Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.3 — 09 - Chapter 3.26, Part 2

We have just seen that the dialect of the Carib women in the West India Islands contains the vestiges of a language that was extinct.

Some writers have imagined that this extinct language might be that of the Ygneris, or primitive inhabitants of the Caribbee Islands; others have traced in it some resemblance to the ancient idiom of Cuba, or to those of the Arowaks, and the Apalachites in Florida: but these hypotheses are all founded on a very imperfect knowledge of the idioms which it has been attempted to compare one with another.

The Spanish writers of the sixteenth century inform us that the Carib nations then extended over eighteen or nineteen degrees of latitude, from the Virgin Islands east of Porto Rico, to the mouths of the Amazon.

Another prolongation toward the west, along the coast-chain of Santa Marta and Venezuela, appears less certain.

Gomara, however, and the most ancient historians, give the name of Caribana, not, as it has since been applied, to the country between the sources of the Orinoco and the mountains of French Guiana,* (* This name is found in the map of Hondius, of 1599, which accompanies the Latin edition of the narrative of Raleigh's voyage.

In the Dutch edition Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, the Llanos of Caracas, between the mountains of Merida and the Rio Pao, bear the name of Caribana.

We may remark here, what we observe so often in the history of geography, that the same denomination has spread by degrees from west to east.

) but to the marshy plains between the mouths of the Rio Atrato and the Rio Sinu.

I have visited those coasts in going from the Havannah to Porto Bello; and I there learned that the cape which bounds the gulf of Darien or Uraba on the east, still bears the name of Punta Caribana.

An opinion heretofore prevailed pretty generally that the Caribs of the West India Islands derived their origin, and even their name, from these warlike people of Darien.

"From the eastern shore springs Cape Uraba, which the natives call Caribana, whence the Caribs of the island are said to have received their present name."

* (* Inde Vrabam ab orientali prehendit ora, quam appellant indigenae Caribana, unde Caribes insulares originem habere nomenque retinere dicuntur.

) Thus Anghiera expresses himself in his Oceanica.

He had been told by a nephew of Amerigo Vespucci that thence, as far as the snowy mountains of St. Marta, all the natives were e genere Caribium, vel Canibalium.

I do not deny that Caribs may have had a settlement near the gulf of Darien, and that they may have been driven thither by the easterly currents; but it also may have happened that the Spanish navigators, little attentive to languages, gave the names Carib and Cannibal to every race of people of tall stature and ferocious character.

Still it is by no means probable that the Caribs of the islands and of Parima took to themselves the name of the region which they had originally inhabited.

On the east of the Andes and wherever civilization has not yet penetrated, it is the people who have given names to the places where they have settled.

* (* These names of places can be perpetuated only where the nations succeed immediately to each other, and where the tradition is interrupted.

Thus in the province of Quito many of the summits of the Andes bear names which belong neither to the Quichua (the language of Inca) nor to the ancient language of the Paruays, governed by the Conchocando of Lican.

) The words Caribs and Cannibals appear significant; they are epithets referring to valour, strength and even superior intelligence.

* (* Vespucci says: Charaibi magnae sapientiae viri.

) It is worthy of remark that, at the arrival of the Portuguese, the Brazilians gave to their magicians the name of caraibes.

We know that the Caribs of Parima were the most wandering people of America; possibly some wily individuals of that nation played the same part as the Chaldeans of the ancient continent.

The names of nations readily become affixed to particular professions; and when, in the time of the Caesars, the superstitions of the East were introduced into Italy, the Chaldeans no more came from the banks of the Euphrates than our Gypsies (Egyptians or Bohemians) came from the banks of the Nile or the Elbe.

When a continent and its adjacent islands are peopled by one and the same race, we may choose between two hypotheses; supposing the emigration to have taken place either from the islands to the continent, or from the continent to the islands.

The Iberians (Basques) who were settled at the same time in Spain and in the islands of the Mediterranean, afford an instance of this problem; as do also the Malays who appear to be indigenous in the peninsula of Malacca, and in the district of Menangkabao in the island of Sumatra.

* (* Crawfurd, Indian Archipelago volume 2 page 371. I make use of the word indigenous (autocthoni) not to indicate a fact of creation, which does not belong to history, but simply to denote that we are ignorant of the autocthoni having been preceded by any other people.

