The first Europeans settlers and their
African captives arrived in Anguilla in 1650.
There is no mention in the early accounts of any Amerindians living in
the island. There is plenty of evidence
of their occupation in earlier times.
Fragments of their pottery are found at sites around the island. Middens, ancient rubbish heaps of broken
conch shells and pottery; carvings; and other discarded objects are
occasionally revealed on or near the beaches (see illus 1).
1. Sandy Ground shell frog (Anguilla
stamp)
Professionally conducted archaeological
digs now take place (see illus 2).
2.
Amerindian pottery bowl found at Sandy Ground
Archaeologists recognise three separate
phases of Amerindian occupation of Anguilla and the other islands of the West
Indies. The pre-ceramic or archaic
period lasted roughly from 1,500 BC to AD 300, when the ceramic age
begins. Pre-ceramic simply means before
pottery. The pre-ceramic age occupants of
the islands were hunter-gatherers. Those
of the ceramic period, when the use of clay pots is evident, were sedentary
farmers. The ceramic age occupants are
divided into two cultures. Those of the
earlier period, 300-900 AD, belong to the ‘Saladoid Culture’. Their pottery is highly decorated compared to
the simpler more utilitarian pottery of the ‘Post-Saladoid’ period, 900-1,500
AD. At least 13 Post-Saladoid village
sites belong to this period. There were also
at least 20 smaller hamlets. Most of
these sites are contemporaneous, suggesting that the late period in Anguilla was
one of relatively high-density occupation.[1] The sites of Amerindian occupation most often
mentioned include Sandy Ground, Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay, and Island Harbour.
The three oldest wells at The Valley, The
Quarter and Statia Valley, date from the time of the Amerindians.[2] There are also springs scattered throughout
the island that supported human occupation.
Fountain Cavern is perhaps the most famous of these springs (see illus 3). It was until recently used by Anguillians as an
emergency source of water. In the 1950s,
the crew of a visiting British frigate helpfully installed a sheer steel ladder
from the entrance at the top of the cavern to the cave floor some 25 feet
below. This allowed the people of Shoal
Bay easier access to the spring. It is
now sealed off to protect the rare and valuable petroglyphs left behind by the original
inhabitants.
3.
Fountain Cavern petroglyphs (By Penny Slinger®)
During much of the twentieth century
electrically operated pumps brought water to the surface from The Valley and
East End wells and distributed it through the government's main supply system. The Valley well is still used to provide brackish
water to the modern desalinisation plant that now supplies a portion of the
island’s public potable water.
The Big Spring at Island Harbour shows
signs of its importance to the Amerindians.
There are many petroglyphs carved around its rim (see illus 4). It also never runs dry.
4. Big Spring (By Penny Slinger®)
At Sandy Ground, the Amerindians used the
spring on the hillside under North Hill.
Their artefacts are found in that area.
The Road Well is located near to it alongside the main road.
Pere Raymond Breton was a French
missionary who was sent to Guadeloupe in 1635.
He spent the next twenty years travelling between that island and
Dominica ministering to the Amerindians.
Much of what we know about the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands
comes from his writings. He tells us
that they called the island ‘Malliouhana’.[3] The meaning of the word is lost. Some have written that it might mean
‘arrow’. This must be a reference to the
long, narrow shape of the island.[4] Others suggest that it means ‘Snake Island’,
after the island’s long and winding shape, but those explanations are both unlikely.[5] Few islands in the world are named after
their shape. It is difficult to imagine
that the shape of Anguilla was immediately apparent to a person paddling by it
in a canoe.
The word Anguilla means eel in Latin and
Italian. The island provides an
excellent habitat for the racer snake, a harmless grass snake that lives off
insects, and that is found everywhere on the island. The first Italian to step ashore would
quickly have become aware of their presence and named the island accordingly.
