104 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 



Carifoona. The word Carifoona was given me, 

 both by the St. Vincent and Dominica Caribs, as the 

 ancient name of the tribe ; so there can be no doubt 

 of the origin of the latter term. 



In this connection, the author of "Myths of the 

 New World " has propounded a curious and by no 

 means improbable theory : " The mythical ancestor 

 of the Caribs created his offspring by sowing the soil 

 with stones, or with the fruit of the Mauritius palm, 

 which sprouted forth into men and women ; while the 

 Yurucares, much of whose mythology was perhaps 

 borrowed from the Peruvians, clothed this crude tenet 

 in a somewhat more poetic form, fabling that at the 

 beginning the first men were pegged, Ariel-like, in 

 the knotty entrails of an enormous bole, until the god 

 Tiri — a second Prospero — released them by cleaving 



it in twain It is still a mooted point whence 



Shakespeare drew the plot of 'The Tempest.' The 

 coincidence mentioned in the text between some parts 

 of it and South American mythology does not stand 

 alone. Caliban, the savage and brutish native of the 

 island, is undoubtedly the word Carib, often spelled 

 Caribana and Calibani in older writers, and his 

 'dam's god, Setebos,' was the supreme divinity of the 

 Patagonians when first visited by Magellan." 



As another curious fact, which inseparably links 

 the Carib with our best fiction, as well as with our 

 early history, let me mention that Robinson Crusoe's 

 w Man Friday " was a Carib ; and the island of their 

 adventures is not in the Pacific Ocean, but lies among 

 the historic isles of the Caribbean Sea. It is, in fact, 

 the island of Tobago, which I visited, and in which I 

 had many and varied adventures. 