) The archipelago of the large and small West India Islands forms a narrow and broken neck of land, parallel with the isthmus of Panama, and supposed by some geographers to join the peninsula of Florida to the north-east extremity of South America.

It is the eastern shore of an inland sea which may be considered as a basin with several outlets.

This peculiar configuration of the land has served to support the different systems of migration, by which it has been attempted to explain the settlement of the nations of the Carib race in the islands and on the neighbouring continent.

The Caribs of the continent admit that the small West India Islands were anciently inhabited by the Arowaks,* a warlike nation, the great mass of which still inhabit the insalubrious shores of Surinam and Berbice.

(* Arouaques.

The missionary Quandt (Nachricht von Surinam, 1807 page 47) calls them Arawackes.

) They assert that the Arowaks, with the exception of the women, were all exterminated by Caribs, who came from the mouths of the Orinoco.

In support of this tradition they refer to the traces of analogy existing between the language of the Arowaks and that of the Carib women; but it must be recollected that the Arowaks, though the enemies of the Caribs, belonged to the same branch of people; and that the same analogy exists between the Arowak and Carib languages as between the Greek and the Persian, the German and the Sanscrit.

According to another tradition, the Caribs of the islands came from the south, not as conquerors, but because they were expelled from Guiana by the Arowaks, who originally ruled over all the neighbouring nations.

Finally, a third tradition, much more general and more probable, represents the Caribs as having come from Florida, in North America.

Mr. Bristock, a traveller who has collected every particular relating to these migrations from north to south, asserts that a tribe of Confachites (Confachiqui* (* The province of Confachiqui, which in 1541 became subject to a woman, is celebrated by the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida.

Among the nations of the Huron tongue, and the Attakapas, the supreme authority was also often exercised by women.

)) had long waged war against the Apalachites; that the latter, having yielded to that tribe the fertile district of Amana, called their new confederates Caribes (that is, valiant strangers); but that, owing to a dispute respecting their religious rites, the Confachite-Caribs were driven from Florida.

They went first to the Yucayas or Lucayes Islands (to Cigateo and the neighbouring islands);

thence to Ayay (Hayhay, now Santa Cruz), and to the lesser Caribbee Islands; and lastly to the continent of South America.

* (* Rochefort, Hist.

des Antilles volume 1 pages 326 to 353; Garcia page 322;

Robertson book 3 note 69. The conjecture of Father Gili that the Caribs of the continent may have come from the islands at the time of the first conquest of the Spaniards (Saggio volume 3 page 204), is at variance with all the statements of the early historians.

) It is supposed that this event took place toward the year 1100 of our era.

In the course of this long migration the Caribs had not touched at the larger islands; the inhabitants of which however also believed that they came originally from Florida.

The islanders of Cuba, Hayti, and Boriken (Porto Rico) were, according to the uniform testimony of the first conquistadores, entirely different from the Caribs; and at the period of the discovery of America, the latter had already abandoned the group of the lesser Lucayes Islands; an archipelago in which there prevailed that variety of languages always found in lands peopled by shipwrecked men and fugitives.

* (* La gente de las islas Yucayas era (1492) mas blanca y de major policia que la de Cuba y Haiti.

Havia mucha diversidad de lenguas.

[The people of the Lucayes were (1492) of fairer complexion and of more civilized manners than those of Cuba and Hayti.

They had a great diversity of languages.

] Gomara, Hist.

de Ind.

fol.

22. ) The dominion so long exercised by the Caribs over a great part of the continent, joined to the remembrance of their ancient greatness, has inspired them with a sentiment of dignity and national superiority which is manifest in their manners and their discourse.

"We alone are a nation," say they proverbially; "the rest of mankind (oquili) are made to serve us."

This contempt of the Caribs for their enemies is so strong that I saw a child of ten years of age foam with rage on being called a Cabre or Cavere; though he had never in his life seen an individual of that unfortunate race of people who gave their name to the town of Cabruta (Cabritu); and who, after long resistance, were almost entirely exterminated by the Caribs.

