Caribs

“ F. Michelenena y Rojas, Exploracion Oficial, p. 54, the palm for physical superiority and intelligence is to be awarded to the Caribs. He says the Carib race is without doubt ... the most beautiful, the most robust and the most intelligent of all those in Venezuela. Not only this; he seems inclined to consider them the superiors of all the Indians in South America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To resume our description of these ancient possessors of Antigua​—​these warlike Caribs. Vanity is a passion which to a greater or lesser degree pervades the breast of almost every mortal, and the savage in his native wilds feels the force of it in the same manner, although, perhaps, not to the same extent, as the giddy fair who whirls round the vortex of dissipation within the purlieus of May Fair. When first discovered by the Spaniards, the Caribs were habited in different fashions ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Caribs, from whom Antigua and the adjoining islands took their names, were a very different race of beings from the gentle and hospitable inhabitants of Cuba, Jamaica, Hayti, &c., who were called Arrowawks, and with whom the Caribs were ever at war. From the martial and ferocious spirit of the Caribs, and from their repasts upon human flesh, historians agree in supposing they were descended from the Africans ”

“ That fine race of people, the Caribs, now occupy only a small part of the country which they inhabited at the time of the discovery of America. The cruelties exercised by Europeans have entirely exterminated them from the West Indian Islands and the coasts of Darien; while under the government of the missions they have formed populous villages in the provinces of New Barcelona and Spanish Guiana. The Caribs who inhabit the Llanos of Piritu and the banks of the Carony and the Cuyuni may be estimated at more than thirty-five thousand. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brown, Ponder, and Co., of Belize, who dealt in mahogany and logwood—do still, I hope. That trade appears to be rather interesting. The merchant keeps a gang of Caribs, who have been in the employment of the firm all their lives perhaps. They go out at the proper season to find and mark the trees; fell [Pg 152] them presently and return whilst the timber is drying; or amuse themselves in the bush, hunting and gathering miscellaneous produce. Then they float the raft down to Belize.
These Caribs are more or less descended from the Indians of Jamaica. ”

“ But upon the Marigalante, well-penned, the Admiral had a stallion and two mares, a young bull and a couple of heifers, and two dogs—bloodhounds. The Caribs were yonder, five men in all.
He took me to see them. They were tall, strong, sullen and desperate in aspect, hardier, fiercer than Indians of these northward lands. But they were Indians, and their guttural speech could be made out, at least in substance. They asked with a high, contemptuous look when we meant to slay and eat them.
“They eat men’s flesh, every Caribal of them! ”

“ Whether the transportation of the Caribs, now useless in Truxillo, to the shores of the Dulce, and the banks of the Motagua, or whether the division of the land near the coast into small lots, and ceded to Indians on condition of cultivating a certain portion with the fruit of the country, be desirable, is for others to determine. ”

“ Dominica, the next island which Stuart passed after he had left Martinique, besides being one of the scenic glories of the world, described as "a tabernacle for the sun, a shrine of a thousand spires, rising tier above tier, in one exquisite fabric of green, purple and grey," has many claims to fame. Here, the cannibal Caribs were so fierce that for 255 years they defied the successive fleets of Spaniards, French and English who tried to take possession of the island. Some three hundred Caribs still dwell upon the island upon a reservation provided by the government. ”

“ The lagoon abounds in fish and water-fowl, and there are some savannahs, at a considerable distance up the Patuca, and on other streams flowing into the lagoon, which are thronged with deer. But it would seem that these are only occasionally hunted by the Caribs, and then chiefly for their skins, of which large numbers are exported.
As I have said, we arrived in Brus during the annual carnival, which follows on the return of those members of the community who have been absent in the mahogany-works. It is in these works that the able-bodied Caribs find their principal employment. ”

“ Caribs, a race of American Indians, originally inhabiting the West Indies, now confined to the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea, as far as the mouth of the Amazon; they are a fine race, tall, and of ruddy-brown complexion, but have lost their distinctive physique by amalgamation with other tribes; they give name to the Caribbean Sea.
Carinthia (361) , since 1849 crownland of Austria, near Italy; is a mountainous and a mineral country; rears cattle and horses; manufactures hardware and textile fabrics; the principal river is the Drave ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ We have also found that though no general migration took place from the continent southward, nor from the islands northward, yet there was considerable intercourse in both directions; that not only the natives of the greater and lesser Antilles and Yucatan, but also numbers of the Guaranay stem of the southern continent, the Caribs proper, crossed the Straits of Florida and founded colonies on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico ”

