l8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 92 



Concerning the location of the province of Maia, Lothrop be- 

 Heves it was on the Honduras mainland but that the term was only 

 accidently, not linguistically, cognate with Maya proper. Blom be- 

 lieves that it refers to the Maya regions of Yucatan. The eye wit- 

 ness, Ledesma, and the historian Peter Martyr, are specific in locatmg 

 the province of Maia on the Honduras mainland. Bartholomew 

 Columbus makes Maia equivalent to Yucatan but, as already pointed 

 out, this equivalence may well have been a later and alien addition to 

 his text. Las Casas. and after him Herrera. assign the canoe to 

 Yucatan, but this may have been based on the touched-up letter, as 

 Lothrop believes. 



As the evidence now stands, there is no positive proof regarding 

 either the language spoken by the traders at Bonacca or the location 

 of the region of Maia. Regarding the first, it is clear that " Giumbe " 

 could make himself understood among certain groups on the mam- 

 land adjacent to the Bay Islands, but it is equally certain that several 

 dififerent languages were spoken even in the immediate vicinity of 

 the Cape of Honduras. My own interpretation of the evidence is 

 that " Giumbe " and his fellow merchants had come from the western 

 part of Honduras, probably from near the mouth of the Uloa, and 

 that their native tongue, which may have been Choi or Chorti Maya, 

 Jicaque, or even Lenca, was understandable to numerous mamland 

 groups to the west of Cape Gracias a Dios. As to the provenience of 

 the land of " Maia ", I incline toward the testimony of Ledesma and 

 Peter Martyr, that it was on the Honduras mainland. If it were one 

 of the provinces of the culturally advanced Uloa region occupied 

 by Maya, all the bits of evidence concerning these much-discussed 

 traders fall into line. However, there may be difficulties, linguistic 

 or otherwise, of which I am unaware, standing in the way of such 

 a solution. In any case we are no nearer an answer to the original 

 problem concerning the linguistic affiliations of the Bay Islanders. 



A compilation of modern linguistic classification leads to no more 

 definite results. Squier states that there are good reasons to believe 

 that the people of the Bay Islands and those of the adjacent main- 

 land pertained to the same stock. He classified both as Lenca, a group 

 in which he also included Jicaque and Paya. (Squier, 1858, pp. 252, 

 604.) In 1910 Lehmann grouped the Sumu and Miskito as close 

 linguistic affiliates of the Talamancan subdivision of the Chibchan 

 stock, with the Paya, Lenca, and Jicaque as more remote members." 

 In his later work he indicates that the people of the Bay Islands 



"Lehmann, 1910, pp. 711, 722,. This classification is not universally accepted; 

 see Lothrop, L 1926, pp. 13- 18. 



