Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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When A Continent And Its Adjacent Islands Are Peopled By One And The
Same Race, We May Choose Between Two Hypotheses; Supposing The
Emigration To Have Taken Place Either From The Islands To The
Continent, Or From The Continent To The Islands.
The Iberians
(Basques) who were settled at the same time in Spain and in the
islands of the Mediterranean,
Afford an instance of this problem; as
do also the Malays who appear to be indigenous in the peninsula of
Malacca, and in the district of Menangkabao in the island of Sumatra.*
(* Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago volume 2 page 371. I make use of the
word indigenous (autocthoni) not to indicate a fact of creation, which
does not belong to history, but simply to denote that we are ignorant
of the autocthoni having been preceded by any other people.) The
archipelago of the large and small West India Islands forms a narrow
and broken neck of land, parallel with the isthmus of Panama, and
supposed by some geographers to join the peninsula of Florida to the
north-east extremity of South America. It is the eastern shore of an
inland sea which may be considered as a basin with several outlets.
This peculiar configuration of the land has served to support the
different systems of migration, by which it has been attempted to
explain the settlement of the nations of the Carib race in the islands
and on the neighbouring continent. The Caribs of the continent admit
that the small West India Islands were anciently inhabited by the
Arowaks,* a warlike nation, the great mass of which still inhabit the
insalubrious shores of Surinam and Berbice.
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