Title: "The Race Leapt at Sauteurs": genocide, narrative, and indigenous exile from the Caribbean archipelago

Author(s): Melanie J. Newton

Source: Caribbean Quarterly. 60.2 (June 2014): p5.
Document Type: Article
http://www.uwi edu/cq/default aspx?sflang-en
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Introduction
IN MARCH 2012. ATOP A HILL on Balllceaux Island In St Vincent and the Grenadines. Belizean-born Garifuna healer Lucia Ellis
gave thanks for being alive. Balliceaux is an inhospitable place, devoid of fresh water, natural shelter and consumable plant life. In
July 1796. British forces interned 4.776 prisoners on this desolate island, which was hours away from St Vincent even on a frigate. An
epidemic swept through the camp and only 2.248 prisoners were still alive by March 1797. when they were exiled to Central America.
Lucia, like the Garifuna people of Central America and the diaspora today, descends from these survivors. (1 )
Lucia spoke during a pilgrimage to Balliceaux. which was organised by St Vincent's Garifuna Heritage Foundation. The participants
ncluded Garifuna and Caribs from St Vincent and the Grenadines. Belize. Honduras and the United States, as well as nonndigenous Vincentians and academics from the Caribbean. North America and Europe. (2) Indigenous Vincentians shared stories of
the discrimination they endured in St Vincent. I grew up in Barbados, half an hour by plane from St Vincent. Legend has it that
Africans from a wrecked slave ship bound for Barbados escaped in St Vincent and became ancestors of today's Garifuna people.
Nevertheless few Barbadians know of the Garifuna or think much about Barbados's pre-colonlal history as part of an Indigenous
system of life, yet Barbados and St Vincent share a genocidal history that forms a key basis of modern statehood. This essay is about
the Garifuna/'Carib' people between 1492 and the late eighteenth century. Most of the analysis centres on the sub-archipelago of
southeastern/Lesser Antillean islands that was their ancestral territory, known in the early colonial period as the Caribbees.
Charaibes. Carabes and Caribes (3) The Lesser Antilles' histories of enslavement and colonisation fit the 1951 United Nations
definition of genocide as an attempt to "destroy. In whole or In part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". (4)
The late Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed that "the word history offers ... an irreducible distinction and yet an equally irreducible
overlap between what happened and that which is said to have happened ... The ways in which what happened and that which Is
said to have happened are or are not the same may Itself be historical." (5) For Trouillot, a full grasp of a historical event's meaning
requires exploration of its two-sided historicity, made up of "the materiality of the sociological process (historicity 1 ) [which] sets the
stage for future historical narratives (historicity 2)". (6) I examine the 'two-sided historicity' of three acts of annlhllatlonlst violence
committed between 1493 and 1797 by (In order of occurrence) the Spanish, the French and the British against Indigenous Lesser
Antillean people
I explore these three incidents as acts of genocide (historicity 1). as well as the material for a genocidal historical narrative (historicity
2), which Is a version of history that seeks to complete the work of the original act of genocide, even if that may not be the intention of
those who repeat the narrative. These three encounters were part of imperial Europe's 'Carib archive', which transformed the defeat
of even the smallest Carib contingent into a moment representing the annihilation of the Carib people "in whole or in part" The
translation of military defeats Into widely recognised symbols of racial annihilation helped colonial authorities to dispossess the
descendants of Caribbean aboriginal people of legal claims to redress or rights based on Carib ancestry
Taino activist Jorge Estevez condemned historians' '"paper genocide' With the stroke of their pens the legacy of my ancestors was
wiped out." (7) This paper Illustrates that genocidal antl-Carlb narratives survive because a diverse range of agents who engage
publicly with the past reproduce them-historians, of course, but also filmmakers, visual artists, poets and government officials The
marginalisation of Carib survival narratives means that, in the Lesser Antilles today, aboriginal rights are difficult to conceptualise or
articulate effectively In most political or legal contexts
Hispaniola, 1493: Columbus's Caribe ghosts
On 26 December 1492 Christopher Columbus promised a 'Taino' cacique from Hispaniola that "the sovereigns of Castile would order
the Caribes destroyed". (8) During his two months in the Caribbean, Columbus had surmised that Caribes were "man-eaters" who
lived somewhere to the south and east On Sunday 13 January 1493, on his return voyage to Spain, Columbus had his first putative
encounter with Caribes In a bay on Hispaniola's northeast coast (9) The incident is recounted in Bartolom de las Casas's digest of
Columbus's logbook, as well as In The Life of the Admiral, written between 1537 and 1539 by Columbus's son Ferdinand (Hernando
Colon). The logbook and The Life of the Admiral describe how Columbus sent members of his crew ashore to barter with a group of
men. Columbus disliked the looks of an aboriginal man who came to the caravel to speak with him, describing him as "very illproportioned In appearance [with] his face all stained with charcoal he must be of the Caribes who eat men" Relations on the
beach soured when the men refused to sell the Spanish more than a few bows and arrows Claiming the Caribes were about to
attack, the Spanish struck first with crossbows and swords, wounding several of the men, who fled Columbus defended the attack
because "he believed they were those of Carib and that they would eat men" Even if they were not Caribes, then they "must be their
neighbours and with the same customs and be men without fear" (10)
A sentence from the logbook states that "the Christians would have killed many of them [the Caribs] if the pilot who went as their
captain had not prevented It". (11) Hernando's account rephrases this sentence as follows: "And it is certain that many would have
been killed, If the pilot of the caravel, whom the Admiral had placed in charge of the boat and leader of the men on it, had not
prevented It." (12) Hernando's sentence suggests that there could have been heavy casualties on both sides J.M. Cohen's
Christopher Columbus: The Four Voyages, an authoritative set of translations of firsthand accounts of Columbus's travels, renders
Hernando's sentence as follows: "Certainly many of our men would have been killed if the pilot of the caravel whom the Admiral had
put In charge of the ship and those In It had not come to their rescue and saved them " (13) Cohen's text does not translate the
digest's version of the Hispaniola Incident. Columbus's willingness to sanction the first Spanish slaughter of Antllleans on the pretext
that they were Caribs Is transformed, In this Influential and widely used English translation, into a near murder of the Spanish by
Caribs.
This series of altered renderings, ending with Cohen's spectacular mistranslation, is not accidental: the Hispaniola encounter was the
first expression of Spain's annlhllatlonlst Impulse in the Americas, yet it was the Caribs who entered the Imperial archive accused as
"man-eaters" and murderers. (14) The Taino word Canlba, which Columbus believed referred to the supposedly Carib practice of
eating people, was the basis of the word cannibal, which displaced the Greek term anthropophagy in Western Europe. (15)
Archaeologist William Keegan suggests that the "man-eating Caribe" belonged to the realm of Taino spirituality and did not actually
refer to human beings; nevertheless, Columbus's Invention of Caribs who "killed and ate Arawak men and took Arawak women for
wives and consorts ... currently pervades fictional and nonflctlonal writings about the early history of the West Indies" (16)
In 1503, Queen Isabella Issued the first of several decrees permitting Caribs' enslavement because of their putative cannibalism,

giving carte blanche for slave raids in the Lesser Antilles. (17) The Spanish used the term 'Carib' as an anthropological category to
refer to people from the southeastern Caribbean and the nearby coastal mainland, as well as a legal category deployed against
indigenous people who resisted conquest or otherwise behaved Inconveniently. The designation 'Carib' became a label of genocldal
proportions that justified the enslavement, dislocation and annihilation of collectives of people, similar to the anti-Semitic Idea of
'blood-libel'. (18)
Bartolom de las Casas's writings about the Greater Antilles, Central America, Peru, Venezuela and the Rio Plata made Spanish
policy in these areas a matter of public debate In Spain, and were foundational In the development of a human rights discourse that
opposed genocidal violence. (19) Yet he wrote no critique of the passage of yet another decree sanctioning Carib enslavement In
1533, or the fact that the 1542 'New Laws', which forbade the enslavement of Indigenous Americans who were subjects of the Crown,
were interpreted as permitting Carib slavery. In 1547, the Spanish monarchy explicitly exempted male Carlbs from the protection of
the New Laws. (20) Las Casas illustrates the disparity between Lesser Antllleans' Important place In the emerging Atlantic system
and their ghostly presence in the growing Imperial archive. On the one hand, European ships routinely stopped In the Lesser Antilles
in order to trade, take on water and wood, wash clothes and enjoy hospitality. Lesser Antllleans took part In the transoceanic
economy based on their desire for items similar to those that Europeans exchanged In West Africa In the same period. However, the
items that Antilleans offered for barter were perishable and were consumed at sea, never reaching Europe. (21 ) Philip Boucher notes
that European writers and artists consistently represented Carlbs as people who "occupied the lowest rank In human societies". Few
Carib representatives whose presence might have challenged negative stereotypes reached Europe. (22) In translation Las Casas's
Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, especially the 1598 Latin edition, published and gruesomely Illustrated by the antiCatholic engravers Theodor de Bry and Sons, was the origin of Europe's 'Black Legend', which condemned Spanish violence against
indigenous people. (23) At the same time, rumours of Carib cannibalism continued to circulate, blunting opposition to their
persecution and contributing to the image of Lesser Antllleans as beings who seemed to achieve corporeality only to kidnap and eat
Europeans.
The absence of an early colonial debate about the enslavement and massacre of Carlbs had a lasting Impact on historiographical
writing about the early conquest. Influential historical geographer Carl Sauer assumed In 1966 that Spanish slave raiding reduced the
Lesser Antillean indigenous population to the point where they became Irrelevant to colonial history. (24) General histories of the
Caribbean ignore the indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles as significant forces In Atlantic World politics between 1500 and 1605,
the date of a failed British attempt to colonise St Lucia. (25) By the early seventeenth century the Spanish-derived construction of the
people of the Lesser Antilles as 'Caribs' did resemble the Taino Caribe, a haunting presence of uncertain corporeality, perhaps
occupying a space between the living and the dead. (26) Spain's Carib narrative fundamentally shaped French and British practices
when they began their invasion of the Lesser Antilles in the 1620s.
Grenada, 1651: Annihilating a'race'
On the northern coast of the island of Grenada, a cliff overlooks the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, with a sheer drop onto
jagged rocks and pounding surf. The French named this dramatic precipice Le Morne des Sauteurs. At the end of the Seven Years'
War in 1763, the Paris Treaty gave Grenada to the victorious British, who anglicised the name as Sauteurs Point, Leapers Hill, or
Carib's Leap. The name recalls a 1651 battle between the French and Indigenous Antllleans during the colonisation of the 'Caribbees'
or les Caraibes, as the French called the Lesser Antilles. French Dominican friar Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, who travelled to Grenada
in 1656 and 1657, related the conquest of Grenada, based on evidence from French settlers, in a short chapter of his massive threevolume Histoire generale des Antilles habites par les Franais. (27) Du Tertre established the veracity of his narrative by contrasting
his detailed account with that of a rival text by Charles de Rochefort, who made only passing reference to the Morne des Sauteurs
battle. (28)
At the beginning of his Histoire, Du Tertre blamed the Spanish for establishing a genocidal pattern in the Caribbean that the French
and English now had no choice but to replicate. He began with the colonisation of St Kitts under the leadership of Thomas
Waernard/Warner (first English governor of the Caribbee islands) and Frenchman Pierre d'Esnambuc. According to Du Tertre, the
Englishman Warner, having been a victim of Spanish cruelty, sought to differentiate himself from the Spanish and "lived in the same
good intelligence with the natives as we French". Warner's good Intentions were thwarted by a Carib degeneracy made worse by
Spanish barbarism:
[T]he Devil, unable to suffer such a great friendship, persuaded the natives ... that these foreign Nations could not
have come so far to their island, except with the intention to massacre them cruelly there, just as these Nations
[Europeans, i.e., the Spanish] had massacred their ancestors by fire and blood, in all of terme ferme and the islands
which they presently occupied in all of America. (29)

