ABORIGINES OF THE WEST INDIES. 385 



order to fire the dwellings they assailed. When a male child was 

 born it was sprinkled with some drops of the father's blood, and as 

 the child grew older it was if possible anointed with the fat of a 

 slaughtered Arrowauk. When the boy entered manhood he had to 

 undergo excruciating tortures in order to prove his prowess and claim 

 to be accounted a warrior. They were not unskillful in the few arts 

 with which they were conversant; they wove cotton and dyed it of 

 various colors, red being the favorite color of the Caribs; they 

 made pottery and burned it in a rough kiln, the shapes of some of 

 their vessels being artistic and pleasing. They were particularly 

 clever in weaving baskets of palmetto leaves, an art still retained 

 by the Caribs of Dominica and St. Vincent, whose beautifully dyed 

 and woven baskets are fashioned with such cunning that they will 

 even hold water. Like the Arrowauks, they believed in future states 

 of bliss or woe. In the former the braves were to enjoy supreme 

 felicity with their wives and captives, while the spirits of cowards 

 were to be banished eternally beyond the mountains, and doomed 

 to everlasting toil in captivity to the Arrowauks. In every hut 

 there was an altar made of banana leaves and reeds, on which they 

 placed the earliest fruits and choice viands. Demons and evil spirits 

 were dreaded and worshiped, and sacrifices offered to them by the 

 hands of their Boyez, or magicians, the worshipers on such occasions 

 wounding themselves by instruments made of the teeth of the 

 agouti. 



We can picture the depredations caused by the incessant maraud- 

 ing of bands of these ferocious cannibals, and the terror they must 

 have excited in the minds of the milder islanders. Peter Martyr 

 tells us that in his time alone more than five thousand men had been 

 taken from the island of Sancti Johannis to be eaten. Even after 

 the Caribs had abandoned cannibalism they continued a fierce and 

 desperate people, shunned and dreaded by Arrowauks and Europeans 

 alike, and when cannibalism had ceased to be an everyday matter 

 it would break out every now and then when occasion arose. The 

 establishment of Spanish rule and the disappearance of the Arro- 

 wauks must have been the main factors in the decline of cannibalism, 

 but before such was the case the Caribs seem to have given up the 

 practice in some places. Thus Herrera says that " those of St. Croix 

 and Dominica were greatly addicted to predatory excursions, hunting 

 men," but not long before he wrote the Caribs of Dominica had 

 eaten a poor monk, " and he so disagreed with them that many died, 

 and that for a time they left off eating human flesh, making expedi- 

 tions instead to carry off cows and mares." 



When the English began to settle in the smaller Antilles they 

 found the still unconquered Caribs a formidable obstacle to their 



VOL. LII. 29 



