European impressions of the Island Carib's use of alcohol in the early colonial period

Ethnohistory

Volumn 53, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 543-566

  Smith, Frederick H ^a  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746905175     PISSN: 00141801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2006-004     Document Type: Review

References (194)

1. Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main: The Land, Nature, and People Columbus Encountered in the Americas (Berkeley, CA, 1966), 51.
2. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT, 1992), 12, 158.
3. Historians, archaeologists, and linguists generally distinguish between Carib and Taino cultures, though recent scholarship has blurred the division. Peter Hulme, for example, argued that the Caribbean at the time of European contact in 1492. was a fluid but somewhat uniform, circum-Caribbean culture area (Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 [London, 1986], 45-87). According to Hulme, early European explorers misunderstood the ethnic distinctions between Carib and Taino, and any disparity between Amerindians in the Greater Antilles and those in the Lesser Antilles was probably a reflection of differing political organizations. Thus, while all Amerindians in the Caribbean were ethnically similar, Amerindians in the Greater Antilles (Taino) lived in large chiefdoms, while the Amerindians in the Lesser Antilles (Carib) lived in small autonomous villages. However, in terms of alcohol use, as well as a variety of other material and ideological traits, there seems to be significant cultural divergence between the Carib and Taino.
4. The Orinoco Delta region of mainland South America is the ancestral home of the Island Carib. According to Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 62-63, the Island Carib spoke an Arawakan language similar to that of the Taino, but, due to trade relations between the Lesser Antilles and mainland South America, the Island Carib also embraced a lingua franca that included mainland Cariban vocabulary. If Hulme is correct, the Island Carib's diglossic language system has created much confusion among scholars of Island Carib history, and it would indicate that the Island Carib were quite distinct from Cariban-speakers along the mainland coast. In either case, researchers generally treat Island and Mainland Carib separately. There are a number of Cariban-speaking Amerindian groups in the Guianas, though the name Carib is most closely associated with the Karinya of the coastal regions of what is today Guyana;
5. see, e.g., B. J. Hoff, The Carib Language (The Hague, 1968);
6. and Neil Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimá and the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham, NC, 2002).
7. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1657), 32;
8. Giles Silvester, "A Briefe Discription of the Ilande of Barbados," in Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667, ed. V. T. Harlow (New York, 1967), 46.
9. Griffith Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados (London, 1750), 5. It is unclear whether the indigenous peoples of Barbados can rightly be called Carib;
10. see, e.g., Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 191-95.
11. For an archaeological perspective on this controversy, see Louis Allaire, "Understanding Suazy," in Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress for Caribbean Archaeology, ed. E. N. Ayubi and J. Haviser, 2 vols. (Willemstad, Curaçao, 1991), 2:715-28;
12. Arie Boomert, "Notes on Barbados Prehistory," Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 38 (1987): 8-43;
13. Boomert, "Island Carib Archaeology," in Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean, ed. Neil Whitehead (Leiden, Netherlands, 1995);
14. Ripley Bullen and Adelaide Bullen, "Barbados, a Carib Center," Bajan and South Caribbean 155 (1966): 20-22;
15. and David D. Davis and Christopher Goodwin, "Island Carib Origins: Evidence and Nonevidence," American Antiquity 55.1 (1990): 37-48.
16. Jerome Handler, "Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Caribbean Studies 8.4 (1969): 38-64;
17. John Scott, "The Description of Barbados" (ca. 1667), in Some Early Barbadian History, ed. P. Campbell (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1993).
18. See Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh, transcribed and annotated by Neil Whitehead (Norman, OK, 1997), 187.
19. John Amphlett, Under a Tropical Sky: A Journal of First Impressions of the West Indies (London, 1873), 92;
20. Ernest Hurst Cherrington, Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, 6 vols. (Westerville, OH, 1924-30), I:425;
21. Hoff, Carib Language, 14;
22. C. N. Roach, foreword to "The Caribs of Dominica," Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 5 (1937): 19;
23. Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 75, 187.
24. Père Raymond Breton, Relations de l'Ile de la Guadeloupe (Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1978), 45-46;
25. Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 4 vols. (Martinique, 1958 [1667-71]), 2:108-11;
26. W. H. Hodge and Douglas Taylor, The Ethnobotany of the Island Caribs of Dominica (Florence, Italy, 1957), 574-75;
27. Jean-Baptiste Père Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique Antilles, 1693-1705, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1724), 2:133;
28. Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des isles antilles de l'Amerique (Rotterdam, 1681), 501;
29. Douglas Taylor, The Caribs of Dominica, Bureau of American Ethnology, no. 119, Anthropological Papers no. 3 (Washington, DC, 1938), 137.
