ie. 
1883.) 11 [Hale, 
accustomed to amuse his grave fellow-senators occasionally by asserting 
the right which each councillor possesses of addressing the council in the 
language of his people, —his speech, if necessity requires, being translated 
by an interpreter. In the case of the Tutelo chief the jest, which was duly 
appreciated, lay in the fact that the interpreters were dumfounded, and 
that the eloquence uttered in an unknown tongue had to go without reply. 
From this chief, and from his aunt, an elderly dame, whose daughter 
was the wife of a leading Onondaga chief, I received a sufficient number 
of words and phrases of the language to give a good idea of its grammati- 
cal framework. Fortunately, the list of words obtained from the old Tutelo 
was extensive enough to afford a test of the correctness of the additional 
information thus procured. The vocabulary and the outlines of grammar 
which have been derived from these sources may, therefore, as far as they 
extend, be accepted as affording an authentic representation of this very 
interesting speech. 
There is still, it should be added, some uncertainty in regard to the tribal 
name. So far as can be learned, the word Tutelo or Totero (which in 
the Iroquois dialects is variously pronounced Tiaterih or Tehdtirigh, Te- 
hiitili, Tititei and Titie) has no meaning either in the Tutelo or the Iro- 
quois language. It may have been originally a mere local designation, 
which has accompanied the tribe, as such names sometimes do, in its sub - 
sequent migrations. Both of my semi-Tutelo informants assured me that 
the proper national name—or the name by which the people were desig- 
nated among themselves—was Yesing or Yesdh, the last syllable having 
a faint nasal sound, which was sometimes barely audible. In this word 
we probably see the origin of the name, Nahyssan, applied by Lederer to 
the tribes of this stock. John Lederer was a German traveler who in 
May, 1670—a year before Captain Batt’s expedition to the Alleghenies— 
undertook, at the charge of the colonial government, an exploring jour- 
ney in the same direction, though not with equal success. He made, how- 
ever, some interesting discoveries. Starting from the Falls of the James 
river, he came, after twenty days of travel, to ‘‘Sapon, a village of the 
Nahyssans,’’ situate on a branch of the Roanoke river. These were, wn- 
doubtedly, the Saponas whom Captain Batt visited in the following year, the 
kindred and allies of the Tuteloes. Fifty miles beyond Sapon he arrived 
at Akenatzy, an island in the same river. ‘‘The island,’’ he says, ‘though 
small, maintains many inhabitants, who are fixed in great security, being 
naturally fortified with fastnesses of mountains and water on every 
side.”’* In these Akenatzies we undoubtedly see the Aconechos of 
Lawson, and the Ochineeches mentioned by Governor Spotteswood. Dr. 
Brinton, in his well-known work on the ‘“‘ Myths of the New World,’’ has 
pointed out, also, theiridentity with the Occaneeches mentioned by Bever- 
ley in his ‘History of Virginia,” and in doing so has drawn attention to 
* See ** The Discoveries of John Lederer,” reprinted by O. H, Harpel. Cincin- 
nati, 1879, p. 17. 
