Admitting this, how easy is it to pass, exclusive of the passage already described, by land from the coast of Africa to Brazil, from the Canaries to the Western Islands, and from them to the Antilles? From the British Isles, or the coast of France, to Newfoundland, the passage is neither long nor difficult; I might say as much of that from China to Japan; from Japan, or the Phillipines, to the Isles Mariannes; and from thence to Mexico.
There are islands at a considerable distance from the continent of Asia, where we have not been surprized to find inhabitants, why then should we wonder to meet with people in America? Nor can it be imagined that the grandsons of Noah, when they were obliged to separate and spread themselves in conformity to the designs of God, over the whole earth, should find it absolutely impossible to people almost one half of it.
I have been more copious in my extracts from this author than I intended, as his reasons appear to be solid, and many of his observations just. From this encomium, however, I must exclude the stories he has introduced of the Huron and Floridan women, which I think I might venture to pronounce fabulous.
I shall only add, to give my Readers a more comprehensive view of Mons. Charlevoix’s dissertation, the method he proposes to come at the truth of what we are in search of.
The only means by which this can be done, he says, is by comparing the languages of the Americans with the different nations, from whence we might suppose they have peregrinated. If we compare the former with those words that are considered as primitives, it might possibly set us upon some happy discovery. And this way of ascending to the original of nations, which is by far the least equivocal, is not so difficult as might be imagined. We have had, and still have, travellers and missionaries who have attained the languages that are spoken in all the provinces of the new world; it would only be necessary to make a collection of their grammars and vocabularies, and to collate them with the dead and living languages of the old world, that pass for originals, and the similarity might easily be traced. Even the different dialects, in spite of the alterations they have undergone, still retain enough of the mother tongue to furnish considerable lights.
Any enquiry into the manners, customs, religion, or traditions of the Americans, in order to discover by that means their origin, he thinks would prove fallacious. A disquisition of that kind, he observes, is only capable of producing a false light, more likely to dazzle, and to make us wander from the right path, than to lead us with certainty to the point proposed.
Ancient traditions are effaced from the minds of such as either have not, or for several ages have been without, those helps that are necessary to preserve them. And in this situation is full one half of the world. New events, and a new arrangement of things, give rise to new traditions, which efface the former, and are themselves effaced in turn. After one or two centuries have passed, there no longer remain any traces of the first traditions; and thus we are involved in a state of uncertainty.
He concludes with the following remarks, among many others. Unforeseen accidents, tempests, and shipwrecks, have certainly contributed to people every habitable part of the world: and ought we to wonder, after this, at perceiving certain resemblances, both of persons and manners, between nations that are most remote from each other, when we find such a difference between those that border on one another? As we are destitute of historical monuments, there is nothing, I repeat it, but a knowledge of the primitive languages that is capable of throwing any light upon these clouds of impenetrable darkness.
By this enquiry we should at least be satisfied, among that prodigious number of various nations inhabiting America, and differing so much in languages from each other, which are those who make use of words totally and entirely different from those of the old world, and who consequently must be reckoned to have passed over to America in the earliest ages, and those who, from the analogy of their language with such as are at present used in the three other parts of the globe, leave room to judge that their migration has been more recent, and which ought to be attributed to shipwrecks, or to some accident similar to those which have been spoken of in the course of this treatise.
I shall only add the opinion of one author more before I give my own sentiments on the subject, and that is of James Adair, Esq; who resided forty years among the Indians, and published the history of them in the year 1772. In his learned and systematical history of those nations, inhabiting the western parts of the most southern of the American colonies, this gentleman without hesitation pronounces that the American Aborigines are descended from the Israelites, either whilst they were a maritime power, or soon after their general captivity.