cap of crimson velvet, and replaced it with a circle of gold which
he wore.

Alas for them! That fatal present of gold brought down on them
enemies far more ruthless than the Caribs of the northern islands,
who had a habit of coming down in their canoes and carrying off the
gentle Arrawaks to eat them at their leisure, after the fashion
which Defoe, always accurate, has immortalised in Robinson Crusoe.
Crusoe's island is, almost certainly, meant for Tobago; Man Friday
had been stolen in Trinidad.

Columbus came no more to Trinidad. But the Spaniards had got into
their wicked heads that there must be gold somewhere in the island;
and they came again and again. Gold they could not get; for it does
not exist in Trinidad. But slaves they could get; and the history
of the Indians of Trinidad for the next century is the same as that
of the rest of the West Indies: a history of mere rapine and
cruelty. The Arrawaks, to do them justice, defended themselves more
valiantly than the still gentler people of Hayti, Cuba, Jamaica,
Porto Rico, and the Lucayas: but not so valiantly as the fierce
cannibal Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, whom the Spaniards were
never able to subdue.

It was in 1595, nearly a century after Columbus discovered the
island, that 'Sir Robert Duddeley in the Bear, with Captain Munck,
in the Beare's Whelpe, with two small pinnesses, called the Frisking
and the Earwig,' ran across from Cape Blanco in Africa, straight for
Trinidad, and anchored in Cedros Bay, which he calls Curiapan,
inside Punta Icacque and Los Gallos--a bay which was then, as now,
'very full of pelicans.' The existence of the island was known to