"Land of Sweetness: A Pre-Columbian Timeline" Topic

"The night was deep on Guanahani Island, and the world was asleep. The heavens were black, the stars and the half-moon's steady light alone illuminating the rows of ripening maize and drying fish. Even the parrots were quiet. Only the whistles of the hutias and the crashing of the waves disturbed the silence of the night – not that there was anyone to hear them. It was the time of day and year when women and children dozed in their cottages, waiting for the men to return from the country of the Caniba.

"Don't go in the woods after dark," mothers here would tell their children, "there might be Caniba out there, and they're more than happy to eat you." The people of these islands called themselves Yucayans, "Islanders." But to be a Yucayan was more than to simply live on an island. Yucayans possessed the spirit of taiguan, the essence of civilized life. The Caniba, the Yucayan name for the tribal peoples to their north and south, did not. So they were inferior. The Caniba, it was said, did not know how to build with stone. They were too ignorant to read or write, to irrigate their maize and manioc, or even to have monarchs and ministers. If you believed the rumors, some Caniba had sex with their daughters and feasted each night on human flesh…"
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