Thus we find among half savage hordes, as in the most civilized part of Europe, those inveterate animosities which have caused the names of hostile nations to pass into their respective languages as insulting appellations.

The missionary of the village of Cari led us into several Indian huts, where extreme neatness and order prevailed.

We observed with pain the torments which the Carib mothers inflict on their infants for the purpose not only of enlarging the calf of the leg, but also of raising the flesh in alternate stripes from the ankle to the top of the thigh.

Narrow ligatures, consisting of bands of leather, or of woven cotton, are fixed two or three inches apart from each other, and being tightened more and more, the muscles between the bands become swollen.

The monks of the missions, though ignorant of the works or even of the name of Rousseau, attempt to oppose this ancient system of physical education: but in vain.

Man when just issued from the woods and supposed to be so simple in his manners, is far from being tractable in his ideas of beauty and propriety.

I observed, however, with surprise, that the manner in which these poor children are bound, and which seems to obstruct the circulation of the blood, does not operate injuriously on their muscular movements.

There is no race of men more robust and swifter in running than the Caribs.

If the women labour to form the legs and thighs of their children so as to produce what painters call undulating outlines, they abstain (at least in the Llanos), from flattening the head by compressing it between cushions and planks from the most tender age.

This practice, so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions which we visited.

The men there have foreheads rounder than those of the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco.

A systematizer would say that the form is such as their intellectual faculties require.

We were so much the more struck by this fact as some of the skulls of Caribs engraved in Europe, for works on anatomy, are distinguished from all other human skulls by the extremely depressed forehead and acute facial angle.

In some osteological collections skulls supposed to be those of Caribs of the island of St. Vincent are in fact skulls shaped by having been pressed between planks.

They have belonged to Zambos (black Caribs) who are descended from Negroes and true Caribs.

* (* These unfortunate remnants of a nation heretofore powerful were banished in 1795 to the Island of Rattam in the Bay of Honduras because they were accused by the English Government of having connexions with the French.

In 1760 an able minister, M. Lescallier, proposed to the Court of Versailles to invite the Red and Black Caribs from St. Vincent to Guiana and to employ them as free men in the cultivation of the land.

I doubt whether their number at that period amounted to six thousand, as the island of St. Vincent contained in 1787 not more than fourteen thousand inhabitants of all colours.

) The barbarous habit of flattening the forehead is practised by several nations,* of people not of the same race; and it has been observed recently in North America; but nothing is more vague than the conclusion that some degree of conformity in customs and manners proves identity of origin.

(* For instance the Tapoyranas of Guiana (Barrere page 239), the Solkeeks of Upper Louisiana (Walckenaer, Cosmos page 583).

Los Indios de Cumana, says Gomara (Hist.

de Ind.

), aprietan a los ninos la cabeca muy blando, pero mucho, entre dos almohadillas de algodon para ensancharlos la cara, que lo tienen por hermosura.

Las donzellas traen senogiles muy apretados par debaxo y encima de las rodillas, para que los muslos y pantorillas engorden mucho.

[The Indians of Cumana press down the heads of young infants tightly between cushions stuffed with cotton for the purpose of giving width to their faces, which they regard as a beauty.

The young girls wear very tight bandages round their knees in order to give thickness to the thighs and calves of the legs.

]) On observing the spirit of order and submission which prevails in the Carib missions, the traveller can scarcely persuade himself that he is among cannibals.

This American word, of somewhat doubtful signification, is probably derived from the language of Hayti, or that of Porto Rico; and it has passed into the languages of Europe, since the end of the fifteenth century, as synonymous with that of anthropophagi.

"These newly discovered man-eaters, so greedy of human flesh, are called Caribes or Cannibals,"* says Anghiera, in the third decade of his Oceanica, dedicated to Pope Leo X. (* Edaces humanarum carnium novi helluones anthropophagi, Caribes alias Canibales appellati.

) There can be little doubt that the Caribs of the islands, when a conquering people, exercised cruelties upon the Ygneris, or ancient inhabitants of the West Indies, who were weak and not very warlike; but we must also admit that these cruelties were exaggerated by the early travellers, who heard only the narratives of the old enemies of the Caribs.

It is not always the vanquished solely, who are calumniated by their contemporaries; the insolence of the conquerors is punished by the catalogue of their crimes being augmented.

