The people whom they saw on their first landing, and who are stated to have been for the most part naked, are described as being black in color, and not very different from Ethiopians, (di colore neri non molto dagli Etiopi disformi) and of medium stature, well formed of body and acute of mind.  The latter observation would imply that the voyagers had mixed with these natives very considerably in order to have been able to speak so positively in regard to their mental faculties, and therefore could not have been mistaken as to their complexion for want of opportunity to discover it.  The precise place where they first landed and saw these black people is not mentioned further than that the country where they lived was situated in the thirty-fourth degree of latitude.  From this place they proceeded further along the coast northwardly, and again coming to anchor attempted to go ashore in a boat without success, when one of them, a young sailor, attempted to swim to the land, but was thrown, by the violence of the waves, insensible on the beach.  Upon recovering he found himself surrounded by natives who were black like the others.  That there is no mistake in the design of the writer to represent these people as really black, like negroes, is made evident by his account of the complexion of those he found in the harbor of the great bay in latitude 41 Degrees 40”, who are described as essentially different and the finest looking tribe they had seen, being “of a very white complexion, some inclining more to white, and others to a yellow color” (di colore bianchissimo; alcuni pendano piu in bianchezza, altri in colore flavo).  The difference between the inhabitants of the two sections of country, in respect to color, is thus drawn in actual contrast.

This is unfounded in fact.  No black aborigines have ever been found within the entire limits of North America, except in California where some are said to exist.  The Indians of the Atlantic coast were uniformly of a tawny or yellowish brown color, made more conspicuous by age and exposure and being almost white in infancy.  The first voyagers and early European settlers universally concur in assigning them this complexion.  Reference need here be to such testimony only as relates to the two parts of the country where the distinction is pretended to have existed.  The earliest mention of the inhabitants of the more southerly portion is when the vessels of Ayllon and Matienzo carried off sixty of the Indians from the neighborhood of the Santee, called the Jordan, in 1521, and took them to St. Domingo.  One of them went to Spain with Ayllon.  They are described by Peter Martyr, from sight, as semifuscos uti nostri sunt agricolae sole adusti aestivo, half brown, like our husbandmen, burnt by the summer sun. [Footnote:  Dec.  VII, 2.] Barlowe, in his account of the first expedition of Raleigh, which entered Pamlico sound, within the region now under consideration, describes the Indians whom he found there as of a