Carib People - Cannibalism

Cannibalism

The Carib word karibna meant "person". It became the origin of the English "cannibal". Although among the Carib, it was apparently associated with rituals related to the eating of war enemies, some Europeans believed the Carib practiced general cannibalism.

The Kalinago had a tradition of keeping bones of their ancestors in their houses. Missionaries such as Père Jean Baptiste Labat and Cesar de Rochefort described the practice as part of a belief that the ancestral spirits would always look after the bones and protect their descendants. The Caribs have been described as vicious and violent people in the history of the people who battled against other tribes.

Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was killed and said to have been eaten by Carib natives on what is now Guadeloupe (French West Indies) in 1528 (before called "Karukera" by the Amerindian people which means: the island of beautiful waters), during his third voyage to North America, after exploring Florida, the Bahamas and the Lesser Antilles.

Historians have described the cannibalism as related to war rituals. Columbus and his people did not understand what they were seeing, and they were shocked at this cannibalism. In 1503, Queen Isabella ruled that only people who were better off under slavery (a definition which explicitly included cannibals) could legally be taken as slaves. This provided Spaniards an incentive and legalistic pretext for identifying various Amerindian groups as cannibals to enslave them and take their lands away.

To this day, the Kalinago people fight against what they regard as a misconception about their ancestors. The film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was criticised by the National Garifuna Council for portraying the Carib people as cannibals.

In Myths and realities of Caribbean history the author Basil A. Reid concluded that "No evidence, either archaeological or from firsthand observations by Europeans, conclusively proves that Island-Caribs ever consumed human flesh."