(32) The eight-page section devoted to slaves in 1654 had now ballooned to fifty pages, forty-one of which now focused exclusively on "Negro Slaves, Commonly called Moors in France." (33) In the new work, Du Tertre estimated that French missionaries had converted more than 15,000 black slaves throughout the Antilles over the previous thirty-five years, while during the same period, perhaps only twenty
Caribs had embraced Christianity.
The
Caribs' tenacity contributed several colorful words to the English language.
Caribs and Arawaks originated in the delta forests of the Rio Orinoco, and hated each other as far back as legend can tell.
Simpatico settlers were often given an Indian girl as a wife or concubine, and the Spaniards made themselves valuable against
Carib attacks.
The ancestors also gave the Garifuna their characteristic music, which incorporates both African and Native American drum rhythms and song patterns, and an expressive language made up of Arawakan and Cariban (the original languages of the
Caribs) and Yoruba, a West African language.
Vincent remained in the hands of the French and
Caribs until 1762 when another English expedition took the island; the Treaty of Paris officially ceded it to the British in 1763.
Vincent's cultural milieu, and by the mid-1700s Africans and Kalinago had commingled to the point that Europeans began referring to them as another distinct cultural group, the Black
Caribs (or Garinagu) who quickly overpowered the island's Kalinago inhabitants.
In five chapters ("Border of Violence, Border of Desire: The French and the Island
Caribs," "Domestication and the White Noble Savage," "Creolization and the Spirit World: Demons, Violence, and the Body," "The Libertine Colony: Desire, Miscegenation, and the Law," and "Race, Reproduction, and Family Romance in Saint-Dominique"), The Libertine Colony offers critical analyses of missionary writings by Jean-Baptiste Labat and Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (both of whom are frequently cited in the literature), as well as of Raymond Breton's first bilingual Carib-French dictionary.
The geographical pattern is echoed in history as the islands, which were inhabited previously by the
Caribs. They flirted initially with the French before the islands finally passed into the possession of the British who had settled there first in 1623 and, using it as a base for colonising other islands, described St Kitts as the "Mother Colony of the West Indies".
Caribs' Leap/Western Deep, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, (until May 26)