A supply of French linen that the Caribs had liberated from a Spanish ship.

From Love & Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price. Page 23.

The voyagers spent the next month sailing westward under the power of the Atlantic trade winds, the closest thing to sailing downhill. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, writing in 1954, offered a rhapsodic description of the experience of sailing this stretch of ocean, based on his own re-creation of the early Atlantic crossings:

Sailing before the trades in a square-rigger is as near heaven as any seaman expects to be on the ocean. You settle down to a pleasant ritual, undisturbed by shifts of wind and changes of weather. There is the constant play of light and color on the bellying square sails (silver in moonlight, black in starlight, cloth-of-gold at sunset, white as the clouds themselves at noon), the gorgeous deep blue of the sea, flecked with white-caps, the fascination of seeing new stars arise, the silver flash when a school of flying fish springs from the bow wave, the gold and green of leaping dolphins.

The ships reached the West Indies on March 23, with the sighting of the island of Martinique. The colonists, still some 1,500 miles from their destination, sailed past Martinique and landed the next day on Dominica to replenish their water and food. There, they began eighteen days of island-hopping, working their way northward by sail from one small, lush landmass to another. Colonist George Percy recalled Dominica as “a very fair island, the trees full of sweet and good smells.” It was also the site of the voyagers’ first encounter with the natives of the New World.

The English, true to form, were contemptuous of the culture of the “savage Indians” of the island, known as the Caribs. The Caribs wore jewelry through their noses, ears, and lips—“very strange to behold,” Percy thought—but were otherwise naked. The men of the tribe spoke one language, the women another. Beyond these curiosities, the English had also gleaned an unsettling (and accurate) travelers’ advisory from Spanish accounts: namely, that the Caribs sometimes ate human flesh.

The Caribs, for their part, were suspicious of the English because they resembled the Spanish, whom the Caribs had repeatedly battled over the course of the preceding century. Dominica had been visited by Christopher Columbus, and the Caribs had since repulsed every Spanish attempt to settle there. Their favored tactic was to raise a contingent of hundreds of warriors assembled from the Carib-controlled islands, bring them together in a fleet of dugout canoes, and then overwhelm one of the Spanish settlements with a surprise attack from the sea. The Caribs thereby preserved their freedom against the slavery of the encomienda system, succeeding through force where the more trusting Aztecs and Incas had failed. Yet the Caribs did not have entirely clean hands themselves: some time earlier, they had conquered and expelled the Arawaks, the original inhabitants, from Dominica and some of the other small Caribbean islands. Tradition had it that the Caribs had arrived by canoe from parts unknown before sending the less militaristic Arawaks on their way. (The surviving Arawaks resettled in Puerto Rico and other islands in the vicinity.)

The Caribs finally satisfied themselves that the visitors were not Spaniards—and, presumably, that they did not intend to stick around and settle. The Caribs then came to the three ships in canoes, ready to trade food in exchange for European knives and hatchets (“which they esteem much,” Percy observed) as well as copper and beads. The colonists acquired various fruits and vegetables, and also a supply of French linen that the Caribs had liberated from a Spanish ship.