The myths and traditions of the Haitians have fortunately been preserved, though not in so perfect a form as might be wished. When Bartholomew Columbus left Rome for the Indies, he took with him a lay brother of the order of the Hermits of St. Jerome, Ramon Pane by name, a Catalan by birth, a worthy but credulous and ignorant man.[45] On reaching Haiti brother Pane was first sent among the natives of the small province called Macorix de abajo, which had a language peculiar to itself, but he was subsequently transferred to the province of Guarinoex on the southeastern part of the island where the lengua universal prevailed. He remained there two years, and at the request of Columbus collected and wrote down the legends and beliefs of the natives.
He is not a model authority. In the first place, being a Catalan he did not write Spanish correctly; he was very imperfectly acquainted with the native tongue; he wrote hastily, and had not enough paper to write in full; he is not sure that he commences their legends at the right end. Moreover his manuscript is lost, and the only means we have of knowing anything about it is by a very incorrectly printed Italian version, printed in 1571, and two early synopses, one in Latin in the Decades of Peter Martyr, the other in Italian, by Messer Zuane de Strozi of Ferrara, which has been quite recently published for the first time.[46] By comparing these we can arrive at the meaning of Brother Pane with considerable accuracy.
His work contains fragments of two distinct cycles of legends, the one describing the history of the gods, the other the history of the human race.
Earliest of creatures was the woman, Atabéira or Ataves, who also bore the other names Mamóna, Guacarapíta, Iiélla, and Guimazóa. Her son was the supreme ruler of all things, and chiefest of divinities. His names were Yocaúna, Guamaónocon, and Yocahu-vaguaniao-vocoti. He had a brother called Guaca, and a son Iaiael. The latter rebelled against his father, and was exiled for four mouths and then killed. The legend goes on to relate that his bones were placed in a calabash and hung up in his father’s house. Here they changed into fishes, and the calabash filled with water. One day four brothers passed that way, who had all been born at one time, and whose mother, Itaba tahuana, had died in bringing them into the world. Seeing the calabash filled with fish the oldest of the four, Caracaracol, the Scabby, lifted it down, and all commenced to eat. While thus occupied, Yocaúna suddenly made his appearance, which so terrified the brothers that they dropped the gourd and broke it into pieces. From it ran all the waters of the world, and formed the oceans, lakes, and rivers as they now are.
At this time there were men but no women, and the men did not dare to venture into the sunlight. Once, as they were out in the rain, they perceived four creatures, swift as eagles and slippery as eels. The men called to their aid Caracaracol and his brothers, who caught these creatures and transformed them into women. In time, these became the mothers of mankind.
The earliest natives of Haiti came under the leadership of the hero-god, Vaguoniona, a name applied by Las Casas to Yocahu, from an island to the south called in the legend Matininó, which all the authors identify, I know not why, with Martinique. They landed first on the banks of the river Bahoboni in the western part of Haiti, and there erected the first house, called Camotéia. This was ever after preserved and regarded with respectful veneration.
Such, in brief, were their national myths. Conspicuously marked in them we note the sacred number four, the four brothers typifying the cardinal points, whose mother, the Dawn, dies in giving them birth, just as in the Algonkin myths. These brothers aid the men in their struggles for life, and bring to them the four women, the rain-bringing winds. Here, too, the first of existences is the woman, whose son is at once highest of divinities and the guide and instructor of their nation. These peculiarities I have elsewhere shown to be general throughout the religions of America.[47]
The myth of the thunder storm also appears among them in its triplicate nature so common to the American mind. God of the storm was Guabancex, whose statue was made of stones. When angry he sent before him as messenger, Guatauva, to gather the winds, and accompanied by Coatrischie, who collected the rain-clouds in the valleys of the mountains, he swept down upon the plain, surrounded by the awful paraphernalia of the thunder storm.[48]
Let us place side by side with these ancient myths the national legend of the Arawacks.[49] They tell of a supreme spiritual being Yauwahu or Yauhahu. Pain and sickness are the invisible shafts he shoots at men, yauhahu simaira the arrows of Yauhahu, and he it is whom the priests invoke in their incantations. Once upon a time, men lived without any means to propitiate this unseen divinity; they knew not how to ward off his anger or conciliate him. At that time the Arawacks did not live in Guiana, but in an island to the north. One day a man named Arawanili walked by the waters grieving over the ignorance and suffering of his nation. Suddenly the spirit of the waters, the woman Orehu, rose from the waves and addressed him. She taught him the mysteries of semeci, the sorcery which pleases and controls Yauhahu, and presented him with the maraka, the holy calabash containing white pebbles which they rattle during their exorcisms, and the sound of which summons the beings of the unseen world. Arawanili faithfully instructed his people in all that Orehu had said, and thus rescued them from their wretchedness. When after a life of wisdom and good deeds the hour of his departure came, he “did not die, but went up.”
Orehu accompanied the Arawacks when they moved to the main, and still dwells in a treeless, desolate spot, on the banks of the Pomeroon. The negroes of the colony have learned of her, and call her in their broken English, the “watra-mamma,” the water-mother.