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Their tone of voice, their gravity of deportment, the gestures which accompanied their speech, all denoted an intelligent people capable of a high degree of civilization. A Franciscan monk, who knew enough of the Carib language to preach in it occasionally, pointed out to us that the long and harmonious periods which occur in the discourses of the Indians are never confused or obscure.
Dolores, his daughter, "a splendidly lithe, glowing creature of beauty and passion," "a royal woman conscious of mental and physical perfection," succeeded her father as tyrant over the motley crew of Spaniard and Briton, Creole and mulatto, Carib and octoroon, and coal-black negroes.
One of these was Cannabo, the chief cacique of that island in the late disturbances, who was himself a Carib and not a native of that island.
Humboldt is of the same opinion, and suggests that the name Carib may be derived from Calina or Caripuna through transformation of the letters l and p into r and b, forming Caribi or Galibi.
A Carib chief, in a full suit of scarlet, excited once the anger of Madame Aubert, wife of a French governor of Dominica, because he sat upon her couch, which had a snowy dimity cover, and left there the larger portion of his pantaloons.
Originally the buccaneers were hunters, and their name comes from boucan, a word meaning dried flesh. They hunted wild cattle and wild pigs on that island over there." "Haiti?" "It was called Hispaniola, then. The Spanish owned it, but had only a few settlements on the coast. The population was largely Carib, a savage race given to cannibalism.
Expelled from the Amazon itself in 1627 by the Portuguese from Para, the Dutch traders established themselves at different times at the mouths of almost all the rivers along what was known as the Wild Coast of Guiana, and penetrating inland through a good understanding with the natives, especially with the ubiquitous Carib tribes, carried on a barter traffic beyond the mountains into the northern watershed of the Amazon, even as far as the Rio Negro itself.
Its height is so inconsiderable that it would scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this part of the Llanos. No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano. A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche.
The object of many of their raids of later years was to obtain captives to sell to the Dutch. When slavery was abolished by the British, this incentive to cruelty no longer existed. The fierce Caribs were, however, very indignant at the new order of things. A Carib chief arriving with a slave, offered him for sale to the English governor.
The Spanish writers of the sixteenth century inform us that the Carib nations then extended over eighteen or nineteen degrees of latitude, from the Virgin Islands east of Porto Rico, to the mouths of the Amazon. Another prolongation toward the west, along the coast-chain of Santa Marta and Venezuela, appears less certain.
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