For Du Tertre this discovery sufficiently explained why, based on slim intelligence of an alleged Carib plot to kill the settlers, the
French and British conducted a pre-emptive massacre and enslavement of Caribs on St Kitts in 1627. (30)
Du Tertre's description of Warner as an unusual Englishman because he treated the Caribs with a typically'French' humanity
exemplified a French colonial myth, according to which there existed a unique understanding between French settlers and the most
'savage' Indigenous people. French diplomatic relations with people such as the Tupinambas of Brazil, the Hurons of the Great
Lakes, and, eventually, the Carlbs of the Lesser Antilles were held up in implicit contrast to the Spanish preference for diplomatic ties
with hierarchical, sedentary, urbanised and Imperial indigenous societies. (31) Yet Du Tertre's narrative illustrates that the French
understanding of the Carlbs drew heavily on Spanish depictions of them as untrustworthy cannibals who ultimately had to be
eliminated.
In 1635, the king of France granted the Compagnie des Iles d'Amrique the 'right' to colonise three of the Caribbees-Martinique, St
Lucia and Grenada. In Martinique, colonists reached uneasy and temporary agreement with indigenous people. (32) By contrast, the
French were unable to establish themselves on either Grenada or St Lucia. According to Du Tertre, "the multitude of Savages who
lived there and ... Its distance from the Island of St Christopher" frustrated French desires to take possession of Grenada. (33) In
June 1646 the Compagnie assigned Martinique governor Jacques du Parquet the task of settling Grenada, because he had
"conducted himself so valiantly with the Savages of Martinique, where he was In command, and also with those of Grenada, who had
begged him to come and live among them". (34) Du Parquet moved quickly, knowing how "Inconstant" were the "barbarians". He
raised a colonisation force of two hundred men, Including "Masons, Carpenters, Locksmiths, and other Artisans", and took provisions
for three months, crops for planting, and Items to barter. In case all else failed, he armed his men with "rifles and good pistols, and
enough ammunition to fight for an entire day, If need be, without the gun powder that he had transported In several barrels". (35)
Du Parquet reached Grenada In June 1650 and was allegedly well received by Kalerouane, who Du Tertre claimed was Grenada's
Carib chief. (36) Du Parquet made great ceremony of taking possession of Grenada-plantlng the cross, displaying the royal coat of
arms, and firing cannon and muskets--and promptly set his men to work building a military fort. Watching this, Kalerouane Informed
du Parquet that "he wanted to have his Island and remain Its master" and allegedly demanded something commensurate In exchange
for the Island. Du Parquet gave him "a certain quantity of sickles, Glass Beads, Crystals, Knives, and other dry goods that he
demanded", along with two quarts of brandy. By this means the Indigenous people supposedly "ceded In good faith all rights that they
had to this Island, except for their huts and their fields". Du Parquet left his cousin (whom Du Tertre and de Rochefort named only as
"the Count") In charge and returned to Martinique. (37)
Eight months later, Grenada's Carlbs rose up against the French, and du Parquet sent a force of three hundred men, ordering the
Count "to fell any Savages that he found; and, at the least sign of resistance, to take the war to their huts, and oblige them to quit the
Island". Du Tertre Illustrated the Impossibility of reaching a diplomatic settlement by claiming that a group of Carlbs killed a prominent
settler In cold blood under the pretext of trying to make peace. Indigenous fighters from neighbouring Dominica and St Vincent joined
the Grenadian struggle, but the French gained the upper hand, forcing the Antllleans to retreat and killing many of them. Trapped by
the French during a stand-off at Morne des Sauteurs,
they [the Caribs] jumped from this high precipice into the sea, where they perished miserably, some forty of them,
another forty remaining; a young Savage girl, quite beautiful, around twelve or thirteen years old, was for some time the

subject of a contest between two Officers: but while they disputed over who would have her, a third arrived, who, having
shot the poor girl in the head; and having let her fall dead at his feet, brought them to agreement. (38)

The anecdote of this child's fatal ordeal Is the only clue that French military strategy likely Included the rape and murder of women
and children.
Other Caribs kept fighting, catching French settlers In the woods, and the Count raised another one hundred and fifty men to continue
the war of annihilation. He slaughtered everyone who crossed his path, "not pardoning either women or children [and] burned all the
huts and took all the victuals". The Count secured victory for the French, when, "having located all [the Caribs'] pirogues and canoes
in a river, he seized them, and removed by this method the means of going to beg refuge with the Savages of the Islands of Saint
Vincent, and of Martinique". (39)
Du Tertre constructed the French massacre In Grenada as Inevitable. First, the Caribs demonstrated an apparently Irresistible
attraction to the French and invited them to the Island, a reference that interpolated cannibals who must ultimately be destroyed
because they could neither live without, nor live with, proper humans. The Caribs engaged In rituals of legal exchange whose
meaning was, the narrative implied, self-evident to civilised people. However, they failed to respect the treaties that they entered,
which led inexorably to conflict and massacre. Du Tertre's claim that the Caribs killed at Grenada Included Caribs from St Vincent and
Dominica did not necessarily suggest the destruction of all Caribs In the Lesser Antilles. (40) Nevertheless, Carlb survival as
members of Grenadian colonial society, most likely via absorption Into the growing enslaved population, was treated as historically
irrelevant. Du Tertre laid a foundation for the 'Leap at Sauteurs' to enter the narrative of Antillean history as an emblem of the
assumed connection between the arrival of Europeans and the Caribs' supposed disappearance.
During decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s, Sauteurs Point became a floating symbol of colonial Injustice but retained Its
colonising significance as the moment marking Carlb annihilation. Drawing on Du Tertre, Eric Williams noted In 1969 that "what
happened to Grenada may be taken as typical of this phase In Caribbean history [the late seventeenth century]. The Caribs were
literally exterminated by the French, the last group throwing themselves headlong from a precipice, which has since been called Le
Morne des Sauteurs (Leapers Hill)." (41) In 1971, W Adolphe Roberts similarly described the Morne des Sauteurs battle as the
moment when Grenada's "last Caribs" jumped from the cliff, and noting that the Incident was material for the "as yet unwritten epic
poetry of the Caribbean". (42) Nobel prizewinning St Lucian poet Derek Walcott wrote that epic poem, with the Morne des Sauteurs
suicide providing the material for the following key stanza of his 1973 work Another Life:
The leaping Caribs whiten in one flash, the instant the race leapt at Sauteurs a cataract! One scream of bounding lace.
(43)

For Walcott, the race of the Caribs leapt at Sauteurs, not just forty warriors. Editorial comments in the 2004 annotated version of
Walcott's poem reflect assumptions that the Sauteurs battle symbolises an archipelagic process of Carib destruction: "Although the
historic (and ill-recorded) incident took place at Sauteurs, It could easily have taken place on any island, and probably did take place,
repeatedly and unrecorded, elsewhere." (44)
The historical counterpoint of the Sauteurs annihilation narrative was the development of what eventually became the Carib Reserve
of Dominica, putative home of the only remaining 'pure' Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. (45) Both France and Britain laid claim to
Dominica, but it finally went to the British In 1763. Genocldal colonial policies throughout the Lesser Antilles were best articulated in
Thomas Atwood's 1791 History of the Island of Dominica. Atwood, who was a judge in Dominica, noted that'"of the Indians, natives
of Dominica ... properly called 'Carlbbes'... there are no more than twenty or thirty families, who have their dwellings on the east part
of the island, at a great distance from Roseau [the capital], where they are seldom seen". (46) Atwood's comments should be
understood as part of a process of internal exile during the eighteenth century, when French and British settlers forced Dominica's
indigenous people onto a diminishing area of land in the island's northeast. In I860, the colonial government paternalistically placed
some of this land "in trust" for the Caribs, and colonial legislation in 1903 created a 3,700-acre Carib Reserve. The reserve itself
became the legal sign of Caribness -outside of its boundaries, descendants of Caribs who lived in colonial society became invisible
to the state and the law as Caribs, and Carib ancestry by itself never implied inherited claims to collective rights or land. (47)
The Sauteurs annihilation narrative continues to surface in diverse contexts that (re)produce historical meaning. The 2002 short film
Installation Carib's Leap, Western Deep by acclaimed British Grenadian artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen was described by UK
newspaper the Guardian as "a film of collapsed time, of Grenada today and the memory of the mass suicide of the native Caribs, who
in 1651 preferred to jump from the cliffs at a place now called Carib's Leap, rather than submit to the French, who... drove the
natives from their land". (48) The disembodied voice of Wikipedia describes Sauteurs as the place where "the last remaining Carib
Natives in Grenada jumped off a 40-meter-tall cliff [sic] later named Caribs1 Leap to their deaths in 1651 rather than face domination
by the conquering French". (49) The Grenada Board of Tourism's website omits all reference to the Sauteurs battle, but notes, "The
Grenada of your Spice Experience is the collective influence of long gone Amerindian customs, French and English ownership,
infused with African, East Indian, European and Caribbean ancestry." (50)
Balliceaux island, 1797: Returning the 'invaders' to the mainland
Article Nine of the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War, divided five disputed Lesser Antillean territories
between the French and the British. Grenada, Tobago, Dominica and St Vincent went to the British. St Lucia, which the British
captured during the war, went to the French. Article Nine therefore determined the status, on paper at any rate, of islands disputed by
Britain and France, and which the 1748 Treaty of Aix La Chapelle had called the "Neutral" islands. (51) Late-eighteenth-century
Anglo-Jamaican historian Bryan Edwards was critical of the Paris Treaty: "The Charaibes not being mentioned once in the whole
transaction, as if no such people existed." (52) Before Aix La Chapelle, these islands, along with much of the rest of the Lesser
Antilles, had been known as the Caribbees, Charaibes, Carai'bes or Caribes. Their legal transformation into the "Neutral" islands was
part of a process that led to the exile of thousands of Caribs from St Vincent, first to Balliceaux island and then to Roatan island, off
the Honduran coast, in 1797.
Seventeenth-century French missionaries were chiefly responsible for propagating the idea that the Caribs invaded the Lesser
Antilles from the South American mainland and conquered the original 'Arawak' inhabitants. (53) This implied that the Caribs were not
truly 'native' to the Caribbean region and had no more territorial rights there than Europeans. As Peter Hulme notes, "There is
probably not much truth at all in this story," but it is repeated often in Caribbean historiographical works and profoundly shaped early
British colonisation strategy. (54) Until the 1660s the British refused the French model of making treaties with the Caribs, preferring
an often-suicidal policy of attempting to settle on Caribbee islands without seeking Carib permission. In 1659 the British governor of
Barbados, who claimed rights over the Caribbees, finally began treaty-making efforts. What followed were, first, the 1660 FrancoAnglo-Carib treaty that was supposed to confine the Caribs to Dominica and St Vincent, and two treaties from 1663 and 1668, by
which the British claimed that the Caribs ceded St Lucia to them. (55)
The official imperial archive took the ethnographic assumption that Caribs were from the mainland so much for granted that it was not
mentioned. However, this belief was recorded in literature, which was another, equally important, if less official, colonial archive. The
majority of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe takes place on "an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth
of the Great River of OROONOQUE" where Crusoe is shipwrecked from 1659 to 1687. Elsewhere Defoe makes it clear that the
island is "within the circle of the Caribbee Islands" and that it is just southeast of Trinidad. (56) Crusoe early on deploys the threat of
cannibal Caribs from the nearby coast as a crucial element of the plot, noting: "I had heard that the people of the Caribbean coast
were cannibals or man-eaters, and I knew by the latitude that I could not be far from that shore." (57)
Robinson Crusoe documents the profoundly land-bound concept of territory that British colonisers brought to the Lesser Antilles. The
British waged war on the indigenous view of the Lesser Antilles as one indivisible space made up of sea and land, islands and
mainland. To the British (and the French), each of the Caribbee islands was an individual piece of real estate that could be alienated
from the rest. (58) Defoe deploys a foundational myth of British colonialism in the Lesser Antillesthat unlike the Spanish, the British
occupied uninhabited territories, leaving the continental indigenous people alone to practise their way of life in peace. Crusoe notes,
"These people [the Caribs] had done me no injury... Therefore it could not be for me to fall upon them." If he did then he would be not

better than the Spaniards who "destroyed millions of these people, who however they were idolaters and barbarians. .. were yet, as
to the Spaniards, very Innocent people". (59) Later, Crusoe rescues the Carib man whom he names Friday from being consumed at a
cannibal feast. Friday confirms the mainland origins of the Caribs and testifies that his people now live on the border of the Spanish
Main and that they "had killed much mans, that was his word: by all which I understood he meant the Spaniards, whose cruelties in
America had been spread over the whole country, and were remembered by all the nations from father to son". (60)
The stage is set for the book's climax, when the Caribs capture a Spaniard and prepare to eat him. Crusoe rescues and arms the
Spaniard and then oversees the massacre of twenty-one Caribs. He provides a detailed and systematic list, almost a legal record, of
the slaughter:
3 Kill'd at our first shot from the tree. 2 Kill'd at the next shot. 2 Kill'd by Friday in the boat. 2 Kill'd by ditto,
of those at first wounded. 1 Kill'd by ditto, in the wood. 3 Kill'd by the Spaniard. 4 Kill'd, being found dropp'd here
and there of their wounds, or kill'd by Friday in his chase of them. 4, Escap'd in the boat, whereof one wounded if not
dead. 21 in all. (61)

