Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 66

stone to their heads while they were still pliable. This process is said to have hardened the bone, so that in
later life their skulls were proof against all primitive weapons, and even capable of turning or splintering
the blade of a Toledo sword. In his plea to the King of Spain to forbid the continued enslavement and
exploitation of the Indians lest the race should become extinct (a prophecy of which the truth was proved
in very few decades), Father Las Casas described the Arawaks as the most naive and gentle of mortals. [3]
But long before the Spaniards burst into their quiet lives, the Arawaks were confronted by a far more
terrible horde of newcomers. Again, no dates are known, and it is not even certain where exactly the
Caribs came from. Some early chroniclers, notably Father Labat, thought that they must have reached the
islands from North America, via Florida, the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles, but this theory must be
abandoned owing to the absence at that time of all but Arawaks (and in western Cuba of a few surviving
Ciboneys) in Cuba and Jamaica. Father Du Tertre—for it is to the monks, as usual, that we owe any ink-
lings of knowledge—affirms that they were the descendants of the Galibis, who still live in a savage state
between the Oyapock and Maroni Rivers, also in the Guianas. But the results of later researches, based on
linguistic similarities, indicate that the original cradle of the Carib race lay much farther south; in Brazil,
somewhere in the region of the Amazon. It is possible that they set out northwards from the mouth of the
Orinoco, of which the currents still darken the waters of Trinidad with the effluvia of the Andes. From
Trinidad their war canoes advanced northwards on exactly the same route as that of the Arawaks.
They made short work of their unwarlike forerunners. They massacred and sometimes devoured the
men, and married the women; some of them taking root, while the others moved on, rapidly eating and
marrying their way through the Windward and Leeward and Virgin Islands, and into the greater Antilles.
They never, as far as I can gather from the chroniclers, settled permanently in the western Caribbean.
Cuba and Jamaica escaped them altogether, and Hispaniola and Puerto Rico lived in dread of their fre-
quent invasions, but did not have to endure them as a permanent evil. Perhaps their arrival in these re-
gions coincided with the advent of the Spaniards, or perhaps they preferred the forests and gorges of the
Lesser Antilles to the sierras and savannahs of Borinquen. Or they may have felt that the time had come
to pause and, as it were, digest their conquests. They became static.
When the Spaniards came to the Windwards and Leewards in 1493, Columbus dropped anchor at
each of the islands, went ashore on some of them, and symbolically claimed them for his king. In nearly
every case he was greeted by a fierce resistance; in Guadeloupe the men were reinforced by an army of
Amazons who came down to the shore to loose off their poisoned shafts. He sailed away again, and on pa-
per Hewanorra became St. Lucia, Madanino became Martinica, Karoukera Guadeloupe, Wytoukoubouli
Dominica, and so on, and that, for over a century, was all. There were brighter lures for the Spaniards
in Mexico and Peru, and a long war with these savages for a handful of green tufted rocks was an un-
profitable thought. Dominican monks landed occasionally to convert the Caribs and were massacred. The
Conquistadors Ponce de Leon and Jerrando and even Sir Francis Drake, failed to dislodge the savages.
The Caribs remained unchallenged masters of the Lesser Antilles. In the first decades of the seventeenth
century, France and England started to settle in these languidly held possessions of Spain, and their weari-
some two centuries of wars began. But the prolonged and ferocious resistance of the Caribs in some of the
islands, and the impossibility of subduing them, prompted the English and French to agree at the treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that Dominica, St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Tobago should remain neutral, with
the Caribs in undisturbed possession. De Rochefort and Fathers Du Tertre and Breton (who wrote a Carib
dictionary, and translated parts of the liturgy into Carib) give us a clear idea of how these savages lived,