30. Ligon, True and Exact History, 32;
31. The mastication of raw manioc root is also described in Hans Staden's mid-sixteenth-century account of Amerindians of Guiana and illustrated in Theodor de Bry's 1592 depiction of Amerindians of Guiana in Americae tertia pars memorabilè provinciae Brasiliae historiam cantinès, 6 vols. (Frankfurt, 1592), 3:112, 174.
32. See Staden, "Veritable History and Description of a Country Belonging to the Wild, Naked, and Terrible Eaters of Men's Flesh, Situated in the New World, America" (1573), in Discovering the New World, ed. M. Alexander (New York, 1976), 90-121 (this book also reproduces de Bry's woodcuts). The fact that Carib women in Barbados chewed the raw manioc root rather than the cassava cakes may reflect the greater influence of Guiana Carib in Barbados.
33. Breton, Relations, 46;
34. du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:110-11;
35. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:133;
36. Sieur de La Borde, Relations de l'origine, moeurs, coustumes, religion, guerres et voyages des Caraibes, sauvages des isles Antilles de l'Amerique, ed. L. Billaine (Paris, 1674), 2.3;
37. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 501.
38. Ligon, True and Exact History, 32.
39. Ligon, True and Exact History Ibid.
40. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2: 110;
41. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:133.
42. Ligon, True and Exact History, 32.
43. Ligon, True and Exact History Ibid.
44. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1741), 2:132.
45. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2: 111;
46. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:133;
47. La Borde, Relations, 7;
48. Ligon, True and Exact History, 31-32;
49. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 501;
50. Silvester, "Briefe Discription," 46.
51. Silvester, "Briefe Discription," 46.
52. Harlow identifies the author as anonymous, but notes that it might be Giles Silvester, the brother of Constant Silvester, a wealthy sugar planter in Barbados. Further research has confirmed that Giles Silvester is in fact the author of this piece; see Frederick H. Smith, "Disturbing the Peace in Barbados: Constant Silvester of Constant Plantation in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 44 (1998): 38-54.
53. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:133.
54. Rochefort, for example, noted that some colonists found the mastication process "disgusting" (Histoire naturelle et morale, 501).
55. Amphlett, Under a Tropical Sky, 92;
56. La Borde, Relations, 23;
57. Ligon, True and Exact History, 32;
58. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 501.
59. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:113, 119;
60. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1: 133-34;
61. Ligon, True and Exact History, 32;
62. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 501.
63. Ligon, True and Exact History, 31.
64. Hodge and Taylor, Ethnobotany, 597;
65. Taylor, Caribs of Dominica, 154.
66. Ligon, True and Exact History, 31.
67. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:133-34;
68. see also du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:113;
69. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 501.
70. Ligon, True and Exact History, 37-38, 44.
71. Henry Whistler, "An Account of Barbados in 1654: Extracts from Henry Whistler's Journal of the West India Expedition," ed. N. Connell, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 5 (1937-38): 185.
72. Heinrich von Uchteritz, "A German Indentured Servant in Barbados in 1652: The Account of Heinrich von Uchteritz," ed. A. Gunkel and J. Handler, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 33 (1970): 93;
73. Father Antoine Biet, "Father Antoine Biet's Visit to Barbados in 1654," ed. J. Handler, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 32 (1967): 62.
74. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 501.
75. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:113;
76. Labat, Nouveau voyage, I:133-34.
77. Hughes, Natural History of Barbados, 34.
78. Frederick H. Smith, "Alcohol, Slavery, and African Cultural Continuity in the British Caribbean," in Drinking: Anthropological Approaches, ed. I. de Garine and V. de Garine (New York, 2001): 212-24;
79. Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Gainesville, FL, 2005).
80. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:331.
81. Oldmixon, British Empire, 2:132.
82. A.C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies, 2 vols. (1833; New York, 1969), 1:288. Sometime in the nineteenth century, mobbie became the term for a nonalcoholic beverage in Barbados made, not from potatoes, but from several varieties of tree bark. This usage is also found in Martinique and Guyana.
83. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies: Or the English American, His Travel by Sea and Land: Containing a Journal of Three Hundred Miles within the Land of America, 3rd ed., (London, 1677), 37.
84. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:29; "Bon jour compere, toi tenir taffia [italics orig.]." The? is missing in the original. Tafia was low-quality rum made in the French Caribbean.
85. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:439.
86. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles Ibid., 1:426.
87. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, NH, 1996), 42-43;
88. Peter Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 47;
89. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1991), 66-67;
90. Frederick H. Smith, "Spirits and Spirituality: Enslaved Persons and Alcohol in West Africa and the British and French Caribbean," Journal of Caribbean History 38 (2004): 279-309.
91. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:29, 2:101.
92. John Braithwaite, "The Report of Captain John Braithwaite to Nathaniel Uring, Esq.," in Chronological History of the West Indies, ed. Captain Thomas Southey, 3 vols. (London, 1827), 2:233.
93. Breton, Relations, 56-57;
94. La Borde, Relations, 13-14;
95. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 472.
96. Breton, Relations, 56-57;
97. La Borde, Relations, 13;
98. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 468-472.
99. La Borde, Relations, 7;
100. see also translation in Peter Hulme and Neil Whitehead, Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, an Anthology (Oxford, 1992), 142.
101. Douglas Taylor, "The Interpretation of Some Documentary Evidence on Carib Culture," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5 (1949): 389-90,
102. notes that the Carib did not make offerings to evil spirits (mápoya) but only to "spirit helpers." However, Whitehead reveals that Carib shaman [boyéz], at least in parts of the Guianas, make alcohol offerings to call down the more aggressive "evil spirits," which they use to attack their enemies (Dark Shamans, 48-49).
103. Breton, Relations, 66;
104. see translation in Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 112;
105. see also La Borde, Relations, 32-33.
106. Postpartum fasting and food taboos are known in anthropological literature as couvade.
107. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:352;
108. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 550-51;
109. Douglas Taylor, "The Meaning of Dietary and Occupational Restrictions among the Island Carib," American Anthropologist 52.3 (1950): 343-49;
110. La Borde reported that women undergo a similar fast when they reach marriageable age, during which time they eat cassava and oüicou (Relations, 34-35).
111. Breton, Relations, 66;
112. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:353;
113. La Borde, Relations, 34-35;
114. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 554-55.
115. Breton, Relations, 65-67;
116. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:356;
117. La Borde, Relations, 32-38;
118. Frederick Ober, Camps in the Caribbees: The Adventures of a Naturalist in the Lesser Antilles (Boston, 1880), 213;
119. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 553-54;
120. Douglas Taylor, "Kinship and Social Structure of the Island Carib," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 2 (1946): 185-86.
121. While it may be problematic to test the reliability of early colonial writers using modern ethnographic accounts of Island Carib, twentieth-century ethnographies show that the Island Carib's spiritual use of oüicou has continued on such occasions well into modern times. See, e.g., Hodge and Taylor, Ethnobotany;
122. Taylor, Caribs of Dominica;
123. Taylor, "Kinship and Social Structure," 185-86;
124. Taylor, "Meaning," 343-49;
125. and Taylor, "Interpretation."
126. Breton, Relations, 79-80;
127. La Borde, Relations, 37;
128. Taylor, "Kinship and Social Structure," 187.
129. Breton, Relations, 80.
130. La Borde, Relations, 37-38.
131. La Borde, Relations Ibid., 7.
132. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:29-30.
133. Dr. Layfield, "A Large Relation of the Porto Rico Voyage; Written, as Is Reported, by That Learned Man and Reverend Divine Doctor Layfield, His Lordship Chaplaine and Attendant in That Expedition; Very Much Abbreviated," in Hakluytus Postumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, ed. S. Purchas, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1906), 16:56.
134. William Young, "A Tour through Several Islands of Barbados, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada, in the Years 1791 and 1792," in The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, ed. B. Edwards, 5th ed., 5 vols. (London, 1818-19), 3:255.
135. Braithwaite, "Report," 234.
136. Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 172.
137. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:364.
138. Similarly, paiwori or paiwarri are the names used for drinking festivals among some Amerindian groups in Guyana; see Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 75, 187.
139. La Borde, Relations, 26.
140. La Borde, Relations Ibid., 14.
141. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 2:364.
142. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 2:107;
143. see also translation in Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 164.
144. For example, in the early seventeenth century, Dutch commanders in the Low Country had such a reputation for plying troops with gin that the spirit was often referred to as "Dutch courage."
145. The anthropologist Seth Leacock argued that alcohol use had just such an effect on members of Afro-Brazilian cults in Brazil ("Ceremonial Drinking in an Afro-Brazilian Cult," American Anthropologist 66 [1964]: 344-54).
146. In the case of Brazil, however, spirit possession enhanced one's ability to play a god. In Carib society, according to Rochefort, shamans invoked spirits who possessed the bodies of women (Histoire naturelle et morale, 473).
