There being no mammals in the island, they knew not the use of flesh for food, but they had abundance of fish, and they ate besides whatever creeping or crawling thing they happened to find.  These with the yucca from which they made their casabe or bread, maize, yams, and other edible roots, constituted their food supply.

There were in Boriquen, as there are among all primitive races, certain individuals, the embryos of future church functionaries, who were medicine-man, priest, prophet, and general director of the moral and intellectual affairs of the benighted masses, but that is all we know of them.[60]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 60:  For further information on this subject, see Estudios Ethnologicos sobre los indios Boriquenos, by A. Stahl, 1888.  Revista Puertoriquena, Ano II, tomo II.]

CHAPTER XXIX

THE “JIBARO,” OR PUERTO RICAN PEASANT

“There is in this island a class of inhabitants, not the least numerous by any means, who dwell in swamps and marshes, live on vegetables, and drink muddy water.”  So wrote Dr. Richard Rey[61] a couple of decades ago, and, although, under the changed political and social conditions, these people, as a class, will soon disappear, they are quite numerous still, and being the product of the peculiar social and political conditions of a past era deserve to be known.

To this considerable part of the population of Puerto Rico the name of “jibaros” is applied; they are the descendants of the settlers who in the early days of the colonization of the island spread through the interior, and with the assistance of an Indian or negro slave or two cleared and cultivated a piece of land in some isolated locality, where they continued to live from day to day without troubling themselves about the future or about what passed in the rest of the universe.

The modern jibaro builds his “bohio,” or hut, in any place without regard to hygienic conditions, and in its construction follows the same plan and uses the same materials employed in their day by the aboriginal inhabitants.  This “bohio” is square or oblong in form, raised on posts two or three feet from the ground, and the materials are cane, the trunks of the coco-palm, entire or cut into boards, and the bark of another species of palm, the “yaguas,” which serves for roofing and walls.  The interior of these huts is sometimes divided by a partition of reeds into two apartments, in one of which the family sit by day.  The other is the sleeping room, where the father, mother, and children, male and female, of all ages, sleep, promiscuously huddled together on a platform of boards or bar bacao.

The majority of the jibaros are whites.  Mestizoes, mulattos, and negroes are numerous also.  But we are here concerned with the jibaro of European descent only, whose redemption from a degraded condition of existence it is to the country’s interest should be specially attended to.