Crusoe provides the weapons and gives the orders, but he does not record his personal responsibility for any of the killings. As
colonial overlord and sovereign proprietor, Crusoe allows his new subjects--who are in his debt for saving their lives and letting them
live on 'his' Island-to pay him back by removing the Carib threat to his dominion. (62) A well-conducted and meticulously recorded
act of colonial slaughter allows Crusoe, after being reduced to a near state of nature on his island, to 'people' his island with
dependent subjects and re-enter the world of white, Protestant Englishmen. By joining in this slaughter, the Spaniard also redeems
himself as a European Christlan-the problem with Spanish imperialism was not that they killed indigenous people, but that they did
not do so In an orderly fashion, leaving a clear record of the legality of their actions. It was also a sign of Spaniards' disorderly
approach to genocide that they failed to secure the Americas from cannibalism, as Crusoe has now done on his island ("I understood
since ... the savages never attempted to go over to the island afterwards"). (63)
In the text of the novel, Friday Is unambiguously presented as a Carib; yet almost immediately, new editions of the novel began to be
printed with Illustrations that portrayed him as African. Friday's inconsistent Africanisation in the novel's illustrations mapped the
changes that African slavery brought to Carib society. A similar transition from aboriginal Caribbean to African occurred with Inkle and
Yarlco, a seventeenth-century story originally about the doomed love affair between an Englishman and an aboriginal woman in
Barbados. When the story was turned Into one of eighteenth-century Britain's most popular plays, the character Yarico was depicted
as an African slave. (64) In much of mainland British and French North America, the predominant form of mixture between indigenous
people and those from the 'Old World' was with Europeans. There were intense debates about how indigenous such 'mixed' people
were-the Canadian federal government denied aboriginal status to many Metis people in Canada, a position only overturned in the
courts In January 2013. (65) However, In the slaveholding era Afro-indigenous 'mixing' was especially dangerous, for such children
might be slaves who could Invoke the claims to territory and sovereignty of free aboriginal people.
The Increase In the number of Caribs of visible African ancestry was accompanied by the French and British colonial articulation of a
narrative that denied the Carlb-ness of so-called Black Caribs. According to the narrative, the Black Caribs originated in a slave ship
bound for Barbados that wrecked off the coast of St Vincent. The St Vincent Caribs rescued and, in some accounts, enslaved, the
Africans, but the 'blacks' multiplied more rapidly than 'yellow' Caribs, and the two groups went to war. Major John Scott (appointed
royal geographer for his expertise on the mainland Essequibo region) made first mention of this shipwreck in 1661 and gave the date
as 1635; French missionary Sieur de la Borde repeated this date in 1674. (66) Governor of St Vincent Valentine Morris repeated the
shipwreck story In 1777, but the date had changed to about 1712. He noted that the Blacks "so nearly extirpated the original
possessors of the Island, that scarce forty [sic] of them now remain alive." (67) In 1795, Sir William Young, son of the British land
commissioner in St Vincent at the end of the Seven Years' War, gave the date of this shipwreck as 1675 in his Account of the Black
Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent. (68) The shipwreck story established a legal fiction according to which 'Black Caribs1 were really
African maroons who had never been adopted into Carib society.
Young's account of the shipwreck myth is an especially clear illustration of how Europeans deployed racist rape fantasies in order to
displace their own genocidal intentions onto Africans and Caribs. Young claimed that It was the Carib warring practice of killing their
captives' male children and "reserving the females" that provoked the Africans' rebellion. Young Implies that the original African
shipwreck survivors were all men who responded to the threatened massacre of their children by killing the Caribs and fleeing "with
[the Africans'] wives and children, to the woods and rocks which cover the high-mountalns to the north-east of St Vincent". These
Africans joined other African fugitives "who, murderers or runaways, had fled from justice, revenge, or slavery... Incorporating Into
these Negro outlaws, they formed a nation, now known by the name of Black Charaibs; a title they themselves arrogated, when
entering into contest with their ancient masters." After that these "Negroes ... assumed the national appellation of Charaibs [and]
individually their Indian names ... and ... many of their customs." Like the 'real' Caribs, the Africans killed the men they captured in
war and "carried off and cohabited with the women", which explained "the tawney colour and mixed complexion to be met with
occasionally among the Charaibs". (69)
Young wrote his Account in order to justify the planned forced removal of the Black Caribs/Garifuna from St Vincent. The year his
Account was published saw the French Revolution in the midst of its most radical phase, having abolished slavery and established a
commonwealth out of the former imperial mtropole and its erstwhile colonies. The leader of the Garifuna, Joseph Chatoyer, allied
with French forces in a war to expel the British from St Vincent. Chatoyer was killed and the French capitulated quickly, but the
Garifuna fought on until their defeat in 1796. (70) At that point, the British rounded up as many indigenous people-men, women and
children all desperately weakened by war and starvation-all across St Vincent, and shipped them to Balliceaux. Of the 4,776
prisoners initially held captive on Balliceaux between July 1796 and February 1797, 4,633 were classified as "Black Caribs", including
1,643 children; 102 as "Yellow Caribs" (three of whom were born during internment on Balliceaux); and 41 as "Negroes the property
of the Black Caribs". Christopher Taylor notes that "those figures ... do not reflect the casualties of the armed struggle and the deaths
from hunger and disease before the surrender". As mentioned in the introduction, just over half of the prisoners died before the final
exile to Central America in March 1797. Eighty-three "Yellow Caribs" were returned to St Vincent, based on British general Ralph
Abercromby's assumption that, as "real" Caribs, they were "few in number and innocent of the late War". Abercromby decided that
the "Yellow Caribs" who remained in St Vincent "should not be allowed to intermarry with the Blacks upon pain of forfeiture of their
lands and being sent away". (71) By this means the British sought to impose the racial divisions that they claimed already existed
among Caribs.
In the aftermath of the exile, the remaining indigenous Vincentians faced a new legal existence as barely tolerated guests in their own
homeland. St Vincent's legislature pardoned them in 1805, and the British authorities designated small areas of land in the remote
north as Carib settlements. The 1806 'grant' of land in Sandy Bay as a Carib settlement was the origin of St Vincent's modern-day
Carib Territory. (72) The St Vincent Carib Territory has never had anything approximating the same recognition from the colonial
government as its counterpart in Dominica. The seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonial insistence that 'blackness' had
destroyed St Vincent's Carib heritage preconditioned the legal invisibility and impoverishment of the island's Carib Territory. (73) The
Vincentian Carib Territory's absence from the legal landscape of indigenous rights is reflected in scholarly silence on its historical
significance. Contemporary scholars Kenneth Kiple and Kriemhild Ornelas invoke Thomas Atwood when they note that, after the
1797 exile, the "twenty or thirty families reported in Dominica were the only true Caribs remaining in the whole of the Caribbean
region". (74) Philip Boucher goes even further to state that there were "very few 'pure' Caribs ... by 1900, perhaps four or five at St
Vincent and rather more at Dominica". (75)
The British equated the Garifuna with maroons, using the 1740 Jamaican Maroon Treaty as a model for reaching agreements with
the Garifuna and emphasising that they were of African and not Carib ancestry. The historical intersections between maroon and
indigenous sovereignties in the Americas are recognised in international law. Convention no. 169 of the International Labor
Organisation (ILO), "Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries" (adopted in 1989), which seeks to protect
the collective rights of indigenous people, also explicitly protects the rights of maroons as 'tribal' peoples. In the Caribbean context,
ILO Convention 169's reference to 'indigenous' and 'tribal' is a reminder that there are historical distinctions between indigenous and
maroon struggles for sovereignty and survival. (76) The British sought to unequivocally identify the Garifuna as maroons by
separating "Yellow" and "Black" Caribs in 1796.

Caribbean historiography has in recent years reclaimed the Garifuna in ways that unintentionally replicate the British Insistence that
blackness cancelled out 'Carib-ness'. Alvin Thompson's 2006 Flight to Freedom is the first study of maroon communities to Include
the Garifuna, whom he describes as "one of the most well-known instances of miscegenation... In time the African elements became
domlnant-hence the name 'Black Caribs'". (77) Barry Higman's 2011 Concise History of the Caribbean describes the Garifuna In a
section between the Jamaican maroons and the suppression of slave resistance. He repeats the shipwreck
story and states that "some 5,000 of the [Black Caribs] were transported by the British to an island off the coast of Honduras where
they flourished as the 'Garifuna'." (78) The use of terms like 'transportation' and 'deportation' reproduces colonial claims that Africandescended Caribs were not really indigenous. As a Garifuna woman pointedly reminded me in 2011 after I used the word
'deportation' In a conference paper, 'This was exile. You cannot deport people from their own country."
This brings us back to Robinson Crusoe and the continued migration of a semi-Africanised Friday from the realm of textual
representation to other modern communications and entertainment media. The novel's absolute clarity about the Island's location In
the Carlbbees has not prevented an intense debate about its position; an island off the coast of Chile was even renamed "Crusoe's
Island". There have been numerous film and television adaptations of Defoe's novel, in some of which Friday appears as Indigenous
American, while In others he Is not. In Crusoe, a 1989 English language film starring black actor Ade Sapara as Friday, the Island
was somewhere off the coast of Africa, and Friday and the other indigenous people were Africans from the mainland. The 1997 film
Robinson Crusoe moved the island to Papua New Guinea and cast late Papua New Guinean actor William Takaku as Friday. (79) In
removing both the Caribbean and the Caribs from a story crucial to the historic European-Carib encounter, Chile's "Crusoe's Island"
and films such as these might represent the perfect union between narrative and the genocidal effort to exile Caribs from both the
Lesser Antilles and the modern imagination.
Conclusion
During the First International Garifuna Conference held in St Vincent in March 2012, filmmaker Andrea Leland recorded footage for
Yurumeln, her film documenting Vincentian Garifuna life. Her previous groundbreaking film, The Garifuna Journey (1996), focused on
Belize's Garifuna people. Like Yurumein, this article is animated by a concern with survivors, and with the present as much as the
past. Carib-ness Is a widespread but little understood or publicly acknowledged reality of modern Caribbean life. (80) What does It
mean to be Carlb, or to know oneself to be the descendant of Caribs, in the Lesser Antilles? What might a meaningful reckoning with
the legacies of the Imperial 'Carib archive' actually look like?
This essay has explored the two-sided historicity of anti-Carib genocide in the Lesser Antilles. It challenges the exclusion of the
history of the Caribs from wider conversations about genocide and contributes to efforts to overturn the belief that Carib-ness Is not
Important In the modern Caribbean. I also have sought to demonstrate that simply acknowledging that people have been the victims
of genocide is not enough. Survivors and the rights they are owed are as important as the dead and the wrongs they endured. (81)
Rectifying the consequences of genocide is a collective responsibility that includes critical reflection on our modern relationship to
genocidal histories and our role in perpetuating narratives originally crafted so that certain people might get away with murder.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Holocaust historian Doris Bergen, my research assistant Rashna Mohamed, lawyer Patricia Harewood, Aaron
Kamuglsha and Caribbean Quarterly's reviewers for their comments and assistance.
NOTES
(1.) Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival and the Making of the Garifuna (Oxford and Mississippi: University
Press of Mississippi, 2012), 141-45.
(2.) Garifuna Is the term generally used by the descendants of the 1797 exiles In Central America today, while Carib and, sometimes,
Garifuna and Karlfuna, are used In St Vincent and Dominica. See Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their
Visitors, 1877-1998 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.
(3.) This group of Islands extends from St Kitts In the northwest to Tobago In the southeast. See Julian Granberry and Gary
Vescellus, Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 14-15.
(4.) United Nations, "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide", Article II, adopted by Resolution 260
(lll)A of the United Nations General Assembly, 9 December 1948. It Is not this essay's focus, but I would argue that the Middle
Passage and plantation slavery In the Caribbean constituted genocide. Dlasporlc Africans were victims of new legal classifications
that forced them and their descendants Into an enslavement that was supposed to be perpetually hereditary. Yet plantation labour
regimes were so deadly that the slave trade was required to maintain the enslaved population at numbers profitable for agriculture.
(5.) Mlchel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1995), 3-4.
(6.) Ibid., 3, 29.
(7.) Jorge Estevez, "Ocama-Daca Taino (Hear Me, I am Taino): Perspective of Jorge Estevez, a Taino from the Dominican Republic",
In Indigenous Resurgence In the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerlnldlan Survival and Revival, ed. Maximilian Forte (New York: Peter
Lang, 2006), 59.
(8.) The original reads: "los reyes de Castilla mandaran destruir a los caribes ..." See Cristobal Colon, Diario de abordo [Logbook],
ed. and ntrod. Luis Arranz (Madrid: Biblioteca Edaf, 2006), 199. No original copies of Columbus's logbook have survived, only
Bartolom de las Casas's digest containing transcriptions from the original.
(9.) The precise location of the bay where this encounter took place Is disputed. It Is not named In Las Casas's digest.
(10.) Quotations translated from Colon, Diario, 224; see also Hernando Colon, Vida del Almirante don Cristobal Colon escrito por su
hijo Hernando Colon (Mexico City and Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1947), 118-20; Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola:
Caribbean Chlefdoms In the Age of Columbus (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 72-73.
(11.) The digest reads: "Mataran diz que los cristianos muchos de ellos, si el piloto que Iba por capitn de ellos no lo estorbara"
(Cristobal Colon, Diario, 224).
(12.) "Y ciertamente muchos habran quedado muertos, so no lo hubiese Impedido el piloto de la carabela, a quien el Almirante habla
mandado a cargo de la barca y como jefe de los hombres que en ella Iban" (Hernando Colon, Vida del Almirante), 119.
(13.) J.M. Cohen, ed. and trans, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: Penguin, 1969), 99.
(14.) Colon, Diario, 224; Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), 15; Maximilian C. Forte, Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonlal Representations of
Aborlglnallty In Trinidad and Tobago (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 49; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:
The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 81.
(15.) William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),
44; on anthropophagy and religious Intolerance In medieval Europe, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native
Caribbean (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 81-87; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 81-89.

