INDIAN HOME LIFE. IO5 



From the same old Carib who aided in enriching 

 my vocabulary I obtained many quaint tales and tra- 

 ditions, which, in another chapter, are related to show 

 that the Caribs, though wanderers, robbers, and can- 

 nibals, were not without their fireside stories and super- 

 stitions. Like the African, like the North American 

 Indian, the Carib is very superstitious ; the woods, 

 shore, rocks, and trees are peopled with jumbies, or 

 evil spirits, who can, if they please, work them harm ; 

 the spirits of men and women who once lived among 

 them, and who, they firmly believe, still inhabit this 

 earth. Anything of odd shape or mysterious aspect 

 is believed to be possessed of a jumbie. The owl, 

 from its nocturnal habits and soft flight, its large, 

 staring e}^es and boding cry, is the chosen bird for 

 the terrestrial abode of the spirits, and bears the appel- 

 lation of "jumbie-bird " in every island. But a jumbie 

 may appear in the shape of anything animate or in- 

 animate, and it may happen that now and then an 

 animal is wrongly accused of being possessed of a 

 jumbie. 



To the ethnologist, the Caribs of St. Vincent pre- 

 sent an attractive subject for study, for there is among 

 them a people formed by the union of two distinct 

 races, the American and the Ethiopian. They are 

 called "Black Caribs," to distinguish them from the 

 typical or "Yellow Caribs." Various reasons are as- 

 signed for the cause of this mixture. One tradition is 

 to the effect that the Caribs attacked and burned a 

 Spanish ship, in the sixteenth century, and took its 

 freight of slaves to live among them ; another version, 

 that a slaver was wrecked near St. Vincent, and the 

 Africans, escaping, joined the Caribs. The Yellow 