My preferred theory about the meaning of
the word Malliouhana is based on Jill Tattersall's analysis of the wordlists
and dictionaries of Amerindian languages.[6] These were put together by the early
missionaries to the Amerindians. Each
vowel and consonant has a number of possible meanings or connotations. When you apply her analysis to the consonants
and vowels you find that one possible meaning of the word Malliouhana is, ‘The
Ritual Strengthening Place of the Young Men of my Tribe’. If this is correct, it might be a reference
to the important ceremonial function of the Fountain
Cavern at Shoal
Bay. The elaborate carvings and
petroglyphs on its walls suggest this was a ritual cavern, far too elaborate to
have served only the inhabitants of the island.
You may conclude that the Fountain Cavern was more probably a ceremonial
site for the puberty rituals of the young men from several of the islands
around. At the most propitious time each
year, the drugged young men would be landed on the beach at Shoal Bay. The well-worn track from the beach to the
cavern shows generations of bare feet wearing down the rocky surface (see illus
5 for Penny Slinger’s depiction of Shoal Bay and the cavern below).
5. Golden Age of the Arawaks (By Penny
Slinger®)
The
grotesque wall carvings of the cavern, and the equally ominous totems carried
by the shamans, visible in the flickering torch light, would doubtless have
thoroughly terrified the young men. Such
ceremonies were intended to prepare them for the rigours of manhood that they
were about to meet (see ills 6, 7, and 8 for depictions of the petroglyphs).
6. Lizard Fertility God petroglyph from
Fountain Cavern (Anguilla stamp)
7. Solar Chieftain petroglyph at Fountain
Cavern (Anguilla stamp)
8.
Rendezvous Bay shell mask (Anguilla stamp)
According to Spanish legend, that is unquestioningly
repeated to this day in all the history books and tourist literature, the
Amerindians that were living in the islands of the Caribbean when the Spaniards
arrived belonged to two supposedly quite different and opposed Amerindian
cultures. They called them the Caribs
and the Arawaks.[7]
Archaeologists now believe that, during
the period 900–1,500 AD, the Amerindians of Anguilla and the Leeward Islands
were all members of one culture. They
were mainly sedentary and agricultural, with extensive trade links between the
islands. There is not one piece of
archaeological evidence for the entry of the legendary warlike tribe of Caribs,
killing and eating their way northwards through the islands at the time of the
arrival of the Spanish.
When Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’
the northern islands of the Bahamas in 1492, he found the natives wearing
ornaments of gold which they readily exchanged with the Spaniards for trifles (see
illus 9). The search for the source of
this gold became one of the major causes of the destruction of the Amerindians of
the West Indies.
Columbus described the Amerindians of
the Bahamas as having a loving manner and gentle speech. These Amerindians became known to history as
the Arawaks. As we know, this was not
the name they called themselves.
About the year
1975, Professor Christopher Goodwin, then of Baton Rouge University, gave a
lecture in Basseterre in St Kitts. He
was conducting rescue archaeology on the site of the Ponds Pasture industrial estate
in St Kitts. This area of Basseterre was
long known as an Amerindian burial site.
As I recall his lecture, he gave an imaginary and amusing explanation of
how Columbus came to mis-name the inhabitants of the Caribbean as ‘Arawaks’ and
‘Caribs’.
9. Track through the Caribbean of the
First Voyage of Columbus in 1492.
The purpose of his
anecdote was to demonstrate how incredible it is that the Amerindians that
Columbus met on his first voyage could have told him what the names were of the
tribes that inhabited the West Indies at the time of Columbus’ arrival. Tongue in cheek as the tale was, it is still
the only sensible explanation that I have ever come across.
Convinced the earth
was a sphere, Columbus sailed west in search of India and the spices of the
east. He took the precaution of taking an
interpreter, Luis de Torres, with him.
