This is unfounded in fact. No black aborigines have ever been found within the entire limits of North America, except in California where some are said to exist. The Indians of the Atlantic coast were uniformly of a tawny or yellowish brown color, made more conspicuous by age and exposure and being almost white in infancy. The first voyagers and early European settlers universally concur in assigning them this complexion. Reference need here be to such testimony only as relates to the two parts of the country where the distinction is pretended to have existed. The earliest mention of the inhabitants of the more southerly portion is when the vessels of Ayllon and Matienzo carried off sixty of the Indians from the neighborhood of the Santee, called the Jordan, in 1521, and took them to St. Domingo. One of them went to Spain with Ayllon. They are described by Peter Martyr, from sight, as semifuscos uti nostri sunt agricolae sole adusti aestivo, half brown, like our husbandmen, burnt by the summer sun. [Footnote: Dec. VII, 2.] Barlowe, in his account of the first expedition of Raleigh, which entered Pamlico sound, within the region now under consideration, describes the Indians whom he found there as of a "colour yellowish." [Footnote: Hakluyt, III. 248.] Captain John Smith, speaking of those of the Chesapeake, remarks, that they "are of a color brown when they are of age, but they are born white." [Footnote: Smith, Map of Virginia, 1612, p. 19.] On the other hand the natives of Massachusetts and Rhode Island in latitude 4l Degrees 40' are described by the first explorers of that region in substantially the same terms. Brereton, who accompanied Gosnold in his first voyage to the Elisabeth islands and the main land opposite, in 1602, mentions the natives there, as being of a complexion or color "much like a dark olive." [Footnote: Purchas, IV. 1652.] Martin Fringe who visited Martha's Vineyard the next year and constructed there a barricade where the "people of the country came sometimes, ten, twentie, fortie or three score, and at one time one hundred and twentie at once," says, "these people are inclined to a swart, tawnie or chesnut colour, not by nature but accidentally." [Footnote: Ibid, IV, 1655.] And Roger Williams, partaking of the same idea as Pringe, that the swarthy color was accidental, testifies, almost in the same language as Captain Smith, that the Narragansets and others within a region of two hundred miles of them, were "tawnie by the sunne and their annoyntings, yet they were born white." [Footnote: Roger Williams's Key, 52.] Thus the authorities flatly contradict the statement of black Indians existing in North Carolina, and a difference of color between the people of the two sections claimed to have been visited in this voyage.