Had it not been for the Caribs the Antilleans would have led a placid existence. Those warlike and predacious Indians would not keep the peace, nor would they allow other people to do so. Though they had their capital in Guadaloupe, they extended their military enterprises in every direction, and Cuba, Porto Rico, Hayti, Jamaica, and the lesser islands suffered from their assaults. They were trained to fight from childhood, and attained to great proficiency in arms. Being active voyagers, they had some knowledge of astronomy. When operating in the waters of a hostile country it was their custom to mask their boats with palm leaves, for in this guise they stole upon the enemy the easier. Like the red men of our plains, they painted their faces, and, indeed, they retained many of the practices common to our tribes. In their traditions they came from the North, like other strong races, their old home being among the Alleghanies, and they conquered their way from Florida to Brazil. Their tribe, they say, grew up from stones that their remote ancestors had sowed in the soil. They buried their dead in a sitting posture that they might be ready to leap up when the spirit came for them, and they faced the sunrise that they might see the day of resurrection the quicker.
In their mythology the first men came down from heaven on clouds to purify the world and make it as clean as the moon; but, while they were looking about at this untidy planet, the clouds floated back and they were left in a sorry plight, for they had brought no provisions with them. Their hunger having sharpened so as to become unbearable, they scraped up clay and baked it to make it less tough and more eatable, and were grieved when it came out of the fire as hard as stone. Then the birds and beasts had pity on them, and led them to the groves and fields where they could find fruit, nuts, maize, and yams. One tree was of such size that they chopped it with stone axes for ten months before it fell, and they ate all of it. Beneath its roots, in a cave, lived the Water Mother, who, possibly because she was angered by the destruction of the tree, released a flood that would have covered the earth had not a rock fallen into the throat of the cavern and stopped the flow. This rock had life and speech. It warned the new race that when its founders should grow old they were to expect a deluge. Until that appeared they should find in the atone their best adviser and protector, and if they would pray to it, giving a deaf ear to the wood-devils, it would cure them of illness, gray hair, and age. After a time came the monkey out of the woods, beguiling and wheedling, while at every chance, with a monkey’s love of mischief, he worked at the stone, trying to dislodge it from the mouth of the cave. At last he succeeded, and out poured the flood. An old woman ran to a palm that touched the sky with its vast leaves, and climbed with feverish haste, but fright and fatigue brought her to a stop when half-way up, and she hardened to stone, thus blocking the way to all behind her, who, when they touched her, became stone likewise. Some scrambled down, splashed through the rising waters, and reached another palm tree, which they climbed to its top, and so saved their lives.
As the waters were subsiding, Amalwaka came sailing across the ocean from the east, ascended the Orinoco, carved the figures found near the head of that river, without leaving his canoe, smoothed the rugged hills and invented the tides, so that men might go from place to place on the current, but, being unable to make the Orinoco flow up stream, he sailed away again into the arch of the rising sun, guided at night by the constant star and by the tapir and Serikoai,—which is another story, told by the Arawaks, to this effect: The bride of Serikoai was seduced by the tapir god, who had first aroused her curiosity and interest by his attentions, and had finally won her love by promising to put off his swinish shape and reveal himself as a finer being than her husband. If only she would follow him to the edge of the earth, where the sky comes down, she would see that he was a god. The poor husband was crippled by the wife, that he might not follow, for she chopped off his leg as he descended an avocado pear-tree, in which he had been gathering fruit for her. He nearly bled to death, but a wandering spirit revived him and called his mother, who healed the wound with gums and helped to make a wooden leg, on which he stumped over the earth in search of his runaway wife. It is known that the aborigines performed trepanning with skill, but this is probably the earliest appearance in an American legend of a wooden leg. Though he found no foot-prints, it was easy to trace the couple, because avocados were springing up from seeds that the woman spat out as she journeyed on. At the edge of the earth he caught the tapir and killed him; yet the creature’s shadow arose from the body and kept on its flight with the wife. Straightforth she leaped into the blue vast, and there she hangs, only we call her the Pleiades. The brute is the Hyades. He glares and winks with his red eye: Aldebaran. The husband is Orion, who follows the others through the sky.
The Caribs were a handsome people, and one tradition narrates the madness that afflicted a governor of Antigua, because of his jealousy of a native chief. In 1640 this dusky Paris stole the English woman and her child, and carried them to Dominica. The governor pursued. Arrived where Roseau now stands, he learned that a captive woman and her child had been landed there, and had been taken to some stronghold in the forest. Drops of blood, pricked out by cactus thorns on the march, formed a trail which he was able to follow, and believing that they betokened murder, he killed all the Caribs he encountered. His wife and boy were safe, however, except for their bleeding feet, and he found them in the otherwise deserted cabin of the chief and took them back to Antigua. The affair preyed on his mind. He began to doubt his wife, thinking she had accompanied the savage willingly, and his jealousy so increased that his friends had to secrete her, to save her from his wrath. He probably recovered his senses in time.