147. However, this does not mean that the Carib rejected the idea that alcohol bestows on the drinker a momentary sense of power. In Dominica, in 1700, a hammerhead shark attacked a Carib child who was bathing in the sea. According to Labat, a Carib, angered by the attack, "armed himself with two well-sharpened bayonets, and after raising his courage by drinking a couple of glasses of rum, he dived into the sea" (Nouveau voyage, 2:118). Perhaps the ready availability of distilled spirits and the heavy European military presence in the Caribbean led at least some Caribs, especially in the later colonial period, to embrace the belief that alcohol promoted courage.
148. La Borde, Relations, 19, 2.4.
149. Ironically, despite the French missionaries' condemnation of Carib drunkenness, some had no problem dispensing shots of brandy to entice Carib into Christian baptism; see, e.g., Labat, Nouveau voyage, 1:31;
150. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 481.
151. In the mid-sixteenth century, Staden wrote that Amerindians in the Guianas went on drinking binges about once every month; he also noted that "they get drunk, but they rarely quarrel" ("Veritable History," 106). Staden's account contrasts sharply with Labat's late-seventeenth-century description of the more violent drinking binges of Island Carib. If the drinking patterns of pre-Columbian Island Carib were similar to those of their South American counterparts, then the drunken comportment of Island Carib changed after European contact. The change, discussed below, resulted from European aggression and the breakdown of traditional Carib society.
152. La Borde, Relations, 2.4.
153. James Schaefer, "Drunkenness and Cultural Stress: A Holocultural Test," in Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Study of Alcohol: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. M. Everett, J. Waddell, and D. Heath (The Hague, 1976), 287-322.
154. La Borde, Relations, 5-6, 14-15;
155. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 474-75.
156. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 558.
157. According to Mark Keller, the overriding ritual importance of alcohol in Judaism is responsible for the infrequency of alcoholism among American Jews; Keller, "The Great Jewish Drink Mystery," in Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages: A Cross-Cultural Survey, ed. M. Marshall (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), 404-14.
158. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 462.
159. Ligon, True and Exact History, 33.
160. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1740), 31.
161. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (New York, 1969 [1834]), 93-94;
162. Smith, Caribbean Rum, 154-57.
163. Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale, 531.
164. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 1:424-31.
165. Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 89-106. Using a number of primary sources, Hulme and Whitehead provide a comprehensive account of this incident.
166. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 2:109;
167. see also Alexander Anderson, Alexander Anderson's Geography and History of St. Vincent, ed. R. Howard and E. Howard (Cambridge, MA, 1983 [ca. 1800]), 65-66;
168. La Borde, Relations, 19.
169. Staden, "Veritable History," 106.
170. A similar link has been made between the growing European alcohol trade and an increase in internal violence among Native Americans in North America. See, e.g., Mancall, Deadly Medicine, 89-94.
171. Joseph Senhouse, "The Senhouse Papers," ed. J. Brandow, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 37 (1985): 284.
172. According to Anderson, "the unhappy wives [of the Carib men of St. Vincent] were frequently sacrificed in their drunken and jealous fits" (Anderson's Geography, 66).
173. La Borde also noted that women witches were often put to death by a "drunken executioner" (Relations, 11-12).
174. Philip Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore, 1992), 2-4;
175. Rouse, Tainos, 22.
176. In contrast, anthropologist Douglas Taylor has stressed the "democratic character" of Carib society, at least in the twentieth century ("Kinship and Social Structure," 182).
177. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 2:109;
178. La Borde, Relations, 22.
179. For an overview of anthropological and sociological discussion of the links between patriarchy and drunken domestic violence against women, see R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence against Wives: A Case against the Patriarchy (New York, 1979).
180. See also Richard J. Gelles, "Family Violence," Annual Review of Sociology 11 (1985): 347-67.
181. Historian Peter Mancall mentions that Native American women often hid men's weapons during drinking parties to reduce the threat of violence; see Mancall, Deadly Medicine, 89-94.
182. Franz Scaramelli and Kay Tarble, "Caña: The Role of Aguardiente in the Colonization of the Orinoco," in Histories and Historicities in Amazonia, ed. Neil Whitehead (Lincoln, NE, 2003), 176.
183. See translation in Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 43.
184. Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty Ibid., 40.
185. Breton, Relations, 65.
186. Kinship taboos generally function to reduce family and clan conflict, too Breton's statement also suggests that the drunk in Carib society took on a weak social status similar to a child's.
187. See Mancall, Deadly Medicine, 79-81.
188. Labat, Nouveau voyage, 2:109.
189. See Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (Chicago, 1969).
190. Philip Dennis, "The Role of the Drunk in a Oaxacan Village," American Anthropologist 77 (1975): 856-63.
191. MacAndrew and Edgerton, Drunken Comportment, 75.
192. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles, 1:461-66.
193. Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles Ibid., 4:67.
194. Wicker cited in Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 335.