arried Cuna women

with who Kent Harvey
m they had children. The Frenc
h settlers were im

portant, according to Nordenskiold, in warfare against the Spanish. In 1712, for example, the village of Santa Cruz de Cana was sacked by 80 Frenchmen and 300 Cunas under the command of the Frenchman Charles Tibou. When the Spanish were unable to subdue the Indians by force, they signed a treaty which included these French and their descendants, but in 1757 the Cuna killed these Frenchmen-according to Nordenskiold (4), reportedly at the urging of British, who supplied the Cuna

s with arms. It is said that French was spoken extensively among the Indians at that time. After 1790 peace seems to have settled on the isthmus. Foreign powers had their hands full elsewhere. Yet contact

with trading vessels, particularly from the United States was important throughout the nineteenth century, and many Cuna men took jobs as sailors, a circumstance that writers on the Cuna see as having created their fondness for Americans. A revealing instance of the baron's Cuna paradox of conservatism mixed with love of novelty, no less than of Sherzer s "adaptation without acculturation," is the fact that Cuna men acquired Europe

an names a

• s a result of their
• taking jobs as sailo
• rs on such ships-as