"Pray to the almighty Lord! May those who have been baptized die, in the Lord's death and resurrection, to the cleansing that washes away sin, and at last enjoy the beautiful resurrection after death!..."
The prayers led by the two noble captains rang out aboard the two Portugal ships. And a full six corpses were cast into the endless sea.
In this Carib siege, six men on the flagship had been struck by arrows, and four had died. On the vice ship, four had been poisoned, but only two had died. The fleet that had originally numbered forty-four men had dropped once more to thirty-eight, and the fleet's morale plunged at once!
Looking at it now, that storm-blown loss of course truly had been a misfortune sent down by fate. Columbus's first voyage had gone straight as an arrow to the Bahamas, arriving in the territory of the kind and simple Taino tribes, eating and drinking, cheating and robbing all the way, burning, killing, raping, and plundering. Bruno's first voyage, however, had lurched and stumbled into the land of the fiercely xenophobic Caribs, and had even kept sailing toward the Caribs' lair!
One had to know that among the many tribes of the entire Caribbean islands, whether it was the ancestral Ciboney people tucked away in the corners, or the most numerous Arawakan Taino-Lokono people, none of them were anywhere near as fierce and savage as the newly risen Caribs of several centuries before!
These fierce tribes that occupied the Lesser Antilles had used the crudest Canoes, Stone Spears, Hunting Bows, and Blowpipes to resist Western colonizers for well over a hundred years!
Their two most formidable weapons—first came the famous "Curtain of Poisoned Arrows," coating light arrows and blow-darts with lethal jungle Frog Venom, using the method of "Natural