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By Root 586 0

potent snuff, and after inhaling it, the cacique fell into a deep trance lasting three or four hours. When he emerged, he announced to his followers the prophecies he had heard from the cemís, and those divine utterances set the program that followed. Drummers and other musicians struck their instruments, and the intoxicating reverberation filled the public square, and floated up to the sky, even as the cohoba dust filled the nostrils of the Indians and altered their perception of reality. Three hundred dancers, moving as one, shook the snail shells bound to their arms, their calves, their thighs, and even their heels. “Loaded with these shells they struck the ground with their feet, leaping, singing, and dancing, and they saluted the cacique who, seated in the doorway, received those who came, beating on his drum with a stick,” wrote Peter Martyr.

The dancers held hands or clasped each other’s shoulders as they danced, the men flashing their body designs in gaudy red, black, and white. “The women, on the other hand, came without any special haircuts or paint, the virgins totally nude,” said Martyr.

At a signal from the behiques, or wise men, the garlanded women, dancing and singing their hymns, which they call areítos, offered cassava in laboriously woven baskets. Upon entering, they began to circle those who were seated there; these, rising with sudden leaps, celebrated with admirable areítos of praise, together with them, to the cemí, narrating and singing with the illustrious gestures of their ancestors, giving thanks to the deity for their well being, humbly asking him for future felicity; both sexes on their knees at the end, they offered the deity cassava, which the wise men blessed, and then they divided the cassava into pieces as personal presents.

At the conclusion, each participant carried part of the cassava home and kept it all year as an object of sacred remembrance.

The lost party of nine men suddenly appeared before Columbus on November 8, explaining that they had gone astray in the forest. “We rejoiced at their arrival as though they had come back to life,” Chanca wrote, sensibly enough. They were accompanied by ten women and boys, all fleeing the Caribs. To find their way back to the waiting ships, several men had shimmied to the treetops “to get oriented with the stars but were absolutely not able to see the sky.” Wandering to the water’s edge, they stumbled upon the waiting fleet by accident.

The Admiral was more irritated than pleased by their unexpected return. The tale of their ordeal failed to move his unyielding heart. And he “punished them for their rashness, ordering the captain put in chains and placing the others on short rations,” Ferdinand reported.

At daybreak on November 10, Columbus and his fleet departed from Guadeloupe, sailing northwest along the coast to the island of Montserrat. The handful of Indians aboard his ship explained that the island had been ravaged by the Caribs, who had eaten “all its inhabitants.” Columbus hastened to Santa María la Redonda—so named because it was round—and then Santa María de la Antigua, and held to a northwesterly course, spotting more islands “all very high and densely wooded” and potentially useful, but as his son tells us, Columbus was “so anxious to relieve the men he had left on Hispaniola that he decided to continue” until November 14, when a storm forced the fleet to seek shelter in Salt River Bay, in the lee of the island now known as St. Croix.

A few of the men went ashore “to learn what kind of people lived there,” Chanca noted, “and also because we needed information about which way to follow.” Here, as on other islands, “most of the women . . . were prisoners of the Caribs,” just as they had expected “on the basis of what the women with us had predicted.”

Columbus again dispatched scouts to capture an Indian guide, but they returned instead with several women and three children. As the scouts approached their ship, they found themselves in a pitched battle with four men and a woman in an Indian canoe. The lone woman proved