Carib

“ The word Carib is frequently applied by the Spanish population to any wild tribe, merely in the sense of savage or wild. Thus on the upper Usumacinta the Lacandons, a people of pure Maya stock, are so called by the whites; on the Musquito coast the uncivilized Ulvas of the mountains are referred to as Caribs. There are a large number of pure and mixed Caribs, probably five or six thousand, in British Honduras near Trujillo, but they do not belong to the original population. ”

“ The wide diffusion of this stock is evidenced by the existence of an unmistakably Carib tribe in the basin of the Rio Magdalena beyond the Andes [948] .
In the north the chief groups are the Makirifare of [Pg 416] Venezuela and the Macusi, Kalina, and Galibi of British, Dutch, and French Guiana [949] respectively. In general all the Caribs present much the same physical characters, although the southerners are rather taller (5 ft. 4 in.) with less round heads (index 79.6) than the Guiana Caribs (5 ft 2 in., and 81.3) . ”

“ It was the voyage of Columbus that revealed the practice to be a literal fact and gave it such impressive emphasis that the Indian name Carib or Caribbee, in the modified form of cannibal, came to be used to designate the savage who feeds on human flesh. The smaller islands of the Antilles were all occupied by branches of this parent stock, the Carib, all of whom were distinguished by savage ferocity. The name was given them by a rival race, the Arawaks, who under various designations lived in the four larger islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Hayti, and Puerto Rico. ”

“ This view has been abandoned, as Carib tribes, the Bakairi and Nahuquas, using an archaic type of Carib speech and primitive in habits, have been met by German explorers in the very heart of Brazil. It may thus be assumed that the cradle of the race was the centre of South America; their first migrating movements being to Guiana and the Antilles. A cruel, ferocious and warlike people, they made a stout resistance to the Spaniards. ”

“ It has always seemed to me that the exclusiveness of the Caribs and their excellence as coasting sailors may be due to their having originally been brought to the coast of Africa as prisoners of war from the banks of some of the great lakes in the far interior, and to their thus having no kinship with the tribes from whom the slaves were usually captured, rather than to their supposed mixture with the Carib Indians of the Island of St. ”

“ As others like them, of undoubted Carib workmanship, have been found in the Virgin Islands, it is possible that they are all the work of that once-powerful race, and not of the settled agricultural and statue-making Indians of the western part of the continent. ”

“ They found the island inhabited by the Carib Indians, who, regarding the white men as beings superior in goodness as well as intellect, gave them a cordial welcome, and treated them with kindness and hospitality. ”

“ The first inhabited land seen by our navigators was the island of Trinidad, on the south coast of which they saw a crowd of astonished people watching them from the shore. They landed at three different places with the launches well provisioned, and twenty-two well-armed men. The natives were Caribs, or Cannibals, of fine presence and stature, of great vigour, and very expert in the use of bows and arrows, and shields, which were their proper arms. ”

“ CHAPTER XXVIII. Remarks upon the aboriginal Americans​—​Suppositions of various authors​—​Caribs​—​Arrowawks​—​Ferocity of the Carib​—​Complexion​—​Dress​—​Ornaments​—​Dreadful revenge​—​Wars-Chiefs​—​Severities practised​—​Feasts​—​Remarks upon paganism​—​Anthropophagi​—​A traveller’s tale​—​The Carib’s opinion of death​—​Religious tenets​—​Altars​—​The burning Carib. ”

“ When a Carib fishing-boat comes in, it is at once surrounded by the Carib women, who, with petticoats rolled up, stand knee deep in the water round the boat, taking out, weighing, and selling fish to their fellows; but until the wants of every Carib household are supplied no white person is allowed to buy, and not infrequently the whole catch is disposed of to the Caribs and the white people get none of it. ”

“ Their eyes, which are darker than those of the other hordes of Guiana, denote intelligence, and it may even be said, the habit of reflection. The Caribs have a gravity of manner, and a certain look of sadness which is observable among most of the primitive inhabitants of the New World. ”

