Oviedo in his _Historia de las Indias_ gives a few words of the language as follows:
_mamea_, hell. _nam bi_, dog. _nam bue_, tiger,
the last two of which correspond to those in later vocabularies.[2]
The Auditor Garcia de Palacio (1576) mentions the Mangue as spoken in Choluteca, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, in the last mentioned as introduced from elsewhere.[3] About a century later a colony of Mangues, several hundred in number, were found by Juan Vazquez de Coronado, almost at the extreme eastern end of Costa Rica, in the Province of Pacaca.[4] Those on the Pacific Coast, about the Gulf of Nicoya, were accustomed to cross to the ocean on the north for trading purposes, and to obtain salt.[5] They appear to have been a people of moderate cultivation, and rather extended commercial connections.
_Affiliations._ The Mangue is the mother tongue from which the Chapanec (or Chiapanec) of Chiapas branched off. The separation from the ancestral tribe, and the migration from Nicaragua to Chiapas, were distinctly remembered by the Chapanec off-shoot when first encountered by the whites. Remesal, in his well-known history, gives a brief but clear account of it.
The date of this occurrence cannot be specifically stated, but its occasion can be readily surmised. The Mangues at one time occupied the whole coast from the entrance of the Gulf of Nicoya to Fonseca bay. At a period which we may locate some time in the fourteenth century, a large colony of Aztecs descended the coast and seized the strip between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific, thus splitting the Mangues in two, and driving a large portion of them out of their homes. Some of these wanderers remained with their relatives, but one body of them marched north and west until they reached a lofty peak on the Rio Grande in Central Chiapas, where they constructed a formidable fortress, and became the terror of their Nahuatl-speaking neighbors.[6]
No connection has been demonstrated between the Mangue (or Chapanec), and any other North American language, although owing to the liberal exertions of M. Alphonse Pinart, we have now in print and easily procurable, a grammar and a number of texts of the Chapanec dialect.[7]
A comparison, the partial results of which I have previously published, proves that the differences between the Chapanec and Mangue are slight and unimportant, and for purposes of collation with other stocks the two may be looked upon as identical.