ABORIGINES OF THE WEST INDIES. 373 



ABORIGINES OF THE WEST INDIES. 



By LADY EDITH BLAKE. 



SOME little interest having again been awakened in the outside 

 world concerning the West Indian Islands, the question is occa- 

 sionally asked, Had those islands any aborigines when discovered by 

 Europeans? If there were natives, do any of them remain? Both 

 questions may be answered in the affirmative. The West Indies, or 

 Antilles, consist of many hundreds, or even — reckoning keys or very 

 small islands — several thousand islands varying in area from those 

 which, like Cuba and Jamaica, number their square acres by the 

 million, to the tiny key of half an acre or less. The greater number 

 of these — indeed, all capable of supporting a population, with the 

 exception of Barbados — contained inhabitants when first discovered. 

 Barbados, though containing numerous evidences of former occupa- 

 tion, was uninhabited when taken possession of by its first European 

 settlers, the English. 



The peculiar interest attaching to the meeting between the Euro- 

 pean navigators and the Western barbarians is that — putting aside 

 the discoveries of the Northmen in the tenth and eleventh centuries 

 — it is the first meeting between modern and prehistoric man of 

 which we have any account. Till the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century the civilized world knew little or nothing of prehistoric man, 

 and prehistoric anthropology was an unknown science. To have 

 stated that man had existed on the earth more than four thousand 

 years b. c. would have been regarded as heresy, and to have held that 

 he had roamed over Europe when the mammoth crashed through its 

 forests, and when the stately megaceros and reindeer browsed on its 

 bogs, would have been considered the wildest folly. The stronger 

 light that is being thrown on those times of long ago first shone in 

 Denmark, where the study of runic stones and characters led to the 

 disclosure of evidences of human occupation of that country far ear- 

 lier than had ever heretofore been suspected. Subsequently, the finds 

 at Abbeville, the discovery of the lake dwellings in Switzerland, the 

 investigations in the caves of Kirkdale and Kent's Hole in England, 

 with others too numerous to mention, awoke widespread interest in 

 the newly arisen branch of investigation ; learned men began to com- 

 pare the remains and relics of the aborigines of America with those 

 of Europe, and at length began to recognize that when Columbus 

 landed on Guanahani, and was met by its painted and trembling 

 inhabitants, the people of the Old World, instead of finding men of 

 a new kind, were in reality standing face to face with men such as 

 in Europe had been extinct for nigh two thousand years. This it 



