460 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. 



craft hundreds of miles from the land, and familiar with all the straits and coasf^s 

 from South America to the Great Antilles. Their habit was to land in small 

 bands, and surprise the village of some hostile tribe of the Guatuaios (Ineri or 

 Igneri) of Arawak race, and carry off the plunder, with the young men reserved 

 for the banquet or bondage, and the women for wives and drudges. 



The Caribs appear to have reached the Lesser Antilles only one or two genera- 

 tions before the discovery. They have been regarded as Aztecs, Mayas, Peruvian 

 Quichuas or even Eedskins from North America. But their traditions, as well 

 as their language and usages, point especially to Venezuela, Guiana and Brazil 

 as their primeval homes. They are, in fact, akin to the Galibi of Guiana and to 

 the Indians of the Xingu River recently visited by Ehrenreich.* 



The national name has been diversely explained. In the Tupi language of 

 Brazil, Cari-aïbii is a collective name used in the sense of " bad people," " pirates," 

 or " cannibals." But whatever its origin, it was ultimately adopted by the West 

 Indian Caribs themselves in a noble sense, for they even applied it to the whites 

 in recognition of their superior intelligence. Amerigo Vespucci states expressly 

 that the natives of the Paria coast called the Spanish navigators " Carabes," in 

 this sense, and the French and Portuguese were also called " Caraybbes, Caryba." 



In the Antilles the Carib women spoke a peculiar language differing con- 

 siderably from that of the men, which was originally that of the Galibi who 

 overran the islands as far as Haiti. The female speech, on the contrary, was funda- 

 mentally that of the Arawaks whom the Galibi had vanquished, slaying the men 

 and capturing the women. Eventually this Arawak tongue acquired the pre- 

 ponderance, partly because the education of the children was in the hands of the 

 women, and partly also because it was a richer and more developed form of speech. 



As the Caribs had " eaten " the Arawaks, so they were in their turn devoured 

 by the Spanish, French and English settlers. The history of every island, 

 especially Martinique, Dominica and St. Vincent, is a record of massacres, and 

 now only a few half-caste Caribs survive in the remote upland valleys of those 

 islands. Dominica appears to have about 30 such families, and in IbSl there 

 were 192 persons in St. Vincent calling themselves Caribs. 



And now the white destroyers of the Indians might seem themselves slowly 

 succumbing, not to massacres, but to the climate and changed social relations. 

 During the period of colonisation the increase of the European element was 

 always due to voluntary or forced immigration. Most of the settlers were, in 

 fact, not " free inhabitants," but " engaged " or, rather, temporary slaves. Epi- 

 demics frequently swept away whole communities, and even since the colonies 

 have entered on a period of peaceful development the white mortality has often 

 exceeded the birth-rate, especially during the prevalence of yellow fever. f 

 Altogether decrease was the normal condition, so that the race seemed threatened 

 with extinction by the slow but pitiless hand of nature. 



* Congress of Americanists, Paris, 1890. 



t Mean mortality of yellow-fever patients in Martinique from 1802 to 1869, according to Béranger 

 F raud, 232 per thousand. 



