378 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



guage from the men. The Caribs did not kill or eat the women 

 whose tribes they attacked. The young women, says Martyr, " they 

 take to keep for increase, as we do hens to lay eggs; the old women 

 they make their drudges." Alluding to this fact, and discussing 

 the probable date of the arrival of the Caribs in the West Indian 

 Archipelago, Dr. D. G. Brinton says : 



The latter event was then of such recent occurrence that the women of 

 the island Caribs, most of whom had been captured from Arowaks, still 

 spoke that tongue. 



The comparatively mild and inoffensive Arrowauks must have 

 had a bad time of it when the Caribs were on the war path in those 

 lovely islands, about which Martyr writes so enthusiastically as " an 

 earthly paradise," where 



was never any noisome beast found in it, nor yet any ravening four-footed 

 beast : no lion, no bear, no fierce tygers, no crafty foxes, nor devouring 

 wolves. All things are blessed and fortunate, 



exclaims he, writing of Hispaniola; but the human enemy, more 

 relentless and deadly than four-footed beast, must have been a 

 blighting factor in the happiness of the daily life of the Arrowauk, 

 even before the arrival of Spanish oppressors. " They of the islands," 

 writes the old monk, ignoring his having pronounced all things there 

 " blessed and fortunate," 



when they perceive the cannibals coming have no other shift but only to 

 flee, for although they use very sharp arrows made of reeds, yet are they 

 of small force to repress the fury of the cannibals, for even they them- 

 selves confess that ten of the cannibals are able to overcome a hundred of 

 them if they encounter with them. 



Cruel as were the Spaniards to the unfortunate Indians in gen- 

 eral, to the Arrowauks they must at first have appeared almost as 

 benefactors compared to the Caribs, and indeed the more severe 

 enactments of the conquerors were avowedly directed against those 

 Indians " guilty of that unnatural crime " of eating human flesh. 



Nowadays that travelers in Africa, New Zealand, the Pacific, and 

 elsewhere have made us familiar with stories of cannibalism as a 

 widespread practice among savage peoples, and that research has 

 shown us that in prehistoric times it may not have been unknown 

 even in Europe, we often fail to appreciate the horror and astonish- 

 ment with which so strange and revolting a habit filled the early 

 Spanish navigators. It came upon them as a shock, a horror which 

 was a novelty, and therefore all the more abominable. We are 

 always apt to overlook cruelties and evils with which we are familiar, 

 while rarely failing to be scandalized at those that are new to us. 

 The Spaniards were not squeamish about cruelty, and indeed the 