According to Professor Godwin’s amusing theory of what happened next, de
Torres was fluent in Urdu and Hindi, the main languages of the Indian
sub-continent. As this was the first
voyage to the West Indies, there were in Spain no Amerindian language speakers
who could act as interpreters. When his
crew came upon that first pirogue being furiously paddled by a terrified old
man of the coast of the Bahamas, Professor Goodwin imagines that Columbus must
have said to his interpreter, “Ask the
fellow in the canoe what part of India he belongs to.” The interpreter complied. He ran to the bow of Columbus’ carrack, the Santa
Maria (see illus 10), and leaned over, calling out to the paddler in the canoe
below, “Ah pucha nah, yani mani cou?”,
or something to that effect, in Urdu. The
old man in the canoe below may have looked up to him, and with the Amerindian
version of the famous two-finger gesture, responded, “Arawak, Arawak”, or something like that.
Not comprehending
that he was being told to go back where he came from, but not wishing to seem
incompetent, the interpreter hurried back to Columbus. He explained, “Lord Admiral, I did as you instructed. The old
man says he belongs to the Arawak nation.”
10.
Replica of Columbus’ Santa Maria
Columbus solemnly wrote it down in
his journal which was later carried to all the corners of Europe. “The
first Indian I found belongs to the Arawak nation!” This word ‘Arawak’ has remained in all the
history books ever since, even though we have long known that it is utter
nonsense.[8]
In recognition of the wrongful naming of
the Amerindians as Caribs and Arawaks, modern archaeologists, following Irving
Rouse, have taken to calling all the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas,
the Greater Antilles, and the Northern Leeward Islands ‘Tainos’.[9] The word is thought to mean ‘good’ or
‘noble’. There is no evidence that the
people inhabiting Anguilla at the time of the arrival of Columbus called
themselves by this name. It is more
likely that the people of each island called themselves by their name for the
island they occupied.
The so-called ‘Arawak’ crops of the
Bahamas, as of Anguilla, consisted of maize and bulbous plants such as sweet
potatoes and cassava (see illus 11). They
cultivated tobacco and smoked it in pipes.
They became quite intoxicated from smoking the dried leaves by inserting
a forked pipe through their nostrils.
11.
Cassava
They also grew cotton, weaving it into
'hamacas' to sleep in, nets, and small aprons or loin cloths. Some Arawaks went naked or clothed themselves
with leaves. They protected their bodies
from the sun by staining their skins with the dye they called ‘roucou’. Arawak shelters were mere huts, thatched with
palm leaves. Their chiefs or Caciques
wore head-dresses of feathers, occasionally decorated with small pieces of gold
and bands of coloured beads and bones.
Their religion was a form of nature-worship. Their gods, called 'zemis', were represented
in the form of heads of lizards, snakes or bats made from chalk or baked earth
or carved on rocks (see illus 12 for one with character).
In addition to farming and fishing, the
Amerindians of the Leeward Islands at the time of Columbus’ arrival were a
sea-faring people.
12. A zemi (By Penny Slinger®)
They built pirogues, large canoes, from
the gommier and cedar trees, capable of holding up to one hundred men. These were used for travelling among the islands. There was an active trade in stone tools and
pottery, and many of the artefacts found in Anguilla are made of stone from
neighbouring islands.
According to the legends taught to our
children to this day, the Caribs were supposedly far less civilized than
the Arawaks. They lived on the southern
islands of the Lesser Antilles. The
Arawaks were supposedly docile farmers and fishermen who occupied the northern
islands. The Caribs were described as warlike
and cannibalistic. As for the story of
cannibalism, a form of ritual cannibalism undoubtedly existed among the
Amerindians of the West Indies. This
involved chopping up a dead or dying enemy and cooking and eating parts of
him. This ritual was meant to insult the
dead or dying enemy. The injuries to his
muscles prevented his spirit from taking any kind of revenge once he was
dead. If the eyes, tongue or muscles
from the arms and legs were cooked and chewed, the spirit of the dead man would
be handicapped from ever seeing, talking and shooting again. That was their faith.
For the religious ‘Caribs’, it was a waste
to simply kill a captured enemy outright.
