The Buccaneer Chief by Gustave Aimard — Read

We will leave the filibustering flotilla steering through the inextricable labyrinth of the Antilles, and transport ourselves to St. Domingo, as the French call it, Hispaniola as Columbus christened it, or Haiti as the Caribs, its first and only true owners, called it.

And when we speak of the Caribs, we mean the black as well as the red, for it is a singular fact, of which many persons are ignorant, that some Caribs were black, and so thoroughly resembled the African race, that when the French planters settled at St. Vincent, and brought with them Negro slaves, the black Caribs, indignant at resembling men degraded by slavery, and fearful too lest at a later date their color might serve as a pretext to make them endure the same fate, fled into the wildest recesses of the forest, and in order to create a visible distinction between their race and the slaves brought to the island, they compressed the foreheads of their new born infants, so that they became completely flattened, which in the ensuing generation produced, as it were, a new race, and afterwards became the symbol of their independence.