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peoples pay great reverence. One they say helps the corn and the vegetables that are planted; another the child-bearing of women without pain; and the third helps by means of water (i. e. rain) and the sun when they have need of it. I sent three of these stones to your Highness by Antonio de Torres* and another set of three I have to bring with me. When these Indians die they have the funerals in different ways. The way the Caciques are buried, is as follows. They open the Cacique and dry him by the fire in order that he may be preserved whole, (or, entirely). Of others they take only the head. Others are buried in a cave and they place above their head a gourd of water and some bread. Others they burn in the house where they die and when they see them on the point of death they do not let them finish their life but strangle them. This is done to the Caciques. Others they drive out of the house; and others they put into a hamaca, which is their bed of netting, and put water and bread at their head and leave them alone without returning to see them any more. Some again that are seriously ill they take to the Cacique and he tells them whether they ought to be strangled or not and they do what he commands.

I have taken pains to learn what they believe and if they know where they go after death; especially from Caunabo, who is the chief king in Española, a man of years, of great knowledge and very keen mind; and he and others replied that they go to a certain valley which every principal Cacique believes is situated in his own country, affirming that there they find their father and all their ancestors; and that they eat and have women and give themselves to pleasures and recreation as is more fully contained in the following account in which I ordered one Friar Roman (Ramon) who knew their language to collect all their ceremonies and their antiquities although so much of it is fable that one cannot extract anything fruitful from it beyond the fact that each one of them has a certain natural regard for the future and believes in the immortality of our souls."†

Then follows in Ferdinand's biography a transcript of this "Account by Friar Roman (Ramon) of the Antiquities. of the Indians which he as one who knows their language diligently collected by command of the Admiral." Before describing Friar Ramon's work I will present what little information in regard to him that I have been able to find. The historian Las Casas knew Ramon Pane and tells us in his Apologetica Historia that he came to Española at the beginning with the Admiral‡ which must mean on the

*Antonio de Torres set forth on the return voyage here referred to February 2, 1494. †Historie. Ed. 1571, folios 125-126.

Las Casas. Apologetica Historia. Docs. Inéd. para la Hist. de España, LXVI, 435-36.

second voyage in 1493 as there were no clergy on the first voyage. Later he says he came five years before he himself did which would be in 1497.* This second statement is erroneous for Columbus, as has just been seen, reports the result of his labors in his own account of his second voyage which he drew up in 1496. Las Casas also says that Ramon was a Catalan by birth and did not speak Castilian perfectly and that he was a simple-minded man so that what he reported was sometimes confused and of little substance.† The Admiral sent him first into the province of lower Maçorix whose language he knew and then later, because this language was spoken only in a small territory, to the Vega and the region where King Guarionex bore sway where he could accomplish much more because the population was greater and the language diffused throughout the island. He remained there two years and did what he could according to his slender abilities.‡

To Peter Martyr who read and abstracted his treatise, he is merely "One Ramon a hermit whom Colon had left with certain kings of the island to instruct them in the Christian faith. And tarrying there a long time he composed a small book in the Spanish tongue on the rites of the islands."§

These few references are all the contemporary information to be derived about Ramon Pane outside of his own narrative. This little work which I have called the pioneer treatise in American Antiquities has come down to us as a whole, as I have said, only in the Italian translation of Ferdinand Columbus's life of the Admiral. By one of the mishaps of fate the translator transformed the author's name from Ramon Pane into Roman Pane, and under that disguise he appears in most modern works in which he appears at all. But the testimony of Las Casas who knew him and of Peter

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Martyr who used his work in Spanish is conclusive that his name was Ramon. Ramon, too, is a common Catalan name. Such few writers on early American religion and folk-lore as use his work directly resort either to the Italian text or some of the translations or to Peter Martyr's epitome in the 9th book of the first of his decades of the Ocean. Few, if any, make a critical comparison of these two forms of his work and none so far as I know have supplemented such a comparison with such of the material in Las Casas's Apologetica Historia as was derived from Ramon's work in the original.

The interest and importance of the subject justify it seems to me a critical study of Friar Ramon's work as the earliest detailed account of the legends and religious beliefs and practices of the long since extinct natives of Hayti. The range of its contents is considerable. It contains a cosmogony, a creation legend, an Amazon legend, a legend which offers interesting evidence that syphilis was an indigenous and ancient disease in America at the time of its discovery, a flood and ocean legend, a tobacco legend, a sun and moon legend, a long account of the Haytian medicine men, an account of the making of their cemis or fetishes, of the ritualistic use of tobacco, a current native prophecy of the appearance in the island of a race of clothed people and lastly a brief report of the earliest conversions to Christianity in the island and of the first native martyrs.

