A number of studies of the interaction between Europeans and native West Indians have been published during the celebration of the Columbus Quincentenary. Most, including a book by this reviewer, examine the relations between the Spaniards and the Tainos (Arawaks), who inhabited the Bahama Islands and the Greater Antilles. The present volume focuses instead on European encounters with the Island Caribs, who lived in the Lesser Antilles.
Boucher begins by summarizing the sporadic Spanish contacts with the Island Caribs before other European nations became interested in the Lesser Antilles. He then discusses the rivalry between the British and French as they founded their first colonies between 1623 and 1660, the success of the remaining Island Caribs in playing the two nations against each other from 1660 to 1689, and the gradual decline of the natives from 1689 to 1763. Dutch colonization is mentioned only incidentally. Views of the Amerindians in the contemporary European literature are considered at the end.
The book's strength lies in its handling of the European side of the contact situation. Boucher offers new insights into conditions in the colonies based on extensive study of the French archives, and explains in detail how incidents in Europe affected events in the Caribbean. His discussion of European images of the Native Americans extends beyond the West Indies to include both South and North America.
The handling of the Island Carib side of the contact is less successful. Boucher favors the revisionist conclusion that the Tainos and Island Caribs constituted a single ethnic group. Actually, the two spoke different languages and had different cultures. For example. Taino villages centered on a chief's house, which faced a central plaza and was surrounded by the homes of nobles and commoners, whereas the Island Carib villages consisted of a men's house set in the midst of homes for the women and children. The Tainos acquired power by keeping the bones of their ancestors in their houses, while the Island Caribs obtained it by eating bits of their enemies. Boucher correctly rejects the widespread belief that the Caribs ate their enemies as food, but fails to consider seriously the alternative possibility of ritual cannibalism.
His archival research does support a second ethnic dichotomy that has also been questioned, between Black and Yellow Caribs. Slaves fleeing the British plantations on Barbados intermarried with the natives on the windward side of neighboring St. Vincent to form the Black Caribs. The natives on the leeward side then became known as Yellow Caribs because they retained their original skin color. History here repeats itself for the ancestral Island Caribs had arisen through absorption of mainland Carib war parties into the previous Igneri population in the southern half of the Lesser Antilles.
