Section IL, 1S97. [ 91 ] Trans. R. S. C. 



Til. — The Oiujin of the Haldahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands. 

 By John Campbell, LL.D. 



AVhile the ssoc-ioty is celebrating the landfiill of the illustrious John 

 Cabot upon the eastern shore of our Dominion four hundred years ago, I 

 have thought it not inappropriate to chronicle a possibly more ancient 

 and more adventurous voyage that has left a permanent impression u])on 

 the islands of the far west. This voyage was undertaken at some remote 

 period by the ancestors of those natives of the Queen Charlotte and 

 adjoining islands now known as Haidahs. My attention was first called 

 to these Indians by Mr. Francis Poole's book on the Qvieen Charlotte 

 Islands, published in 1872 ; for the " Voyages of Captain Meares," pub- 

 lished in 1791, give no definite information concerning them. Yocabu- 

 laries of their language were edited by Gallatin and Scouler in the 

 Arch:rologia Americana and the Journal of the Geographical Society of 

 London, and to these was added, in 1877, the collection of Mr. George 

 Gibbs in the tii'st volume of the Contributions to American Ethnology, 

 published by the United States Geographical and Geological Survey. In 

 1880, making use of this scanty material, I instituted a comparison of 

 the Haidah dialects with those of the Malay-Polynesian family, which 

 appears as an appendix to a paj^ier on the " Origin of the Aborigines of 

 Canada " in the Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of 

 Quebec of the following year. About the time that paper was read, I 

 was favoured by Dr. George M. Dawson with a copy of his elaborate 

 report on the Queen Charlotte Islands, which contains seventy large 

 octavo pages on the Haidahs, and twelve of specimens of their language. 

 This volume was supplemented in ISS-l by " Comparative Vocabularies of 

 the Indian Tribes of British Columbia," by Dr. W. F. Tolmie and Dr. 

 George M. Dawson, which devotes 26 of its 127 pages to the Haidahs. 

 Finally, in the Transactions of this Society for 1895, appears that great 

 desidei'atum, a Haidah Grammar, from the pen of the Rev. C. Harrison, 

 and edited by Dr. A. T. Chamberlain. 



A mere glance at the grammar sufficed to show that the Haidahs 

 could not possibly be ranked as a people of Malay-Polynesian origin, in 

 spite of the resemblance of the vocabularies. The Haidah is a postposi- 

 tional, and the Malay-Polynesian are prepositional languages. Neverthe- 

 less, of all the northei-n Asiatic tongues, Japo Siberian, Mongol, Tungusic, 

 etc., there is not one that exhibits any affinity to the Haidah vocabulary, 

 although their grammatical structure is more or less accordant. But, 

 scattered through the Malay-Polynesian area, and cropping up more 

 widely in Borneo, New Guinea, Australasia, the New Hebrides and the 