(16.) William Keegan, "Columbus Was a Cannibal: Myth and the First Encounters", in The Lesser Antilles In the Age of European
Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 22.
(17.) Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 49-54; J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain In America, 1492-1830 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 97; Forte, Ruins of Absence, 48-49.
(18.) Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 49-50; Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 78-87; Forte, Ruins of Absence, 48-49; Kris Lane, "Punishing the
Sea Wolf: Corsairs and Cannibals In the Early Modern Caribbean", New West Indian Gulde/Nleuwe West-lndlsche Glds 77, nos. 3-4
(2003): 204.
(19.) Bartolom de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (London: Penguin, 1992);
David Henlge, "On the Contact Populations of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics", Hispanic American Historical Review 58,
no. 2 (1978): 217-37; Ben Klernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 72-86. Debates about Greater Antillean annihilation or survival are beyond the
scope of this essay. For that discussion, see, for example, Jose Barrelro, Jorge Estevez and Lynne Guitar's contributions to Forte,
Indigenous Resurgence; Tony Castanha, The Myth of Indigenous Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation In Borlken (Puerto Rico)
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); J.C. Martinez Cruzado et al., "Mitochondrial DNA Analysis Reveals Substantial Native
American Ancestry In Puerto Rico", Human Biology 73, no. 4 (August 2001): 491-511.
(20.) Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 49; Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 16; Forte, Ruins of Absence, 51 ; Lane, "Punishing the Sea Wolf",
204.
(21.) Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 18; see Thomas Gage's 1625 account of a Spanish stopover In Guadeloupe, reprinted In Wild
Majesty: Encounters with Carlbs from Columbus to the Present Day, ed. Peter Hulme and Nell L. Whitehead (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992), 83-88; Lennox Honychurch, "Crossroads In the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and Exchange In Dominica", World
Archeology 28, no. 3 (February 1997): 296-97; Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate
In the Atlantic World (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), 100-102; John Thornton, Africa and Africans In the Making
of the Atlantic World (1992; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 44-53.
(22.) Boucher contrasts the consistently negative view of the Carlbs with the romantlclsatlon of the Tuplnambas (see Boucher,
Cannibal Encounters, 25-27).
(23.) Boucher, Cannibal Encounters. See David Armltage, "Christopher Columbus and the Uses of History", History Today 42 (May
1992): 50. See Las Casas, Jodocus van Wlnghe and Johann Theodor de Bry, Narratlo Reglonum Indlcarum per Hispanos quasdam
Devastatarum Verlsslma (1598; Oppenhelml: Sumtlbus Johan-Theodor de Bry; Typls Hleronyml Gallerl, 1614).
(24.) Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966)--see, for example, 204.
(25.) On the Imperial archives' limited mention of Carlbs between 1493 and the mid-seventeenth century, see Louis Allaire, "The
Carlbs of the Lesser Antilles", In Indigenous People of the Caribbean, ed. Samuel M. Wilson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1997), 180. See, for example, Eric Eustace Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (London:
Andre Deutsch, 1970); J.H. Parry, Philip Sherlock and Anthony Malngot, A Short History of the West Indies, 4th ed. (London and
Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987); Franklin Knight, The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (1978; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Barry W. Hlgman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
(26.) For comparison, see Renee L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 2000).
(27.) Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire generate des Antilles habites par les Francois, divise en deux tomes ... (Paris: Thomas Lolly,
1667). This was a two-volume edition; the third and final volume was published In 1671. All references In this article are to vol. 1 and
all translations are the author's.
(28.) Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l'Amerique ... avec un Vocabulaire Caraibe (Rotterdam:
Arnaud Leers, 1665), 23-24; Du Tertre, Histoire generale, 425-33. See also "The Leap at Sauteurs: The Lost Cosmology of
Indigenous Grenada", Lennox Honychurch, http://www.lennoxhonychurch.com /artlcle.cfm?ld=392 (accessed 13 June 2013).
(29.) Du Tertre, Histoire, 5. The words "fire and blood" refer to a 1608 Spanish decree granting licence to make war on the Caribsof
Dominica, Martinique, Grenada, St Vincent and St Lucia a fuego y sangre-see Nell Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of
the Carlbs In Colonial Venezuela, 1498-1820 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), 174.
(30.) Fora similar narrative of events leading up to the massacre, see Vincent T. Harlow, Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies
and Guiana, 1623-1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1924), xvlll-xlx.
(31.) On the French fascination with non-hlerarchlcal peoples, see Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 20-25.
(32.) Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation In the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 31-32.
(33.) DuTertre, Histoire, vol. 1, 425.
(34.) On du Parquet as governor of Martinique, see de Rochefort and Du Tertre.
(35.) DuTertre, Histoire, 426.
(36.) DuTertre'stext Is the only historical document In which Kalerouane's name appears, which suggests that the French invented
his chiefly status In order to buttress their claims that they had acquired Grenada legally.
(37.) DuTertre, Histoire, 428.
(38.) Ibid., 430. The number Is probably a fiction, Invoking the biblical symbolism of the number forty rather than representing an
accurate count of the numbers on the cliff (my thanks to Doris Bergen for pointing this out).
(39.) Ibid., 431.
(40.) See also de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle, 24.
(41.) Williams, From Columbus to Castro, 95.
(42.) W. Adolphe Roberts, The French In the West Indies (New York: Cooper Square Publications, 1971), 5 5, cited in Honychurch,
"The Leap at Sauteurs".
(43.) Derek Walcott (with a critical essay and comprehensive notes by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh), Another Life: Fully
Annotated (London: Lynne Rlenner, 2004), 71, lines 1674-77.
(44.) Baugh and Nepaulsingh, Another Life, annotations, line 1676, 281.

(45.) Honychurch, "Crossroads in the Caribbean"; Trista Patterson and Luis Rodriguez, 'The Political Ecology of Tourism in the
Commonwealth of Dominica", in Tourism and Development in Tropical Islands: Political Ecology Perspectives, ed. Stefan Gossling
(Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2003), 68-69.
(46.) Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica (1791; London: Frank Cass, 1971), 221.
(47.) On the history of the Dominica Carib Territory, see Honychurch, "Crossroads in the Caribbean"; Hulme, Remnants of Conquest.
(48.) Adrian Searle, "Into the Unknown", Guardian, 8 October 2002.
(49.) "Sauteurs", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauteurs (accessed 10 June 2013). See note 38.
(50.) http://www.grenadagrenadines.com/discover-the-islands/grenada-details/ (accessed 10 June 2013) (my emphases).
(51.) See Article 9, 'The Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship between his Britannick Majesty, the most Christian King, and the
King of Spain. Concluded at Paris, the 10th day of February, 1763. To which, the King of Portugal acceded on the same day"
(London: E. Owen and T. Harrison, 1763), 16, Microfilm Number Reel 797, Goldsmiths Library, University of London.
(52.) Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, vol. 1 (Dublin: Luke White, 1793),
377.
(53.) Louis Allaire attributes the first mention of this myth to an obscure sixteenth-century German author, but it was widely
popularised by Raymond Breton, who claimed the Caribs originated in the Guianas. See Allaire, "On the Historicity of Carib
Migrations in the Lesser Antilles", American Antiquity 45, no. 2 (April 1980): 238, and Allaire, "Caribs of the Lesser Antilles", 177;
Samuel M. Wilson, The Archeology of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 147-48.
(54.) Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 48. Barry Higman's The Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011 ) is the first general history of the Caribbean to acknowledge that this invasion idea is fiction.
(55.) On the 1659-60 treaty, see Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 51-52; Sue Peabody, "A Nation Born to Slavery: Missionaries and
Racial Discourse in the Seventeenth-Century French Antilles", Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 117. On the 1663 and 1668 St
Lucia treaties, see Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 260/3, St Vincent Original Correspondence, St Vincent Appendix, petition to their
Excellencies the Lords Justices (reproducing documentation from 1663-1668 on the St Lucia 'purchase'), 2 October 1719, National
Archives, London, United Kingdom; Edwards, History, 409.
(56.) Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. and introd. John Richetti (1719; London: Penguin, 2003), xxxv, 35.
(57.) Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 99.
(58.) Irving Rouse, Migrations in Prehistory (New Haven: Yale University Press), 128; Samuel M. Wilson, "The Cultural Mosaic of the
Indigenous Caribbean", in Proceedings of the British Academy 81 (1993), 60; I am also indebted to archaeologist Benoit Berard and
filmmaker Christian Foret for their presentation on the project and film Kytangomingo Ema-Following the Path of Our Ancestors, at
the First International-Garifuna Conference, Kingstown, St Vincent, 10-13 March 2012.
(59.) Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 136.
(60.) Ibid., 170.
(61.) Ibid., 186-87.
(62.) Ibid., 190.
(63.) Ibid., 191.
(64.) On Friday's "Negroization" (Wheeler's term), see Roxanne Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in
Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 83-88. For a recent literary reading of
Friday as an enslaved African, see J.M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Viking Press, 1987). On Yarico as an enslaved black woman, see
Frank Felsenstein, "Introduction", in Felsenstein, ed., English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the
New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 20.
(65.) Harry Daniels, Gabriel Daniels, Leah Gardner, Terry Joudrey and the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples v. Her Majesty the Queen,
as represented by the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and the Attorney General of Canada, Federal Court of
Canada, 8 January 2013; Jeffrey Simpson, "What the Metis Decision Means for Canada", Globe and Mail, 9 January 2013,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/what-the-metis-decision-means-for-canada/article705 5433/ (accessed 11 January
2013).
(66.) Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 171. On Scott, see Cornelis Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Wild Coast,
1580-1680 (Assen: Koninkiijke Van Gorcum and Company, 1971), 80.
(67.) CO 260/2 A40, Original Correspondence--St Vincent, Morris to Lord George German, 13 November 1777. See note 38.
(68.) William Young, Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent (London: J. Sewell, Cornhill/Knight and Triphook,
1795), 6.
(69.) Young, Account, 7-9. As far as we know, Young's story about the African 'rebellion' is a gendered fiction.
(70.) Julie Chun Kim, "The Caribs of St Vincent and Indigenous Resistance during the Age of Revolutions", Early American Studies
11, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 117-32; Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 279.
(71.) Taylor, Black Carib Wars, 141-45.
(72.) Ibid., 151-52. The legislature actually wanted to pardon the Caribs and exile them to Trinidad in 1805.
(73.) On the "Africanisation" of the Caribs (Hulme's term), see Hulme, Remnants, 20. On recent efforts to develop sustainable models
in the Carib Territories, see Hulme, Remnants, 302-308, and David Timothy Duval, "Cultural Tourism in Postcolonial Environments:
Negotiating Histories, Ethnicities and Authenticities in St Vincent, Eastern Caribbean", in Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested
Discourses, Identities and Representations, ed. Colin Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker (New York and Oxford; Routledge, 2004),
57-75.
(74.) Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild C. Ornelas, "After the Encounter: Disease and Demographics in the Lesser Antilles", in Paquette
and Engerman, Lesser Antilles, 52-53 (my emphasis).
(75.) Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 94, 130-31.
(76.) For a sensitive implicit acknowledgement of the historical importance of this distinction, see Richard Price's analysis of the

Saamaka maroons' legal case in Suriname, in his Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (Oxford: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2011 ), especially 1-25. See also Fergus MacKay, 'The Rights of Maroons in International Human Rights Law", and Kenneth
Bilby, "Maroon Autonomy in Jamaica", Cultural Survival 25, no. 4 (special issue on Maroons in the Americas),
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/jamaica/ maroon-autonomy-jamaica (accessed 3 November
2011),
(77.) Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston: University of the West Indies
Press, 2006), 83 (my emphasis).
(78.) Higman, Concise History, 142-43.
(79.) Mr Robinson Crusoe, dir. A. Edward Sutherland (Elton Productions, 1932); Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe/Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, dir. Luis Bunuel (Oscar Dancigers Productions and Producciones Tepeyac, 1954); Man Friday, dir. Jack Gold
(ABC Entertainment, Incorporated Television Company, Keep Films, 1976); Crusoe, dir. Caleb Deschanel (Island Pictures, 1989);
Robinson Crusoe, dir. Rod Hardy and George Miller (Miramax Films, RHI Entertainment, 1997).
(80.) Yurumein (Homeland), dir. Andrea E. Leland (New Day Films, 2013); The Garifuna Journey, dir. Andrea E. Leland (New Day
Films, 1996). See also Indigenous Survivors, dir. Tony Hall, Christopher Laird and Bruce Paddington, Caribbean Eye television
series, vol. 2 (UNESCO/Banyan Productions, 1991).
(81.) On history, colonialism and restorative justice, see Caroline Elkins, "Alchemy of Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the
High Court of Justice", Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 731-48.
MELANIE J. NEWTON is an associate professor of history and director of the Caribbean Studies Programme at the University of
Toronto. She is the author of a book and several scholarly works on gender, slavery, and emancipation. Her current research is on
indigeneity in the Lesser Antilles.
Newton, Melanie J
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Newton, Melanie J. "'The Race Leapt at Sauteurs': genocide, narrative, and indigenous exile from the Caribbean archipelago."
Caribbean Quarterly 60.2 (2014): 5+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.

