ANTS WERE EXTERMINATED, and none have
since been seen in the island.

Chapter XXIX. INSURRECTION IN GRENADA

I have already stated that the French established their first settlement
in the island of Grenada in 1650. They found the island inhabited by
the Carib Indians, who, regarding the white men as beings superior in
goodness as well as intellect, gave them a cordial welcome, and treated
them with kindness and hospitality. The French, well pleased with their
reception, gave the cacique a few hatchets, knives, and beads, and a
barrel of brandy, and very coolly took possession of the island they
had thus purchased. Their conduct in this respect reminds one of the
language of the ill-treated Caliban to the proud Prospero:

"This island's mine, Which thou tak'st from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strok'dst and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries
in't; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That
burn by day and night; and then I loved thee, And showed thee all the
qualities of the isle The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and
fertile; Cursed be I that did so."

The remonstrances of the Caribs against the wrongs they were doomed
to suffer were as little heeded by the colonists as the complaints of
Caliban by Prospero. The French were resolute, powerful, and rapacious,
and treated the red men with inhumanity. The Indians, unable to contend
with their oppressors by open force, fled to their mountain fastnesses,
and commenced an obstinate predatory warfare upon the whites, murdering
without discrimination all whom they found defenceless. This led to a
bloody and protracted struggle for the mastery; and a reenforcement of
troops having been sent from France to aid the infant colony, it was
decided, after mature deliberation, that the most expeditious and
effectual mode of ending the war, and establishing peace on a permanent
basis, was TO EXTERMINATE THE CARIBS.

These original "lords of the soil" were accordingly driven from their
fastnesses, hunted by parties of soldiers, shot down like wild beasts
wherever found, until their number was reduced from thousands to about
one hundred. Bing cut off from the mountains by a military force, this
remnant of a powerful band fled to a promontory on the north part of the
island which overlooked the ocean, and, hard pressed by their civilized
foes, more than half their number leaped over the rocky precipice into
the sea which dash