by Jacob Nelson
The man was also naked aside from a decorated loincloth, feathers, and paint. The one difference that made him stand out was that he wore a strangely carved wooden mask, which was in the shape of some sort of animal or demon. Caribo hurriedly explained that he was the zemi, a local shaman. He was there to ask their local deity for a blessing on the food.
Straightaway the chanting stopped and the zemi presented the chief with a long stick that was about the width of a thumb. Then leaving the stick with the cacique, the zemi hurried away to collect the carving of the pregnant woman. “The figure of the Cemie”, explained Caribo, “The local deity”.
Kit was in awe. ‘What next?’ he wondered to himself.
Caribo answered the unspoken thought with a point of his hand. With the shaman holding the Cemie in front of him, the chanting stopped as the chief stood and brought the stick up in front of him. Then placing the stick into his mouth, he abruptly shoved it far inside and whipped it out again in time to avoid vomiting all over it. As he regurgitated his meal the whole place erupted in cheer!
Kit started to stand but Caribo pulled him down. “It is the purging of impurities of the body and soul,” he made him understand, “to give place for the spirit of Cemie.”
‘Great,’ thought Kit.
The swallowing stick was passed onto the next in line. One by one the villagers took the stick and purged themselves.
As the purging took place, naked women served bread, first to the zemi, then to the cacique, followed by the other people. “The sacred bread is a powerful protector,” said Caribo, obviously pleased with the whole ceremony.
Following the bread, fermented mango drink was given to each member of the tribe, all sipping from the same gourd.
Finally, the swallowing stick was placed into Kit’s hand by Caribo on his left. Kit swallowed hard and then, dropped the stick down his throat.
He knew he didn’t need the stick. He needed only to think about how many other mouths that stick had been in to cause him to regurgitate.
As he pulled out the stick and vomited his last meal, or the lack thereof, the crowd quieted. A woman came and carefully wiped his mouth with the dyed and finely decorated cotton cloth from her sash; her bare chest leaning upon his shoulder. Then, taking a broken piece of the bread, she placed it gingerly into his mouth, caressing his lips with her fingers.
Kit took it all in stride, and slowly chewed as he felt hundreds of eyes upon him. As the woman finished her part in the ceremony another took her place.
This new woman brought the gourd to his lips, and tasting the fermented mango, he nearly spit it out, but forced himself to take a swallow. As he did so, she straightened up causing Kit to follow her with his eyes.
A loud cheer echoed through the village.
Caribo, having finished the ritual immediately before Kit, clapped his hand on Kit’s left shoulder. “You are now one of us!” he announced.
Then came the feast. And what a feast it was!
The Cuban diet centered on wild meat or fish, and there were lots of different fish; and much to Kit’s chagrin, they tended to eat their fish either raw or only partially cooked. However, he shortly found out that the fish wasn’t so bad… as they also ate snakes, various rodents, bats, worms, and birds. In general, any living thing they could find with the exception of humans. Ducks and turtles rounded out the protein side of the meal.
Aside from the meat, Cassava bread which they made from grated yucca seemed to be the staple of the Cubans. Additionally, this coastal tribe used maize. They also presented squash, beans, peppers, sweet potatoes, yams and peanuts.
Then there were the fruits and berries. So many different varieties; so many different flavors. Kit could barely stand by the end of it. He was stuffed.
He needn’t have worried. There was no need to get up, as next came an oral history lesson: the singing of the village epic in honor of the cacique and his ancestors. As the tale was spun, sweet water was passed around to help down the various culinary works.
The tale continued and Kit found himself enthralled with the poem. He didn’t notice the rhythmic accompaniment until later, but then at one especially gripping moment the poet paused. It was then that the maraca, a piece of hardwood, which was beaten with pebbles, really stood out as the rift in a musical sonata.
Finally, the night was over, and Kit and Caribo were lying in their respective hammocks. The excitement of the next day was nearly too much for Kit. Though he was well fed and should have been sleeping with ease, he was wide awake.
