The Story of Hanover - A Jamaican Parish

By Marguerite R. Curtin

This publication is about the history of the second smallest parish of the island of Jamaica. From the heights of the Dolphin Head Mountains to a coastline of coves, white sandy beaches and luxury hotels, its blue-green landscape of plains and valleys dotted with historic landmarks, tells a fascinating story. Lucea, the parish capital, originally called Santa Lucia by the Spaniards, lies beside a picturesque horseshoe harbour which was once a busy port shipping bananas and Lucea yam.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623098483

Book preview

2007

CHAPTER ONE

Taino Territory: Spanish and African Arrivals

Jamaica was one of the islands of the northern Caribbean which the Taino inhabited. Their settlements were often situated near the mouth of a river, or on rising ground in view of the sea. They cultivated their crops in adjoining clearings where they grew cassava, sweet potatoes and maize; they ate fruits such as pineapple, guava, papaw and mammee. Cotton was also cultivated. Among the indigenous trees of the island were several that were valued highly for their medicinal properties, including the dogwood and trumpet tree. Also of great use to the Taino were the calabash, the pimento and the annatto.

1.1 Hanover Coastline from map of Jamaica by H. Moll, 1727

Jamaica was a rich habitat for birdlife, while the sea and rivers abounded with fish, manatee and turtle. Reptiles were numerous, including the iguana and the crocodile. The canoes in which the Taino traversed the Caribbean Sea were large, sometimes measuring ninety feet in length; they were hollowed out of the hewn trunks of the ceiba or silk cotton. Great stands of ceiba trees¹ were part of the primeval landscape of this beautiful Taino island; the height and span of these trees were immense and their buttresses enormous.

1.2 The Pineapple (Ananas comosus)

1.3 Pimento known also as Allspice (Pimenta dioica)

1.4 The Trumpet Tree (Cecropia peltata)

In the religion of the Taino, the inhalation of tobacco smoke was an important part of a ritual in which the participants made contact with the spiritual world. The cultivation and curing of tobacco was, therefore, essential to every Taino community. The soft-spoken language of the Taino people was Arawak; the name, Xaymaca (Jamaica), originates from an Arawak word, meaning the land of wood and water. Taino place names in the parish of Hanover are now rare but King’s Valley in nearby Westmoreland is known to have had a Taino name.

Taino sites which have been identified in Hanover have been characteristic of Taino settlements elsewhere in the island. Their middens and caves contain pottery and zemis.² The establishment of the Institute of Jamaica in 1879 resulted in a new interest in the precolombian inhabitants of Jamaica and upon his appointment as Curator of the Museum, Dr J. E. Duerden, in 1895, started a collection of artefacts. His exhibition of Arawak Remains in the newly erected museum in Kingston did much to heighten the interest of the Jamaican public in aboriginal peoples of the region. As a result of his islandwide investigation in the 1880s and 1890s, Duerden recorded four middens in the Hanover area which A. Bancroft had earlier reported to the Institute of Jamaica. They were on four properties: Kew, Haughton Hall, Rhodes Hall, and Campbellton Estate at the Newfound River site³.

In his autobiography, Foster Barham Zincke in 1891 recorded that he had found some beautifully polished stone implements of green obsidian in a cave under his family’s house at Eardley in Hanover. The cave had been tenanted by aboriginal inhabitants and the artefacts were now in his possession in Britain. ⁴

1.5 Calabash (Crescentia cujete)

It was not until the 1960s that considerable archaeological work was done by Dr James (Jim) Lee on Taino sites in the island. In Hanover, to the east of Lucea, he recorded sites at Point Pen, Tamarind Hill, Paradise (200 feet above sea level) and further inland, Spaniard Hill (250 feet above sea level). Dr Lee also recorded sites on the beach at Round Hill and on the shore of Mosquito Cove but these have inadvertently been destroyed. One of the founding members of the Jamaican Archaeological Society, Dr Lee, a Canadian who married a Jamaican, worked with Alcan for many years and was instrumental in calling attention to the many rich archaeological sites which had hitherto gone unnoticed.

