Portuguese in the seas of Asia, with the knowledge of the mariners' compass, Ferdinand Columbus and Diaz del Castillo both state there were found some, on their first visiting the West-Indian islands, capable of holding forty or forty-five persons each; and Peter Martyr says there was one having as many as eighty rowers. If we consider the state of discipline necessary to manage such vessels and crews, and the provision necessary to be made for their maintenance, we must acknowledge that there were sufficient means at the command of those tribes to remove themselves bodily by sea in long voyages, so that, in the comparatively smooth waters of the tropics, they might have transported themselves from very long distances to the places in which they were found by Europeans of different nations.
In this one respect, then, it appears to me that the various authors to whom I have referred are correct in supposing the Indians of America to be descendants of fugitives from very different parts of the ancient world, the far greater part of whom undoubtedly came from Asia, though from different parts of Asia to different parts of America, at many and different periods of time, and possessing different degrees of barbarism or semi-civilization. Such different bands of fugitives, if meeting at any time, and commingling either as friends, or even as conquerors and conquered, would in the course of two or three generations become a people with a language and character difficult to be traced to either line
