Among the accounts of these early experiences of the Spaniards with the native people, the story of cannibalism is a constant theme. To circulate such stories enhanced the wonder with which Europe was to be impressed.
Caribs.
The cruelty of the custom was not altogether unwelcome to warrant a retaliatory mercilessness. Historians have not wholly decided that this is enough to account for the most positive statements about man-eating tribes. Fears and prejudices might do much to raise such a belief, or at least to magnify the habits. Irving remarks that the preservation of parts of the human body, among the natives of Española, was looked upon as a votive service to ancestors, and it may have needed only prejudice to convert such a custom into cannibalism when found with the Caribs. The adventurousness of the nature of this fierce people and their wanderings in wars naturally served to sharpen their intellects beyond the passive unobservance of the pacific tribes on which they preyed; so they became more readily, for this reason, the possessors of any passion or vice that the European instinct craved to fasten somewhere upon a strange people.
Caribs and Lucayans.
The contiguity of these two races, the fierce Carib and the timid tribes of the more northern islands, has long puzzled the ethnologist. Irving indulged in some rambling notions of the origin of the Carib, derived from observations of the early students of the obscure relations of the American peoples. Larger inquiry and more scientific observation has since Irving's time been given to the subject, still without bringing the question to recognizable bearings. The craniology of the Caribs is scantily known, and there is much yet to be divulged. The race in its purity has long been extinct. Lucien de Rosny, in an anthropological study of the Antilles published by the French Society of Ethnology in 1886, has amassed considerable data for future deductions. It is a question with some modern examiners if the distinction between these insular peoples was not one of accident and surroundings rather than of blood.
1493. November 10. Columbus leaves Guadaloupe.
When Columbus sailed from Guadaloupe on November 10, he steered northwest for Española, though his captives told him that the mainland lay to the south. He passed various islands, but did not cast anchor till the 14th, when he reached the island named by him Santa Cruz, and found it still a region of Caribs. It was here the Spaniards had their first fight with this fierce people in trying to capture a canoe filled with them. The white men rammed and overturned the hollowed log; but the Indians fought in the water so courageously that some of the Spanish bucklers were pierced with the native poisoned arrows, and one of the Spaniards, later, died of such a wound inflicted by one of the savage women. All the Caribs, however, were finally captured and placed in irons on board ship. One was so badly wounded that recovery was not thought possible, and he was thrown overboard. The fellow struck for the shore, and was killed by the Spanish arrows. The accounts describe their ferocious aspect, their coarse hair, their eyes circled with red paint, and the muscular parts of their limbs artificially extended by tight bands below and above.
Porto Rico.