A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  The Caribs attached great importance to personal appearance. They scarred their cheeks with deep incisions which they painted black. They inscribed black and white circles round their eyes. They were beardless, removing all superfluous hair. In the perforated dividing cartilage of their nostrils they inserted a fishbone or piece of tortoiseshell. The teeth of their dead enemies provided bangles for their arms and ankles; shinbones supplied them with arrowheads. Their children were taught the use of the bow and arrow by having their food suspended out of reach from trees and having to go hungry till they could shoot it down. When a male child was born, he was sprinkled with drops of his father’s blood. The father suffered considerably during the ceremony by which this blood was produced, but he submitted stoically, believing that the courage he displayed would be transmitted to his son. A young man suffered an extremely painful initiation ceremony before he was admitted to the rights of manhood. He was gashed with the saw-like leaves of the pineapple; it was called ‘being passed by the lances’. A man who wished to lead his fellows into battle had to endure even more excruciating tests, suffocation being one of them. The courageous and successful warrior was highly honoured. He could change his name, taking that of the most formidable enemy who had fallen by his hand. His countrymen offered for his choice the most beautiful of their daughters. Polygamy existed as a status symbol. Wives took their turn by the month in polygamous households. Pregnant wives did not have marital relations with their husbands. Marital fidelity was axiomatic. According to Rochefort, there was no punishment for adultery because the crime was unknown. When the white man introduced adultery, the injured husband became his own avenger. Men could desert wives, but wives could not desert their husbands.

  In times of peace there was no exercise of authority, no ruled or rulers. The Caribs set great store by independence. There was no division of land, everyone cultivating as much land as he needed. Theft was considered a great crime, and was rarely committed. There were no judges; there was no law; private property did not exist. They understood exchange, but not the value of articles. The French at one time started a war with them, because they took a hammock in exchange for pork. The men ate their meals in common, the women feeding apart. They were formal in their social observances. They showed great hospitality to strangers, and had their own ways of showing a stranger how fully he might partake of that hospitality. If the cassava bread was unfolded he could eat as much as he liked, but if it was folded he was expected to leave some. When Caribs met each other after a separation, they embraced, their heads on each other’s shoulders, one knee on the ground. They had three different languages – one for women among themselves, one for general use, and a third which was exclusively masculine and was employed only when the men were engaged in serious discussions. The men learned the women’s language but never deigned to use it. Labat believed that the women’s language was Arawak in origin, the female prisoners after their menfolk had been slaughtered continuing to talk among themselves in their familiar tongue. But this is guesswork. Labat’s guesses were not always accurate. He believed, for instance, that the Caribs originally came from Florida. It is now generally held that they came from South America. Labat also doubted if they were cannibals. He believed that they cooked the limbs of their dead enemies so that they could preserve them as trophies. On this point no one is in agreement with him.

  Fighting was their passion. ‘Frown on a Carib and you must fight him,’ so the legend ran. ‘Fight him and you must kill him or be killed.’ They brought oystershells from South America, which they crushed into a powder for the carvings on their clubs. Their clubs were so heavy that they sank in water. They never needed to force volunteers to battle. When the men set out to battle they took one woman with them, to cook for them, paint them and comb their hair. In Guadeloupe, when an early governor saw the Caribs send away their women he guessed that they were preparing to attack. They rarely attacked at night, for fear that they would kill each other. They waited till dawn, when they delivered themselves of a grisly shriek before they charged. They had few relaxations when they were not fighting, beyond wrestling in their own style, without body holds, grasping each other by the arm above the elbow and striving to throw the other by means of a jolt. They were idle. They are reported to have had melancholy dispositions.

  They were punctilious about what they ate. They made stews out of tomalley; crabs were their favourite delicacy; certain foods, such as eels, turtles, Mexican hogs and sea cows, they avoided as unclean. They did not eat poultry or cattle. They disliked fat and made their elderly male prisoners starve before they killed them. At feasts they would rub their bodies with gum from the trees and fix feathers into it. They had a kind of beer which they brewed from trees, and they fermented fruit juice. Like the Romans, they forced themselves to vomit so that they could consume more. Calabashes served as crockery. They had their gardens in the hills, where they fished for tadpoles, crayfish and small snails. Manioc was their staple diet. They cooked in manioc water. They possessed the art of baking clay, and the ruins of their kilns were found in Barbados during the seventeenth century. When they drew their bows they had three arrows in their fingers. The Arawaks did not at first believe a Spaniard could die. A half-breed, to prove that they were mortal, drowned one. But not until he began to putrefy did the Arawaks believe that he was dead. The Caribs had no such illusions.