The Spaniards chased the Caribs out of several of the islands. That of Grenada terminates on the north in a tall cliff called Le Morne des Sauteurs, over which the white men compelled the flying Indians to leap to their death. Not one Carib was left alive on this island.
Secret Enemies in the Hills
The brutalities of the Spaniards who first occupied the West Indies would seem incredible if so many of them had not continued to our own day. It is estimated that half of the natives of Porto Rico were killed, and within sixty or seventy years after the seizure of Cuba its populace of three hundred thousand had been destroyed or removed by war, murder, slavery, hunting with blood-hounds, imported vices and diseases, flight and forced emigration. These natives are said to have been a peaceful and happy race, practised in the simpler arts, observing the moralities better than their oppressors, holding a faith in one god—a god of goodness, not of hate—and in the immortality of the soul, and abstaining from useless forms and ceremonies. They held that when the soul had left the body it went into the woods and hills or abode in caves, and took its food and drink as in the flesh. When a man calls out in a solitary place among the mountains and an answering voice comes back, it is not an echo, but a wandering soul that speaks.
Even the relics of these folk—the Cubans or Siboneyes—have vanished, save in the instance of the temple remains near Cobre, and an occasional caney or mound of the dead, a truncated cone of earth and broken stones. Some fossil skeletons found in caves, and of an alleged age of fifty thousand years, denote an ancient race of large, strong people. There are other skeletons of Siboneyes, Chinese, and negroes in the caves,—victims of herding, slavery, fever, cruelty, and suicide. There is little doubt that of the aboriginal stock not a man remains. Yet there are stories of strange people who were seen by hunters and explorers among the mountains, or who peered out of the jungle at the villagers and planters and were gone again, without track or sound,—people with swarthy faces, sinewy forms, long black hair, decorations of coral shells and feathers, and bracelets, armlets, and anklets of gold. Almost from the first, the conduct of the Spaniard toward his enemies and dependents was such as to earn for him a permanent hate; so, when his cruelty had been practised, and the futility of opposing arms against his heavy weapons and his coat of steel had been proved, it was natural that those who escaped him should keep as far from reach as possible, and it is idle to suppose that he traversed the seven hundred and thirty miles of Cuba’s length, whipping every forest and climbing every mountain, for no more than the pleasure of killing. Negro slavery was introduced into the New World before its existence had been known in Spain for a century, and although the black men have usually been tractable, the severities of their masters led to many revolts and to the organization of bands for retaliation. These bands often degenerated, and during this century the Spanish Antilles have been troubled by companies of beggars and outlaws, mostly blacks and half-breeds, who have robbed and murdered in the dark, run off stock from the farms, burned houses and shops, and because of their secret and cowardly methods have been feared as much as the Spaniards were hated.
The Nañigos originally formed a secret order of negroes, banded for protection against unkind slave-owners and overseers, but feeling their power, and being swayed by passion and superstition, they constituted, after a time, a body correspondent to the voodoos, or wizards, of our Gulf States. With hideous incantations, with mad dances, with obscene songs, with the slaughter of animals, with oaths on an altar and crucifix, they invoked illness, ruin, and death on their enemies. In time they gained accessions to their fraternity from Spanish residents,—thieves, vagrants, deserters from the army, the half-witted and wrong-hearted outcasts from the towns,—and the fantastic ceremonies of the jungle came to mean something more to the purpose of mischief, for the newer Nañigos had more skill and courage than the slaves, and were familiar with more sins. To enter this order it was required of the candidate that he steal a cock, kill it, and drink the warm blood. A darker tale is that they were required to drink human blood. In Havana this part of the initiation was performed on the Campo Marti. The man’s right nostril was pierced, and a skull and crossbones branded on his chest. It was then expected of him that within fifteen days he would kill an official or a policeman, a white, black, or yellow marble, drawn by chance from a globe, deciding whether he was to slay a white man, negro, or mulatto. When he had, by this crime, attained to full membership, a little shield was given to him which he might wear beneath his coat, and which was decorated with the device of a skull and bones. For every murder he committed a red stitch was put in at the edge of the skull. Once a month, in the dark of the moon, the Nañigos paraded the streets of the towns, their naked forms painted fantastically, their faces ghastly with flour, tramping and leaping to the thud of drums and clash of cymbals, yelling defiance to the military, brandishing knives and firing pistols. It was a kind of thing that in an American city could have happened for one consecutive time, but no more. In Havana the Spaniards were terrorized. The police refused to make arrests, lest they should fall victims to the outlaws. One judge who refused to liberate an assassin was slain in his own house by his servant.