Other relics of native art and history attracted the attention of the traveller, and he specially dwelt with interest on a paved ring of granite, upwards of 2200 feet in circumference, with a human figure rudely-fashioned in granite occupying the centre. It stands in the vicinity of San Juan de Maguana, in St. Domingo, which formed, at the time of its first discovery, a distinct kingdom, governed by the cacique Caonabo, the most fierce and powerful of the Carib chiefs, and an irreconcilable enemy of the European invaders. It is called at the present day, “El Cercado de los Indios,” but Sir Robert Schomburgk questioned its being the work of the inhabitants of the island when first visited by the Spaniards, and assigned it, along with figures which he examined cut on rocks in the interior of Guiana, and the sculptured figures of St. Domingo, to a people far superior in intellect to those Columbus met with in Hispaniola. These he conceived to have come from the northern part of Mexico, adjacent to the ancient district of Huastecas, and to have been conquered and extirpated by their Carib supplanters, prior to European colonists displacing them in their turn. The roving Caribs supplied themselves with axes and clubs of jade, greenstone, and others of the most prized materials of the mainland; but they turned the easily wrought shells of the neighbouring seas to account in much the same way as the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific to whom any harder material is unknown. But while noting the varied uses to which the shells of the Caribbean Sea were applied by the natives of the archipelago, a greater interest attaches to the indications of an ancient trade in these products of the Gulf of Florida, carried on among widely-scattered tribes of North America, long before its discovery by Columbus.