the best made and healthiest people of America. Theft was
unknown to them, nothing was hidden; their huts had neither doors nor
windows, and when, after the advent of the French, a Carib missed
anything in his hut, he used to say: "A Christian has been here!"
Dutertre says that in thirty-five years all the French missionaries
together, by taking the greatest pains, had not been able to convert
20 adults. Those who were thought to have embraced Christianity
returned to their practises as soon as they rejoined their fellows.
"The reason for this want of success," says the father, "is the bad
impression produced on the minds of these intelligent natives by the
cruelties and immoralities of the Christians, which are more barbarous
than those of the islanders themselves. They have inspired the Caribs
with such a horror of Christianity that the greatest reproach they can
think of for an enemy is to call him a Christian."

The reason the Spaniards never attempted the conquest of the Caribs is
clear. There was no gold in their islands. They defended their homes
foot by foot, and if, by chance, they were taken prisoners, they
preferred suicide to slavery. Toward the end of the eighteenth century
there still existed a few hundred of the race in the island of St.
Vincent. They were known as the black Caribs, because they were
largely mixed with fugitive negro slaves from other islands and with
the people of a slave-ship wrecked on their coast in 1685. They lived
there tranquil and isolated till 1795, when the island was settled by
French colonists, and they were finally absorbed by them. They were
the last representatives in the Antilles of a race which, during five
centuries, had ruled both on land and sea. On the continent, along the
Esequibo and its affluents, they are numerous still; but in their
contact with the European settlers in those regions they have lost
the strength and the virtues of their former state without acquiring
those of the higher civilization. Like all aboriginals under similar
conditions, they are slowly disappearing.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 89: Revista Puertoriquena, Tomo I, Ano I, 1887.]

[Footnote 90: The word "cannibal" is but a corruption of guaribo, is,
"brave or strong," changed into Caribo, Cariba, and finally that
Carib. The name Galibi, also applied to the Caribs, means equally
strong or brave.]

[Footnote 91: The author visited this region and sketched some of the
ruins of these Jesuit-Gu