Chapter 337: Daybreak: The Darkest Hour Has Passed
Before seeing the painting “Crossing the Sea,” Everly had imagined the scene like this: under the colonists’ massacre, the Carib people split into two groups. One group remained steadfast in their homeland and was eventually killed by the colonists, while the other crossed the vast ocean, traversed the broad strait, and came to the North American continent in an attempt to establish a new home there.
However, the scene depicted in the painting was completely different from what Everly had imagined.
Several centuries ago, this group of Carib people in the forest had crossed the sea aboard the colonists’ ships.
They seemed to have reached some kind of agreement with the colonists of that time. No sooner had they set foot on the land than they became embroiled in a battle with an indigenous tribe with yellowish-brown skin that lived along the coast, and they defeated the tribe through overwhelming superiority.
The indigenous tribe was slaughtered until only the elderly, the weak, and the infirm remained. Faced with a powerful enemy, they were forced to abandon their homeland and become displaced.
The Carib people seized the indigenous tribe’s land, cut off the heads of its men, ate their bodies, took their wives and daughters by force, and sat upon the victims’ corpses as they indulged themselves, singing and reveling night after night.
The white-skinned colonists visited the Carib people’s temporary camp and traded cloth, iron pots, soap, and other goods for the heads of the indigenous people, as well as the land beneath their feet.
After eating and drinking their fill, the Carib people, urged on by the white colonists, once again launched attacks against other tribes on the continent.
The rest of the paintings essentially repeated the same sequence over and over again.