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I told them the fable of the dog in the manger, which abashed Fritz; and he then besought his brother to teach him the means of training this noble bird, and promised to present him with his monkey. Ernest then told him that the Caribs subdue the largest birds by making them inhale tobacco smoke.
On one side was a large library of religious, historical and literary works, the selection of which displayed no small taste and judgment. On the opposite side of the room was a fine cabinet of minerals and shells. In one corner stood a number of curious relics of the aboriginal Caribs, such as bows and arrows, etc., together with interesting fossil remains.
You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to "race suicide," as the British administration does in Fiji.
The attacks seemed to grow bolder, and not till Governor Mendoza himself led an expedition to Vieques, in which the cacique Yaureibó was killed, did the Indians move southeastward to Santa Cruz. That the Caribs inhabiting the islands Guadeloupe and Dominica made common cause with the fugitives from Boriquén is not to be doubted.
There is no race of men more robust and swifter in running than the Caribs. This practice, so common heretofore in the islands and among several tribes of the Caribs of Parima and French Guiana, is not observed in the missions which we visited. The men there have foreheads rounder than those of the Chaymas, the Otomacs, the Macos, the Maravitans and most of the inhabitants of the Orinoco.
Train them, set some sort of penalty for malfeasance. "They should be taught to mine for us," said Pedro Margarite. "Pay them? Of course of course! But do not pay them too much. Do not we protect them from Caribs and save their souls to boot? Take it as tribute!" It was the first time the word was said, in Spanish, here. We built a fort much after the model of La Navidad and named it St. Thomas.
But we must pass from the scenery of this region of cataracts and forests, to take another glance at the wild tribes who inhabit it. The most numerous and ferocious at one time, by far, were the cannibal Caribs; who for ages had inhabited the country, and were joined by their brethren, driven by the Spaniards from the islands they had long occupied.
They had a god, as well as minor spirits, and sang hymns to them; they had some crafts and arts, for they made canoes, huts, chairs, nets, hammocks, pottery, weapons, and implements, and, although the fierce Caribs vexed them now and again, they were accounted as the gentlest and most advanced of the native people in the Antilles.
It was rather humiliating to be an admiral without anything to do, and have a hungry crew at your heels begging for reales to buy plantains and tobacco with. When he returned to where his happy-go-lucky Caribs were waiting they sprang up and saluted, as he had drilled them to do. "Come, muchachos," said the admiral; "it seems that the government is poor. It has no money to give us.
The Caribs, when they arrived amid the numerous tribes of the Upper Orinoco, divided themselves into several bands, in order to reach, by the Cassiquiare, the Cababury, the Itinivini, and the Atabapo, on a great many points at once, the banks of the Guiainia or Rio Negro, and carry on the slave-trade with the Portuguese.
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