‘Maybe I should go over any last minute preparations,’ he thought. ‘Let’s see,’ he continued to himself, ‘I have to get this hammock unstrung… I’ll need to bring the cassava juice with us in a gourd…’ This was a poisonous juice that was squeezed from the cassava root that the locals used to poison the tips of their arrows. ‘…then there’s my father’s gifts of the pistols, …and the espada roperas …’—yawn— ‘…and the…’
And that was the last conscious thought Kit entertained until the following morning.
Chapter 2
The following morning was a flurry of activity. Kit and Caribo needed to get their transportation needs taken care of, followed by the stocking of provisions.
Caribo was quite proud to show Kit their new boat, having worked most of it himself.
He led Kit down to the river’s edge and there he proudly displayed his dugout canoe. It was long, sleek and well designed. Caribo had carved a depiction of how they met alongside the outer edge. Kit was duly impressed, and well he should have been; for Caribo had been working on the craft for the past few months, and it was beautiful.
It did not strike Kit as odd to travel the ocean in this craft for he had seen just what amazing work the Cubans could do in their dugouts.
The Cubans loved to travel. Typically, they could be found travelling the rivers and the sea in search of fish. Additionally they were great traders well known on various islands and the mainland.
The Cubans’ primary form of travel was in a dugout canoe. The dugout canoes varied in size from small (fitting just two members of the tribe) to large (in which seventy to eighty people could all fit the hollowed out trunk). Not only were the canoes propelled by their streamlined swath and deep paddles, they also used sails made from the woven leaves of the moriche palm or cotton.
The Cubans were very proud of their cotton and grew and produced it for use in all areas of life from ceremonial to the mundane: from ceremonial sashes to fishing nets, hammocks, and sails.
In this case Caribo had made his canoe of the Ceiba tree, commonly called the Kapok... a wood that is naturally very buoyant. He made it slightly larger than the average two-man canoe in order to leave room for their supplies.
Kit suggested and received consent from Caribo to supplement the woven moriche palm sail with a cotton sail. The combined effort really caught the wind and looked as if it would do well on a long voyage.
In addition to food and water, stored mainly in gourds, Caribo also brought indigenous weapons of his own make.
Though the Cubans themselves were a peaceful people, they did have enemies and on occasion needed to defend themselves from the Caribs; a neighboring tribe reputed to be cannibals.
Caribo understood the Caribs all too well, being half Carib himself.
His mother was Carib by birth, but she adamantly refused to participate in the ritual ceremony of victory that the legend of cannibalism originated from; a legend that the Caribs permitted neighboring tribes to believe in as it helped in their fight against their enemies.
Though they did not eat human flesh, victims of the Caribs were ritually sacrificed and bled, with the victim’s blood ceremonially drunk.
Then one day Caribo’s mother found a man that had made landfall on their island as a result of a storm, who was a trader by profession, who told her of others that lived on neighboring islands. Though he was captured and killed, the idea of escape was planted in her mind and allowed to germinat
e.
When she was finally old enough to make a getaway, she ran away, and by chance of ocean currents, ended up on the island of Cuba, where she met Caribo’s father.
There they fell in love.
The Caribs noticed that they had lost one of their own—to the Cubans, no less—and wanted her back. But Caribo’s father wasn’t going to give her up.
A mighty battle ensued between the Cubans and the Caribs and in the end, the Cubans won. However, Caribo’s father died, never knowing his new wife carried the physical representation of his love inside of her.
Many months later, the widow that had renounced the Caribs to stay with the Cubans had her son. Thus, when Caribo was born, his mother named him “Caribo” which in the native Cuban tongue means “not of Carib”, in reference to the life she left behind.
Despite the name, and the great demeanor of Caribo, his features still betrayed the high cheekbones and nose of the Caribs, features that shamed him and caused him to try to hide them through face paint.
Kit never knew the history of his friend and really wouldn’t have cared aside from the friendship that Caribo demonstrated.