Ritual required that his captors torture him death. His dying screams of pain, his last breath,
would be inhaled by the victors leaning over his tortured body. In that way, the strength of his spirit was
absorbed by his capturers and fortified their spirits. The greater the torture, and the more painful
the death, the greater would be the strength of the spirit that was inhaled and
absorbed. Hence, their reputation for
sitting around their tortured male victims, watching them as they died. There was no similar advantage in torturing
women or children. There was no
masculine strength to absorb from their dying spirits. There are no accounts of women or children
being tortured or eaten. Torturing,
killing and eating men was a religious practice, not a nutritional supplement.
Anthropologists
call the practice of eating part of an enemy ‘exo-cannibalism’. It is distinguished from ‘endo-cannibalism’. The latter occurs when the fat, or some other
part of the body of the deceased, is consumed by the grieving relatives. This is believed to preserve the spiritual
essence of the loved one within the tribe and family. That is particularly important in the case of
a great chief or other dignitary. The
belief is not limited to the South American Amerindians. It is a recurring concept through human
civilization. We see traces of its
survival in the Christian ritual of the Eucharist. Thus, we celebrate Christ offering his
disciples bread and water saying, “This
is my body, take it and eat it in memory of me.
This is my blood, take it and drink it in memory of me”. The sacrament of the Eucharist is a
ritualized form of endo-cannibalism.
Both forms of cannibalism served religious rather than nutritional aims.
Professor Goodwin,
as I recall, also amusingly explained how the ‘Caribs’ got their name. He surmises that, shortly after Columbus and
his men landed on the first Bahamas island they came to, the ladies of the
village wasted no time in cavorting in the surf with his sailors and crew. The same enterprising, Urdu-speaking
interpreter was sent to have a word with the Cacique, or chief, perhaps
standing with his warriors in front of his home, or ‘ajoupa’.
Columbus’ instruction
to the interpreter at this first landing was to enquire of the Cacique whether
all the natives of the islands around were as friendly as his people were. Or, were there, perhaps, some who were
dangerous and to be avoided? So, the
interpreter approached the stern-looking Cacique. He enquired in Urdu, “Ah pucha nah, mani ani cou yah nah hah?” or something to that
effect. The uncomprehending chieftain
glared back at him. Perhaps, with an
imperious gesture of his out-flung right hand, which was then pointing to the
south, he replied, “Carib, Carib,” or
something to that effect. He probably meant,
“Leave our women alone and sail back out
to sea immediately!”
Still not wishing
to seem a dunderhead, the enterprising but uncomprehending interpreter hurried
back to Columbus. He delivered the
solemn news, “My Lord High Admiral, I did
as you instructed. The chieftain told me
that, to the south, where he pointed, there lie a people who are war-like and
much to be avoided. They call themselves
Caribs.” Columbus solemnly wrote down
the information in his journal. And so,
there entered the lexicography, topography, and mythology of the world the
long-lasting story of the peaceful Arawaks of the northern islands and the
war-like Caribs of the southern islands of the West Indies. All this was told to Columbus on his first
voyage, when there was no Spaniard who could speak or understand the language
of the natives. This myth would haunt
the Amerindians in the years to come. As
for the image of the ladies cavorting in the surf with the Spanish adventurers,
little did they know that the only historically significant gift of the
‘Indians’ that they would carry back to Europe when this voyage was over was
the dread spirochete later known as Syphilis.
Bishop Bartholome
Las Casas was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest (1474-1566) who arrived in
Hispaniola in 1502. He was the first
Catholic priest ordained in the Americas, and the first bishop of the West
Indies, where he lived from 1502 to 1550.
At his urging, the Spanish King would issue his famous but short-lived
edict. This was to the effect that the
‘peaceful Arawaks’ were spared from slavery.
No such indulgence need be shown to the ‘war-like Caribs’. Having no immunity to common European
diseases, the initially enslaved Amerindians of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico soon
died off. More slaves were needed to
work the Spanish mines.
