Talking Taino: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective

5. The Age of Reptiles (2003)

5 The Age of Reptiles On land I saw no animal of any kind except parrots and lizards. —Christopher Columbus, 1492 The name iguana (higuana) is a Taíno word. The syllable gua begins the Taíno words for gold, parrot, fire, and the names of many caciques. It is possible that gua was a designation for a favored thing, although Granberry and Vescelius translate gua as “our.” Indeed, iguanas were one of the favored foods of the Taínos, but by the time the Spanish arrived, iguanas were so rare they were reserved only for the caciques. This situation suited the Spanish just fine. The Spanish considered iguanas to be extremely ugly beasts that were not suited for human consumption. While sailing along the south coast of Cuba on his second voyage, Columbus entered the harbor at Guantanámo Bay and met a group of fishermen who were smoking fish and iguanas in preparation for a feast that their cacique was planning to host. The Spanish helped themselves to the smoked fish, but left the iguanas. The Taínos expressed great satisfaction that the iguanas were not eaten because they were a highly prized food that was difficult to find. Today on the Guantanámo Bay U.S. Naval Base, terrestrial animals such as iguanas and a large rat called a hutia are extremely common as they no longer have any human predators inside the base boundaries (see plate 6). By the time Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote his natural history of the Caribbean islands (first published in 1526), at least a few of the Spanish had come around to the delicacies of these islands, for he reports “the animal [iguana] is better to eat than to see” and describes the flesh “as good or better than rabbit.” He 32 / Chapter 5 further describes the Taíno keeping the iguanas tied or penned up in their villages, stating that they could survive up to twenty days without food or water, or longer if they were fed cassava bread, which they apparently appreciated. Another distinction given the iguana was the special way they were prepared before cooking. Peter Martyr D’Anghera, another of the early Spanish chroniclers, reported: “as a distinction from other game, they removed the entrails from iguanas .” He described the preferred Taíno method of cooking the animal as boiling it in a large pot heavily seasoned with hot pepper until, after a time, “from the interior of the iguana exuded a savoury stew.” There are several genera and a number of species of iguanas that were once common in the Caribbean Islands. The rock iguanas of the Greater Antilles and the Bahama archipelago are a ground-dwelling species. The smallest species of all the rock iguanas still survives on the small cays of the Turks & Caicos Islands. Today, they reach an average length of fifty centimeters (twenty inches) in body length (including the tail). However, they were not always so small. When the firstTaínos reached Grand Turk about thirteen hundred years ago, they found themselves in something of a Jurassic Park. Approaching the beach in their canoes, they came upon the tracks of large green turtles who had just laid their eggs, saw large iguanas sunning themselves on the sand, and must have been curious about the massive tortoises (now extinct) plodding slowly through the bush. This was the Age of Reptiles for GrandTurk. No humans—and for that matter, no mammals—were present on the island and these reptilian creatures grew large due to a lack of predators. Iguana bones from the archaeological site of Coralie, which dates to the initial human colonization of the island (see chapter 22), revealed that Grand Turk iguanas were once more than three feet long! This is the size of iguanas found on Hispaniola and Cuba. Yet within four hundred years, the nesting turtles, tortoises, and iguanas had TAÍNO WORD TRANSLATION Higuana Iguana Caguaya Common lizard Guey Sun Anoli Anole lizard Ameiva Skink Bayoya Curlytail lizard Maja Large snake (boa) Jujo Small snake The Age of Reptiles / 33 been driven to extinction on most islands.They were meat for the hungry humans who were spreading through the islands. We are fortunate that iguanas still survive in a few isolated locations in the Caribbean. Green turtles no longer nest on many of these islands and the giant tortoises have been gone so long that there...