76 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 
youngest and handsomest of the women, and made 
prisoners of the men, to be killed and eaten. “The 
admiral learned from them that most of the men of 
the island were absent, the king having sailed some 
time before, with ten canoes and three hundred war- 
riors, on a cruise in quest of prisoners and booty. 
When the men went forth on these expeditions, the 
women remained to defend their shores from inva- 
sion.” 
This island of Guadeloupe was their northernmost 
stronghold. Continuing his cruise northward, to- 
ward Haspaniola, and coasting the islands, Columbus 
discovered the last resident Caribs at Santa Cruz. 
Here a boat’s crew of Spaniards attacked an Indian 
canoe containing several men and women. The fight 
was long and desperate. Even after the canoe was 
overturned the Indians fought in the water, “discharg- 
ing their arrows while swimming, as dexterously as 
though they had been upon firm land; and the women 
fought as fiercely as the men.” 
“The hair of these savages was long and coarse; 
their eyes were encircled with paint, so as to give 
them a hideous expression; and bands of cotton were 
bound firmly above and below the muscular parts of 
the arms and legs, so as to cause them to swell to a 
disproportioned size.” Humboldt makes mention of 
this custom, in vogue among the Caribs of South 
America, in the early part of the present century. . 
“The warlike and unyielding character of these 
people, so different from that of the pusillanimous 
nations around them, and the wide scope of their en- 
terprises and wanderings, like those of the nomad 
tribes of the Old World, entitle them to distinguished 