  Though they believed in an after-life, they were filled with remorse at death. The corpse was painted red, with the hair carefully arranged; it was then wrapped in a cotton hammock; bread and wine were buried with it, and a fire was set round the grave. At the end of a year, the body was uncovered and earth was thrown upon it and trampled down. The mourners drank for twenty-four hours.

  Labat said that they were naked but modest, hiding the ‘shameful parts’, but not all the witnesses are agreed on this. Bryan Edwards notes that clothing was not considered necessary to personal comfort in a climate where there was no winter, adding that women on reaching the age of puberty wore a half boot made of cotton, a privilege that was denied to women who had been captured in war. They had ornaments but that was all. To them, hair was the greatest beauty, and they mocked bald men. They had as much culture as was necessary for their way of life. Christopher Columbus’ men saw a canoe for the first time when they landed in Hispaniola, and the French learned the art of the canoe in Guadeloupe. The Caribs could count as far as they needed, up to five but no further. To express ten they would say, ‘All the fingers’. To express twenty, ‘All the fingers and all the toes’. They had four colours – yellow, red, black and white. They had no organized religion. Their priests were witch doctors. They knew the right remedy for their own complaints. When Drake on his last voyage put into Dominica, fever was raging in his ships; three hundred men had died, but the Caribs provided a cure. There are still doubts of the origin of syphilis, which many maintain was brought back to Europe after Columbus’ first voyage; there is evidence that the Caribs had a cure, for yaws, a form of gonorrhea, out of sandalwood.

  In only one island today can you find any survival of the Caribs. On the windward coast of Dominica there is a Carib reservation. Their faces have a Mongolian cast, their black hair is straight, their lips are soft and full, their cheeks less brown than yellow.

  They have abandoned their old language. Nearly all of them are Roman Catholics. They enjoy cricket. Once they built a special kind of cabin, with a second floor under the roof, on which they slept, but they have now adopted the conventional style. They are very pacific. The corporal in charge of the local police post has little trouble with them. They enjoy their rum as much as the next man does, but they keep their squabbles to themselves. When a Carib feels the need to Met off steam’, he calls a friend across and exchanges a couple of punches with him, without rancour or ill temper. That, and no more than that, and he feels a great deal better.

  They still make canoes. I saw one under construction. Long and narrow, scooped from a single trunk, it was
being dried over a fire, with the inside filled with boulders to prevent the wood from shrinking. I also saw a local craftsman at work on one of the baskets that are in universal use throughout the island. They are made in two layers, with large leaves arranged between to make them waterproof. The cover is decorated by the weaving of different-coloured fibres. Their only disadvantage to the northerner is the weakness of the handle, but this is no disadvantage to the islander, who carries his luggage on his head. I tried to talk to the man who made it, but he spoke only the local patois. I was only a little more successful with the councillor to whom the corporal introduced me. A short, dapper little man with a drooping black moustache, he looked like a Maupassant character out of the original Albin Michel edition. He spoke some English, and I could understand what he said to me, but his vocabulary was small and I could not be sure that he was understanding what I said. He was a courtly, gracious man who appeared to be in agreement with me. His replies, however, rarely bore much relation to my original enquiries.

  It was difficult to realize that the ancestors of this quiet man were cannibals, but it is equally difficult to reconstruct their life from the fragmentary and prejudiced accounts that have come to us from those who arrived in their territory with the intention of enslaving them. ‘Our knowledge of them,’ wrote Bryan Edwards, ‘is limited within a narrow circle. Of a people engaged in perpetual warfare, hunted from island to island by revenge and rapacity, few opportunities could have offered, even to those who might have been qualified for such researches, of investigating the natural dispositions and habitual customs with minuteness and precision. Neither indeed could a just estimate have been formed of their national character from the manners of such of them as were at length subjugated to the European yoke; for they lost together with their freedom many of their original characteristics, and at last even the desire of acting from the impulse of their own minds.’

  Rochefort wrote: ‘We discern a wonderful change in the dispositions and habits of the Caribs. In some respects we have enlightened, in others, to our shame be it spoken, we have corrupted them. An old Carib once addressed one of our planters on this subject. “Our people,” he complained, “are become almost as bad as yours. We are so much altered since you came among us that we hardly know ourselves, and we think it is owing to so melancholy a change that hurricanes are more frequent than they were formerly. It is the evil spirit who has done all this; he has taken our best lands from us and given us up to the dominion of the Christians.’’’

  Since there were no precious metals in the Lesser Antilles, the Spaniards had no inducement to undertake the subjugation of this warlike race, but there were others, French, English, Dutch, to whom the possibilities of the Caribbean were an irresistible magnet and who were not to be so easily deterred.

