INDIAN HOME LIFE. I05 
From the same old Carib who aided in enriching 
my vocabulary I obtained many quaint tales and tra- 
ditions, which, in another chapter, are related to show 
that the Caribs, though wanderers, robbers, and can- 
nibals, were not without their fireside stories and super- 
stitions. Like the African, like the North American 
Indian, the Carib is very superstitious; the woods, 
shore, rocks, and trees are peopled with jumbzes, or 
evil spirits, who can, if they please, work them harm ; 
the spirits of men and women who once lived among 
them, and who, they firmly believe, still inhabit this 
earth. Anything of odd shape or mysterious aspect 
is believed to be possessed of a jumbie. The owl, 
from its nocturnal habits and soft flight, its large, 
staring eyes and boding cry, is the chosen bird for 
the terrestrial abode of the spirits, and bears the appel- 
lation of “jumbie-bird” in every island. But a jumbie 
may appear in the shape of anything animate or in- 
animate, and it may happen that now and then an 
animal is wrongly accused of being possessed of a 
jumbie. 
To the ethnologist, the Caribs of St. Vincent pre- 
sent an attractive subject for study, for there is among 
them a people formed by the union of two distinct 
races, the American and the Ethiopian. They are 
called “ Black Caribs,” to distinguish them from the 
typical or “ Yellow Caribs.” Various reasons are as- 
signed for the cause of this mixture. One tradition is 
to the effect that the Caribs attacked and burned a 
Spanish ship, in the sixteenth century, and took its 
freight of slaves to live among them; another version, 
that a slaver was wrecked near St. Vincent, and the 
Africans, escaping, joined the Caribs. The Yellow 