Caribo packed his weapons into the vessel while Kit stored the food and water. In went the bows and arrows, along with the cassava poison for the arrow tips. He added some long cotton ropes for defense and some spears with fish hooks on the end. Since there were hardwoods on the island, he was also able to add a war club made of macana.
The hammocks were packed, along with two espadas that belonged to Kit. The last item to be packed were the two silver pistols Kit’s uncle had given him.
Most of the tribe saw them off, and it surprised Kit to find that he had grown so fond of them. However the feeling of adventure overwhelmed him; and tossing his head back, he gulped in some of the salty air while a smile of anticipation crossed his face.
The Caribbean Sea is connected with the Gulf of Mexico by the Yucatán Channel, a passage 120 miles wide between Cuba and the Peninsula itself. The ocean’s currents were in their favor as well as the wind. Caribo and Kit found that they really had little paddling to do, despite the drag that was caused by the Sargasso kelp that seemed to cover the majority of their trip.
The trip was somewhat long and for the most part uneventful as they passed their time in conversation. It was early in the afternoon of the next day when they finally saw it: land! The northernmost tip of the Yucatán! Unbeknownst to Kit, he was the first white man to reach the New World.
The decision to head south was a difficult one.
“The water seems to want us to go that way,” Caribo rightly pointed out to Kit as he indicated north.
“True,” he assented, “but my uncle asked me to search out the Golden City he had heard about,” replied Kit, “…and I would not be here had it not been for my uncle. The rumors are that the city is that direction,” continued Kit, pointing south. “Besides, we can always go north again later if we don’t find anything to the south; and the waters will help us along our way,” he concluded, his argument made.
Caribo studied the landscape. “Then we will go south, as you say,” he finally consented.
Their southern meanderings along the coast took them many days in their canoe.
Eventually they arrived at the mouth of a large river.
“What do you say?” Kit asked his friend. “Do we explore it or keep going south?”
“I am tired of this southern trip. We haven’t found anything. Let’s explore,” Caribo frankly replied.
“Agreed,” said Kit. So it was decided.
The river was huge and flowed from the west. Caribo was tired of paddling against the current and said so, but Kit wanted to press on. The current in that part of the outer fringe of the river wasn’t too strong, so Kit offered.
“Tell you what. I’ll paddle for a time and you sleep.”
Caribo didn’t need to be told twice, and without a word, and with a grunt of assent, he laid down his paddle and folding himself down into the canoe, drifted off into a deep sleep.
It was the lack of motion that woke him a few hours later. Groggily he stretched and yawned as he tried to wake up. He realized his companion wasn’t in the canoe and sitting up, searched him out along the shore. When he saw Kit his pupils widened.
More through reflex than through anything else, he swept up his bow and arrow and brought it to bear upon his friend and partner in travel. Without even consideration for the logistics of such a long range shot from such a primitive weapon, he let the arrow fly.
Chapter 3
The arrow sped steadily… ever closer to Kit’s head. Yet Kit had no idea of the projectile that was on its way.
Kit stood under a large tree with grayish bark, shiny green leaves and spikes of small greenish flowers. Above him hung green and greenish-yellow fruits that looked like small apples. The tree leaned inward a bit from the shore, an obvious natural windbreak, and had small crabs clustered around its base.
As Kit reached up to pick its fruit, the arrow narrowly missed his head and caught the fruit a half second before his hand closed on it.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion as Kit’s heart sped up and he whirled around to discover who was shooting at him.
To his surprise it was Caribo.
“Don’t move friend!” Caribo called out, nocking another arrow. “If you want to live, friend, keep your hands where I can see them and slowly walk toward me.”
Kit didn’t know why Caribo shot the arrow at him, but did as he was told. He considered his weapons and realized there was no chance to get at his pistol before Caribo could let fly another arrow. The last one was so close to him that it cut a small apple out of his outstretched hand before he could even close on it, and that was from over 150 meters! He considered his swords, and realized he had left them in the canoe. Slowly, with his hands in view, he walked toward Caribo, altogether forgetting the fruit.