“ Traces of Indian blood are still evident amongst the inhabitants of the wild regions in the eastern part of Cuba, who boast indeed that they are the "Caribbees." The women are especially beautiful, and remarkable for the extraordinary length of their hair, which sometimes touches the ground. A female attendant in the house of a planter whom I visited in this part of the island some years ago, was, I was assured, of undoubted Caribbean descent. ”

“ Indeed, the place has a beautiful and imposing appearance. Dark green forests and emerald tracts of sugar-cane now clothe its plains and hills; and Mount Misery, the loftiest peak, rises to a height of over four thousand feet. Caribs were the original inhabitants and possessors of St. Kitts, but when England and France agreed to divide this island between them in 1627, we find the local anthropophagi left out in the cold as usual. After bickering for about sixty years, the French enjoyed a temporary success, and slew their British brother colonists pretty generally. ”

“ CARIBS, the name, used first by Columbus (from Cariba, said to mean “a valiant man”) , of a South American people, who, at the arrival of the Spanish, occupied parts of Guiana and the lower Orinoco and the Windward and other islands in what is still known as the Caribbean Sea. They were believed to have had their original home in North America, spreading thence through the Antilles southward to Venezuela, the Guianas, and north-east Brazil. ”

“ Juan, are certainly of Carib stock, and it is more than probable that the same is true of the Woolwas, Ramas, Toacas, and Poyas, and also of the other tribes on the Atlantic coast, further to the southward, towards Chiriqui Lagoon, and collectively denominated Bravos."—Central America and Nicaragua, ii. pp. 308-309.
Nevertheless, as has been already stated, the language is other than Carib. It is other than Carib, whether we look to the Moskito or the Woolwa vocabularies. It is other than Carib, and admitted by Mr. Squier to be so. The previous extract has given us his opinion ”

“ Let us have food; and then we will sail—for the barracks at Alforan—no?”
The Caribs prepared a meal, to which the three passengers of El Nacional set themselves with famished delight. About sunset, as was its custom, the breeze veered and swept back from the mountains, cool and steady, bringing a taste of the stagnant lagoons and mangrove swamps that guttered the lowlands. The mainsail of the sloop was hoisted and swelled to it, and at that moment they heard shouts and a waxing clamour from the bosky profundities of the shore. ”

“ MR. BARRAUD. "The Caribbean Sea is, generally speaking, still and quiet, and in fine weather the water is so transparent, that the mariner can discern fish and coral at fifty fathoms below the surface. The ship seems to float in the air, and the spectator is often seized with vertigo, while he beholds through the crystalline fluid, submarine groves and beautiful shells glittering among tufts of fucus and sea-weed. ”

“ Readers of Robinson Crusoe associate the Caribbean Sea with piracy and rum, but usually have few other ideas on the subject. Most people of the United States have scarcely so much as heard that there be any Caribbean world except that it is somewhere in the tropics. ”

“ The relations of the island of Jamaica to the great barrier formed by Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico are such as to constitute it the natural stepping-stone by which to pass from the consideration of entrance into the Caribbean, which has been engaging our attention, to that of the transit across, from entrance to the Isthmus, which we must next undertake. ”

“ Notwithstanding the dangers to be encountered from the fierce Caribs—who, sheltered by trees and rocks everywhere, attacked their foes with poisoned arrows—and the numerous disappointments which occurred, fresh bands of adventurers, age after age, still believing in the fabled wealth which was to be their prize should they succeed, set forth, in hope of reaching the wonderful city. ”

“ The wide gulf of sea which we were traversing—named after the aboriginal Caribs who ruled over its domain lang syne, and hedged in from the Atlantic Ocean by the semicircular group of the Lesser Antilles, or “Windward Islands” of the West Indies—presents great difficulties to the navigators of sailing ships ”

