The carbet is thus described by a French missionary: “The Carib dwelling I entered was about sixty feet long and twenty-four wide. The posts on which it was erected were rough and forked, and the shortest of them about nine feet above the ground; the others were proportioned to the height of the roof. The windward end was enclosed with a kind of wicker-work of split flags; the roof was covered with the leaves of the wild plantain, which here grows very large; the laths were made of reeds. The end of the carbet which was covered had a doorway for a passage to the kitchen; the other end was nearly all open. Ten paces from the great carbet was another building, about half the size of the large one, which was divided by a reed partition. The first room was the kitchen; here six or eight females were employed in making cassada. The second room was for a sleeping apartment for such of the women and children as were not accommodated in the great carbet. “All the rooms were furnished with hammocks and baskets. The men had their weapons in the great carbet. Some of the men were making baskets--two women were making a hammock. There were many bows, arrows, and clubs attached to the rafters. The floor was smooth and clean; it was made of well-beaten earth, and sloped towards the side. There was a good fire, about one third the length of the carbet, round which a number of Caribs were squatted on their haunches. They were smoking and waiting till some fish were roasted, and made their salutations to me without rising.” The Caribs were hunters and fishermen. Their food was much better cooked than that of the Indians of the northern continent, who lived by the chase and fishing, though to us it would not appear very refined. Their meat and small birds they stuck on a kind of wooden spit, which was fixed in the ground before the fire, and they turned it, till all the slices of meat or the birds were roasted. This was quite a civilized method of management compared with their treatment of the large birds, such as parrots, pigeons, &c. These they threw on the fire, without picking or dressing them, and when the feathers were burnt, they raked the bird up in the cinders till it was done. On taking it from the ashes, the crust formed by the burnt feathers peeled off, and the bird was perfectly clean and delicate. It is said this manner of roasting was much approved by the Europeans who had an opportunity of trying it.