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Title: "The Race Leapt at Sauteurs": genocide, narrative, and indigenous exile from the Caribbean archipelago
Author(s): Melanie J. Newton
Source: Caribbean Quarterly. 60.2 (June 2014): p5.
Document Type: Article
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The University of the West Indies
http://www.uwi edu/cq/default aspx?sflang-en
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Introduction
IN MARCH 2012. ATOP A HILL on Balllceaux Island In St Vincent and the Grenadines. Bellzean-born Garlfuna healer Lucia Ellis
gave thanks for being alive. Balliceaux is an inhospitable place, devoid of fresh water, natural shelter and consumable plant life. In
July 1796. British forces interned 4.776 prisoners on this desolate island, which was hours away from St Vincent even on a frigate. An
epidemic swept through the camp and only 2.248 prisoners were still alive by March 1797. when they were exiled to Central America.
Lucia, like the Garifuna people of Central America and the diaspora today, descends from these survivors. (1 )
Lucia spoke during a pilgrimage to Balliceaux. which was organised by St Vincent's Garifuna Heritage Foundation. The participants
ncluded Garifuna and Caribs from St Vincent and the Grenadines. Belize. Honduras and the United States, as well as nonndigenous Vincentians and academics from the Caribbean. North America and Europe. (2) Indigenous Vincentians shared stories of
the discrimination they endured in St Vincent. I grew up in Barbados, half an hour by plane from St Vincent. Legend has it that
Africans from a wrecked slave ship bound for Barbados escaped in St Vincent and became ancestors of today's Garifuna people.
Nevertheless few Barbadians know of the Garifuna or think much about Barbados's pre-colonlal history as part of an Indigenous
system of life, yet Barbados and St Vincent share a genocidal history that forms a key basis of modern statehood. This essay is about
the Garifuna/'Carib' people between 1492 and the late eighteenth century. Most of the analysis centres on the sub-archipelago of
southeastern/Lesser Antillean islands that was their ancestral territory, known in the early colonial period as the Caribbees.
Charaibes. Carabes and Caribes (3) The Lesser Antilles' histories of enslavement and colonisation fit the 1951 United Nations
definition of genocide as an attempt to "destroy. In whole or In part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". (4)
The late Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed that "the word history offers ... an irreducible distinction and yet an equally irreducible
overlap between what happened and that which is said to have happened ... The ways in which what happened and that which Is
said to have happened are or are not the same may Itself be historical." (5) For Trouillot, a full grasp of a historical event's meaning
requires exploration of its two-sided historicity, made up of "the materiality of the sociological process (historicity 1 ) [which] sets the
stage for future historical narratives (historicity 2)". (6) I examine the 'two-sided historicity' of three acts of annlhllatlonlst violence
committed between 1493 and 1797 by (In order of occurrence) the Spanish, the French and the British against Indigenous Lesser
Antillean people
I explore these three incidents as acts of genocide (historicity 1). as well as the material for a genocidal historical narrative (historicity
2), which Is a version of history that seeks to complete the work of the original act of genocide, even if that may not be the intention of
those who repeat the narrative. These three encounters were part of imperial Europe's 'Carib archive', which transformed the defeat
of even the smallest Carib contingent into a moment representing the annihilation of the Carib people "in whole or in part" The
translation of military defeats Into widely recognised symbols of racial annihilation helped colonial authorities to dispossess the
descendants of Caribbean aboriginal people of legal claims to redress or rights based on Carib ancestry
Taino activist Jorge Estevez condemned historians' '"paper genocide' With the stroke of their pens the legacy of my ancestors was
wiped out." (7) This paper Illustrates that genocidal antl-Carlb narratives survive because a diverse range of agents who engage
publicly with the past reproduce them-historians, of course, but also filmmakers, visual artists, poets and government officials The
marginalisation of Carib survival narratives means that, in the Lesser Antilles today, aboriginal rights are difficult to conceptualise or
articulate effectively In most political or legal contexts
Hispaniola, 1493: Columbus's Caribe ghosts
On 26 December 1492 Christopher Columbus promised a 'Taino' cacique from Hispaniola that "the sovereigns of Castile would order
the Caribes destroyed". (8) During his two months in the Caribbean, Columbus had surmised that Caribes were "man-eaters" who
lived somewhere to the south and east On Sunday 13 January 1493, on his return voyage to Spain, Columbus had his first putative
encounter with Caribes In a bay on Hispaniola's northeast coast (9) The incident is recounted in Bartolom de las Casas's digest of
Columbus's logbook, as well as In The Life of the Admiral, written between 1537 and 1539 by Columbus's son Ferdinand (Hernando
Colon). The logbook and The Life of the Admiral describe how Columbus sent members of his crew ashore to barter with a group of
men. Columbus disliked the looks of an aboriginal man who came to the caravel to speak with him, describing him as "very illproportioned In appearance [with] his face all stained with charcoal he must be of the Caribes who eat men" Relations on the
beach soured when the men refused to sell the Spanish more than a few bows and arrows Claiming the Caribes were about to
attack, the Spanish struck first with crossbows and swords, wounding several of the men, who fled Columbus defended the attack
because "he believed they were those of Carib and that they would eat men" Even if they were not Caribes, then they "must be their
neighbours and with the same customs and be men without fear" (10)
A sentence from the logbook states that "the Christians would have killed many of them [the Caribs] if the pilot who went as their
captain had not prevented It". (11) Hernando's account rephrases this sentence as follows: "And it is certain that many would have
been killed, If the pilot of the caravel, whom the Admiral had placed in charge of the boat and leader of the men on it, had not
prevented It." (12) Hernando's sentence suggests that there could have been heavy casualties on both sides J.M. Cohen's
Christopher Columbus: The Four Voyages, an authoritative set of translations of firsthand accounts of Columbus's travels, renders
Hernando's sentence as follows: "Certainly many of our men would have been killed if the pilot of the caravel whom the Admiral had
put In charge of the ship and those In It had not come to their rescue and saved them " (13) Cohen's text does not translate the
digest's version of the Hispaniola Incident. Columbus's willingness to sanction the first Spanish slaughter of Antllleans on the pretext
that they were Caribs Is transformed, In this Influential and widely used English translation, into a near murder of the Spanish by
Caribs.
This series of altered renderings, ending with Cohen's spectacular mistranslation, is not accidental: the Hispaniola encounter was the
first expression of Spain's annlhllatlonlst Impulse in the Americas, yet it was the Caribs who entered the Imperial archive accused as
"man-eaters" and murderers. (14) The Taino word Canlba, which Columbus believed referred to the supposedly Carib practice of
eating people, was the basis of the word cannibal, which displaced the Greek term anthropophagy in Western Europe. (15)
Archaeologist William Keegan suggests that the "man-eating Caribe" belonged to the realm of Taino spirituality and did not actually
refer to human beings; nevertheless, Columbus's Invention of Caribs who "killed and ate Arawak men and took Arawak women for
wives and consorts ... currently pervades fictional and nonflctlonal writings about the early history of the West Indies" (16)
In 1503, Queen Isabella Issued the first of several decrees permitting Caribs' enslavement because of their putative cannibalism,

giving carte blanche for slave raids in the Lesser Antilles. (17) The Spanish used the term 'Carib' as an anthropological category to
refer to people from the southeastern Caribbean and the nearby coastal mainland, as well as a legal category deployed against
indigenous people who resisted conquest or otherwise behaved Inconveniently. The designation 'Carib' became a label of genocldal
proportions that justified the enslavement, dislocation and annihilation of collectives of people, similar to the anti-Semitic Idea of
'blood-libel'. (18)
Bartolom de las Casas's writings about the Greater Antilles, Central America, Peru, Venezuela and the Rio Plata made Spanish
policy in these areas a matter of public debate In Spain, and were foundational In the development of a human rights discourse that
opposed genocidal violence. (19) Yet he wrote no critique of the passage of yet another decree sanctioning Carib enslavement In
1533, or the fact that the 1542 'New Laws', which forbade the enslavement of Indigenous Americans who were subjects of the Crown,
were interpreted as permitting Carib slavery. In 1547, the Spanish monarchy explicitly exempted male Carlbs from the protection of
the New Laws. (20) Las Casas illustrates the disparity between Lesser Antllleans' Important place In the emerging Atlantic system
and their ghostly presence in the growing Imperial archive. On the one hand, European ships routinely stopped In the Lesser Antilles
in order to trade, take on water and wood, wash clothes and enjoy hospitality. Lesser Antllleans took part In the transoceanic
economy based on their desire for items similar to those that Europeans exchanged In West Africa In the same period. However, the
items that Antilleans offered for barter were perishable and were consumed at sea, never reaching Europe. (21 ) Philip Boucher notes
that European writers and artists consistently represented Carlbs as people who "occupied the lowest rank In human societies". Few
Carib representatives whose presence might have challenged negative stereotypes reached Europe. (22) In translation Las Casas's
Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, especially the 1598 Latin edition, published and gruesomely Illustrated by the antiCatholic engravers Theodor de Bry and Sons, was the origin of Europe's 'Black Legend', which condemned Spanish violence against
indigenous people. (23) At the same time, rumours of Carib cannibalism continued to circulate, blunting opposition to their
persecution and contributing to the image of Lesser Antllleans as beings who seemed to achieve corporeality only to kidnap and eat
Europeans.
The absence of an early colonial debate about the enslavement and massacre of Carlbs had a lasting Impact on historiographical
writing about the early conquest. Influential historical geographer Carl Sauer assumed In 1966 that Spanish slave raiding reduced the
Lesser Antillean indigenous population to the point where they became Irrelevant to colonial history. (24) General histories of the
Caribbean ignore the indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles as significant forces In Atlantic World politics between 1500 and 1605,
the date of a failed British attempt to colonise St Lucia. (25) By the early seventeenth century the Spanish-derived construction of the
people of the Lesser Antilles as 'Caribs' did resemble the Taino Caribe, a haunting presence of uncertain corporeality, perhaps
occupying a space between the living and the dead. (26) Spain's Carib narrative fundamentally shaped French and British practices
when they began their invasion of the Lesser Antilles in the 1620s.
Grenada, 1651: Annihilating a'race'
On the northern coast of the island of Grenada, a cliff overlooks the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, with a sheer drop onto
jagged rocks and pounding surf. The French named this dramatic precipice Le Morne des Sauteurs. At the end of the Seven Years'
War in 1763, the Paris Treaty gave Grenada to the victorious British, who anglicised the name as Sauteurs Point, Leapers Hill, or
Carib's Leap. The name recalls a 1651 battle between the French and Indigenous Antllleans during the colonisation of the 'Caribbees'
or les Caraibes, as the French called the Lesser Antilles. French Dominican friar Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, who travelled to Grenada
in 1656 and 1657, related the conquest of Grenada, based on evidence from French settlers, in a short chapter of his massive threevolume Histoire generale des Antilles habites par les Franais. (27) Du Tertre established the veracity of his narrative by contrasting
his detailed account with that of a rival text by Charles de Rochefort, who made only passing reference to the Morne des Sauteurs
battle. (28)
At the beginning of his Histoire, Du Tertre blamed the Spanish for establishing a genocidal pattern in the Caribbean that the French
and English now had no choice but to replicate. He began with the colonisation of St Kitts under the leadership of Thomas
Waernard/Warner (first English governor of the Caribbee islands) and Frenchman Pierre d'Esnambuc. According to Du Tertre, the
Englishman Warner, having been a victim of Spanish cruelty, sought to differentiate himself from the Spanish and "lived in the same
good intelligence with the natives as we French". Warner's good Intentions were thwarted by a Carib degeneracy made worse by
Spanish barbarism:
[T]he Devil, unable to suffer such a great friendship, persuaded the natives ... that these foreign Nations could not
have come so far to their island, except with the intention to massacre them cruelly there, just as these Nations
[Europeans, i.e., the Spanish] had massacred their ancestors by fire and blood, in all of terme ferme and the islands
which they presently occupied in all of America. (29)