As Kit approached Caribo, he kept his hands out with the palms showing. When he was about half the distance between the tree and Caribo, Caribo immediately relaxed, dropped his weapon, and even let out a hearty laugh. “You really had me scared my friend. I thought I would surely need to build a funeral pyre for you.”
Kit stopped and eyed his ‘friend’ quizzically. His obviously confused look sent a new wave of laughter through Caribo.
“Please tell me the joke,” Kit commented drily.
“Caribo regained some composure and began, “I woke to see you about to pick the fruit of the manchineel tree. It is a deadly fruit. It is a deadly tree.”
“What?” burst out Kit. “But they’re just apples.”
“No,” corrected Caribo. “They are not apples but a fruit that resembles the apple,” said Caribo in reference to the fruit his people received as gifts when the Europeans had first arrived, “…however, this fruit is very dangerous. It is a very bad fruit. It will kill you.”
Kit finally relaxed, allowing himself to take in the situation.
Caribo came near and he explained. “The manchineel tree and its parts contain strong poisons. The Caribs use the sap of this tree to poison their darts (and are known to poison the water supply of their enemies with the leaves). As a form of torture they tie victims to this tree and leave them exposed to the outside... especially the rain.”
Kit stared on incredulous.
Seeing that Kit either wasn’t understanding or didn’t believe him, Caribo continued, “Contact with the manchineel tree can cause very bad problems. Just touching the milky sap makes you feel like you are on fire. You get raised skin and red burns. But that is not all,” warned his friend, “the leaves, bark, sap and fruit of the tree are all poisonous. Eating the fruit, as you almost did,” he reminded Kit, “though the smell is good, and I am told the fruit has a very good taste, is deadly. Swallowing even a tiny amount of the fruit will cause the tongue to have bumps and the mouth and throat will close tight making brave men faint and die in agony. Even standing under the tree is bad if it
is raining. The water burns as it passes through the leaves and fruit.”
“If this is so dangerous why hasn’t it been abolished?” asked Kit.
This time Caribo looked quizzical.
“Destroyed,” Kit answered his unvoiced question.
“Ah! Cutting this tree will cause the sap to squirt. Burning this tree makes the sap to be carried in the smoke and burn the eyes and skin of people that are close to the smoke. If the sap, or smoke from the burning tree enters the eyes it will make you no longer see,” Caribo finished.
‘Blindness,’ thought Kit, ‘practically death in this environment.’ Openly he stated, “Warning taken.” Then as an afterthought he added, “Thank you, my friend, I owe you my life.”
“It was nothing, my friend. But remember it.” Caribo smiled back.
Several hours later the two of them were further along the river. As Kit trailed his fingers in the water, he commented to Caribo, “I just saw something I don’t believe I saw.”
“What was it?” asked Caribo.
“Well, I can only describe it as a living greenish-gray log with eyes on top of its head!”
“Be wary of this animal, Kit. My people know its smaller cousin and he will grab you with his many teeth and drag you underwater, never to be seen again.”
“A lovely place, this river,” replied Kit, sarcastically, as he pulled his fingers out of the water. They stayed quite vigilant after that.
As they followed the river, they eventually came to a large lake. More than 100 miles long and averaging 45 miles wide, its western border lay only 12 miles from the Pacific Ocean.
The size of the lake was amazing in itself, but Kit and Caribo were even more amazed to see sharks circling the dugout canoe. Caribo dropped his hand into the water and cupped out a handful. Tasting it his face lighted up. “This water is fresh, not salt,” he said with a surprised look to Kit.
“Hmmm. Freshwater sharks…” Before Kit could finish what he was about to say, a strange creature leapt out of the water, with a shark in close pursuit. The fish had the appearance of a saw in front, as if it were used to cut down large trees. “…and a saw-head fish. The wonders of this world never cease to surprise me!”
