The islands of the Central American archipelago were the first to reward the sagacity of Columbus, as he steered his course westward in search of the old East. The arts of their simple natives accordingly attracted his attention; and although he found among them personal ornaments of gold, sufficient to awaken the avaricious longings of the Spaniards for that fatal treasure of the New World, yet practically they were in ignorance of metallurgic arts, and lacked that stimulus to ingenious industry which the requisites of clothing call forth in less genial climes. The natives of Guanahanè, or San Salvador, were friendly and gentle savages, in the simplicity, if not in the innocence, of nakedness. Their only weapons were lances of wood hardened in the fire, pointed with the teeth or bone of a fish, or furnished with a blade made either of the universal flint, or more frequently, with them, from the large tropical shells which abound in the West Indian seas. They had learned to turn the native cotton-plant to economical account; but their chief mechanical ingenuity was expended on the light barks to which they gave the now universal name of _canoe_. These were formed from the trunk of a single tree, hollowed by fire, with the help of their primitive adzes of flint or shell, and were of various sizes, from the tiny bark only capable of holding its solitary owner, to the galley manned by forty or fifty rowers, who propelled it swiftly through the water with their paddles, and baled it with the invaluable native calabash, which supplied every domestic utensil, and rendered them indifferent to the potter’s art. The canoe has a peculiar interest and value in relation to the archæology of the New World. With our wondrous steamships, wherewith we have bridged the Atlantic, we are apt to lose faith in the capacity of uncivilised man for overcoming such obstacles as the dividing oceans which had so long concealed America from the ancient world. But the bark in which Columbus first crossed the Atlantic was in no degree more capable of braving the ocean’s terrors than the navies of the Mediterranean had been a thousand years before; and the primitive canoes of the American archipelago far more nearly resembled the Pinta, or the Niña with its lateen sails, than the smallest of our modern ocean craft. Throughout the Polynesian archipelago, fragments of foreign vocabularies are the chief traces of that oceanic migration by which alone the descendants of a common race could people those distant islands of the sea. The recognition of certain Malay and Polynesian words in the language of the remote island of Madagascar is one striking illustration of what such intrusive linguistic elements imply. We can thus trace the primitive voyagers, in their _praus_, or slight Malayan vessels, navigating an ocean of three thousand miles; and perceive how, even by such means, the ocean highway was open to the world’s grey fathers in remotest prehistoric times.