For Du Tertre this discovery sufficiently explained why, based on slim intelligence of an alleged Carib plot to kill the settlers, the
French and British conducted a pre-emptive massacre and enslavement of Caribs on St Kitts in 1627. (30)
Du Tertre's description of Warner as an unusual Englishman because he treated the Caribs with a typically'French' humanity
exemplified a French colonial myth, according to which there existed a unique understanding between French settlers and the most
'savage' Indigenous people. French diplomatic relations with people such as the Tupinambas of Brazil, the Hurons of the Great
Lakes, and, eventually, the Carlbs of the Lesser Antilles were held up in implicit contrast to the Spanish preference for diplomatic ties
with hierarchical, sedentary, urbanised and Imperial indigenous societies. (31) Yet Du Tertre's narrative illustrates that the French
understanding of the Carlbs drew heavily on Spanish depictions of them as untrustworthy cannibals who ultimately had to be
eliminated.
In 1635, the king of France granted the Compagnie des Iles d'Amrique the 'right' to colonise three of the Caribbees-Martinique, St
Lucia and Grenada. In Martinique, colonists reached uneasy and temporary agreement with indigenous people. (32) By contrast, the
French were unable to establish themselves on either Grenada or St Lucia. According to Du Tertre, "the multitude of Savages who
lived there and ... Its distance from the Island of St Christopher" frustrated French desires to take possession of Grenada. (33) In
June 1646 the Compagnie assigned Martinique governor Jacques du Parquet the task of settling Grenada, because he had
"conducted himself so valiantly with the Savages of Martinique, where he was In command, and also with those of Grenada, who had
begged him to come and live among them". (34) Du Parquet moved quickly, knowing how "Inconstant" were the "barbarians". He
raised a colonisation force of two hundred men, Including "Masons, Carpenters, Locksmiths, and other Artisans", and took provisions
for three months, crops for planting, and Items to barter. In case all else failed, he armed his men with "rifles and good pistols, and
enough ammunition to fight for an entire day, If need be, without the gun powder that he had transported In several barrels". (35)
Du Parquet reached Grenada In June 1650 and was allegedly well received by Kalerouane, who Du Tertre claimed was Grenada's
Carib chief. (36) Du Parquet made great ceremony of taking possession of Grenada-plantlng the cross, displaying the royal coat of
arms, and firing cannon and muskets--and promptly set his men to work building a military fort. Watching this, Kalerouane Informed
du Parquet that "he wanted to have his Island and remain Its master" and allegedly demanded something commensurate In exchange
for the Island. Du Parquet gave him "a certain quantity of sickles, Glass Beads, Crystals, Knives, and other dry goods that he
demanded", along with two quarts of brandy. By this means the Indigenous people supposedly "ceded In good faith all rights that they
had to this Island, except for their huts and their fields". Du Parquet left his cousin (whom Du Tertre and de Rochefort named only as
"the Count") In charge and returned to Martinique. (37)
Eight months later, Grenada's Carlbs rose up against the French, and du Parquet sent a force of three hundred men, ordering the
Count "to fell any Savages that he found; and, at the least sign of resistance, to take the war to their huts, and oblige them to quit the
Island". Du Tertre Illustrated the Impossibility of reaching a diplomatic settlement by claiming that a group of Carlbs killed a prominent
settler In cold blood under the pretext of trying to make peace. Indigenous fighters from neighbouring Dominica and St Vincent joined
the Grenadian struggle, but the French gained the upper hand, forcing the Antllleans to retreat and killing many of them. Trapped by
the French during a stand-off at Morne des Sauteurs,
they [the Caribs] jumped from this high precipice into the sea, where they perished miserably, some forty of them,
another forty remaining; a young Savage girl, quite beautiful, around twelve or thirteen years old, was for some time the

subject of a contest between two Officers: but while they disputed over who would have her, a third arrived, who, having
shot the poor girl in the head; and having let her fall dead at his feet, brought them to agreement. (38)

The anecdote of this child's fatal ordeal Is the only clue that French military strategy likely Included the rape and murder of women
and children.
Other Caribs kept fighting, catching French settlers In the woods, and the Count raised another one hundred and fifty men to continue
the war of annihilation. He slaughtered everyone who crossed his path, "not pardoning either women or children [and] burned all the
huts and took all the victuals". The Count secured victory for the French, when, "having located all [the Caribs'] pirogues and canoes
in a river, he seized them, and removed by this method the means of going to beg refuge with the Savages of the Islands of Saint
Vincent, and of Martinique". (39)
Du Tertre constructed the French massacre In Grenada as Inevitable. First, the Caribs demonstrated an apparently Irresistible
attraction to the French and invited them to the Island, a reference that interpolated cannibals who must ultimately be destroyed
because they could neither live without, nor live with, proper humans. The Caribs engaged In rituals of legal exchange whose
meaning was, the narrative implied, self-evident to civilised people. However, they failed to respect the treaties that they entered,
which led inexorably to conflict and massacre. Du Tertre's claim that the Caribs killed at Grenada Included Caribs from St Vincent and
Dominica did not necessarily suggest the destruction of all Caribs In the Lesser Antilles. (40) Nevertheless, Carlb survival as
members of Grenadian colonial society, most likely via absorption Into the growing enslaved population, was treated as historically
irrelevant. Du Tertre laid a foundation for the 'Leap at Sauteurs' to enter the narrative of Antillean history as an emblem of the
assumed connection between the arrival of Europeans and the Caribs' supposed disappearance.
During decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s, Sauteurs Point became a floating symbol of colonial Injustice but retained Its
colonising significance as the moment marking Carlb annihilation. Drawing on Du Tertre, Eric Williams noted In 1969 that "what
happened to Grenada may be taken as typical of this phase In Caribbean history [the late seventeenth century]. The Caribs were
literally exterminated by the French, the last group throwing themselves headlong from a precipice, which has since been called Le
Morne des Sauteurs (Leapers Hill)." (41) In 1971, W Adolphe Roberts similarly described the Morne des Sauteurs battle as the
moment when Grenada's "last Caribs" jumped from the cliff, and noting that the Incident was material for the "as yet unwritten epic
poetry of the Caribbean". (42) Nobel prizewinning St Lucian poet Derek Walcott wrote that epic poem, with the Morne des Sauteurs
suicide providing the material for the following key stanza of his 1973 work Another Life:
The leaping Caribs whiten in one flash, the instant the race leapt at Sauteurs a cataract! One scream of bounding lace.
(43)

For Walcott, the race of the Caribs leapt at Sauteurs, not just forty warriors. Editorial comments in the 2004 annotated version of
Walcott's poem reflect assumptions that the Sauteurs battle symbolises an archipelagic process of Carib destruction: "Although the
historic (and ill-recorded) incident took place at Sauteurs, It could easily have taken place on any island, and probably did take place,
repeatedly and unrecorded, elsewhere." (44)
The historical counterpoint of the Sauteurs annihilation narrative was the development of what eventually became the Carib Reserve
of Dominica, putative home of the only remaining 'pure' Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. (45) Both France and Britain laid claim to
Dominica, but it finally went to the British In 1763. Genocldal colonial policies throughout the Lesser Antilles were best articulated in
Thomas Atwood's 1791 History of the Island of Dominica. Atwood, who was a judge in Dominica, noted that'"of the Indians, natives
of Dominica ... properly called 'Carlbbes'... there are no more than twenty or thirty families, who have their dwellings on the east part
of the island, at a great distance from Roseau [the capital], where they are seldom seen". (46) Atwood's comments should be
understood as part of a process of internal exile during the eighteenth century, when French and British settlers forced Dominica's
indigenous people onto a diminishing area of land in the island's northeast. In I860, the colonial government paternalistically placed
some of this land "in trust" for the Caribs, and colonial legislation in 1903 created a 3,700-acre Carib Reserve. The reserve itself
became the legal sign of Caribness -outside of its boundaries, descendants of Caribs who lived in colonial society became invisible
to the state and the law as Caribs, and Carib ancestry by itself never implied inherited claims to collective rights or land. (47)
The Sauteurs annihilation narrative continues to surface in diverse contexts that (re)produce historical meaning. The 2002 short film
Installation Carib's Leap, Western Deep by acclaimed British Grenadian artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen was described by UK
newspaper the Guardian as "a film of collapsed time, of Grenada today and the memory of the mass suicide of the native Caribs, who
in 1651 preferred to jump from the cliffs at a place now called Carib's Leap, rather than submit to the French, who... drove the
natives from their land". (48) The disembodied voice of Wikipedia describes Sauteurs as the place where "the last remaining Carib
Natives in Grenada jumped off a 40-meter-tall cliff [sic] later named Caribs1 Leap to their deaths in 1651 rather than face domination
by the conquering French". (49) The Grenada Board of Tourism's website omits all reference to the Sauteurs battle, but notes, "The
Grenada of your Spice Experience is the collective influence of long gone Amerindian customs, French and English ownership,
infused with African, East Indian, European and Caribbean ancestry." (50)
Balliceaux island, 1797: Returning the 'invaders' to the mainland
Article Nine of the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War, divided five disputed Lesser Antillean territories
between the French and the British. Grenada, Tobago, Dominica and St Vincent went to the British. St Lucia, which the British
captured during the war, went to the French. Article Nine therefore determined the status, on paper at any rate, of islands disputed by
Britain and France, and which the 1748 Treaty of Aix La Chapelle had called the "Neutral" islands. (51) Late-eighteenth-century
Anglo-Jamaican historian Bryan Edwards was critical of the Paris Treaty: "The Charaibes not being mentioned once in the whole
transaction, as if no such people existed." (52) Before Aix La Chapelle, these islands, along with much of the rest of the Lesser
Antilles, had been known as the Caribbees, Charaibes, Carai'bes or Caribes. Their legal transformation into the "Neutral" islands was
part of a process that led to the exile of thousands of Caribs from St Vincent, first to Balliceaux island and then to Roatan island, off
the Honduran coast, in 1797.
Seventeenth-century French missionaries were chiefly responsible for propagating the idea that the Caribs invaded the Lesser
Antilles from the South American mainland and conquered the original 'Arawak' inhabitants. (53) This implied that the Caribs were not
truly 'native' to the Caribbean region and had no more territorial rights there than Europeans. As Peter Hulme notes, "There is
probably not much truth at all in this story," but it is repeated often in Caribbean historiographical works and profoundly shaped early
British colonisation strategy. (54) Until the 1660s the British refused the French model of making treaties with the Caribs, preferring
an often-suicidal policy of attempting to settle on Caribbee islands without seeking Carib permission. In 1659 the British governor of
Barbados, who claimed rights over the Caribbees, finally began treaty-making efforts. What followed were, first, the 1660 FrancoAnglo-Carib treaty that was supposed to confine the Caribs to Dominica and St Vincent, and two treaties from 1663 and 1668, by
which the British claimed that the Caribs ceded St Lucia to them. (55)
The official imperial archive took the ethnographic assumption that Caribs were from the mainland so much for granted that it was not
mentioned. However, this belief was recorded in literature, which was another, equally important, if less official, colonial archive. The
majority of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe takes place on "an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth
of the Great River of OROONOQUE" where Crusoe is shipwrecked from 1659 to 1687. Elsewhere Defoe makes it clear that the
island is "within the circle of the Caribbee Islands" and that it is just southeast of Trinidad. (56) Crusoe early on deploys the threat of
cannibal Caribs from the nearby coast as a crucial element of the plot, noting: "I had heard that the people of the Caribbean coast
were cannibals or man-eaters, and I knew by the latitude that I could not be far from that shore." (57)
Robinson Crusoe documents the profoundly land-bound concept of territory that British colonisers brought to the Lesser Antilles. The
British waged war on the indigenous view of the Lesser Antilles as one indivisible space made up of sea and land, islands and
mainland. To the British (and the French), each of the Caribbee islands was an individual piece of real estate that could be alienated
from the rest. (58) Defoe deploys a foundational myth of British colonialism in the Lesser Antillesthat unlike the Spanish, the British
occupied uninhabited territories, leaving the continental indigenous people alone to practise their way of life in peace. Crusoe notes,
"These people [the Caribs] had done me no injury... Therefore it could not be for me to fall upon them." If he did then he would be not

better than the Spaniards who "destroyed millions of these people, who however they were idolaters and barbarians. .. were yet, as
to the Spaniards, very Innocent people". (59) Later, Crusoe rescues the Carib man whom he names Friday from being consumed at a
cannibal feast. Friday confirms the mainland origins of the Caribs and testifies that his people now live on the border of the Spanish
Main and that they "had killed much mans, that was his word: by all which I understood he meant the Spaniards, whose cruelties in
America had been spread over the whole country, and were remembered by all the nations from father to son". (60)
The stage is set for the book's climax, when the Caribs capture a Spaniard and prepare to eat him. Crusoe rescues and arms the
Spaniard and then oversees the massacre of twenty-one Caribs. He provides a detailed and systematic list, almost a legal record, of
the slaughter:
3 Kill'd at our first shot from the tree. 2 Kill'd at the next shot. 2 Kill'd by Friday in the boat. 2 Kill'd by ditto,
of those at first wounded. 1 Kill'd by ditto, in the wood. 3 Kill'd by the Spaniard. 4 Kill'd, being found dropp'd here
and there of their wounds, or kill'd by Friday in his chase of them. 4, Escap'd in the boat, whereof one wounded if not
dead. 21 in all. (61)

