[Footnote H: Histoire Générale des Antilles, par Du Tertre, Paris, 1667, Tom. II. p. 360.]
The Caribs are supposed to have derived the compliment of their name, which means "valiant men," from the Appalachians, who had great trouble in dislodging them. They were very different from the Haytians: they cut their hair very short in front, leaving a tuft upon the crown, bandaged the legs of their children to make a calf that Mr. Thackeray's Jeames would have envied, pulled out their beard hair by hair, and then polished the chin, with rough leaves. A grand toilet included a coat of scarlet paint, which protected them from the burning effect of the sun and from the bites of insects. It also saved their skins from the scurf and chapping which the sea-water occasioned. A Carib chief, in a full suit of scarlet, excited once the anger of Madame Aubert, wife of a French governor of Dominica, because he sat upon her couch, which had a snowy dimity cover, and left there the larger portion of his pantaloons. But afterwards, upon being invited to dine at the Government-House, he determined to respect the furniture, and, seeing nothing so appropriate as his plate, he removed it to his chair before he took his seat. The Caribs, however, had such an inveterate preference for dining au naturel, that they frequently served up natives themselves, whenever that expensive luxury could be obtained. The Spaniards brought home the word Cannibal, which was a Haytian pronunciation of Cariba (Galiba); and it gradually came into use to express the well-known idea of a man-eater. The South-American Caribs preserve this vicious taste.
The Caribs had not overrun the island of Hayti, but it was never free from their incursions. That hardy and warlike race was feared by the milder Haytians, who had been compelled, especially in the southern provinces of the island, to study the arts of defence, which do not appear to have been much esteemed by them. Their arms were of the simplest description: wood pointed and hardened in the fire, arrows tipped with fish-bone or turtle-shell, and clubs of the toughest kinds of wood. The Caribs used arrows poisoned with the juice of the manchineel, or pointed with formidable shark's-teeth, their clubs of Brazil-wood were three feet long, and their lances of hardened wood were thrown with great adroitness and to a great distance. The southern Haytians learned, warlike habits from these encroaching Caribs, and were less gentle than the natives whom Columbus first met along the northern coast.
But they were all gentler, fairer, more graceful and simple than the Caribs, or the natives of the main. Their ambition found its limit when the necessaries of daily life were procured. The greatest achievement of their manual dexterity was the hollowing of a great trunk by fire to fashion a canoe.[I] Their huts were neatly made of stakes and reeds, and covered with a plaited roof, beneath which the hamaca, (hammock,) coarsely knitted of cotton, swung. Every collection of huts had also one of larger dimensions, like a lodge, open at the sides, where the natives used to gather for their public business or amusement. This was called bohio, a word improperly applied to the huts, and used by the Spaniards to designate their villages. In the southern districts, the bohios, and the dwellings of the caciques, were furnished with stools wrought with considerable skill from hard wood, and sometimes ornamented. But they could not have been made by the natives, who had neither iron nor copper in use. Their golden ornaments were nothing more than pieces of the metal, rudely turned, by pounding and rubbing, into rings for the nose and ears, and necklace-plates. Whatever they had, for use or ornament, which was more elaborate, came by way of trade from Yucatan and the contiguous coasts. It is difficult to conjecture what their medium of barter was, for they prepared nothing but cassava-cakes for food and the fermented juice for drink, and raised only the pimento, (red pepper,) the agi, (sweet pepper,) the yuca, whence the cassava or manioc meal was obtained, and sweet potatoes; and all these productions were common to the tribes along the coast. Tobacco may have been cultivated by them and neglected by other tribes. The Haytian word tabaco, which designated the pipe from which they sucked the smoke into their nostrils, and also the roll of leaves,—for they employed both methods,—has passed over to the weed. The pipe was a hollow tube in the shape of a Y, the mystic letter of Pythagoras: the two branches were applied to the nose, and the stem was held over the burning leaves. The weed itself was called cohiba.
[Footnote I: Canoa is Haytian, and is like enough to Kayak, Esquimaux, to Caïque, Turkish and to Kahn, German, to unsettle an etymologist with a theory of origin.]
At the time of the discovery, five principal caciques ruled the island, which was divided into as many provinces, with inferior caciques, who appear to have been the chiefs of settlements. We find, for instance, that Guatiguana was cacique of a large town in the province of which Guarionex was the chief cacique. The power of each cacique was supreme, but nothing like a league existed between the different provinces. When the Haytians in desperation tried the fortune of war against the Spaniards, Caonabo, the cacique of the central province in the South, like another Pontiac, rallied the natives from all quarters, and held them together long enough to fight a great battle on the Vega. But he was a Carib. His brother who succeeded him was also a Carib, and he maintained a union of several caciques till his defeat by Ojeda. Then the less warlike chiefs of the North readily submitted to the Spaniards, and the bolder caciques of the South were compelled to ask for peace.[J]
[Footnote J: In Mr. Irving's Life of Columbus, the characters of the different Indian chieftains are finely drawn, and the history of their intercourse and warfare with the Spaniards admirably told.]
Thus were the natives bound together by the polity of instinct and consanguinity alone. They had no laws, but only natural customs. The cacique was an arbitrator: if his decision did not appease a litigant, the parties had an appeal to arms in his presence. Their cacique received unbounded reverence, and for him they would freely die. Polygamy was permitted only to him, but not always practised by him. The Spaniards were so surprised at the readiness with which the natives gave them everything, both food and ornaments, that they declared them to be defective in the sense of property, and to have everything in common. This was a mistake: each man had his little possessions; stealing was punished with death, as the crime that did the greatest violence to the natural order; and crimes against domestic purity were severely punished, till the people became demoralized by their conquerors, who mistook the childish freedom of the women, for lustful invitation, and imputed to the native disposition something which belonged to their own.[K]
[Footnote K: They even accused the natives of communicating that loathsome disease which results from promiscuous intercourse, when in fact the virus was shipped at Palos, with the other elements of civilization, to give a new world to Castile and Leon! Nations appear to be particularly sensitive upon this point, and accuse each other. But the first time a disorder is observed is not the date of its origin. See the European opinion in the fifteenth century, in Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici, p. 350, and note, Bohn's edition. It has probably existed from the earliest times, wherever population was dense and habits depraved. The Romans suffered from it, but, like the Europeans of the Middle Ages, did not always attribute it to its proper source. What did Persius mean in one or two places in his Third Satire, e.g., 113-115? And see also Celaus, Medicina, Lib. V. §3.
When the fighting-man of Europe became a mercenary, (soldier, soldner, paid-man,) he carried this tinder from country to country, and kindled the fire afresh. The Spaniards bore it to Hayti, and it stung like a snake beneath that fervid sky.]