Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 69

smoked arm or leg of an enemy, and, haranguing them about the wrongs of their race, fling the trophy
into their midst. They all hurled themselves upon it in a frenzy, gnawing and tearing it to shreds; then,
inflamed with rum, tafia and ouicou , and at last decided, they gathered their weapons, and, blowing their
conch-shells, ran down through the trees to their canoes.
On the poop of one of these, which was roughly carved in the shape of a monkey's head, Père Labat
once saw an arm tied with creeper, 'which they offered me, extremely civilly, saying that it was the arm
of an Englishman that they had killed during a raid on Barbuda.' The Caribs, he says, in spite of their bad
reputation as cannibals, devoured their victims as a warlike ceremonial, or in a rage, never out of sheer
gluttony. A few weeks after leaving Dominica, however, in the library of Basseterre in St. Kitts, I came
across a magnificent old volume of De Rochefort, [5] who says that the Caribs of his day—half a century
earlier than Labat—had very decided and discriminating views on meals of this kind. French people were
considered delicious and by far the best of the Europeans, and next came the English. The Dutch were
dull and rather tasteless, while the Spaniards were so stringy and full of gristle as to be practically uneat-
able. The taste of Arawaks had been forgotten long ago, and their own was too commonplace, it must be
assumed, to warrant a mention. The victims were prepared while still alive, by cutting slits down the back
and sides into which pimentos and other herbs were stuffed. After being despatched with a mace, they
were trussed to poles and roasted over a medium fire, while the women busied themselves turning and
basting, and catching the lard in gourds and calabashes, which they allowed to set and then stored away.
They would eagerly lick the sticks where the gravy had fallen. Often the meal was half roasted, and then
half boiled. Some of the meat was eaten on the spot, the rest was cut up and smoked and also prudently
put by for lean or unpatriotic periods in the future. But there was a symbolical aspect to these banquets.
They were considered to seal a military victory, to put it for ever beyond question. De Rochefort reports
that a Carib prisoner, while being made ready, would jeer at his captors, saying that, although they would
soon be eating him, he had already swallowed so many of their family or tribe, and was so thoroughly
nourished on their neighbours and kin, that they would virtually be eating one of their own people. This
kind of language would continue until the final blow was delivered. It never failed to exasperate the com-
pany, and to cast an atmosphere of dejection over the whole meal.
As early as 1508 the geographer Juan de la Casa designated the Windward group as the Isles of the
Cannibals. But, in spite of this custom, the chroniclers maintain that the Caribs were far more compas-
sionate than the Indians of Darien, who ate without mercy everybody they could lay hands on; or than the
Iroquois of the Canadian provinces with their scalpings and their protracted torments. They never harmed
the women, but took them as their own wives, and then adopted the orphans and treated them as their
own children.
They were skilful in building boats, which, as they do today, they hollowed out of the trunks of trees.
They ranged from small canoes and pirogues to war boats, or marassas , over forty feet long, rigged with
three masts and three sails, and propelled by oars and steered by a paddle. Little flotillas of these crafts
would set out on expeditions of war and trade. If they were bent on warlike purposes, two women trav-
elled in each boat to prepare the cassava and attend to the war-paint of the crew. Their skill as sailors
was only paralleled by their wonderful powers of swimming, which was just as well, as they were fre-
quently drunk on returning from their expeditions, and the boats often capsized. The women could swim
as expertly as the men, even with one or two children in their arms, who soon learnt to swim round their
mothers like little fishes. Their speed on the surface and under water was so great that they have been