Crusoe provides the weapons and gives the orders, but he does not record his personal responsibility for any of the killings. As
colonial overlord and sovereign proprietor, Crusoe allows his new subjects--who are in his debt for saving their lives and letting them
live on 'his' Island-to pay him back by removing the Carib threat to his dominion. (62) A well-conducted and meticulously recorded
act of colonial slaughter allows Crusoe, after being reduced to a near state of nature on his island, to 'people' his island with
dependent subjects and re-enter the world of white, Protestant Englishmen. By joining in this slaughter, the Spaniard also redeems
himself as a European Christlan-the problem with Spanish imperialism was not that they killed indigenous people, but that they did
not do so In an orderly fashion, leaving a clear record of the legality of their actions. It was also a sign of Spaniards' disorderly
approach to genocide that they failed to secure the Americas from cannibalism, as Crusoe has now done on his island ("I understood
since ... the savages never attempted to go over to the island afterwards"). (63)
In the text of the novel, Friday Is unambiguously presented as a Carib; yet almost immediately, new editions of the novel began to be
printed with Illustrations that portrayed him as African. Friday's inconsistent Africanisation in the novel's illustrations mapped the
changes that African slavery brought to Carib society. A similar transition from aboriginal Caribbean to African occurred with Inkle and
Yarlco, a seventeenth-century story originally about the doomed love affair between an Englishman and an aboriginal woman in
Barbados. When the story was turned Into one of eighteenth-century Britain's most popular plays, the character Yarico was depicted
as an African slave. (64) In much of mainland British and French North America, the predominant form of mixture between indigenous
people and those from the 'Old World' was with Europeans. There were intense debates about how indigenous such 'mixed' people
were-the Canadian federal government denied aboriginal status to many Metis people in Canada, a position only overturned in the
courts In January 2013. (65) However, In the slaveholding era Afro-indigenous 'mixing' was especially dangerous, for such children
might be slaves who could Invoke the claims to territory and sovereignty of free aboriginal people.
The Increase In the number of Caribs of visible African ancestry was accompanied by the French and British colonial articulation of a
narrative that denied the Carlb-ness of so-called Black Caribs. According to the narrative, the Black Caribs originated in a slave ship
bound for Barbados that wrecked off the coast of St Vincent. The St Vincent Caribs rescued and, in some accounts, enslaved, the
Africans, but the 'blacks' multiplied more rapidly than 'yellow' Caribs, and the two groups went to war. Major John Scott (appointed
royal geographer for his expertise on the mainland Essequibo region) made first mention of this shipwreck in 1661 and gave the date
as 1635; French missionary Sieur de la Borde repeated this date in 1674. (66) Governor of St Vincent Valentine Morris repeated the
shipwreck story In 1777, but the date had changed to about 1712. He noted that the Blacks "so nearly extirpated the original
possessors of the Island, that scarce forty [sic] of them now remain alive." (67) In 1795, Sir William Young, son of the British land
commissioner in St Vincent at the end of the Seven Years' War, gave the date of this shipwreck as 1675 in his Account of the Black
Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent. (68) The shipwreck story established a legal fiction according to which 'Black Caribs1 were really
African maroons who had never been adopted into Carib society.
Young's account of the shipwreck myth is an especially clear illustration of how Europeans deployed racist rape fantasies in order to
displace their own genocidal intentions onto Africans and Caribs. Young claimed that It was the Carib warring practice of killing their
captives' male children and "reserving the females" that provoked the Africans' rebellion. Young Implies that the original African
shipwreck survivors were all men who responded to the threatened massacre of their children by killing the Caribs and fleeing "with
[the Africans'] wives and children, to the woods and rocks which cover the high-mountalns to the north-east of St Vincent". These
Africans joined other African fugitives "who, murderers or runaways, had fled from justice, revenge, or slavery... Incorporating Into
these Negro outlaws, they formed a nation, now known by the name of Black Charaibs; a title they themselves arrogated, when
entering into contest with their ancient masters." After that these "Negroes ... assumed the national appellation of Charaibs [and]
individually their Indian names ... and ... many of their customs." Like the 'real' Caribs, the Africans killed the men they captured in
war and "carried off and cohabited with the women", which explained "the tawney colour and mixed complexion to be met with
occasionally among the Charaibs". (69)
Young wrote his Account in order to justify the planned forced removal of the Black Caribs/Garifuna from St Vincent. The year his
Account was published saw the French Revolution in the midst of its most radical phase, having abolished slavery and established a
commonwealth out of the former imperial mtropole and its erstwhile colonies. The leader of the Garifuna, Joseph Chatoyer, allied
with French forces in a war to expel the British from St Vincent. Chatoyer was killed and the French capitulated quickly, but the
Garifuna fought on until their defeat in 1796. (70) At that point, the British rounded up as many indigenous people-men, women and
children all desperately weakened by war and starvation-all across St Vincent, and shipped them to Balliceaux. Of the 4,776
prisoners initially held captive on Balliceaux between July 1796 and February 1797, 4,633 were classified as "Black Caribs", including
1,643 children; 102 as "Yellow Caribs" (three of whom were born during internment on Balliceaux); and 41 as "Negroes the property
of the Black Caribs". Christopher Taylor notes that "those figures ... do not reflect the casualties of the armed struggle and the deaths
from hunger and disease before the surrender". As mentioned in the introduction, just over half of the prisoners died before the final
exile to Central America in March 1797. Eighty-three "Yellow Caribs" were returned to St Vincent, based on British general Ralph
Abercromby's assumption that, as "real" Caribs, they were "few in number and innocent of the late War". Abercromby decided that
the "Yellow Caribs" who remained in St Vincent "should not be allowed to intermarry with the Blacks upon pain of forfeiture of their
lands and being sent away". (71) By this means the British sought to impose the racial divisions that they claimed already existed
among Caribs.
In the aftermath of the exile, the remaining indigenous Vincentians faced a new legal existence as barely tolerated guests in their own
homeland. St Vincent's legislature pardoned them in 1805, and the British authorities designated small areas of land in the remote
north as Carib settlements. The 1806 'grant' of land in Sandy Bay as a Carib settlement was the origin of St Vincent's modern-day
Carib Territory. (72) The St Vincent Carib Territory has never had anything approximating the same recognition from the colonial
government as its counterpart in Dominica. The seventeenth-and eighteenth-century colonial insistence that 'blackness' had
destroyed St Vincent's Carib heritage preconditioned the legal invisibility and impoverishment of the island's Carib Territory. (73) The
Vincentian Carib Territory's absence from the legal landscape of indigenous rights is reflected in scholarly silence on its historical
significance. Contemporary scholars Kenneth Kiple and Kriemhild Ornelas invoke Thomas Atwood when they note that, after the
1797 exile, the "twenty or thirty families reported in Dominica were the only true Caribs remaining in the whole of the Caribbean
region". (74) Philip Boucher goes even further to state that there were "very few 'pure' Caribs ... by 1900, perhaps four or five at St
Vincent and rather more at Dominica". (75)
The British equated the Garifuna with maroons, using the 1740 Jamaican Maroon Treaty as a model for reaching agreements with
the Garifuna and emphasising that they were of African and not Carib ancestry. The historical intersections between maroon and
indigenous sovereignties in the Americas are recognised in international law. Convention no. 169 of the International Labor
Organisation (ILO), "Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries" (adopted in 1989), which seeks to protect
the collective rights of indigenous people, also explicitly protects the rights of maroons as 'tribal' peoples. In the Caribbean context,
ILO Convention 169's reference to 'indigenous' and 'tribal' is a reminder that there are historical distinctions between indigenous and
maroon struggles for sovereignty and survival. (76) The British sought to unequivocally identify the Garifuna as maroons by
separating "Yellow" and "Black" Caribs in 1796.

Caribbean historiography has in recent years reclaimed the Garifuna in ways that unintentionally replicate the British Insistence that
blackness cancelled out 'Carib-ness'. Alvin Thompson's 2006 Flight to Freedom is the first study of maroon communities to Include
the Garifuna, whom he describes as "one of the most well-known instances of miscegenation... In time the African elements became
domlnant-hence the name 'Black Caribs'". (77) Barry Higman's 2011 Concise History of the Caribbean describes the Garifuna In a
section between the Jamaican maroons and the suppression of slave resistance. He repeats the shipwreck
story and states that "some 5,000 of the [Black Caribs] were transported by the British to an island off the coast of Honduras where
they flourished as the 'Garifuna'." (78) The use of terms like 'transportation' and 'deportation' reproduces colonial claims that Africandescended Caribs were not really indigenous. As a Garifuna woman pointedly reminded me in 2011 after I used the word
'deportation' In a conference paper, 'This was exile. You cannot deport people from their own country."
This brings us back to Robinson Crusoe and the continued migration of a semi-Africanised Friday from the realm of textual
representation to other modern communications and entertainment media. The novel's absolute clarity about the Island's location In
the Carlbbees has not prevented an intense debate about its position; an island off the coast of Chile was even renamed "Crusoe's
Island". There have been numerous film and television adaptations of Defoe's novel, in some of which Friday appears as Indigenous
American, while In others he Is not. In Crusoe, a 1989 English language film starring black actor Ade Sapara as Friday, the Island
was somewhere off the coast of Africa, and Friday and the other indigenous people were Africans from the mainland. The 1997 film
Robinson Crusoe moved the island to Papua New Guinea and cast late Papua New Guinean actor William Takaku as Friday. (79) In
removing both the Caribbean and the Caribs from a story crucial to the historic European-Carib encounter, Chile's "Crusoe's Island"
and films such as these might represent the perfect union between narrative and the genocidal effort to exile Caribs from both the
Lesser Antilles and the modern imagination.
Conclusion
During the First International Garifuna Conference held in St Vincent in March 2012, filmmaker Andrea Leland recorded footage for
Yurumeln, her film documenting Vincentian Garifuna life. Her previous groundbreaking film, The Garifuna Journey (1996), focused on
Belize's Garifuna people. Like Yurumein, this article is animated by a concern with survivors, and with the present as much as the
past. Carib-ness Is a widespread but little understood or publicly acknowledged reality of modern Caribbean life. (80) What does It
mean to be Carlb, or to know oneself to be the descendant of Caribs, in the Lesser Antilles? What might a meaningful reckoning with
the legacies of the Imperial 'Carib archive' actually look like?
This essay has explored the two-sided historicity of anti-Carib genocide in the Lesser Antilles. It challenges the exclusion of the
history of the Caribs from wider conversations about genocide and contributes to efforts to overturn the belief that Carib-ness Is not
Important In the modern Caribbean. I also have sought to demonstrate that simply acknowledging that people have been the victims
of genocide is not enough. Survivors and the rights they are owed are as important as the dead and the wrongs they endured. (81)
Rectifying the consequences of genocide is a collective responsibility that includes critical reflection on our modern relationship to
genocidal histories and our role in perpetuating narratives originally crafted so that certain people might get away with murder.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Holocaust historian Doris Bergen, my research assistant Rashna Mohamed, lawyer Patricia Harewood, Aaron
Kamuglsha and Caribbean Quarterly's reviewers for their comments and assistance.
NOTES
(1.) Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival and the Making of the Garifuna (Oxford and Mississippi: University
Press of Mississippi, 2012), 141-45.
(2.) Garifuna Is the term generally used by the descendants of the 1797 exiles In Central America today, while Carib and, sometimes,
Garifuna and Karlfuna, are used In St Vincent and Dominica. See Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their
Visitors, 1877-1998 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.
(3.) This group of Islands extends from St Kitts In the northwest to Tobago In the southeast. See Julian Granberry and Gary
Vescellus, Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 14-15.
(4.) United Nations, "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide", Article II, adopted by Resolution 260
(lll)A of the United Nations General Assembly, 9 December 1948. It Is not this essay's focus, but I would argue that the Middle
Passage and plantation slavery In the Caribbean constituted genocide. Dlasporlc Africans were victims of new legal classifications
that forced them and their descendants Into an enslavement that was supposed to be perpetually hereditary. Yet plantation labour
regimes were so deadly that the slave trade was required to maintain the enslaved population at numbers profitable for agriculture.
(5.) Mlchel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1995), 3-4.
(6.) Ibid., 3, 29.
(7.) Jorge Estevez, "Ocama-Daca Taino (Hear Me, I am Taino): Perspective of Jorge Estevez, a Taino from the Dominican Republic",
In Indigenous Resurgence In the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerlnldlan Survival and Revival, ed. Maximilian Forte (New York: Peter
Lang, 2006), 59.
(8.) The original reads: "los reyes de Castilla mandaran destruir a los caribes ..." See Cristobal Colon, Diario de abordo [Logbook],
ed. and ntrod. Luis Arranz (Madrid: Biblioteca Edaf, 2006), 199. No original copies of Columbus's logbook have survived, only
Bartolom de las Casas's digest containing transcriptions from the original.
(9.) The precise location of the bay where this encounter took place Is disputed. It Is not named In Las Casas's digest.
(10.) Quotations translated from Colon, Diario, 224; see also Hernando Colon, Vida del Almirante don Cristobal Colon escrito por su
hijo Hernando Colon (Mexico City and Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1947), 118-20; Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola:
Caribbean Chlefdoms In the Age of Columbus (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 72-73.
(11.) The digest reads: "Mataran diz que los cristianos muchos de ellos, si el piloto que Iba por capitn de ellos no lo estorbara"
(Cristobal Colon, Diario, 224).
(12.) "Y ciertamente muchos habran quedado muertos, so no lo hubiese Impedido el piloto de la carabela, a quien el Almirante habla
mandado a cargo de la barca y como jefe de los hombres que en ella Iban" (Hernando Colon, Vida del Almirante), 119.
(13.) J.M. Cohen, ed. and trans, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: Penguin, 1969), 99.
(14.) Colon, Diario, 224; Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), 15; Maximilian C. Forte, Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonlal Representations of
Aborlglnallty In Trinidad and Tobago (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 49; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:
The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 81.
(15.) William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),
44; on anthropophagy and religious Intolerance In medieval Europe, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native
Caribbean (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 81-87; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 81-89.

