Talking Taino: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective

10. Herbs, Fish, and Other Scum and Vermin (2003)

10 Herbs, Fish, and Other Scum and Vermin At a meeting held in 1573 to decide the fate of the colony [St. Augustine, La Florida], one of the soldiers testified that rations were often short and that “when there was nothing they ate herbs, fish and other scum and vermin.” —Margaret C. Scarry and Elizabeth J. Reitz, 1990 About 88 percent of the creatures in the sea are animals without backbones— the invertebrates, which include corals, clams, snails, jellyfish, crabs, and sponges, among others. As our title indicates, the Spanish were not always enamored of the local foods that were offered to them by the native peoples. Yet foods that Europeans once considered unsuited for human consumption are today the choicest morsels (such as escargot, crab, conch, lobster, calamari, and oysters). The Taíno Indians collected and consumed vast amounts of these marine creatures as we do today. The most common species preserved in archaeological sites are crabs, lobsters, conchs, clams, whelks, nerite snails, and chitons. Most of these items are still on our list of preferred dinner items in the West Indies today, much the same as it was in the past. People who live on small islands quickly exhaust their choices of terrestrial foods such as small mammals, reptiles, and birds. What they are left with is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fish and other sea creatures. Queen conch has been the most important item in the economy of the Lucayan Islands since people first settled there. Millions of dried conchs were exported from theTurks & Caicos Islands in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Caicos Conch Farm on Providenciales is today leading efforts to revive this drastically over-fished resource. Most Caribbean nations outside of the Bahama archipelago no longer have viable conch-fishing industries. The Taíno word for the conch was cobo, and they may even have referred specifically to the magnificent queen conch. The sound ko translates as outer and bo 58 / Chapter 10 is the word for house (Taínos called their homes bohio). So the word cobo refers to an animal that carries its house. Conchs (in the islands these snails are pronounced “konk” not “konsch”) were a primary food item that was prepared in a variety of ways and was dried and traded between islands. As it is one of the hardest and most plentiful materials in this environment, the Taíno used conch shells as a primary source material for making tools.These included gouges to hollow out canoes, hoes to clear fields for planting, hammers, picks, fishhooks, and net mesh gauges. Conch was fashioned into disk-shaped beads, carved into amulets, and used as inlay materials in more elaborate sculptures. Conch shells also were fashioned into trumpets. Though queen conchs were made into trumpets, the top-of-the-line variety of trumpets was made from the shell called the Atlantic Triton. These are the largest snails in the Caribbean and their shells can reach a maximum length of forty-five centimeters (eighteen inches). The Taíno had a specific word for trumpets made from this particular shell— guamo. Again, the sound gua may indicate this was a prized item. Trumpets had everyday uses and the ability to call individuals to action was highly regarded by theTaínos, but they were also important in religious rites. By blowing a shell trumpet , the powers of the spiritual realm were called to action. The Taíno term for land crab is juey. This white soldier crab was a major food item for theTaínos, especially during their initial colonization of the Caribbean islands . Certain archaeological sites were so full of crab remains that archaeologists first called the Indians found in Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles the “Crab Culture .” Each full-grown male crab can provide up to one pound of meat. The season for hunting land crab is May to October, since they hibernate in the winter. Even so, heavy rains will bring crabs out of their deep burrows in any season (see plate 10). In archaeological sites primarily it is the claws that are preserved. These claws TAÍNO WORD TRANSLATION Cobo Shell; “outer house”; conch Bohio Home Guamo Shell trumpet Juey Blue land crab Cocolia Blue crab, marine Caguara Clam (to cut hair) Donaca Donax clam Herbs, Fish, and Other Scum and Vermin / 59 often show evidence for burning, so roasting crab for dinner was not an uncommon...