I have thus finished the work which was required of me by the Historical Committee of the American Philosophical Society. On reading over the printed sheets which have been kindly sent to me from Philadelphia, as they issued from the press, I have noticed several errors, some of which may be ascribed to me, others to the transcriber of the manuscript, and very few to the printer. I regret that there are among them some mistakes in dates and names of places; they are all rectified in the errata.

I am very sensible of the many defects of this little work in point of method, arrangement, composition and style. I am not an author by profession; the greatest part of my life was spent among savage nations, and I have now reached the age of seventy-five, at which period of life little improvement can be expected. It is not, therefore, as an author that I wish to be judged, but as a sincere relator of facts that have fallen within my observation and knowledge. I declare that I have said nothing but what I certainly know or verily believe. In matters of mere opinion, I may be contradicted; but in points of fact I have been even scrupulous, and purposely omitted several anecdotes for which I could not sufficiently vouch. In my descriptions of character, I may have been an unskilful painter, and ill chosen expressions may imperfectly have sketched out the images that are imprinted on my mind; but the fault is in the writer, not in the man.

It is with pleasure that I inform the reader that the parts of Mr. Zeisberger’s Iroquois Dictionary which I have mentioned above, (pages 97, 118,) as being irretrievably lost, have most fortunately been found since this work is in the press. The book has been neatly bound in seven quarto volumes, and will remain a monument of the richness and comprehensiveness of the languages of the Indian nations. Several valuable grammatical works on the same language, by the same author and Mr. PyrlÆus, have been recovered at the same time, by means of which, the idiom of the Six Nations may now be scientifically studied.

When I spoke (p. 136) of the impression made by Captain Pipe’s speech “on all present,” I meant only on those who understood the language; for there were many who did not, and M. Baby, the Canadian interpreter, did not explain to the bystanders the most striking passages, but went now and then to the Commandant and whispered in his ear. Captain Pipe, while he spoke, was exceedingly animated, and twice advanced so near to the Commandant, that M. Baby ordered him to fall back to his place. All who were present must have at least suspected that his speech was not one of the ordinary kind, and that everything was not as they might suppose it ought to be.

I promised in my introduction (p. xxvi.) to subjoin an explanatory list of the Indian nations which I have mentioned in the course of this work, but I find that I have been so full on the subject that such a list is unnecessary.

I have classed the Florida Indians together in respect of language, on the supposition that they all speak dialects of the same mother tongue; the fact, however, may be otherwise, though it will be extraordinary that there should be several languages entirely different from each other in the narrow strip of land between the Carolinas and the Mississippi, when there are but two principal ones in the rest of the United States. It is to be expected that the researches of the Historical Committee will throw light upon this subject.