Turning our attention now to this latter land, we should have cause to be surprised did we not find signs that such adventurous navigators as the Caribs had planned and executed incursions and settlements there. That these signs are so sparse and unsatisfactory, we owe not so much to their own rarity as to the slight weight attached to such things by the early explorers and discoverers. From the accounts we do possess, however, there can be no doubt but that vestiges of the Caribbean tongue, if not whole tribes identical with them in language and customs, have been met with from time to time on the peninsula.[159] The striking similarity in the customs of flattening the forehead, in poisoning weapons, in the use of hollow reeds to propel arrows, in the sculpturing on war clubs, construction of dwellings, exsiccation of corpses,[160] burning the houses of the dead, and other rites, though far from conclusive are yet not without a decided weight. It is much to be regretted that Adair has left us no fuller information of those seven tribes on the Koosah river, who spoke a different tongue from the Muskohge and preserved “a fixed oral tradition that they formerly came from South America, and after sundry struggles in defence of liberty settled their present abode.”[161] Thus it clearly appears that the frame, so to speak, of the traditions preserved by Bristock actually did exist and may be proved from other writers. But we are still more strongly convinced that his account is at least founded on fact, when we compare the manners and customs, of the Apalachites, as he gives them, with those of the Cherokee, Choktah, Chickasah, and Muskohge, tribes plainly included by him under this name, and proved by the philological researches of Gallatin to have occupied the same location since De Soto’s expedition.[162] We need have no suspicion that he plagiarized from other authors, as the particulars he mentions are not found in earlier writers; and it was not till 1661 that the English settled Carolina, not till 1699 that Iberville built his little fort on the Bay of Biloxi, and many years elapsed between this latter and the general treaty of Oglethorpe. If then we find a close similarity in manners, customs, and religions, we must perforce concede his accounts, such as they have reached us, a certain degree of credit.