Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Fig. 48.—Carib Shell-Knives.

The Carib aborigines of the Antilles furnish a striking example of what the more active manifestations of moral degradation among a savage people really imply. Compared with the gentle, passive Indians met by the Spaniards on the first islands visited by European explorers, the Caribs were a cruel and fierce race of cannibals, as hateful in all their most salient characteristics as the New Zealanders or Fijians. Yet time has proved, even under very unfavourable circumstances, that the fierceness and aggressive cruelty of the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles corresponded to the wild fury of the old viking rovers of Europe, and gave proof of energy and stamina capable of sturdy endurance; while the gentle and friendly Indians of the larger Antilles, without, in reality, any superior moral attributes, but only the characteristics of a weak and passive nature, have disappeared, leaving behind them scarcely a memorial of their existence. The Caribs are the historic race of the Antilles. Their chronicles derive vitality and endurance, like those of ancient Europe, from the vicissitudes of war. Those show them as restless aggressors; and though long since expelled from their ancient insular possessions, they still appear on the southern mainland as the people of an encroaching area; and the marches of their extending frontier ring with the shouts of border warfare, as fierce, and to us not greatly less substantial than the Wendish and Bulgarian warrings of Henry the Fowler, and his German Markgräfs of well-nigh a thousand years ago.

In 1851, Sir Robert Schomburgk communicated to the British Association the results of recent ethnological researches in St. Domingo. In these the observant traveller deplored the fact that of the millions of natives who at its discovery peopled the island, not a single pure descendant now exists, though he could trace in the Indios of mixed blood the peculiar features and other physical characteristics of the Indian still uneradicated. In the absence of a true native population, Sir Robert Schomburgk remarks: “My researches were restricted to what history and the few and poor monuments have transmitted to us of their customs and manners. Their language lives only in the names of places, trees, and fruits, but all combine in declaring that the people who bestowed these names were identical with the Carib and Arawaak tribes of Guiana. An excursion to the calcareous caverns of Pommier, about ten leagues to the west of the city of Santo Domingo, afforded me the examination of some picture-writings executed by the Indians after the arrival of the Spaniards. These remarkable caves, which are in themselves of high interest, are situated within the district over which, at the landing of the Spaniards, the fair Indian Catalina reigned as cacique.” To this district they were tempted by the news of rich mines in its mountains. In 1496, a fortified tower was erected, called originally San Aristobal; but so abundant was the precious metal, that even the stones of the fortress contained it, and the workmen named it the Golden Tower. But the lives of millions of the miserable natives were sacrificed in recovering the gold from their mountain veins; and then, the mines being exhausted, the country was abandoned to the exuberance of tropical desolation, while the caverns which had previously been devoted to religious rites, became places of retreat from the Spaniard and his frightful bloodhounds. One of the smaller caves still exhibits a highly interesting series of symbolic pictures, which the Indians had traced on its white and smooth walls. Near the entrance of a second cave, Sir R. Schomburgk discovered decorations of a more enduring character carved on the rock, and of these he remarks: “They belong to a remoter period, and prove much more skill and patience than the simple figures painted with charcoal on the walls of the cave near Pommier. The figures carved of stone, and worked without iron tools, denote, if not civilisation, a quick conception and an inexhaustible patience, to give to these hard substances the desired forms.” From his examination of the tools and utensils still in use in Guiana, Sir Robert doubted such to be the work of the Caribs; but he admitted that they are only found where we have sure evidence of their presence; and he under-estimated both the skill and patience shown by many native artists equally poorly provided with tools.

Other relics of native art and history attracted the attention of the traveller, and he specially dwelt with interest on a paved ring of granite, upwards of 2200 feet in circumference, with a human figure rudely-fashioned in granite occupying the centre. It stands in the vicinity of San Juan de Maguana, in St. Domingo, which formed, at the time of its first discovery, a distinct kingdom, governed by the cacique Caonabo, the most fierce and powerful of the Carib chiefs, and an irreconcilable enemy of the European invaders. It is called at the present day, “El Cercado de los Indios,” but Sir Robert Schomburgk questioned its being the work of the inhabitants of the island when first visited by the Spaniards, and assigned it, along with figures which he examined cut on rocks in the interior of Guiana, and the sculptured figures of St. Domingo, to a people far superior in intellect to those Columbus met with in Hispaniola. These he conceived to have come from the northern part of Mexico, adjacent to the ancient district of Huastecas, and to have been conquered and extirpated by their Carib supplanters, prior to European colonists displacing them in their turn.

The roving Caribs supplied themselves with axes and clubs of jade, greenstone, and others of the most prized materials of the mainland; but they turned the easily wrought shells of the neighbouring seas to account in much the same way as the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific to whom any harder material is unknown. But while noting the varied uses to which the shells of the Caribbean Sea were applied by the natives of the archipelago, a greater interest attaches to the indications of an ancient trade in these products of the Gulf of Florida, carried on among widely-scattered tribes of North America, long before its discovery by Columbus.

Abundant evidence proves that the large marine shells were regarded with superstitious reverence, alike by the more civilised nations of the land around the Gulf, and by others even so far north as beyond the shores of the great Canadian Lakes. In the latter case it is not difficult to account for the origin of such a feeling among tribes familiar only with small native fresh-water shells. But in one of the singular migratory scenes of the ancient Mexican paintings, copied from the Mendoza Collection,[^[53]] in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, a native, barefooted, and dressed in a short spotted tunic reaching to his loins, bears in his right hand a spear, toothed round the blade, it may be presumed with points of obsidian, and in his left hand a large univalve shell. A river, which he is passing, is indicated by a greenish stripe winding obliquely across the drawing, and his track, as shown by alternate footprints, has previously crossed the same stream. On this trail he is followed by other figures nearly similarly dressed, but sandalled, and bearing spears and large fans; while a second group approaches the river by a different trail, and in an opposite direction to the shell-bearer. Other details of this curious fragment of pictorial history are less easily interpreted. An altar or a temple appears to be represented on one side of the stream; and a highly-coloured circular figure on the other, may be the epitomised symbol of some Achæan land or Sacred Elis of the New World. But whatever be the interpretation of the ancient hieroglyphic painting, its general correspondence with other migratory depictions is undoubted; and it is worthy of note, that, in some respects, the most prominent of all the figures is the one represented fording the stream, and bearing a large tropical univalve in his hand.

The evidence thus afforded of an importance attached to the large sea-shells of the Gulf of Mexico, among the most civilised of the American nations settled on its shores, deserves notice in connection with the discovery of the same marine products among relics pertaining to Indian tribes upwards of three thousand miles distant from the native habitat of the mollusca, and separated by hundreds of miles from the nearest sea-coast.

Fig. 49.—Tennessee Idol.