There is a superficial resemblance between the connexions of the northern and southern land bodies in the Old World and in the New—the Isthmus of Suez having its counterpart in Panama; the peninsulas and large islands of southern Europe corresponding to Florida, Yucatan, and the Greater Antilles; and the break at Gibraltar suggesting the uncertain bridge of the Lesser Antilles. But the resemblance is merely superficial. The Mediterranean served far more as a unifier than as a divider of cultures and civilizations in antiquity; all its shores were in a sense a single land even before Rome united them politically. The Caribbean, on the other hand, was a true obstacle to the primitive intercourse of the western continents, having its proper Old World analogue in the Sahara Desert rather than in the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, we can carry this truer analogy a step further, pointing out that just as Old World culture went southward, from Egypt into Ethiopia, by way of the comparatively secure route of the Nile, so New World civilization found its securest path by way of the solid land of the Isthmus, while the islets of the Lesser Antilles and the isle-like oases of the Sahara were alike unfriendly to profoundly influential intercourse.
In one striking particular the analogies of the Old World are reversed in the New: at least in recent periods, the migration of native races and culture has been from the south to the north. This is the more extraordinary in view of the land predominance which, as has been indicated, belongs to the north. The Isthmus was held by, and is now representative of, the Chibchan stock, extending far south into Ecuador; while the Antilles, at the time of the discovery, were almost entirely possessed by tribes of two great South American stocks, Arawakan and Carib. In Cuba, and probably in the Bahamas, there were remnants of more ancient peoples—timid and crude folk, whose kindred seem to have been the makers of the shell-mounds of Florida, and whose provenience was doubtless the northern continent; but neither the race nor the affinities of these vanished peoples is certainly known; even in pre-Columbian times they were succumbing to the war-like Calusa of southern Florida and to the still more dangerous Arawakan tribes from the south.
Of the two powerful races from the south, the first comers were doubtless the Taïno[7] (as the Antillean Arawak are named), whom the Spaniards found in possession of most of Cuba and of the other greater islands, Porto Rico alone showing a strong Carib element along with the Arawak. The Lesser Antilles, bordering the sea which was named for their race, was inhabited by Carib tribes, whose language comprised a man-tongue and a woman-tongue, the latter containing many Arawak words—a fact which has led to the interesting (though uncertain) inference that the first Carib invaders slew all the warriors of their Arawak predecessors, taking the women for their own wives. Only when they came to Porto Rico, the first of the Greater Antilles in their route, were they partially stopped by the mass and strength of the more highly developed Taïno peoples; some, indeed, obtained a foothold here, while beyond, in Hispaniola, one of the five caciques[8] dividing the power of the island was reputed a Carib, and in Cuba itself have been found bones believed to be those of Carib marauders. The typical culture of the Antilles, that of the Arawakan Taïno, was scarcely less aggressive than the Carib. Arawaks gained a foothold in Florida, and their influence, in trade at least, seems to have extended far into Muskhogean territories to the north, while it may have affected Yucatan and Honduras to the west. Nor was it meanly savage in type. The Antilles furnish every incentive of climate, food supply, rich resources, and easy communication for development of civilization; and at the time of the discovery of the Taïno peoples, they were already advanced in the arts of agriculture, pottery-making, weaving, and stone-working, combined with some knowledge of metals. Furthermore, they had developed their social organization to such an extent that their chiefs, or caciques, with power in some cases hereditary, were the heads of veritable nations—all of Jamaica was under one ruler, Hispaniola had five, while the Ciboney of Cuba and the Borinqueño of Porto Rico were powerful peoples. The Spanish conquerors of the islands succeeded early in virtually annihilating these nations, but their handiwork and the traditions which they have left still command respect.
II. THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS[9]
Even before Columbus's day the mythical Island of Antilia was marked on the maps out in the Atlantic west; and when the archipelago which Columbus first discovered came to be known as an archipelago, the name, in the plural form Antilles, was not unnaturally applied to it. Probably, too, it was with more than the glamour of discovery—enchanting as that must have been—that Columbus first looked upon the new-found lands. From time immemorial European imagination had been haunted by legends of Isles of the Gods, Isles of the Happy Dead—Fortunate Isles, in some weird sense, lying far out in the enchanted seas; and it is no marvel if Columbus should have felt himself the finder of this blessed realm. In one of his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella he wrote: "This country excels all others as far as the day surpasses the night in splendour; the natives love their neighbours as themselves; their conversation is the sweetest imaginable; their faces always smiling; and so gentle and so affectionate are they that I swear to your highness there is not a better people in the world."
