Sea kings of the Antilles.

• Author: Muilenberg, Peter
• Position: The Carib Indians

One thing everybody knows about the Caribs is that they were cannibals. This indelibly impressed itself on the European imagination when Columbus' crew first pulled up their longboat on the shore of Guadeloupe, poked through a hastily abandoned Carib village, and came upon a peacefully bubbling cauldron. Inevitably one of them lifted the lid to see what these folk fancied for dinner - and gagged at what lay stewing within.

This electrifying discovery stereotyped the Caribs as savages from that moment on, but did so unfairly. Fierce cannibals they were, but they were also accomplished seafarers who made the most impressive voyages of pre-Columbian America. Far from being primitive fishing folk who stumbled half-drowned on each new island as storms drove them, the Caribs roamed the Caribbean at will, like New World vikings.

Significantly, when the Spaniards burst upon the scene, the Caribs survived the Conquest. They even thrived by raiding the new settlements and defying the cross and the sword. For almost two centuries after the wholesale extermination of the island Arawaks, the Caribs remained a force to be reckoned with in the eastern Caribbean. By the time they retreated back to their ancestral jungles in Venezuela they had stamped their name on the sea that was once theirs.

Caribs and Arawaks originated in the delta forests of the Rio Orinoco, and hated each other as far back as legend can tell. The Arawaks were the first to migrate up the Lesser Antilles, those mountainous emerald isles that stretch in a sparkling area from South America up the eastern border of the Caribbean. Using them as stepping stones, the Arawaks moved up through the Greater Antilles, evolving a culture remarked at by the early Europeans for its balanced, healthy, peaceful way of life.

Eventually the Caribs made a similar migration, capturing island after island of the Lesser Antilles until they reached the Anegada Passage, a wide, often rough barrier of water that separated them from Puerto Rico. That island proved too strong for them to take and here the Caribs had to call halt to their migration, but not to their seafaring.

Instead they became a pirate people, a race of seagoing warriors equally at home on the water or ashore. Every hurricane season the Caribs would take advantage of the weakened tradewinds and prevailing calms to launch their dugouts, disappear over the horizon, and strike at the Arawaks of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, or those of the South American mainland. Into their hollowed-out trees (as long as 80 feet) they could cram over one hundred men with gear and provisions and paddle almost a thousand miles to raid an unsuspecting town. They stopped at night to rest and cook, pulling their vessels up on the beach. Five hundred men in massive war dugouts formed a mobile, lethal strike force that had little to fear. With good reason they were called the "Camajuya," meaning "thunderbolt" since they fell on coastal villages at dawn like a blast of lightning, leaving smoke and blood to mark their course. They loved weapons, lived for combat, and delighted in rape.

Being a spartan lot, material loot did not interest the Caribs nearly as much as women did. They would paddle thousands of miles to capture female slaves, "especially the young and beautiful whom they keep as servants and concubines," as an early eyewitness commented. They took so many Arawak women that the Carib women spoke a different language from the men ... they spoke Arawak. European ships that touched at the Carib islands often picked up Arawak women escaping from slavery in Carib beds and fields.

The Caribs also brought back men and boys, for the titillation of castrating them, storing them in wooden cages, and butchering them for ceremonial feasts. At these bacchanals they would drink prodigious quantities of their casava beer and dance on wooden boards over a pit that sounded like a giant drum. According to a priest who stayed with them, the Caribs decided on their next marauding voyage while drunk and frenzied.

That such long distance passage-making could be performed in dugouts surprises anyone who supposes they were fit only for rivers and sheltered waters. In fact, the dugout was quite capable and well-suited to the Caribs' environment and several advantages over European sailing ships. For one thing it was of strong and trouble construction, with no seams to caulk, no planks to spring, no fastenings to rot. From small one-man fishing skiffs to enormous war dugouts, each vessel came from a single tree. A large one took over a year to build. Without steel tools the Caribs felled a tree by firing its roots, then hollowed it out by laying live coals on it and scraping out the charcoal with stone adze. Appropriate carvings on the stem and stern finished off what was the Caribs' most valued possession and their culture's highest expression.

Built of hardwoods and hauled out of the water when not in use, the dugout...