would not do what was required, or any thing else. When desired to hunt or
sholt- game, they chose to fish, and probably would neglect the very employment
they chose.”* Chanvallon declares that their stupid eyes were the mirror of
their souls, and that “ their reason is not more enlightened than the instinct of
brutes.” They kept their women in the vilest servitude, and instilled into the
minds of their children the love of cruelty and slaughter.
One of the most remarkable facts connected with these people, was their
custom of flattening the skulls of their offspring. That which has been often
doubted, is now reduced to certainty: yet it must be admitted as a singular
circumstance, that Peter Martyr makes no mention of i t ; and even Humboldt
thinks that it was confined to the Black Charibs, who were of Negro descent.!
That this is an error is proved by the fact of the continental ancestors of the
Insular Charibs having practised the custom in very distant times; by its being
recorded by Rochefort, who wrote his account before the Black Charibs were
known in St. Vincent and by the personal testimony of several later voyagers.
M. Amic, who was in Guadeloupe in 1791, saw both Charibs* and Negroes with
flattened heads, and obtained from them the apparatus by which the deformity
was effected .$ Mr. Lawrence has figured the head of a Red Charib chief who
was well known in St. Vincent ;|| and Humboldt has represented both the natural
and artificial configuration, the former differing in nothing from the ordinary
Indian head.
The annexed illustration of the Charib skull, is derived from a cast in the
possession of the Phrenological Society of this city: the original is preserved, I
believe, in the Royal Museum at Paris; and it is the same which Gall and
Spurzheim have figured in their great work on the Nervous System. A few
diameters are all the measurements that can be obtained from the cast,
Longitudinal diameter,
MEASUREMENTS.
7.2 inches,
Parietal diameter, 5.7 inches.
Frontal diameter, 4.5 inches,
Vertical diameter, 5.1 inches.
* S heldon, in Archæolog. Amer.. I, p. 411. P ers* Narr. VI, p. 31.
% Histoire des Antilles, published in 1671.
§ Journal de Physique, Tome XXXIX, for 1791. || Lectures on Zoology, &c., Plate X.