(16.) William Keegan, "Columbus Was a Cannibal: Myth and the First Encounters", in The Lesser Antilles In the Age of European
Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 22.
(17.) Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 49-54; J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain In America, 1492-1830 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 97; Forte, Ruins of Absence, 48-49.
(18.) Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 49-50; Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 78-87; Forte, Ruins of Absence, 48-49; Kris Lane, "Punishing the
Sea Wolf: Corsairs and Cannibals In the Early Modern Caribbean", New West Indian Gulde/Nleuwe West-lndlsche Glds 77, nos. 3-4
(2003): 204.
(19.) Bartolom de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (London: Penguin, 1992);
David Henlge, "On the Contact Populations of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics", Hispanic American Historical Review 58,
no. 2 (1978): 217-37; Ben Klernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 72-86. Debates about Greater Antillean annihilation or survival are beyond the
scope of this essay. For that discussion, see, for example, Jose Barrelro, Jorge Estevez and Lynne Guitar's contributions to Forte,
Indigenous Resurgence; Tony Castanha, The Myth of Indigenous Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation In Borlken (Puerto Rico)
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); J.C. Martinez Cruzado et al., "Mitochondrial DNA Analysis Reveals Substantial Native
American Ancestry In Puerto Rico", Human Biology 73, no. 4 (August 2001): 491-511.
(20.) Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 49; Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 16; Forte, Ruins of Absence, 51 ; Lane, "Punishing the Sea Wolf",
204.
(21.) Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 18; see Thomas Gage's 1625 account of a Spanish stopover In Guadeloupe, reprinted In Wild
Majesty: Encounters with Carlbs from Columbus to the Present Day, ed. Peter Hulme and Nell L. Whitehead (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992), 83-88; Lennox Honychurch, "Crossroads In the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and Exchange In Dominica", World
Archeology 28, no. 3 (February 1997): 296-97; Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate
In the Atlantic World (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), 100-102; John Thornton, Africa and Africans In the Making
of the Atlantic World (1992; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 44-53.
(22.) Boucher contrasts the consistently negative view of the Carlbs with the romantlclsatlon of the Tuplnambas (see Boucher,
Cannibal Encounters, 25-27).
(23.) Boucher, Cannibal Encounters. See David Armltage, "Christopher Columbus and the Uses of History", History Today 42 (May
1992): 50. See Las Casas, Jodocus van Wlnghe and Johann Theodor de Bry, Narratlo Reglonum Indlcarum per Hispanos quasdam
Devastatarum Verlsslma (1598; Oppenhelml: Sumtlbus Johan-Theodor de Bry; Typls Hleronyml Gallerl, 1614).
(24.) Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966)--see, for example, 204.
(25.) On the Imperial archives' limited mention of Carlbs between 1493 and the mid-seventeenth century, see Louis Allaire, "The
Carlbs of the Lesser Antilles", In Indigenous People of the Caribbean, ed. Samuel M. Wilson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1997), 180. See, for example, Eric Eustace Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (London:
Andre Deutsch, 1970); J.H. Parry, Philip Sherlock and Anthony Malngot, A Short History of the West Indies, 4th ed. (London and
Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987); Franklin Knight, The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (1978; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Barry W. Hlgman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
(26.) For comparison, see Renee L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 2000).
(27.) Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire generate des Antilles habites par les Francois, divise en deux tomes ... (Paris: Thomas Lolly,
1667). This was a two-volume edition; the third and final volume was published In 1671. All references In this article are to vol. 1 and
all translations are the author's.
(28.) Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l'Amerique ... avec un Vocabulaire Caraibe (Rotterdam:
Arnaud Leers, 1665), 23-24; Du Tertre, Histoire generale, 425-33. See also "The Leap at Sauteurs: The Lost Cosmology of
Indigenous Grenada", Lennox Honychurch, http://www.lennoxhonychurch.com /artlcle.cfm?ld=392 (accessed 13 June 2013).
(29.) Du Tertre, Histoire, 5. The words "fire and blood" refer to a 1608 Spanish decree granting licence to make war on the Caribsof
Dominica, Martinique, Grenada, St Vincent and St Lucia a fuego y sangre-see Nell Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of
the Carlbs In Colonial Venezuela, 1498-1820 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), 174.
(30.) Fora similar narrative of events leading up to the massacre, see Vincent T. Harlow, Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies
and Guiana, 1623-1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1924), xvlll-xlx.
(31.) On the French fascination with non-hlerarchlcal peoples, see Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 20-25.
(32.) Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation In the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 31-32.
(33.) DuTertre, Histoire, vol. 1, 425.
(34.) On du Parquet as governor of Martinique, see de Rochefort and Du Tertre.
(35.) DuTertre, Histoire, 426.
(36.) DuTertre'stext Is the only historical document In which Kalerouane's name appears, which suggests that the French invented
his chiefly status In order to buttress their claims that they had acquired Grenada legally.
(37.) DuTertre, Histoire, 428.
(38.) Ibid., 430. The number Is probably a fiction, Invoking the biblical symbolism of the number forty rather than representing an
accurate count of the numbers on the cliff (my thanks to Doris Bergen for pointing this out).
(39.) Ibid., 431.
(40.) See also de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle, 24.
(41.) Williams, From Columbus to Castro, 95.
(42.) W. Adolphe Roberts, The French In the West Indies (New York: Cooper Square Publications, 1971), 5 5, cited in Honychurch,
"The Leap at Sauteurs".
(43.) Derek Walcott (with a critical essay and comprehensive notes by Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh), Another Life: Fully
Annotated (London: Lynne Rlenner, 2004), 71, lines 1674-77.
(44.) Baugh and Nepaulsingh, Another Life, annotations, line 1676, 281.

(45.) Honychurch, "Crossroads in the Caribbean"; Trista Patterson and Luis Rodriguez, 'The Political Ecology of Tourism in the
Commonwealth of Dominica", in Tourism and Development in Tropical Islands: Political Ecology Perspectives, ed. Stefan Gossling
(Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2003), 68-69.
(46.) Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica (1791; London: Frank Cass, 1971), 221.
(47.) On the history of the Dominica Carib Territory, see Honychurch, "Crossroads in the Caribbean"; Hulme, Remnants of Conquest.
(48.) Adrian Searle, "Into the Unknown", Guardian, 8 October 2002.
(49.) "Sauteurs", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauteurs (accessed 10 June 2013). See note 38.
(50.) http://www.grenadagrenadines.com/discover-the-islands/grenada-details/ (accessed 10 June 2013) (my emphases).
(51.) See Article 9, 'The Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship between his Britannick Majesty, the most Christian King, and the
King of Spain. Concluded at Paris, the 10th day of February, 1763. To which, the King of Portugal acceded on the same day"
(London: E. Owen and T. Harrison, 1763), 16, Microfilm Number Reel 797, Goldsmiths Library, University of London.
(52.) Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, vol. 1 (Dublin: Luke White, 1793),
377.
(53.) Louis Allaire attributes the first mention of this myth to an obscure sixteenth-century German author, but it was widely
popularised by Raymond Breton, who claimed the Caribs originated in the Guianas. See Allaire, "On the Historicity of Carib
Migrations in the Lesser Antilles", American Antiquity 45, no. 2 (April 1980): 238, and Allaire, "Caribs of the Lesser Antilles", 177;
Samuel M. Wilson, The Archeology of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 147-48.
(54.) Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 48. Barry Higman's The Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011 ) is the first general history of the Caribbean to acknowledge that this invasion idea is fiction.
(55.) On the 1659-60 treaty, see Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 51-52; Sue Peabody, "A Nation Born to Slavery: Missionaries and
Racial Discourse in the Seventeenth-Century French Antilles", Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 117. On the 1663 and 1668 St
Lucia treaties, see Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 260/3, St Vincent Original Correspondence, St Vincent Appendix, petition to their
Excellencies the Lords Justices (reproducing documentation from 1663-1668 on the St Lucia 'purchase'), 2 October 1719, National
Archives, London, United Kingdom; Edwards, History, 409.
(56.) Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. and introd. John Richetti (1719; London: Penguin, 2003), xxxv, 35.
(57.) Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 99.
(58.) Irving Rouse, Migrations in Prehistory (New Haven: Yale University Press), 128; Samuel M. Wilson, "The Cultural Mosaic of the
Indigenous Caribbean", in Proceedings of the British Academy 81 (1993), 60; I am also indebted to archaeologist Benoit Berard and
filmmaker Christian Foret for their presentation on the project and film Kytangomingo Ema-Following the Path of Our Ancestors, at
the First International-Garifuna Conference, Kingstown, St Vincent, 10-13 March 2012.
(59.) Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 136.
(60.) Ibid., 170.
(61.) Ibid., 186-87.
(62.) Ibid., 190.
(63.) Ibid., 191.
(64.) On Friday's "Negroization" (Wheeler's term), see Roxanne Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in
Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 83-88. For a recent literary reading of
Friday as an enslaved African, see J.M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Viking Press, 1987). On Yarico as an enslaved black woman, see
Frank Felsenstein, "Introduction", in Felsenstein, ed., English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the
New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 20.
(65.) Harry Daniels, Gabriel Daniels, Leah Gardner, Terry Joudrey and the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples v. Her Majesty the Queen,
as represented by the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and the Attorney General of Canada, Federal Court of
Canada, 8 January 2013; Jeffrey Simpson, "What the Metis Decision Means for Canada", Globe and Mail, 9 January 2013,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/what-the-metis-decision-means-for-canada/article705 5433/ (accessed 11 January
2013).
(66.) Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 171. On Scott, see Cornelis Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Wild Coast,
1580-1680 (Assen: Koninkiijke Van Gorcum and Company, 1971), 80.
(67.) CO 260/2 A40, Original Correspondence--St Vincent, Morris to Lord George German, 13 November 1777. See note 38.
(68.) William Young, Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent (London: J. Sewell, Cornhill/Knight and Triphook,
1795), 6.
(69.) Young, Account, 7-9. As far as we know, Young's story about the African 'rebellion' is a gendered fiction.
(70.) Julie Chun Kim, "The Caribs of St Vincent and Indigenous Resistance during the Age of Revolutions", Early American Studies
11, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 117-32; Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 279.
(71.) Taylor, Black Carib Wars, 141-45.
(72.) Ibid., 151-52. The legislature actually wanted to pardon the Caribs and exile them to Trinidad in 1805.
(73.) On the "Africanisation" of the Caribs (Hulme's term), see Hulme, Remnants, 20. On recent efforts to develop sustainable models
in the Carib Territories, see Hulme, Remnants, 302-308, and David Timothy Duval, "Cultural Tourism in Postcolonial Environments:
Negotiating Histories, Ethnicities and Authenticities in St Vincent, Eastern Caribbean", in Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested
Discourses, Identities and Representations, ed. Colin Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker (New York and Oxford; Routledge, 2004),
57-75.
(74.) Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild C. Ornelas, "After the Encounter: Disease and Demographics in the Lesser Antilles", in Paquette
and Engerman, Lesser Antilles, 52-53 (my emphasis).
(75.) Boucher, Cannibal Encounters, 94, 130-31.
(76.) For a sensitive implicit acknowledgement of the historical importance of this distinction, see Richard Price's analysis of the

Saamaka maroons' legal case in Suriname, in his Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (Oxford: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2011 ), especially 1-25. See also Fergus MacKay, 'The Rights of Maroons in International Human Rights Law", and Kenneth
Bilby, "Maroon Autonomy in Jamaica", Cultural Survival 25, no. 4 (special issue on Maroons in the Americas),
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/jamaica/ maroon-autonomy-jamaica (accessed 3 November
2011),
(77.) Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston: University of the West Indies
Press, 2006), 83 (my emphasis).
(78.) Higman, Concise History, 142-43.
(79.) Mr Robinson Crusoe, dir. A. Edward Sutherland (Elton Productions, 1932); Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe/Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, dir. Luis Bunuel (Oscar Dancigers Productions and Producciones Tepeyac, 1954); Man Friday, dir. Jack Gold
(ABC Entertainment, Incorporated Television Company, Keep Films, 1976); Crusoe, dir. Caleb Deschanel (Island Pictures, 1989);
Robinson Crusoe, dir. Rod Hardy and George Miller (Miramax Films, RHI Entertainment, 1997).
(80.) Yurumein (Homeland), dir. Andrea E. Leland (New Day Films, 2013); The Garifuna Journey, dir. Andrea E. Leland (New Day
Films, 1996). See also Indigenous Survivors, dir. Tony Hall, Christopher Laird and Bruce Paddington, Caribbean Eye television
series, vol. 2 (UNESCO/Banyan Productions, 1991).
(81.) On history, colonialism and restorative justice, see Caroline Elkins, "Alchemy of Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the
High Court of Justice", Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 731-48.
MELANIE J. NEWTON is an associate professor of history and director of the Caribbean Studies Programme at the University of
Toronto. She is the author of a book and several scholarly works on gender, slavery, and emancipation. Her current research is on
indigeneity in the Lesser Antilles.
Newton, Melanie J
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Newton, Melanie J. "'The Race Leapt at Sauteurs': genocide, narrative, and indigenous exile from the Caribbean archipelago."
Caribbean Quarterly 60.2 (2014): 5+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.