Under the rules of
engagement laid down by the Spanish King, the Caribs could legally be seized
and condemned to slavery. Given the
exemption for enslaving Caribs, it is not surprising that the Spanish
slave-hunters ‘discovered’ more and more Caribs paddling their canoes in the
northern waters of the Caribbean. The
explanation was that they were fighting their way from south to north,
decimating and eating the peaceful Arawaks, and threatening the Spaniards. This false narrative served the Spaniards’
purpose of legally enslaving only Caribs and not Arawaks. The truth is there never were either
‘Arawaks’ or ‘Caribs’ in any of the waters of the West Indies. The myth of their existence is repeated as
gospel truth in the history books taught to the school children of the West
Indies to this day.
It was on the second voyage to the West
Indies that Columbus first met the Amerindians he called the Caribs. At Guadeloupe, he saw huts near the shore and
landed, but he found the people run away.
In the huts, his men discovered pottery of various kinds, calabashes,
hammocks, parrots and cotton, both spun and unspun. What was more significant was the large number
of human bones found lying around on the ground or in the eaves of the huts. It even appeared that drinking vessels were
made from human skulls. This led the
Spaniards to believe that they were in the islands of the warlike cannibals,
the Caribs, described previously by the gentle natives of the Bahamas.
After a time, some Amerindian women and
children were brought back to Columbus, and he learned that all the men were
gone on a raid. Columbus’ new
interpreter, Diego Colon, an Amerindian taken back to Spain from the first
voyage, explained that the women claimed they were captives from the northern
islands, and that the male prisoners of those islands were slain and eaten (see
illus 13).
The
very word ‘cannibal’ derives from a spelling error in the name that Columbus
gave the Caribs, whom he called ‘Los Carribales’. Columbus was not very good at forming the
letter ‘r’. When he wrote it, it looked
like an ‘n’. The monks who transcribed his
letter to Queen Isabella mis-read his ‘carribales’ as ‘cannibales’. So, we get the word cannibal in English. The Caribbean Sea may as easily be called the
Cannibal Sea.
13. An early and
imaginary European depiction of Carib cannibalism
What was even more astonishing to the Spaniards
was Diego Colon’s claim that the Carib women spoke a completely different
language from the men. This was a
result, he claimed, of the Carib custom of carrying off Arawak women for
wives. Diego Colon’s account of the
Carib women's explanation for their separate speech is nonsense. What we see here is the Amerindian religious
concept of ‘taboo’ at work. When Amerindian
men were on the warpath, they would use certain expressions which only men
could employ. If the same expressions
were used by women, bad luck would result.
Just as it was taboo for her to use his term for common objects or
persons, so it was taboo for a man to use a woman’s word for the same objects
or persons. That does not mean that they
did not understand each other perfectly well.
We find a version of this common phenomenon even among modern
teenagers. An urban male gang-member in
a modern city to this day uses words special to him and his friends that no
proper lady among his friends and family would dream of using.
There is another cause of sex
differentiation in words and phrases amongst the Amerindians of South America
even today. This is the Amerindian
kinship and gender system. In European
languages derived from Latin, objects and persons may be of the male or female
gender. So, we say, ‘le table’ and ‘la
plume’ in French, the first male, and the second female. Not so among the Amerindians. The word in question changes according to the
gender of the speaker. Thus, the word
for ‘my father’ varies according to the gender of the speaker. A son and a daughter use different
expressions in addressing the same father.
This system of gender differentiation in language is well understood.[10] It suggests that the relationship of a boy
with his father is different to the relationship of a daughter with the same
father. The son and daughter understand
each other perfectly when they speak to each other about their father using the
words proper to their gender. This does
not mean they speak different languages, or that the men captured the women
from foreign tribes.
The misnaming by Columbus of the
aboriginal natives of the West Indies received a further boost in the
mid-nineteenth century. The Prussian
explorer and ethnologist Alexander von Humboldt explored the Amazon and
Essequibo regions in the period 1799 to 1804.
