[3] The Ewaipanomas, to whom Othello, in his address to the fair Desdemona, refers in the following passage:—
“... the cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.”
Captain Keymis, who served under Raleigh, tells us, as we read in Hakluyt, of people “who have eminent heads like dogs, and live all the day-time in the sea, and they speak the Carib language.” [↑]
[4] John Hagthorpe, a contemporary of Raleigh, writes about the matter as follows: “Sir Walter Rawley knewe very well when he attempted his Guayana businesse, who err’d in nothing so much,—if a free man may speak freely,—as in too much confidence in the relations of the countrie: For who knowes not the policy and cunning of the fat Fryers, which is to stirre up and animate the Souldiers and Laytie to the search and inquisition of new Countries, by devising tales and coments in their Cloysters where they live at ease, that when others have taken payne to bringe in the harvest, they may feed upon the best and fattest of the croppe?”—England’s Exchequer, or A Discourse of the Sea and Navigation with Some Things Thereunto Coincident Concerning Plantations, London, 1625. [↑]
[5] Kingsley in Westward Ho! speaks of Columbus and Raleigh as “the two most gifted men, perhaps, with the exception of Humboldt, who ever set foot in tropical America.” Spanish writers, it is safe to say, would strongly demur to this statement so far as Raleigh is concerned. [↑]
[6] Elsewhere he tells us of the thousands of “vglie serpents,” which he calls Lagartos, the Spanish word for lizards, that he saw everywhere along the Orinoco. They were what are now known as crocodiles and caymans, the former of which, according to Schomburgk, are seldom more than six to eight feet long, while the latter are said sometimes to attain a length of twenty-five feet. We saw several of them every day but their number was far from being as great as is usually represented.
Of the armadillo, which is prized as a delicacy in Guiana, Raleigh says “it seemeth to be barred ouer with small plates like to a Renocero with a white horne growing in his hinder parts, as big as a great hunting horne which they vse to winde in steed of a trumpet.” Op. cit., p. 74. [↑]
[7] According to Sr. F. Michelenena y Rojas, Exploracion Oficial, p. 54, the palm for physical superiority and intelligence is to be awarded to the Caribs. He says the Carib race is without doubt ... the most beautiful, the most robust and the most intelligent of all those in Venezuela. Not only this; he seems inclined to consider them the superiors of all the Indians in South America. Vespucci speaks, too, of them as “magnae sapientiae viri”—men of superior intelligence—as well as men of superior strength and valor. [↑]