Charles Kingsley - At Last - A Christmas in the West Indies

There some Spaniards boarded him, to buy linen and other things, all which he ‘entertained kindly, and feasted after our manner, by means whereof I learned as much of the estate of Guiana as I could, or as they knew, for those poore souldiers having been many years without wine, a few draughts made them merrie, in which mood they vaunted of Guiana and the riches thereof,’—much which it had been better for Raleigh had he never heard.

Meanwhile the Indians came to him every night with lamentable complaints of Berreo’s cruelty. ‘He had divided the island and given to every soldier a part. He made the ancient Caciques that were lords of the court, to be their slaves. He kept them in chains; he dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other torments, which’ (continues Raleigh) ‘I found afterward to be true. For in the city’ (San Josef), ‘when I entered it, there were five lords, or little kings, in one chain, almost dead of famine, and wasted with torments.’ Considering which; considering Berreo’s treachery to Whiddon’s men; and considering also that as Berreo himself, like Raleigh, was just about to cross the gulf to Guiana in search of El Dorado, and expected supplies from Spain; ‘to leave a garrison in my back, interested in the same enterprise, I should have savoured very much of the asse.’ So Raleigh fell upon the ‘Corps du Guard’ in the evening, put them to the sword, sent Captain Caulfield with sixty soldiers onward, following himself with forty more, up the Caroni river, which was then navigable by boats; and took the little town of San Josef.

It is not clear whether the Corps du Guard which he attacked was at Port of Spain itself, or at the little mud fort at the confluence of the Caroni and San Josef rivers, which was to be seen, with some old pieces of artillery in it, in the memory of old men now living. But that he came up past that fort, through the then primeval forest, tradition reports; and tells, too, how the prickly climbing palm, 24 24 Desmoncus. the Croc-chien, or Hook-dog, pest of the forests, got its present name upon that memorable day. For, as the Spanish soldiers ran from the English, one of them was caught in the innumerable hooks of the Croc-chien, and never looking behind him in his terror, began shouting, ‘Suelta mi, Ingles!’ (Let me go, Englishman!)—or, as others have it, ‘Valga mi, Ingles!’ (Take ransom for me, Englishman!)—which name the palm bears unto this day.

So Raleigh, having, as one historian of Trinidad says, ‘acted like a tiger, lest he should savour of the ass,’ went his way to find El Dorado, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices: and may God have mercy on him; and on all who, like him, spoil the noblest instincts, and the noblest plans, for want of the ‘single eye.’

But before he went, he ‘called all the Caciques who were enemies to the Spaniard, for there were some that Berreo had brought out of other countreys and planted there, to eat out and waste those that were natural of the place; and, by his Indian interpreter that he had brought out of England, made them understand that he was the servant of a Queene, who was the great Cacique of the North, and a virgin, and had more Caciques under her than there were trees in that island; and that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her as were by them oppressed, and, having freed all the northern world from their servitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. I showed them her Majesty’s picture’ (doubtless in ruff, farthingale, and stomacher laden with jewels), ‘which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to make them idolatrous thereof.’

And so Raleigh, with Berreo as prisoner, ‘hasted away toward his proposed discovery,’ leaving the poor Indians of Trinidad to be eaten up by fresh inroads of the Spaniards.

There were, in his time, he says, five nations of Indians in the island,—‘Jaios,’ ‘Arwacas,’ ‘Salvayos’ (Salivas?), ‘Nepoios,’ and round San Josef ‘Carinepagotes’; and there were others, he confesses, which he does not name. Evil times were come upon them. Two years after, the Indians at Punta Galera (the north-east point of the island) told poor Keymis that they intended to escape to Tobago when they could no longer keep Trinidad, though the Caribs of Dominica were ‘such evil neighbours to it’ that it was quite uninhabited. Their only fear was lest the Spaniards, worse neighbours than even the Caribs, should follow them thither.

But as Raleigh and such as he went their way, Berreo and such as he seem to have gone their way also. The ‘Conquistadores,’ the offscourings not only of Spain but of South Germany, and indeed of every Roman Catholic country in Europe, met the same fate as befell, if monk chroniclers are to be trusted, the great majority of the Normans who fought at Hastings. ‘The bloodthirsty and deceitful men did not live out half their days.’ By their own passions, and by no miraculous Nemesis, they civilised themselves off the face of the earth; and to them succeeded, as to the conquerors at Hastings, a nobler and gentler type of invaders. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Spaniards of ancient blood and high civilisation came to Trinidad, and re-settled the island: especially the family of Farfan—‘Farfan de los Godos,’ once famous in mediæval chivalry—if they will allow me the pleasure of for once breaking a rule of mine, and mentioning a name—who seem to have inherited for some centuries the old blessings of Psalm xxxvii.—

‘Put thou thy trust in the Lord, and be doing good; dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.

‘The Lord knoweth the days of the godly: and their inheritance shall endure for ever.

‘They shall not be confounded in perilous times; and in the days of dearth they shall have enough.’

Toward the end of the seventeenth century the Indians summoned up courage to revolt, after a foolish ineffectual fashion. According to tradition, and an old ‘romance muy doloroso,’ which might have been heard sung within the last hundred years, the governor, the Cabildo, and the clergy went to witness an annual feast of the Indians at Arena, a sandy spot (as its name signifies) near the central mountain of Tamana. In the middle of one of their warlike dances, the Indians, at a given signal, discharged a flight of arrows, which killed the governor, all the priests, and almost all the rest of the whites. Only a Farfan escaped, not without suspicion of forewarning by the rebels. He may have been a merciful man and just; while considering the gentle nature of the Indians, it is possible that some at least of their victims deserved their fate, and that the poor savages had wrongs to avenge which had become intolerable. As for the murder of the priests, we must remember always that the Inquisition was then in strength throughout Spanish America; and could be, if it chose, aggressive and ruthless enough.

By the end of the seventeenth century there were but fifteen pueblos, or Indian towns, in the island; and the smallpox had made fearful ravages among them. Though they were not forced to work as slaves, a heavy capitation tax, amounting, over most of the island, to two dollars a head, was laid on them almost to the end of the last century. There seems to have been no reason in the nature of things why they should not have kept up their numbers; for the island was still, nineteen-twentieths of it, rich primeval forest. It may have been that they could not endure the confined life in the pueblos, or villages, to which they were restricted by law. But, from some cause or other, they died out, and that before far inferior numbers of invaders. In 1783, when the numbers of the whites were only 126, of the free coloured 295, and of the slaves 310, the Indians numbered only 2032. In 1798, after the great immigration from the French West Indies, there were but 1082 Indians in the island. It is true that the white population had increased meanwhile to 2151, the free coloured to 4476, and the slaves to 10,000. But there was still room in plenty for 2000 Indians. Probably many of them had been absorbed by intermarriage with the invaders. At present, there is hardly an Indian of certainly pure blood in the island, and that only in the northern mountains.