Something of the same idealization, coupled with a happy ignorance, underlay, no doubt, the statement which Columbus makes in his letters to Ferdinand's officials, Gabriel Sanchez and Luis de Santangel, describing his first voyage: "They are not acquainted with any kind of worship and are not idolaters, but believe that all power and, indeed, all good things are in heaven." Columbus adds that the natives believed him and his vessels and his crews to be descended from heaven, and the Indians whom he took with him from his first landing, to serve as interpreters, cried out to the others, "Come, come, and see the people from heaven!" This same simplicity was cruelly exploited by the Spaniards of later date, for after the mines of Hispaniola were opened, and the native labour of the island was exhausted, the Bahamas were nearly emptied of inhabitants by the ruse that the Spaniards would convey them to the shores where dwelt their departed relatives and friends. Belief in heaven-spirits and belief in living souls of their dead were surely deep-seated in these first-met of New World peoples.
The earliest encounters were probably with tribes of the Taïno race, for the Indians taken from San Salvador were readily understood in the Greater Antilles; and it was with this race that Columbus had to do on his initial voyage. Yet even then he was learning of other peoples. He was told that in the western part of Cuba ("Juana" was the name he gave to the island) there was a province whose inhabitants were born with tails—a form of derogation of inferior peoples familiar in many parts of the world—and the story very likely designated remnants of the autochthones of the islands. Again, as he explored eastward, he began to hear of the Carib cannibals, with whom he became acquainted on later voyages. "These are the men," he reports, "who form unions with certain women who dwell alone in the island of Matenino, which lies next to Española on the side toward India; these latter employ themselves in no labour suitable to their own sex, for they use bows and javelins as I have already described their paramours as doing, and for defensive armour they have plates of brass, of which metal they possess great abundance." Thus we have the beginning of that legend of Amazons[10] in the New World which not only occupied the fancies of explorers and historiographers for many decades, but eventually, as the domain of these mythical women was pushed farther and farther into the beyond, gave its name to the great river which drains what was then the mysterious heart of the southern continent. Possibly the source of the tale lay in a difference of Taïno and Carib customs, for among the latter the women, as the Spaniards speedily discovered, were quick with bow and spear; possibly it lay in the fact, already noted, that the Caribs, dispatching the men of a conquered tribe, formed unions with their women, who spoke a language differing from that of their conquerors.
Other legends of the Old World, besides that of Amazonian warriors, gained a footing in the New, mingling, not infrequently, with similar native tales. The "Septe Cidade" of the Island of Antilia had been founded, according to Portuguese tradition, by the Archbishop of Oporto and six bishops, fleeing from the Moors in the eighth century; and it was these cities, identified by the Spaniards with the seven caves whence the Aztecs traced their race, that led Cabeza de Vaca onward in his search for the Seven Cities of Cibola and resulted in the discovery of the Pueblos in New Mexico. Similarly, Ponce de León partly brought and partly found the story of the Fountain of Youth,[11] or the life-renewing Jordan, in search of which he went into Florida. The story is narrated in the "Memoir on Florida" of Hernando d'Escalente Fontaneda, who says that the Indians of Cuba and the other isles told lies of this mythical river; but that the story was not merely invented as a gratification of the Spaniards' thirst for marvels is suggested by Fontaneda's further statement that long before his time a great number of Indians from Cuba had come into Florida in search of this same wonder—a possible explanation of the Arawakan colony on the Florida coast.
But it was chiefly with tales of gold that the Spaniards' ears were pleasured. Columbus, writing to de Santangel, promised his sovereigns not only spices and dyes and Brazil-wood from their new realm, fruits and cotton and slaves, but "gold as much as they need"; and this promise was all too well founded for the good of either Spaniard or native, since the spoil of western gold, more than aught else, resulted in the wars which eventually impoverished Spain; and thirst for sudden wealth was the chief cause of the early extermination of the native peoples of the Antilles. Las Casas, bitter and full of pity, gives us the contrasting pictures. The first is of the cacique Hatuey,[12] fled from Haiti to Cuba to escape the Spaniards and there assembling his people before a chest of gold: "Behold," he said, "the god of the Spaniards! Let us do to him, if it seem good to you, areitos [solemn dances], that thus doing we shall please him, and he will command the Spaniards that they do us no harm." The other is the image of the Spanish tyrant, enslaving the Indians in mines "to the end that he might make gold of the bodies and souls of those for whom Jesus Christ suffered death."