The introduction of Black slaves in the Antilles was the only means found to remedy the disappearance of the Carib labor force on the islands and territories discovered and conquered by Christopher Columbus and his lieutenants. The Caribs knew nothing of work as commonly understood. The Reverend Father Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, the Herodotus of the Antilles, to use Pierre Magny’s phrase, said this about this race of people who would rather starve to death than allow themselves to be enslaved: “The natives4 of these islands are the most content, the happiest, [the least depraved]5, the most sociable, [the least pretentious, and the least disease prone] of all the nations of the world. They are as nature made them, that is to say, endowed with the great innocence and simplicity they had originally.6 They are all equal […].7 No one is richer or poorer than his neighbor, and everyone desires only what is useful, and therefore necessary, scorning whatever they possess over and above that as not worth having. […] “There is no police to be seen among them. They all live freely. They eat and drink when they’re hungry and thirsty. They work and rest when they please […]. […] There are no people8 in the world who are more jealous of their liberty and more resentful and impatient when they sense the least threat against it. So they mock us when they see us obeying our superiors. They say we are the slaves of the people we obey, for those people have taken the liberty of giving us orders and we are cowards for obeying their orders.”
4 Maran is quite probably quoting du Tertre from Henri de Lalung’s book, Les Caraïbes : un peuple étrange aujourd’hui disparu (Paris : Éditions Bourrelier et Cie, 1948), chapter II, “Portrait physique et moral.” The e-book edition we consulted is unpaged. Like du Tertre, de Lalung writes “Sauvages” [Savages]. We keep the term “natifs” [natives] which Maran seems to have deliberately used as a more respectful designation for the Caribs. 5 The words in brackets are omitted in Maran’s typescript. Corrections are based on the de Lalung text. On the other hand, when an omission is also found in de Lalung, if necessary, as is the case here, we correct the text according to du Tertre’s book, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, T. 2 (Paris: Chez Thomas Lolly, 1667), Traité VII, chapitre I, p. 357. As for the suspension points in brackets, they indicate a break in the Maran quotation. 6 Following de Lalung but omitting the “s” indicative of the plural, Maran writes “originelle [at the origin] instead of “naturelle” [in nature, of nature] as in R. P. du Tertre, op. cit., p. 357. 7 Maran is following de Lalung in omitting the final clauses of du Tertre’s original sentence: “sans que l’on connaisse presque aucune sorte de supériorité ni de servitude; et à peine peut-on reconnaître aucune sorte de respect, même entre les parents, comme du fils au père” [almost with no noticeable mark of superiority or subservience; one can in fact barely observe any sort of respect even between parents or between a son and a father]. – du Tertre, op. cit., p. 357. 8 From this sentence on de Lalung no longer follows du Tertre, even though, like Maran after him, he seems to attribute all those statements to du Tertre. As we ignore which edition of du Tertre’s book de Lalung may have consulted, several hypotheses are possible. We decline to speculate about it, however, for this is neither the time nor the place to do so. On the other hand, save for a different word—point [not] instead of pas [also not], we have found this last paragraph in extenso on page 329 of Volume IV of Nouveau Voyage aux îles françaises de l’Amérique by R. P. Labat (La Haye: chez P. Husson. T. Johnson. P. Gosse. J. van Duren. R. Alberts, & C. Levier, 1831).
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