“ We proceeded along the coast the greater part of that day, and on the evening of the next we discovered another island called Burenquen,294-2 which we judged to be thirty leagues in length, for we were coasting along it the whole of one day. This island is very beautiful and apparently fertile; hither the Caribbees come with the view of subduing the inhabitants, and often carry away many of the people. These islanders have no boats nor any knowledge of navigation ”

“ The Caribbean region is a marked exception to the broader changes that have affected the coast-line throughout the central and northern portions of the continent, and stands by itself as a conspicuous illustration of more localized earth movements which produced a remarkable submarine topography. ”

“ Yielding to their entreaties, the seamen brought them back, with two children and a young man who had escaped from the Caribs; these people thinking themselves safer in the hands of strangers whom they had never seen or heard of, than among the cruel and wicked Caribs who had eaten their husbands and children, but who are said not to eat women, whom they keep as slaves. ”

“ Unlike the Pacific, too, the tide is inconsiderable. At Panama it rises and falls from seventeen to twenty feet, and, retiring, leaves long expanses of unsightly mud flats, but the Caribbean always plays its part in the landscape well. Unhappily this picturesque street—called Roosevelt Avenue—is about to lose its beauty, for its water front is to be taken for the great new docks, and already at some points one sees the yellow stacks of ocean liners mingling with the fronded tops of the palms. ”

“ On seeing these we suspected that [287] we were amongst the Caribbee islands, whose inhabitants eat human flesh; for the Admiral, guided by the information respecting their situation which he had received from the Indians of the islands discovered in his former voyage, had directed his course with a view to their discovery, both because they were the nearest to Spain, and because this was the direct track for the island of Española, where he had left some of his people. ”

“ You wonder, perhaps, where was the Caribs' home. They told legends of a far-distant land in the north, from which their own people had come. They had fought their way from Florida to South America, and feared no one in the world. They believed that their tribe had grown up out of the stones which had been planted in the soil.
They belonged to the great Indian, or red, race, as did the natives of Porto Rico, but their customs and natures were very different. ”

“ Some of these vessels had topmasts, and the Caribs could rig out fleets of thirty sail at a time. After the French [Pg 185] had been some years settled at Martinico, they were surprised one foggy morning by the appearance of a fleet on their coast. The whole island was instantly in alarm and commotion; every man seized his arms, thinking a large squadron from Europe was come to attack the island. But the fog cleared away, and there, close-hauled in shore, were twenty sail of becassas and piroques, filled with Caribs, who had come for a friendly trading visit. ”

“ In nearly all of their huts were found relics of their horrid feasts upon the bodies of their slaughtered enemies; and in one of them, a man’s arm was roasting for the intended meal of the inmates.
The character of the Caribs presents little of what is interesting to the imagination; ferocious, superstitious, and revengeful, they looked upon all strangers as enemies; and, in return, were dreaded as such by the inhabitants of the other islands; still they are represented as being, generally, peaceable and friendly to one another. They ever retained a high sense of equality and independence. ”

“ Some authors even assert that the arrival of Caribs in the islands could only have shortly preceded the Columban discovery. The Spaniards were astonished to observe that the Carib women spoke a different language from the men. The Caribs did not kill or eat the women whose tribes they attacked. The young women, says Martyr, "they take to keep for increase, as we do hens to lay eggs; the old women they make their drudges." Alluding to this fact, and discussing the probable date of the arrival of the Caribs in the West Indian Archipelago, Dr. ”

“ I scrutinized the map. "There are three several exits from the Caribbean into the Atlantic."
And I pointed them out in order: The Straits of Florida to the north of Cuba; the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, with the great island of Jamaica lying to the westward of it; and last, the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Porto Rico.
"She would never point up for the gaps between the lesser islands in the south," I added.
My great-uncle chuckled with a keenness of relish that was new to him.
"You read the chart well for a landsman, boy," he said. "What say you, Peter? ”