However, linguistic and archaeological evidence contradicts the notion of a mass emigration and conquest; the Kalinago language appears not to have been Cariban, but like that of their neighbors, the Taíno.

Irving Rouse and others suggest that a smaller group of mainland peoples migrated to the islands without displacing their inhabitants, eventually adopting the local language but retaining their traditions of a South American origin.

According to the tales of Spanish conquistadors, the Kalinago were cannibals who regularly ate roasted human flesh,[8] although this is considered by the community to be an offensive myth.

There is no hard evidence of Caribs eating human flesh, though one historian points out it might be useful to frighten enemy Arawak.

[17] The traditional account, which is almost as old as Columbus, says that the Caribs were a warlike people who were moving up the Lesser Antilles and displacing the original inhabitants.

When the Spanish attempted to colonize Puerto Rico, Kalinago from St. Croix arrived to aid the local Taíno.

[28] Daguao village, initially slated to be the Europeans' new capital, was destroyed by Taínos from the eastern area of Puerto Rico, with the support of Kalinago from neighboring Vieques.

The Kalinago took advantage of divisions between the Europeans, to provide support to the French and the Dutch during wars in the 1650s, consolidating their independence as a result.

[30] On Saint Vincent the Kalinago intermarried with runaway slaves, forming the ‘Black Caribs’ or Garifuna who were expelled to Honduras in 1797.

The British colonial use of the term Black Carib, particularly in William Young's Account of the Black Charaibs (1795), has been described in modern historiography as framing the majority of the indigenous St. Vincent population as "mere interlopers from Africa" who lacked claims to land possession in St.

[36] Several hundred Carib descendants live in the U. S. Virgin Islands, St. Kitts & Nevis, Antigua & Barbuda, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Trinidad and St. Vincent.

[citation needed] During the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Island Carib population in St. Vincent was greater than that in Dominica.

Unable to recover from the damage caused by the eruption, 120 of the Yellow Caribs, under Captain Baptiste, emigrated to Trinidad.

[40] Canoes, constructed from the Burseraceae, Cedrela odorata, Ceiba pentandra, and Hymenaea courbaril trees, serve different purposes depending on their height and thickness of the bark.

Berend J. Hoff and Douglas Taylor hypothesized that it dated to the time of the Carib expansion through the islands, and that males maintained it to emphasize their origins on the mainland.

[45] Linguistic analysis in the 20th century determined that the main Island Carib language was spoken by both sexes, and was Arawakan, not Cariban.

Scholars adopted more nuanced theories to explain the transition from the earlier Igneri to the later Island Carib societies in the Antilles.

[citation needed] In 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, the Maipurean-speaking Taínos reportedly relayed stories of the Caribs' war-like nature and cannibalism to him.

[21][25][26] When he arrived in the Lesser Antilles in 1635, the French missionary Raymond Breton made ethnographic and linguistic notes on the "Caribs", which also informed many of the early stereotypes about the Kalinago.

[51] Early European accounts describe the taking of human trophies and the ritual cannibalism of war captives among both Arawak and other Amerindian groups such as the Carib and Tupinambá, though the exact accuracy of cannibalistic reports still remains debated without skeletal evidence to support it.

Beckles have instead suggested that the stories of "vicious cannibals" may have comprised an "ideological campaign" against the Kalinago to justify "genocidal military expeditions" by European colonizers.

Missionaries, such as Père Jean Baptiste Labat and Cesar de Rochefort, described the practice as part of a belief that the ancestral spirits would always look after the bones and protect their descendants.

[56] Chief Kairouane and his men from Grenada jumped off the "Leapers Hill" rather than face slavery under the French invaders, serving as an iconic representation of the Kalinago spirit of resistance.