1P85.] AoJ [Brinton. 



ever, were in the hands of his brother, Doctor Don Jesus de la 

 Rocha, of Granada, who gave Dr. C. H. Berendt an opportunity 

 to copy them in 1874. 



In that same year, 1874, Dr. Berendt collected the last 

 obtainable fragments of the Mangue. In his (printed) lecture 

 before the American Geographical Society in 1876, he thus 

 describes his efforts in this direction, and at the same time 

 points out the localities where the Mangue speaking populations 

 where located when they first came to the knowledge of the in- 

 vading whites. 



"The Spaniards on entering the present State of Nicaragua from Nicoya 

 bay, and then marching through the country, came into contact first with 

 the southern section of the Chorotegas or Mangues, as they were also 

 called ; then with a Nahuatl tribe, whose capital and king are mentioned 

 as bearing the name of Nicarao ; and after these again with Chorotegas or 

 Mangues, who, however, did not occupy the whole tract of land up to the 

 Bay of Fonseca, but were again separated from the Chorotegas on the 

 shores of that bay by another foreign tribe called Manbios. Thus we 

 obtain the three sections into which the Chorotegas of Nicaragua were 

 divided at the time of the Conquest. Now, their language seemed to me 

 an object worthy of having some special attention bestowed upon it— not 

 so much for its own sake, but in order that a better understanding might 

 be arrived at of the ethnological features of Nicaragua, which, on account 

 of an insufficient acquaintance with its actual condition as well as with the 

 early writers, and ot the rather precarious speculations and conjectures of 

 modern authors based upon such scanty knowledge, have become greatly 

 confused. Having studied the Chapanecan language on a former expedi- 

 tion, and wishing to compare it with the Chorotegan, I visited Nicaragua 

 in the year 1874. I found that the Indian population near the Nicoya and 

 the Fonseca bays had entirely disappeared, and in both districts only met 

 with some local names belonging to the Chorotegan language. In the 

 third district also, where descendants of the old stock are still living in 

 twelve villages around the lakes of Masaya and Apoyo, I was informed 

 that no other vestiges of the old idiom were left, the inhabitants speaking 

 exclusively the Spanish language. I had, however, the good luck to 

 ferret out some old people who still remembered words and phrases they 

 had heard in their childhood ; and I was enabled to collect material suffi- 

 cient to convince myself and others of the identity of this Mangue or 

 Chorotegan idiom with the Chapaneco language of Mexico. I was not a 

 moment too early in obtaining this information, for the greater number of 

 my informants died while I was staying in the country. I still hope that 

 with the knowledge of the Chorotegan thus gained in Nicaragua and 

 Chiapas, it may be [possible to trace their history and descent backwards 



