﻿I56 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



1497. His testimony has incurred some doubt where matters pertain- 

 ing to his own achievements are concerned, but in this instance there 

 would be but little temptation to misrepresent. 



Many have supposed the Isle of St. John of the Cabots to be New- 

 foundland itself ; but that they should have recognized, from merely 

 skirting the seaboard, the insular character of this great mass of land 

 is in the highest degree unlikely, in view of Cartier's 1 uncertainty 

 even after he had passed into the Gulf through the Strait of Belle 

 Isle, which Cortereal 2 missed altogether. Cape Breton, Prince 

 Edward Island, and Sable Island have each borne this name on maps 

 or in speech at various times, but there are reasons against them all. 

 Most likely Avalon Peninsula, 3 shown as an island by some of the 

 older maps, was Cabot's Isle of St. John. Its slingers would have 

 been Beothuk, then, or perhaps invading Micmac — whom Fiske may 

 have had in mind when stating in The Discovery of America that 

 slings would be as proper to Micmac as to Eskimo. 



At the present time slings 4 are not found in use at any nearer 

 point than the Pueblos of the upper Rio Grande ; but they hold 

 their ground very well in many parts of South America, always, 

 with Mexico and intervening regions — the main home and head- 

 quarters of their race. 5 Sling-using begins at the bottom of the map, 

 with the almost Antarctic and altogether wretched Yahgans of 

 Tierra del Fuego ; and Bandelier has lately found it as active as ever 

 in the village fights beside Lake Titicaca, the cradle of the most 

 humane culture and the widest and best ordered governmental organi- 

 zation in the New World before the white man came. He writes : 6 

 " A number are badly wounded now and then and some of them are 

 killed, for the Indian is a dangerous expert with the sling." Again 

 we read of " his sling, for which the women provide round pebbles in 

 their skirts." 



At the opening of the sixteenth century, the sling-territory extended 

 very much farther northward. Maya cities employed this weapon. 

 Aztec armies had their slingers no less than those of the Incas. Dr. 

 Friederici, 7 gleaning from early Spanish, French, and English narra- 



1 J. Winsor: From Cartier to Frontenac. Narr. Crit. Hist. Amer. 

 2 VV. S. Wallace's Historical Introduction to Labrador," by W. T. Grenfell 

 and others. 



3 M. F. Howley : The Ecclesiastical History of Newfoundland, p. 53. 



4 Where they are chiefly in use by children, as Mr. Spinden of the 

 Am. Museum relates. 



5 Brinton: The American Race, p. 331. 



6 A. F. Bandelier: The Islands of Titicaca and Koati, pp. 88, 115. 



7 A. Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen, 191 1, Heft 2 (pi. 13). 