He met many Amerindian tribes in South America. He attempted to classify their
languages. He explored the West Indies,
and even wrote a history of Cuba.[11] He gave names to the groups of South American
languages that he identified. Some of
them he arbitrarily called ‘Carib’ and others ‘Arawak.’ These names were of course not known to the
original inhabitants of the islands or of the South American continent. Nor were they an authentic, indigenous tribal
classification. Von Humboldt made the
classifications up out of thin air. In
his writing, he repeated the lurid stories of cannibalism and of the report of
the different languages of the men and the women.[12] His works were popular and widely read. After blessing with this repetition the
fictitious story of the two competing tribes of the Caribs and the Arawaks, no
one would doubt its accuracy until recent times.
On subsequent voyages, Columbus placed
settlements in Hispaniola and later in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where mines were
dug in the frantic Spanish search for gold and silver. They enslaved the Amerindians for this
purpose. By the time that Anguilla was
settled a hundred and fifty years later in 1650, the Amerindians were
gone. One reads only of diminishing
numbers of so-called Caribs living in some of the mountainous volcanic islands
to the south, such as Dominica and Saint Vincent.
The rapid disappearance of the Amerindians
from the islands, including Anguilla, is well documented. There are many explanations for their rapid
dying off in the islands of the West Indies suggested in the textbooks. Spanish cruelty was Protestant propaganda,
and not the entire reason. Even their great
god, Jocahu, the cassava god, could not save them from extinction (see illus 14). The Amerindians were fatally susceptible to
such minor common European diseases as smallpox, measles, and even the common
cold. They possessed no immunity to
these new diseases. More of them died
from these infections than from the guns and swords of the Spaniards. The Amerindian wars with the English, French
and Spanish intruders, and their enslavement in the Spanish mines, are all well
documented. New light is being thrown
every day on the whole question of the identity and culture of these first
aboriginal inhabitants of the islands.
New theories are developing that explain many things not previously
understood about their way of life and their eventual fate.[13]
14. The Great God
Jocahu, carved on a stalagmite at Fountain Cavern (Painting by Penny Slinger®)
The legend of the Arawak women captured by
the fierce Caribs and speaking a different language from the Carib men is now laughed
at. It is the same with the legend of
the cannibalism of the indigenous people.
Modern knowledge has not caused these legends or myths to disappear from
the history books still written and published throughout the region. The attraction of the concepts remains. They probably start in the usual unconscious
design of a conquering nation to objectify the people they are about to
destroy. They were useful in promoting
Christianisation and colonialism in the early period. They served as justification for the European
enslavement and destruction of the ‘savage Caribs’. Now that these fictions have outlived their
usefulness, it might be time to let them go.
[1] Dr John Crock, The Forest North Site
and Post-Saladoid Settlement in Anguilla, 16th Int. Cong. Car.
Arch, 1996.
[2] Sir William Halcrow & Partners, Water
Resources of St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla (1964).
[3] Pere Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire
Caraibe-Francois, p.202.
[5] Bryan Dyde, Out of the Crowded
Vagueness: A History of the Islands of St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla (2005).
[6] Jill Tattersall, Standardised
Simplified Spelling System Applied to Interpreting the Taino and Carib
Languages (International Association for Caribbean Archaeology, 9th
Congress, Santo Domingo, 1981, pp 506-509).
[7] RP Devas, The Island
of Grenada, 1650-1950 (1965) p. 23: "It was the Europeans who called
these people Caribs, for that is not what they called themselves, which, says
Raymond Breton, was Callinago . . ."
[8] See for example: E
Daniel, West Indian Histories (1937) Vol. 1, p. 35; John Parry and Phillip Sherlock, Short
History of the West Indies (1956) p. 3;
OA Garcia, History of the West Indies (1965) p. 18; Helmut Blume,
The Caribbean Islands (1974) p. 55.
[12] Alexander Von
Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctal Regions of America
during the years 1799-1804 (7 vols, 1814-1829).
[13] Penny Slinger’s brilliant and
surrealistic paintings of the Amerindians of Anguilla can be viewed at her
website: http://www.arawakart.com/
