The further we approach the narrowest part of the Isthmus the more fragmentary is our ethnology. It loses, however, none of its importance, since it is by the way of the Isthmus that we find the most direct geographical transition from North to South America.
And here the division must be made between—a, those Indians who seem to have partaken of a civilization of the Mexican type,—and b, those who do not.
The former alternative was probably the case (more or less) with all the divisions already enumerated; the latter with the Indians of Panama, the islands, and the Moskito Coast.
The following is a notice of a tribe on the sea-coast, at present either extinct or incorporated with some other, but well known to the old buccaneers. [159] "The next day we got ashore in one of them [the islands] in hopes of getting some corn, but met with none but a few poor wretches, who had been stripped of all by the privateers, who also frequently made them their slaves; for they are very fit for that purpose, being of a low stature but strong limbed; for the rest they are of a dark olive colour, with round faces, black hair, and small eyes of the same colour: with eyebrows hanging over their eyes, low foreheads, short, thick, and flat noses, full lips, and short chins. They have a peculiar fashion of cutting holes in the lips of the boys whilst yet infants, which they keep open with small pegs till they are fourteen or fifteen years of age; then they put in them something resembling a long beard made of tortoise-shell. Both boys and girls have holes bored in their ears, which by degrees they stretch to the bigness of a crown-piece, and wear in them round and smooth pieces of wood, so that their ears seem wood, unless only in a small skin. As they have very little feet (notwithstanding they are bare-footed), so the females take a great pride in their legs, which they tie very hard from the ankle to the beginning of the calf with a piece of calico, which renders their calfs very round and beautiful. They have no other clothing but a clout about their middle."
The nearest remaining representatives of the aborigines thus described are the—
MOSKITO INDIANS.
Locality.—The Moskito Coast.
Language.—Peculiar.
Like the Indians of the original territory of the United States and Canada, the Europeans with which the Moskito Indians come in contact are of English, rather than Spanish, extraction; besides which, there is a considerable intermixture of Negro blood.
The language, for which we have a fair amount of data, has fewer miscellaneous affinities than any hitherto examined. Still, this is nothing more than what its geographical position leads us to expect. The nearest languages of which we have specimens are those of Guatemala on one side, and the northern part of South America on the other. For the contiguous areas of Honduras, San Salvador, and Costa Rica we have no specimens.