  The first settlements took place between 1625 and 1635. The French were the first in the field, in colonization as in piracy, and they had the pick of the islands – Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, Grenada; and even in those islands that have changed their allegiance since, the French influence remains. Dominica and St Lucia are still predominantly Catholic, and the bush peasants speak a patois that contains more French than English words. The Dutch and English took the islands which the French did not want. The Dutch got Curaçao, which was excellently situated for trade with the northern coast of South America; they also had Saba and St Eustatius. England took Antigua, Montserrat and Barbados, a flat dry island which they found uninhabited except by some pigs which had been left there by the Portuguese. Two islands were in dispute; St Martin between the French and Dutch, St Kitts between the French and English. St Kitts, after many battles, passed eventually into British hands, but St Martin has continued to be divided. At a certain point in its history it was decided to send a Frenchman and a Dutchman walking round the island in opposite directions: the point at which they met should mark the boundary between the two nationalities.

  The second quarter of the seventeenth century was a period of experiment and establishment. England, France and Holland were actively concerned with their home affairs; they saw colonial problems in terms of the national interest. They did not know how important the West Indies were to prove. The imperial pattern of colonization had not yet grown clear to them. Men of a classical education, they were aware of the nature of the Pax Romana and of the system of tributary tribes and nations that had maintained the vast edifice of its administration, but they did not yet see themselves as inheritors of that system.

  The colonization of the Caribbean was at this time a haphazard day-today affair; the colonists were not even certain of their tenure. Spain still felt it had a right to all territory west of the line. She raided St Kitts, for instance, in the early days of its colonization by the French and British, massacred a large number of the colonists, and drove others to seek shelter in Antigua and Montserrat, but she established no settlement to take their place, and the refugees returned. The same thing happened later in Hispaniola, but it soon became apparent that Spain would not bother to attack ports that could defend themselves. She had enough concerns of her own. Well-defended colonies were immune except during the periods when their mother countries were at war, but this was not so serious a problem, since European countries tended to confine their campaigns to their own frontiers.

  During the sixteenth century the waters ‘beyond the lines’ - south of Cancer, west of the meridian of the Azores – had always been independent of legislation. Monarchs had officially disowned their subjects, although they had given them their tacit approval and even invested money in their enterprises. There had been always a state of war in the Caribbean. It was not till the eighteenth century that the islands became so rich and prosperous as to be determinant factors in European foreign policy. They were a sideshow in the early years of the seventeenth century, minor investments that might prove valuable one day. In the meantime, it was useful to own a place where rebel prisoners could be sent and loyal subjects could be rewarded with grants of land.

  The French were the first to undertake serious colonization, first with the Company of St Christophe, which was changed by Richelieu to the Company of the Islands of Amerique, and which undertook the colonization not only of Martinique but also of Guadeloupe, which the Spaniards had finally decided to relinquish because of the fierceness of the Caribs. The company promised to do its best to convert the heathen, and undertook to introduce four thousand white colonists of mixed sexes. The King would appoint the governors. The company was also authorized to colonize any island unoccupied by a Christian prince. That was in 1635; it was not for thirty years that an organized regulation of colonial life and trade was undertaken. Colbert was then Louis XIV’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and history has confirmed his claim to be reckoned one of the great economists. He made mistakes, one of his chief being to regard all men as his enemies, and in consequence to consider that the strength of a country could be assessed by the poverty of its neighbours. He did not envisage the possibility of a universal prosperity, with countries exchanging their own goods. ‘We have no need of anybody and our neighbours have need of us’ – that was his maxim. One of the most important functions of peace was in his eyes the establishment of trade. He was anxious to create new industries. France must not seek from foreigners the goods which were essential to her existence. He revived the cloth trade, bringing over a Dutch expert to Abbeville. At the Gobelins in Paris, under the direction of Lebrun, and at Beauvais, he ordered the creation of tapestries superior to the Flemish ones. He brought Venetian workers for the glass factories of St Gobain and Tourlaville. He forbade the importation of the Venetian point with which the great lords and ladies trimmed their dresses; lace was to be made all over France. The manufacture of soap, tin, arms and silk provided work for thousands who had been on the edge of starvation. The Habsburgs had impoverished Spain by destroying local industries. Colbert did not repeat their mistake. The Habsburgs had restricted local trade by the sales tax. Colbert suppressed a
number of inland duties. Isabella had realized the necessity of establishing local trade, but her successors had followed a different practice. Isabella recognized that the roads were so bad because mules were so common, and she made it a criminal offence to ride a mule. But her successors had allowed her law to pass into desuetude. Colbert put the roads in order.