Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/394

378 from the men. The Caribs did not kill or eat the women whose tribes they attacked. The young women, says Martyr, "they take to keep for increase, as we do hens to lay eggs; the old women they make their drudges." Alluding to this fact, and discussing the probable date of the arrival of the Caribs in the West Indian Archipelago, Dr. D. G. Brinton says:

The latter event was then of such recent occurrence that the women of the island Caribs, most of whom had been captured from Arowaks, still spoke that tongue.

The comparatively mild and inoffensive Arrowauks must have had a bad time of it when the Caribs were on the war path in those lovely islands, about which Martyr writes so enthusiastically as "an earthly paradise," where

was never any noisome beast found in it, nor yet any ravening four-footed beast: no lion, no bear, no fierce tygers, no crafty foxes, nor devouring wolves. All things are blessed and fortunate,

exclaims he, writing of Hispaniola; but the human enemy, more relentless and deadly than four-footed beast, must have been a blighting factor in the happiness of the daily life of the Arrowauk, even before the arrival of Spanish oppressors. "They of the islands," writes the old monk, ignoring his having pronounced all things there "blessed and fortunate,"

they perceive the cannibals coming have no other shift but only to flee, for although they use very sharp arrows made of reeds, yet are they of small force to repress the fury of the cannibals, for even they themselves confess that ten of the cannibals are able to overcome a hundred of them if they encounter with them.

Cruel as were the Spaniards to the unfortunate Indians in general, to the Arrowauks they must at first have appeared almost as benefactors compared to the Caribs, and indeed the more severe enactments of the conquerors were avowedly directed against those Indians "guilty of that unnatural crime" of eating human flesh.

Nowadays that travelers in Africa, New Zealand, the Pacific, and elsewhere have made us familiar with stories of cannibalism as a widespread practice among savage peoples, and that research has shown us that in prehistoric times it may not have been unknown even in Europe, we often fail to appreciate the horror and astonishment with which so strange and revolting a habit filled the early Spanish navigators. It came upon them as a shock, a horror which was a novelty, and therefore all the more abominable. We are always apt to overlook cruelties and evils with which we are familiar, while rarely failing to be scandalized at those that are new to us. The Spaniards were not squeamish about cruelty, and indeed the