414 INNATE FEROCITY OF THE INDIANS. 



existed only among the Caribs of the West Indies. It is 

 they who have rendered the names of cannibals, Caribbees, 

 ana anthropophagi, synonymous ; it was their cruelties that 

 prompted the law promulgated in 1504, by which the 

 Spaniards were permitted to make a slave of every indi- 

 vidual of an American nation which could be proved to be 

 of Caribbee origin. I believe, however, that the anthro- 

 pophagy of the inhabitants of the West India Islands was 

 much exaggerated by early travellers, whose stories Herrera, 

 a grave and judicious historian, has not disdained to repeat 

 in his Decades kistoricas. He has even credited that extra- 

 ordinary event which led the Caribs to renounce this bar- 

 barous custom. The natives of a little island devoured a 

 Dominican monk whom they had carried off from the coast 

 of Porto Rico ; they all fell sick, and would never again eat 

 monk or layman." 



If the Caribs of the Orinoco, since the commencement 

 of the sixteenth century, have differed in their manners 

 from those of the West India Islands ; if they are unjustly 

 accused of anthropophagy; it is difficult to attribute this 

 difference to any superiority of their social state. The 

 strangest contrasts are found blended in this mixture ot 

 nations, some of whom live only upon fish, monkeys, and 

 ants; while others are more or less cultivators of the 

 ground, more or less occupied in making and painting 

 pottery, or weaving hammocks or cotton cloth. Several 

 of the latter tribes have preserved inhuman customs alto- 

 gether unknown to the former. " You cannot imagine," 

 said the old missionary of Mandavaca, " the perversity of 

 this Indian race (familia de Indios). You receive men of 

 a new tribe into the village ; they appear to be mild, good, 



incolebant feri trucesque, qui puerorum et virorum carnibus, quos aliia 

 in insulis bello aut latrociniis cepissent, vescebantur ; afeminis abstinebant; 

 Canibales appellati." " Some of the islands are inhabited by a cruel and 

 savage race, called cannibals, who eat the flesh of men and boys, and 

 captives and slaves of the male sex, abstaining from that of females." 

 (Hist. Venet., 1551.) The custom of sparing the lives of female prisoners 

 confirms what I have previously said, p. 326, of the language of the 

 women. Does the word cannibal, applied to the Caribs of the West 

 India Islands, belong to the language of this archipelago (that of Hayti) ? 

 or must we seek for it in an idiom of Florida, which some tradition! 

 indicate as the first country of the Caribs ? 