All the missionaries of the Carony, the Lower Orinoco and the Llanos del Cari whom we had an opportunity of consulting assured us that the Caribs are perhaps the least anthropophagous nations of the New Continent.

They extend this remark even to the independent hordes who wander on the east of the Esmeralda, between the sources of the Rio Branco and the Essequibo.

It may be conceived that the fury and despair with which the unhappy Caribs defended themselves against the Spaniards, when in 1504 a royal decree declared them slaves, may have contributed to acquire for them a reputation for ferocity.

The first idea of attacking this nation and depriving it of liberty and of its natural rights originated with Christopher Columbus, who was not in all instances so humane as he is represented to have been.

Subsequently the licenciado Rodrigo de Figueroa was appointed by the court, in 1520, to determine the tribes of South America, who were to be regarded as of Carib race, or as cannibals; and those who were Guatiaos,* that is, Indians of peace, and friends of the Castilians.

(* I had some trouble in discovering the origin of this denomination which has become so important from the fatal decrees of Figueroa.

The Spanish historians often employ the word guatiao to designate a branch of nations.

To become a guatiao of any one seems to have signified, in the language of Hayti, to conclude a treaty of friendship.

In the West India Islands, as well as in the archipelago of the South Sea, names were exchanged in token of alliance.

Juan de Esquivel (1502) se hice guatiao del cacique Cotubanama; el qual desde adelante se llamo Juan de Esquivel, porque era liga de perpetua amistad entre los Indios trocarse los nombres: y trocados quedaban guatiaos, que era tanto coma confederados y hermanos en armas.

Ponce de Leon se hace guatiao con el poderoso cacique Agueinaha."

Herrera dec.

1 pages 129, 159 and 181. [Juan de Esquivel (1502) became the guatiao of the cacique Cotubanama;

and thenceforth the latter called himself Juan de Esquivel, for among the Indians the exchange of names was a bond of perpetual friendship.

Those who exchanged names became guaitaos, which meant the same as confederates or brethren-in-arms.

Ponce de Leon became guatiao with the powerful cacique Agueinaha.

] One of the Lucayes Islands, inhabited by a mild and pacific people, was heretofore called Guatao; but we will not insist on the etymology of this word, because the languages of the Lucayes Islands differed from those of Hayti.

) The ethnographic document called El Auto de Figueroa is one of the most curious records of the barbarism of the first conquistadores.

Without any attention to the analogy of languages, every nation that could be accused of having devoured a prisoner after a battle was arbitrarily declared of Carib race.

The inhabitants of Uriapari (on the peninsula of Paria) were named Caribs; the Urinacos (settled on the banks of the Lower Orinoco, or Urinucu), Guatiaos.

All the tribes designated by Figueroa as Caribs were condemned to slavery; and might at will be sold, or exterminated by war.

In these sanguinary struggles, the Carib women, after the death of their husbands, defended themselves with such desperation that Anghiera says they were taken for tribes of Amazons.

But amidst the cruelties exercised on the Caribs, it is consolatory to find, that there existed some courageous men who raised the voice of humanity and justice.

Some of the monks embraced an opinion different from that which they had at first adopted.

In an age when there could be no hope of founding public liberty on civil institutions, an attempt was at least made to defend individual liberty.

"That is a most holy law (ley sanctissima)," says Gomara, in 1551, "by which our emperor has prohibited the reducing of the Indians to slavery.

It is just that men, who are all born free, should not become the slaves of one another."

During our abode in the Carib missions, we observed with surprise the facility with which young Indians of eighteen years of age, when appointed to the post of alguazil, would harangue the municipality for whole hours in succession.

Their tone of voice, their gravity of deportment, the gestures which accompanied their speech, all denoted an intelligent people capable of a high degree of civilization.

A

Franciscan monk, who knew enough of the Carib language to preach in it occasionally, pointed out to us that the long and harmonious periods which occur in the discourses of the Indians are never confused or obscure.

Particular inflexions of the verb indicate beforehand the nature of the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, singular or plural.

Little annexed forms (suffixes) mark the gradations of sentiment; and here, as in every language formed by a free development, clearness is the result of that regulating instinct which characterises human intelligence in the various stages of barbarism and cultivation.

