in noticing the difference between the language of the Carib men and their women, that perhaps the women descended from the female captives made in this movement, the men being as usual slain.  But the Haytians also claimed to have come from Florida.  Perhaps, then, an emigration from Florida, which may be called, for want of any historical data, that of the Ygneris, covered all the West Indian Islands at a very early period, to be overlapped, in part, by a succeeding emigration of Caribs who were pressed out of Florida by the Appalachians.[H]

[Footnote G:  Personal Narrative, Vol.  III. p. 78, where see the subject discussed at length.]

[Footnote H:  Histoire Generale des Antilles, par Du Tertre, Paris, 1667, Tom.  II. p. 360.]

The Caribs are supposed to have derived the compliment of their name, which means “valiant men,” from the Appalachians, who had great trouble in dislodging them.  They were very different from the Haytians:  they cut their hair very short in front, leaving a tuft upon the crown, bandaged the legs of their children to make a calf that Mr. Thackeray’s Jeames would have envied, pulled out their beard hair by hair, and then polished the chin, with rough leaves.  A grand toilet included a coat of scarlet paint, which protected them from the burning effect of the sun and from the bites of insects.  It also saved their skins from the scurf and chapping which the sea-water occasioned.  A Carib chief, in a full suit of scarlet, excited once the anger of Madame Aubert, wife of a French governor of Dominica, because he sat upon her couch, which had a snowy dimity cover, and left there the larger portion of his pantaloons.  But afterwards, upon being invited to dine at the Government-House, he determined to respect the furniture, and, seeing nothing so appropriate as his plate, he removed it to his chair before he took his seat.  The Caribs, however, had such an inveterate preference for dining au naturel, that they frequently served up natives themselves, whenever that expensive luxury could be obtained.  The Spaniards brought home the word Cannibal, which was a Haytian pronunciation of Cariba (Galiba); and it gradually came into use to express the well-known idea of a man-eater.  The South-American Caribs preserve this vicious taste.

The Caribs had not overrun the island of Hayti, but it was never free from their incursions.  That hardy and warlike race was feared by the milder Haytians, who had been compelled, especially in the southern provinces of the island, to study the arts of defence, which do not appear to have been much esteemed by them.  Their arms were of the simplest description:  wood pointed and hardened in the fire, arrows tipped with fish-bone or turtle-shell, and clubs of the toughest kinds of wood.  The Caribs used arrows poisoned with the juice of the manchineel, or pointed with formidable shark’s-teeth, their clubs of Brazil-wood were three feet long, and their lances of hardened wood were thrown with great adroitness and to a great distance.  The southern Haytians learned, warlike habits from these encroaching Caribs, and were less gentle than the natives whom Columbus first met along the northern coast.