Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/401

Rh order to fire the dwellings they assailed. When a male child was born it was sprinkled with some drops of the father's blood, and as the child grew older it was if possible anointed with the fat of a slaughtered Arrowauk. When the boy entered manhood he had to undergo excruciating tortures in order to prove his prowess and claim to be accounted a warrior. They were not unskillful in the few arts with which they were conversant; they wove cotton and dyed it of various colors, red being the favorite color of the Caribs; they made pottery and burned it in a rough kiln, the shapes of some of their vessels being artistic and pleasing. They were particularly clever in weaving baskets of palmetto leaves, an art still retained by the Caribs of Dominica and St. Vincent, whose beautifully dyed and woven baskets are fashioned with such cunning that they will even hold water. Like the Arrowauks, they believed in future states of bliss or woe. In the former the braves were to enjoy supreme felicity with their wives and captives, while the spirits of cowards were to be banished eternally beyond the mountains, and doomed to everlasting toil in captivity to the Arrowauks. In every hut there was an altar made of banana leaves and reeds, on which they placed the earliest fruits and choice viands. Demons and evil spirits were dreaded and worshiped, and sacrifices offered to them by the hands of their Boyez, or magicians, the worshipers on such occasions wounding themselves by instruments made of the teeth of the agouti.

We can picture the depredations caused by the incessant marauding of bands of these ferocious cannibals, and the terror they must have excited in the minds of the milder islanders. Peter Martyr tells us that in his time alone more than five thousand men had been taken from the island of Sancti Johannis to be eaten. Even after the Caribs had abandoned cannibalism they continued a fierce and desperate people, shunned and dreaded by Arrowauks and Europeans alike, and when cannibalism had ceased to be an everyday matter it would break out every now and then when occasion arose. The establishment of Spanish rule and the disappearance of the Arrowauks must have been the main factors in the decline of cannibalism, but before such was the case the Caribs seem to have given up the practice in some places. Thus Herrera says that "those of St. Croix and Dominica were greatly addicted to predatory excursions, hunting men," but not long before he wrote the Caribs of Dominica had eaten a poor monk, "and he so disagreed with them that many died, and that for a time they left off eating human flesh, making expeditions instead to carry off cows and mares."

When the English began to settle in the smaller Antilles they found the still unconquered Caribs a formidable obstacle