Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/162

it now only left me to speak of the Mosquito Indians, of whom I saw many in the course of my visit, and whom I found in every respect a most interesting people, well worthy of more attention than they have hitherto received. The history of this people has like that of the others been enveloped in much obscurity, but it is the province of our science by all the appliances in her reach, not only to elucidate history where history exists, but also to supply her deficiencies where no history is to be traced. Here then I have to refer you back to the tradition which was repeated to Rochefort by the Englishman Brigstock, of a tribe of people being banished from Florida by those whom he called Apalachians, and which tribe he and other writers down to Sir Richard Schomburgk and Washington Irving, have taken for granted were the Caribs. That some weaker party in a nation might have been driven away from Florida is as probable there, as we know such events to have been of constant occurrence elsewhere in all ages and all countries; but if this tradition were really to be relied on, I should judge that the people driven away from Florida were not the numerous and warlike Caribs who could not be supposed to have been driven away by any nation found in Florida, but some smaller tribe who, though perhaps equally brave, yet were not so numerous, nor so fierce and unyielding. Such might have been the people now known as the Mosquito Indians. I saw a great number of this extremely interesting people, and could not but fancy I saw in them a tribe of North American Indians. They had the same coppery color, the same slight but muscular figure, the same easy selfpossessed manner, the same graceful carriage, the same cast of countenance. They have a language distinct from any in their neighbourhood, confined to the few thousands of their own tribe, which language they have yet kept remarkably pure, though they have been subjected to much intermixture of blood with whites and blacks, with Europeans, Negroes and Caribs. This intermixture however cannot be considered to have affected their race very materially, or we should have found traces in their language of such corruptions as we find in the modern Carib, whereas after careful examination of their Vocabulary I can only find one word borrowed from another language in their neighbourhood, and that is Kati, the Moon, taken from the Arrawak. A Grammar and Vocabulary of this language were compiled by the Reverend A. Henderson of Belize and printed for private use at New York in 1846 which has been reprinted in the 2d Vol. of the transactions of the American Ethnological Society. I trust we may soon have a revised