22. Guarive.—Ibid. Intermediate to the Carib Proper, and the Tamanak.
23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32.—The Pareche, Uocheari, Uaracapaccili, Uaramucuru, Paiure, Achericoto, Oje, Chirichiripi, Macchiritari, Areveriani.—Subsections of the Tamanak spoken to the south of the Orinoco.
33.—Caribs of the Lesser Antilles.—Extinct.
Like the Iroquois and Algonkins of North America, the Caribs were one of the first tribes of South America, which were known to Europeans; so that it is they from whom the earliest and most current notions of the intertropical American were taken.
That they were the aborigines to the Lesser Antilles is certain; and it is nearly certain that, as a pure race, this section of them is extinct; since the so-called black Caribs of St. Vincent, although partially descended from the insular division of the class, are mixed with Negro blood, and are not the aborigines of the island, but immigrants from Barbadoes and elsewhere.
How far they extended further than the Lesser Antilles is doubtful. Father Raymond, who, in considering the subject, during the existence of the Caribs of the Islands, but subsequent to the expulsion of the aborigines from Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and St. Domingo (i.e. early in the seventeenth century), remarks that an unequivocal remnant (the only one) of those Indians who escaped from the massacres and cruelties of the Spaniards, the refugee Indians of Curaçoa, had no Carib words in their language.
Again, the same writer, on the authority of Mr. Brigstock, a gentleman well versed in the Floridian and Virginian languages, attributes to the whole stock a North American origin; their progenitors, the Colfachi, having availed themselves of a Mexican migration of the Appalachians to take possession of a portion of Florida. Thence, after a time, a part was ejected, and so found its way to both the Islands and the Southern Continent. Upon the tradition itself I lay little stress. Upon the fact of certain words being common to the Colfachi who remained in Florida, and the true Caribs, I lay more. Probably, the existence of certain points common to the two populations originated the tradition—the connexion (if real) being different from what is described in the legend.
It should be remembered that the series of islands from Trinidad to Florida forms a second line of connexion between North and South America.
That a nation so widely spread as the Caribs should have migrated from North America as a body of fugitives, and that within the traditional epoch, is improbable, the unlikelihood being increased by the number of dialects into which the languages are divided. It is far more likely that a part of them conquered their way from South to North. On their own hemisphere they are preeminently the people of an encroaching area, and the frontier-fights between the Caribs and the Caveri of the Middle Orinoco are the analogues of the wars of the Iroquois and Algonkins in Pennsylvania.
In the ethnography of Polynesia certain peculiar customs in respect to the language of caste and ceremony were noted. The Carib has long been known to exhibit a remarkable peculiarity in this respect. The current statement is—that the women have one language and the men another; so that while the husband talks (say) French, the wife answers in English. The real fact is less extraordinary. Certain objects have two names; one of which is applied by males, the other by females only. Raymond says that the latter terms are Arawak, and that the Arawaks were the older inhabitants of the islands, the men whereof were exterminated and the women adopted as wives. No explanation is more probable than this, and it is applicable in other parts of the world besides America.[164]