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directed his Carib warriors to prepare for scouting expeditions into the mountains in search of settlements from which he might capture a wife.
    This tactic of stealing women was an important part of Carib culture, one that had been practiced for hundreds of years; the warriors might eat the men they captured in battle, and they castrated young boys to fatten them like capons for later feasts; but they did not eat women, they were too valuable for breeding and as the creators of future warriors.
    So with varied purposes Karúku the Carib laid plans to conquer whatever he might find on the island, and the end of the battle was clear in his mind: the extermination of the others.
    In many corners of the world at this time similar expeditions were being launched with similar goals, as groups of human beings, finding it impossible to coexist with those of a different color or religion, were concluding that extermination was the only solution. This conviction would continue to scar the world for the next eight hundred years and probably long after that.
    Karúku was a formidable foe, for he had demonstrated in forays along the Orinoco his skill in warfare and had left that amiable river primarily to find a new area which he could dominate. He was not only skilled in face-to-face battle, wielding a huge war club violently and cracking any skulls that came in the way, but he also had a keensense of tactics and strategy taught him by his father and grandfather, who had also been awesome warriors.
    The heritage of the Caribs was brutality, warfare and little else. They would bequeath to the world words originating in force and terror:
cannibal, hurricane
, the war
canoe
, the manly
cigar
, the
barbecue
, in which they roasted their captives. As they marched they had war drums but only a few songs of battle and none of love. Their food habits were totally primitive and graced with none of the refinements that the Arawaks and other tribes had developed; the Caribs ate by grabbing with dirty fingers scraps of meat from the common platter, the men invariably snatching theirs before the women, who were allowed the leftovers. Their canoes were heavy and crude, not the flying things of delicate line created by others, and even their personal adornment was invariably of a warlike nature, and it was the men, never the women, who were decorated with the whitened bones of their victims.
    But like the military Spartans of ancient Greece, who also seemed brutal when compared to the more cultured Athenians, the Caribs were very good at what they chose to do, and were the terrors in any area into which they wandered. They believed that by eating the most powerful of their enemies they inherited their prowess, and that by taking the most beautiful and healthy of their women they enhanced the vitality of their own group; in this latter belief they were, of course, correct. They were a hybrid group of people, constantly reinforced by fresh blood, and they profited from the brutal strength that such hybridism often produces.
    When Karúku and three others left the sunrise side one morning to explore their newfound island, they moved stealthily and with intense purpose, and after they had probed through the forests for some hours without spotting any signs of habitation, they began to ascend the high mountains that filled the center of the island. Night overtook them before they had seen anything, but this did not distress them, for they were accustomed to sleeping in the open, and for food, they carried with them fragments of fish and meal of which they would eat sparingly, for they could not anticipate who or what they might encounter before they returned to their own people.
    On the afternoon of the second day they came upon a sight that delighted them: it was a clearing in the forest and they concluded that it must have been made purposefully by human beings, for there grew in a consciously designed pattern the tuberous manioc, a majorsource of food.