NO. 14 ARCHEOLOGY OF BAY ISLANDS, HONDURAS STRONG I9 



were Paya in speech, on the grounds that in 1622 Spanish mis- 

 sionaries took Bay Island Indians to the Paya to serve as interpreters. 

 His map shows Paya on the mainland to the south and east of 

 Trujillo and on the Bay Islands. (Lehmann, 1920, II, pp. 629, 631, 

 and map.) The Jicaque are indicated on the mainland opposite the 

 islands. A small Nahuatl colony inland from 1'rujillo, which Cortes 

 mentioned, is also shown on the map. 



According to Thomas and Swanton the available sources indi- 

 cated that the Jicaque occupied the Honduras coast from Puerto 

 Cortez to just beyond Trujillo, taking up a considerable part of the 

 modern province of Yoro. They place the Paya to the east of the 

 Jicaque. Although the Bay Islands are not specifically designated 

 as to speech affiliations, they are directly opposite the bulk of the 

 Jicaque. (Thomas and Swanton, 191 1, pp. 73-76, 78-81, and map.) 

 Conzemius favors the last classification inasmuch as he argues that, 

 since the Jicaque occupied the opposite mainland, the Bay Islanders 

 were also of Jicaque speech. He denies Lehmann's assertion that 

 they were Paya on the basis that Columbus acquired a Maya (sic) 

 interpreter at Bonacca who could converse with mainland peoples as 

 far east as Cape Gracias a Dios. Hence he argues that the Maya 

 tongue served as a lingua franca along the entire coast and that the 

 Bay Island interpreters taken to the Paya spoke Maya and not their 

 native tongue. (Conzemius, 1928, p. 68.) This last argument seems 

 somewhat tenuous. However, the argument of Lehmann that because 

 the Bay Islanders could communicate with the Paya, therefore the 

 Bay Islanders were Paya, seems to me equally unconvincing. Adjacent 

 peoples, even of totally different linguistic stocks, that have been 

 long in contact are often bilingual. I have used an Eskimo interpreter 

 to make contacts with Algonkian Indians, and when we went up 

 the Patuca River in 1933, we had a Miskito interpreter to talk to 

 the Sumu, and there we found Sumu who could speak Paya. 



All of which involved discussion merely demonstrates that we do 

 not know what language was spoken by the aborigines of the Bay 

 Islands. The language is undoubtedly extinct today, but the archives 

 may yet yield a Bay Island vocabulary to solve the difficulty. In 

 the more remote portions of the Department of Yoro several groups of 

 Jicaque still live in isolation, up the Patuca and in Nicaragua are 

 the remnants of the Sumu, while in the interior of Honduras the 

 Paya are still numerous. When their languages and surviving cul- 

 tures have been analyzed by linguist and ethnologist, more light will 

 be thrown on these problems than is now available. 