To facilitate a study of this material in its earliest record I have translated Ramon's treatise from the Italian, excerpted and collated with it the epitomes of Peter Martyr and Las Casas and have prepared brief notes, the whole to form so far as may be a critical working text of this source for the folklorist and student of Comparative Religion in America. The proper names in each case are given as in the 1571 edition of the Historie. Later editions of the Italian and the English version to be found in Churchill's Voyages (vol. II.) and Pinkerton's Voyages (Vol. XII) give divergent

forms. At best the spelling of these names offers much perplexity. Ramon wrote down in Spanish the sounds he heard, Ferdinand, unfamiliar with the sounds, copied the names and then still later Ulloa equally unfamiliar with the originals copied them into his Italian. In such a process there was inevitably some confusion of u and n and of u and v, (Spanish b.) In the Italian text v is never used, it is always u. In not a few cases the Latin of Peter Martyr and the Spanish of Las Casas give us forms much nearer those used by Ramon than the Italian.

LIST OF MODERN WORKS DEALING DIRECTLY WITH THE TREATISE OF RAMON PANE OR PARTICULARLY SERVICEABLE IN THE STUDY OF IT.

BACHILLER Y MORALES, ANTONIO. Cuba Primitiva: Origen, Lenguas, Tradiciones e Historia de los Indios de las Antillas Mayores y las Lucayas. 2nd. Ed. Habana, 1883. The fullest study of the subject with full vocabularies of extant aboriginal words and a dictionary of historical names and traditions. Contains also a translation of the part of Ramon Pane's treatise that relates to primitive religion and folklore.

BASTIAN, ADOLF. Die Culturländer des Alten America. 2 vols. Berlin, 1878. The second vol. with the sub-title, Beiträge zu Geschichtlichen Vorarbeiten auf Westlicher Hemisphäre, devotes a chapter, pp. 285-314 to the Antilles. It consists of rough notes assembled from Ramon Pane and Peter Martyr and other writers relating to the religion and folklore of the aborigines of the Antilles.

BLOCH, Dr. IWAN. Der Ursprung der Syphilis. Eine medizinische und Kulturgeschichtiche Untersuchung. Erste Abteilung, Jena, 1901. An elaborate critical and historical study which definitely establishes the American origin of Syphilis. The evidence from Ramon Pane is discussed on pp. 201-204.

DOUAY, LEON. Affinités lexicologiques du Haitien et du Maya. Congrès International des Américanistes. Compte Rendu de la 10éme session. Stockholm 1897, pp. 193-206. Reproduces in parallel columns with the corresponding Maya words the Haytian vocabulary compiled by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg.

DOUAY, LEON. Études Étymologiques sur L'Antiquité Américaine. Paris, 1891. Etymological interpretation of proper names in Hayti and the non-Carib Antilles, pp. 26-30.

EHRENREICH, PAUL. Die Mythen und Legenden der Südamerikanischen Urvölker und ihre Beziehungen zu denen Nordamerikas und der alten Welt. Berlin 1895. Supplement zu Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 1905. The author of this very valuable introduction to the comparative study of American Mythology has used Ramon Pane only in Peter Martyr's abstract.

GILIJ, FILIPPO SALVADORE. Saggio di Storia Americana o sia storia Natural, Civile, e sacra de regni e delle provincie Spagnuole di Terraferma nell' America Meridionale. Roma MDCCLXXXII, 3 Vols. In vol. 3, pp. 220-228 is a vocabulary of the Haytian language compiled from Oviedo, Peter Martyr (Ramon Pane) Acosta and other writers. This vocabulary is sometimes reproduced by later writers with revisions.

LOLLIS, CESARE DE, ED. Raccolta di Documenti e Studi. Pub. dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, etc. Roma, 1892. Parte I, vol. 1, 213-223 contains text of Ulloa's Italian translation of Ramon Pane with an apparatus criticis.

MARTIUS, DR. CARL F. Ph. v. Beiträge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerika's zumal Brasiliens. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1867. Vol. II, pp. 314-18, contains a Latin-Taino vocabulary based chiefly on Rafinesque's collections.

MONTEJO Y ROBLEDO, DR. BONIFACIO. Procedencia Americana de las Bubas. Actas del Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, 4* Reunion. Madrid, 1881, pp. 334-419. Evidence from Ramon Pane discussed pp. 358, 360.

MUELLER, J. G. Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, Basel, 1855. pp. 155-185 are devoted to the religion of the non-Carib aborigines of the West Indies.

PESCHEL, OSCAR. Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, 2to Aufl. Stuttgart, 1877. On pp. 147-48 the cosmogony of the Haytians is briefly described.

RAFINESQUE, C. S. The American Nations; or Outlines of their General History, Ancient and Modern, etc., etc. Philadelphia, 1836, pp. 162-260. Interesting linguistic material with much highly fantastic conjecture.

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