Times of the Islands Fall 2022

BILL KEEGAN
These spindle whorls (huso) are from site CE-11, Puerto Rico. The most common are recycled
potsherds that were worked into a disk shape with the edges smoothed.
and his sister Anacaona brought Columbus to a building
that contained “a thousand things of cotton.” The most
spectacular Taino artifact is a cotton cemí (spirit representation)
— a doll-like figure encasing a human skull.
Dog hair was interwoven with cotton thread; perhaps to
appease the dog spirit Opiyelguobirán who is the guardian
of the dead.
Producing cotton thread is both time- and labor-
intensive. The sticky black seeds must first be separated
from the fibers. Originally done by hand, the invention of
a cotton gin mechanized the process. Once a household
name, Eli Whitney (“keep your hands off my cotton-picking
gin”) is usually credited with the invention in 1793.
However, Bahamians will point out that it was Joseph
Eve, an American Loyalist living in Nassau, who earlier
invented (1788 patent) the self-loading, wind-powered
cotton gin (“wind ginns”) that did away with the need for
a ginner. (A “ginner” is the operator.) Cotton gins consist
of two parallel rollers that turned in opposite directions
and were powered by hand, foot crank, water, wind, or
animal driven. The seeds fall away leaving only the fibers,
which are then combed to separate and align the fibers to
make ready it for spinning.
Traditional methods of fiber spinning use a pointed
wooden rod or “spindle” weighted on one end by a circular
“whorl” that functions like a flywheel
to help maintain momentum as the
device is spun like a top and the
fibers are pulled into thread. Cotton
is typically spun using the “supported-spinning”
method because of its
staple length and fragility (as compared
to hemp fibers). The spindle is
spun with one end placed in a small
bowl.
We do not have archaeological
evidence for how the Lucayans
cleaned and prepared their cotton
fibers, but we do have evidence that
they spun the fibers into thread. The
most common precontact spindle
whorls (called huso in Taíno) are recycled
potsherds that were worked into
a disk shape with the edges of the
whorl smoothed. The centers of the
disks were perforated with a drill of
stone or possibly shell. In the selection
of sherds for the production of
whorls, there appears to have been
a preference for slightly thicker/heavier bowl fragments
(especially bases) that would facilitate momentum during
spinning. In addition, whorls were made of stone, bone,
or shell. One ethnographic study even mentions a spindle
whorl made from a slice of calabash collected by Samuel
Fahlberg from historic Caribs on Trinidad in 1786. An
elaborate stone “spindle whorl” was collected in Puerto
Rico in 1907, although it may instead be an ornamental
object. Ceramic whorls are found across the Greater
Antilles and Northern Lesser Antilles, but are rare in the
Lucayan Islands.
Although Columbus recognized the economic potential
of cotton in the Caribbean, the initial plantation
economies of Spain and other European countries focused
their colonial efforts in the Caribbean on sugarcane
imported from the Canary Islands (via Southeast Asia).
It was not until Loyalist planters from the southeastern
U.S. arrived in the Turks & Caicos and The Bahamas that
Columbus’ vision was realized.
Following the Lucayan genocide, the Bahamian archipelago
became what Juan Ponce de León called “the
empty islands.” The Caicos Islands remained largely uninhabited
until 1787, when the islands became a refuge
for the American Loyalists. At the end of the American
Revolutionary War, those who were loyal to Britain
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