7 
YBARRA ] LETTER OF DR. DIEGO ALVAREZ CHANCA 439 
“These islanders appear to us to be more civilized than those 
who had hitherto been seen, for although all Indians have houses 
made of straw,! vet the dwellings of these people are constructed 
in a much superior fashion, better stocked with provisions, and 
exhibit more evidences of industry both on the part of the men and 
of the women. They had a considerable quantity of cotton, already 
spun and also prepared for spinning, and many cotton blankets so 
well woven as to be in no way inferior to similar ones made in 
our country.” 
“We inquired of the women who were prisoners of the inhabi- 
tants of this island, what sort of people these islanders were, and 
they replied, Caribbees. As soon as these women learned that 
we abhor such kind of people because of their evil practice of eating 
human flesh, they felt delighted. And after that, if any man or 
woman belonging to the Caribbees was forcibly brought forward 
by our men, they informed us (but in a secret way) whether he 
or she belonged to that kind of people, evincing at the same time 
by their dread of their conquerors that those poor women per- 
tained to a vanquished nation, though they well knew that they were 
then safe in our company.® 
accompanied by their caciques, or kings, the women remained at home to 
defend their shores from invasion, and they were as good archers as the 
men, partaking of the same warrior spirit as their husbands and male rela- 
tives. 
1Dr. Chanca here makes a mistake, for, though the houses of the native 
Indians of the Antilles may have had the appearance of being built of straw, 
they were almost exclusively made of the component parts of the royal-palm 
(Roystonea regia), as stated in the above explanatory note. He probably 
considered those houses made of straw because they certainly had that ap- 
pearance, and in the short space of time which he had had to observe them 
he did not get the opportunity of seeing one of those huts in process of 
construction. 
*They possessed also the art of making household utensils of clay, which 
they baked in kilns like the potters of Europe. 
3Prof. Justin Winsor, the accomplished librarian of Harvard College, in 
his “Christopher Columbus,” referring to the Caribbee Indians, makes the 
following interesting statements: “The contiguity of these two races, the 
fierce Carib and the timid tribes of the more northern islands (the Lucayans) 
has long puzzled the ethnologist. Irving indulged in some rambling notions 
of the origin of the Carib, derived from observations of the early students 
of the obscure relations of the American peoples. Larger inquiries and more 
scientific observations has, since Irving’s time, been given to the subject, still 
without bringing the question to recognizable bearings. The craniology of the 
Carib is scantily known, and there is much yet to be divulged. The race 
in its purity has long been extinct. Lucien de Rosny, in an anthropological 
study of the Antilles published by the French Society of Ethnology in 1886, 
has amassed considerable data for future deductions.” 
