Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 67

but it is the pen of Father Labat that suddenly transforms these aboriginal phantoms into real and vivid
people.
The wise monk realized the hopelessness of trying to convert the Caribs.
Many Indian races, and notably the Caribs, are endowed with an inability to grasp alien ideas which is
too total and grandiose a characteristic to be degraded with a word like stupidity. The Caribs were unable
to count to higher than six, and, not surprisingly, the principles of Christian doctrine were beyond their
grasp; no word existed in their language for god, soul or spirit. They very hazily accepted the existence
of the principles of Good and Evil, but only the latter had a name—Manitou; and Manitou, being the
more dangerous and powerful of the two, was occasionally worshipped. Labat's colleagues, after decades
among the Caribs, declared that they had not made a single conversion, beyond the baptism of a few ba-
bies on the point of death. A number of Caribs had wandered about the islands being baptized again and
again, in order to obtain the christening presents with which the governors and magnates ratified these
rare triumphs of the faith. Another mental limitation was their inability to believe that anybody was dead
unless they actually saw the corpse. A corpse had thus to be kept for long periods till all its family and
relations had seen it. It was kept in a crouching position in a hole under the floor of the hut, which was
closed with planks and covered with mats, and only filled with sand when everybody had assured them-
selves, by sight and touch, that the corpse was no longer alive. A stranger or a relation who died far away
was believed, even after a century or two centuries, to be still alive. Not out of any superstition, but out
of lack of sense of time, and the sheer inability to understand death as an abstract idea.
No, Father Labat's interest in the Carib life was historical, ethnological and, of course, gastronomic.
There were Caribs in the other islands, and pockets of them were dotted about his own island of Marti-
nique; but St. Vincent and Dominica were their especial strongholds. He stayed for three weeks in the hut
of an old Carib woman known as Madame Ouvernard, who was over a hundred years old, and had been,
during her youth, a great beauty, and for many years the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts.
(Labat stayed with her in 1700, and the great Sir Thomas Warner died and was buried in his governor-
ship of St. Kitts in 1648. It is generally supposed that Ouvernard is a garbled and gallicized version of
his name.) She was a cheerful old lady, quite naked and almost totally bald, and a great brandy drinker.
When he left her he travelled all over Dominica, lingering longest in exactly the part of the island where
we were sitting with the last descendants of his hosts.
They lived in huts called carbets , high, roomy penthouses of woven rush, bamboo or palm, whose
eaves reached almost to the ground. When out hunting they built themselves ajoupas , little lean-to biv-
ouacs of leaves. They struck fire by rotating a drill of hard wood in a socket of tinder, and lived off fish,
crabs, birds, yam, cassava, potato and sweet potato. Their meat—they kept pigs, but mostly for trad-
ing—was always 'boucanned'—smoked in the buccaneer's way, over a slow fire. Labat was astonished
at the abundance of eels in the rivers which the Caribs never touched. He immediately ate a dozen, and
pronounced them capital, as well as the partridges and pigeons and ortolans with which the woods aboun-
ded.
The first action of a Carib's day was a bathe in a mountain stream or the sea. The men of the hut would
sit on a stool to dry, and the women would then approach with gourds full of roucou dye, and paint them
all over until every inch of their bodies was bright red. If they were preparing a warlike expedition, their
faces would be adorned with great moustaches and their bodies with circles and lines, for which they
used a black dye called ganipa . Many of them practised forehead deformation like the Arawaks, which