Mangroves grow on many of the Caribbean island shores, as they do in many parts of the world, extending the reach of islands by walking out to sea with their prop roots and capturing sediment and plants that will eventually shape the swamp into an expanded shoreline. There are casuarinas, which have come from afar but made the Caribbean their home, and sea grapes, with their leathery leaves and sour-grape fruit. They may have been the first plant seen by Columbus when he reached what he thought were the Spice Islands of Indonesia—and the smell of these trees, along with the sight of their leaves blown from the shore and carried by the sea, would have been noticed by sailors long before any island came into view.
Anthurium, bougainvillea, Easter lily, wild scallion, and heliconia—called wild banana—are among the flowering plants native to Jamaica, along with a mimosa called Shame-Me-Lady, so sensitive that a light touch or a slight breeze cause the leaf stalks to collapse and the leaflets to close. One indigenous plant called Ram Goat Dash Along makes a healing bush tea, while cerasee makes a bitter tea that is also used as a body wash. Pomegranate and frangipani shrubs are common, along with Duppy Cho-Cho, which may harbor bad spirits. Marigolds and fuchsia grow in the mountains. Jamaica is also home to the greatest variety of orchid species in the Caribbean. They originated in Africa, like the enslaved men, women, and children who were later transported to the island, but many of the orchids were brought to the Americas as seed dust on the Sahara winds.
All humans on the islands of the world are settlers, though when they first traveled there, and why and how and from where, is often uncertain, or else explained in the myths that make up the history of first islanders (and which usually include stories about the first plants and animals as well). We can be sure that some humans came by choice, some reached by chance, and coercion played a part for others. Often islands provided sanctuary for those fleeing hunger or war, or seeking solitude—saintly or otherwise. Islands saw the arrival both of seasonal workers and of enslaved laborers, and of settlers looking for a different life, establishing new societies, and exploiting natural resources that they did not have back home. And some of them will have had a dream.
People seem to have first settled the islands of the Caribbean around six thousand years ago. All of them came by boat—some paddling, some perhaps sailing, others just drifting from the mainland—though over time a myth was told about flying to the islands, transported by birds or spirits. Once there, they gathered wild plants and ocean kelp and hunted food from the seashell-crunchy, seaweed-squishy shore; and according to their stories they were only the latest in a series of travelers in the Caribbean Sea stretching back into the mists of time. Alternating periods of wandering and settling down had defined the lives of these Amerindian people—indeed of all people—since the beginning, with each coming and going being different and yet the same, signaling both a passage and a pattern. Some set out from the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and their first islands were Trinidad and Tobago. Others came from Central America along the Yucatán Peninsula and from Florida, and they settled on Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica (often referred to as the Greater Antilles). Archaeologists have divided them into different indigenous groups, but such labels are misleading, for they all thought of themselves simply as The People. “We the people” is the quintessential island affirmation, for an island is not a metaphor for home. Home is a metaphor for an island.
We can only guess whether it was because of a crisis or out of curiosity that these ancient peoples began to set out to sea from the American mainland. They may have had dreams of a place where they would find material and spiritual well-being; or maybe they had actually heard about such a place from their singers and storytellers. Some of them may have been looking for a new start; others might have just gone for a boat ride and lost their way. Perhaps they were on their way to meet their ancestors. Whatever their motivation, they did set out.
When these first Amerindians arrived on Trinidad and Tobago, they couldn’t see anywhere else to go and so they stayed, imagining these isles for awhile as the new center of their world. Then they heard from their dreamers and derring-doers about other islands, far beyond the horizon—about one hundred miles across the sea, as it happened. So when they had had enough of life on those first islands, or enough of their fellow islanders, or were restless for adventure, they set off again, paddling and drifting until they reached the island of Grenada. From there they could see another island, and another, and another, part of an arc stretching some five hundred miles—the eastern Caribbean (also called the Lesser Antilles). Were these the blessed isles their shamans had spoken about, over the horizon, at the end of the rainbow? Were they the home of spirits of malice and mischief or of gods of grace and goodness? Nobody knew. And everybody wondered.
These ancient Amerindian peoples were used to the ways in which rivers and mountains offered plants and animals to them, and as they traveled north along the arc of islands, they continued to harvest some of the shore food they were already familiar with. But fishing in the open sea offered another livelihood, where hunting and gathering required new knowledge and skills and a surrender to different natural and supernatural forces; and these soon became part of their consciousness and their culture. Over time, they made these islands of the archipelago their new home. They found oysters, mussels, conch, and crab along the shoreline and in the mangrove swamps, and larger species—including lobsters two feet long and weighing over thirty pounds—on the sand, among the sea grass, and on the rocky beaches. They took to the sea for fish, and they ventured inland, finding some animals and plants they knew about and others they had never seen before. They harvested birds and reptiles and the small mammals that had swum to the islands or stolen a ride on driftwood. Slowly they brought their hunting and harvesting heritages into harmony, with island birds and sea turtles now animating their myths, and island storylines telling about their new relationship with the land and the sea around it.
Still, the history of settlement in the Caribbean was far from over. It seldom is with islands, where comings and goings are facts of life. From the South American mainland, new settlers with new ways of living began arriving in the Caribbean around 500 BCE, moving throughout the islands. They cultivated crops and resided in communal dwellings and village centers rather than seasonal hunting and fishing camps. They built houses to last for generations, farmed the land, harvested the sea, and created sophisticated ceremonies. Because many of the islands are mountainous, some of these new Amerindian settlers established political strongholds in the highland interiors where the resources were plentiful and the competition scarce. They expanded the existing traditions of weaving and basket-making and ceramics and developed forms of dance and music and cooking that caught the attention of the Europeans and Africans who came much later; and they became known as the Arawak—from aru, their word for cassava.
Over time, the culture of the Arawak developed in distinctive ways on different islands of the Caribbean. This, too, is the story of life on islands all over the world. (When Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos archipelago, he was intrigued by the differences in flora and fauna on islands only a few miles apart.) And so on the island of Jamaica unique human cultures and languages emerged, with arts and crafts and games that surprised other islanders, even those relatively close by. A system of chiefdoms provided political stability, inheriting power along the matriarchal line (which seemed unnatural to the European seafarers and nostalgic to the Africans when they came as enslaved laborers), and a class system that allocated responsibilities and obligations according to rank. Shamans brought supernatural resources to everyday life, including the medical and the military, inhaling an hallucinogenic powder for healing and holy enterprise called cohoba, ground from the seeds of a local tree. Perhaps their most intriguing artifacts were ceremonial seats (called duhos) and triangular carved stones—a sculptural expression of their spiritual concept of zemis, which were symbolic of ancestral and cosmic power.
The people throughout the Greater Antilles eventually became known as Taino, and their stories provided new island cosmologies and new understandings, both scientific and religious, of natural forces