“ On the map of Columbia constructed by me from my own astronomical observations, this connection is clearly marked. The Caribs, who penetrated from the missions of the Caroni to the plains of the Rio Branco, and as far as the Brazilian boundary, crossed in the journey the ridges of Pacaraima and Quimiropaca. The second mountain mass, which divides the valley of the Amazons from the River Plate, is the Brazilian group. ”

“ Yet time has proved, even under very unfavourable circumstances, that the fierceness and aggressive cruelty of the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles corresponded to the wild fury of the old viking rovers of Europe, and gave proof of energy and stamina capable of sturdy endurance; while the gentle and friendly Indians of the larger Antilles, without, in reality, any superior moral attributes, but only the characteristics of a weak and passive nature, have disappeared, leaving behind them scarcely a memorial of their existence. The Caribs are the historic race of the Antilles. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Upon their leaving, they requested their entertainer to accompany them to the beach, who instantly complied; but the Caribs, more treacherous than the wild beasts that haunt the desert, had no sooner reached the place where their canoes were stationed, than they fell upon their kind host, cruelly murdered him, and broiled his head, which they afterwards carried with them to Dominica. ”

“ The race generally known as Caribs, and who dwell along the shore of the Caribbean Sea, 128predominate at Livingston and along this coast. They have an olive complexion, round heads, abundant black hair, which is usually straight but sometimes kinky. They are also short and erect, but muscular. It has only been in recent years that they wore any clothing at all, and they are not burdened with it yet. Every place where there is water is a bathing resort, and the only bathhouses are big mahogany logs, hewn square. Sharks and alligators sometimes make it exciting for them. ”

“ Was it Atlantis, or was it a submerged country in the Pacific? I am inclined to the latter opinion, and to believe that the inhabitants of ancient Atlantis were the ancestors of the warlike and adventurous Caribs. The Nahuatls, in their peaceful dispositions and agricultural pursuits, are much more nearly allied to the Polynesians, and their present preponderance on the western coast favours the idea that they had a western origin.* (* I have already at page 46 alluded to the fundamental difference in the food of the Nahuatls and the Caribs.) ”

“ 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 ”

“ Their houses are always the same, with a high, peaked and thatched roof, sometimes twenty-five to thirty feet in height. No nails are used in the construction. They sometimes look almost like huge stacks of hay from a distance.
The Caribs are said to have lived on the island of St. Vincent, where, at the conclusion of the war between England and France, they were found to be in such sympathy with the French that they were deported to the island of Roatan. From there they drifted to the mainland and established a number of settlements all along the coast. ”

“ It is singular, that all these nations are found in near proximity to the Caribs, who are remarkably tall. They all inhabit the same climate, and subsist on the same aliments. They are varieties in the race, which no doubt existed previously to the settlement of these tribes (tall and short, fair and dark brown) in the same country. The four nations of the Upper Orinoco, which appeared to me to be the fairest, are the Guaharibos of the Rio Gehette, the Guainares of the Ocamo, the Guaicas of Cano Chiguire, and the Maquiritares of the sources of the Padamo, the Jao, and the Ventuari. ”

“ In their wars, I have told you, the Caribs were murderous and cruel. They often poisoned their arrows, and probably often eat their captives. They fought with bows and arrows, and clubs. But when their angry passions became cool, they treated their prisoners with humanity, and never tortured them like the northern savages.
In some instances these islanders were faithless and treacherous. In 1708 the English entered into an agreement with the Caribs in St. Vincents, to attack the French colonies in Martinico. ”

“ D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, page 268. "Related to the Caribs stand a long list of small tribes ... all inhabitants of the great primeval forest in and near Guiana. They may have characteristic differences, but none worthy of mention are known. In bodily appearance, according to all accounts, these relatives of the Caribs are beautiful. In Georgetown the Arauacas [or Arawaks] are celebrated for their beauty. They are slender and graceful, and their features handsome and regular, the face having a Grecian profile, and the skin being of a reddish cast. ”

“ As boatsmen the Caribs are very daring. In their exceedingly small dories, they stand upright generally, and when seen from a short distance, appear to be walking on the waves. With the utmost confidence they paddle about in deep water, swarming with sharks, though if their little boat capsized they would almost inevitably be devoured. ”