On holidays, after the celebration of mass, all the inhabitants of the village assemble in front of the church.

The young girls place at the feet of the missionary faggots of wood, bunches of plantains, and other provision of which he stands in need for his household.

At the same time the governador, the alguazil, and other municipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, reprimand the idle, and flog the untractable.

Strokes of the cane are received with the same insensibility as that with which they are given.

It were better if the priest did not impose these corporal punishments at the instant of quitting the altar, and if he were not, in his sacerdotal habits, the spectator of this chastisement of men and women; but this abuse is inherent in the principle on which the strange government of the missions is founded.

The most arbitrary civil power is combined with the authority exercised by the priest over the little community;

and, although the Caribs are not cannibals, and we would wish to see them treated with mildness and indulgence, it may be conceived that energetic measures are sometimes necessary to maintain tranquillity in this rising society.

The difficulty of fixing the Caribs to the soil is the greater, as they have been for ages in the habit of trading on the rivers.

We have already described this active people, at once commercial and warlike, occupied in the traffic of slaves, and carrying merchandize from the coasts of Dutch Guiana to the basin of the Amazon.

The travelling Caribs were the Bokharians of equinoctial America.

The necessity of counting the objects of their little trade, and transmitting intelligence, led them to extend and improve the use of the quipos, or, as they are called in the missions, the cordoncillos con necos (cords with knots).

These quipos or knotted cords are found in Canada, in Mexico (where Boturini procured some from the Tlascaltecs), in Peru, in the plains of Guiana, in central Asia, in China, and in India.

As rosaries, they have become objects of devotion in the hands of the Christians of the East; as suampans, they have been employed in the operations of manual arithmetic by the Chinese, the Tartars, and the Russians.

The independent Caribs who inhabit the little-known country situated between the sources of the Orinoco and those of the rivers Essequibo, Carony, and Parima, are divided into tribes; and, like the nations of the Missouri, of Chili, and of ancient Germany, form a political confederation.

This system is most in accordance with the spirit of liberty prevailing amongst those warlike hordes who see no advantage in the ties of society but for common defence.

The pride of the Caribs leads them to withdraw themselves from every other tribe; even from those to whom, by their language, they have some affinity.

They claim the same separation in the missions, which seldom prosper when any attempt is made to associate them with other mixed communities, that is, with villages where every hut is inhabited by a family belonging to another nation and speaking another language.

The authority of the chiefs of the independent Caribs is hereditary in the male line only, the children of sisters being excluded from the succession.

This law of succession which is founded on a system of mistrust, denoting no great purity of manners, prevails in India;

among the Ashantees (in Africa); and among several tribes of the savages of North America.

* (* Among the Hurons (Wyandots) and the Natchez the succession to the magistracy is continued by the women: it is not the son who succeeds, but the son of the sister, or of the nearest relation in the female line.

This mode of succession is said to be the most certain because the supreme power remains attached to the blood of the last chief; it is a practice that insures legitimacy.

Ancient traces of this strange mode of succession, so common in Africa and in the East Indies, exist in the dynasty of the kings of the West India Islands.

) The young chiefs and other youths who are desirous of marrying, are subject to the most extraordinary fasts and penances, and are required to take medicines prepared by the marirris or piaches, called in the transalleghenian countries, war-physic.

The Carribbee marirris are at once priests, jugglers and physicians; they transmit to their successors their doctrine, their artifices, and the remedies they employ.

The latter are accompanied by imposition of hands, and certain gestures and mysterious practices, apparently connected with the most anciently known processes of animal magnetism.

Though I had opportunities of seeing many persons who had closely observed the confederated Caribs, I could not learn whether the marirris belong to a particular caste.

It is observed in North America that, among the Shawanese,* (* People that came from Florida, or from the south (shawaneu) to the north.

) divided into several tribes, the priests, who preside at the sacrifices, must be (as among the Hebrews) of one particular tribe, that of the Mequachakes.

Any facts that may hereafter be discovered in America respecting the remains of a sacerdotal caste appears to me calculated to excite great interest, on account of those priest-kings of Peru, who styled themselves the children of the Sun; and of those sun-kings among the Natchez, who recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.