At the mouth of the Flint River a rich archaeological site is known to have existed but as construction of the new coastal highway occurred in its vicinity in the late 1990s, only archaeological investigations will be able to establish whether or not the artefacts are still intact. In 1994, personnel at the Hanover Museum in Lucea reported to the Archaeological Department at the University of the West Indies, Mona, the existence of a Taino site at Cousins Cove; a dig was conducted in 1995, and artefacts were unearthed and removed to the Mona campus.

In canoes laden with provisions, the inhabitants of Xaymaca rowed out to greet and then follow the three ships of Christopher Columbus as they sailed close under the shore of that most delightful and fruitful country. ⁵ Believing that he had now reached the east, and islands off the continent of India, Columbus repeatedly referred to the Tainos as Indians even though they insisted that that was not what they were called.

The Admiral had first landed on Jamaica on May 5, 1494, at a place in the present-day parish of St Ann, which he named Santa Gloria. Later in the month he sailed north and until July, he explored the coast of Cuba before returning south to Jamaica to a place which he named El Golfo de Buen Tiempo (now Montego Bay). It was on the second leg of this voyage that Columbus sailed farther along the island’s north western coast, passing many river mouths, bays, holes, points and cays in his well-tried caravel, La Nina, along with two other vessels, the San Juan and the Cardera. He and his crew ventured still further westward, passing the round bluff now known as Round Hill; further west the Admiral glimpsed the safe and tranquil waters of Mosquito Cove, and at last he reached the deep harbour of Lucea where he could water his ships.

1.6 The Ceiba or Silk Cotton

There is little evidence now of the thick foliage which enveloped the Taino island of Xaymaca, prior to the arrival of the Europeans in 1494. In that era, mammee, calabash, burnwood and trumpet trees vied for space in the dense undergrowth, and on the coastline giant reeds and red and white mangrove flourished in profusion. From the account of Ferdinand, a son of Columbus, we learn that he was told by the Admiral himself that the vegetation on Jamaica at the time of his arrival was almost impenetrable and that in the western part of the island there gathered every evening a storm of rain which lasted about an hour or less. Recounting his voyages, Columbus had noted that a similar weather pattern had once existed in the Canaries, Madeira and the Azores before the great woods of those islands had been chopped down.⁶

In 1509 Spanish settlement of the island began in earnest on the north coast with the establishment of Sevilla la Nueva, the first township near present-day St Ann’s Bay. It is interesting to note, nevertheless, that on a Spanish map, the name, Sevilla⁷, is marked at the spot where the town of Lucea, now is. On several maps, Lucea is also called Sancta Lucia or Santa Lucia. Lucea may have been established by the Spaniards in as early as the year 1515.⁸

The Spanish settlers came with plants such as the sugar cane, citrus, figs, dates, pomegranates and grapes. They also brought with them livestock such as horses, cattle and hogs. Many decades later, when these hogs had gone into the wild and multiplied, the Spaniards hunted them for their fat. In the northwest around Manteca Bay, the manufacture of lard, manteca, became important as an export to Spanish colonies like Cartagena in South America.

In the far west, the Spaniards established settlements at Negrillo, Savanna-la-Mar and Oristano.⁹ Hand in hand with Spanish settlement, however, went the enslavement of the indigenous Taino people. In the relentless and fruitless search for gold in the Caribbean islands, the Spaniards applied the encomienda, a system of forced labour which eventually resulted in illness and death for the majority of the Taino. Transportation from the island was the fate for some, while others more fortunate, may have sailed away to some safer destination. Among the archaeological finds at Nanny Town, in the Blue Mountains, are terracotta figurines which are believed to be Amerindian¹⁰ and which would indicate that others fled into the rugged hinterland of the island.

1.7 The Arrival of Columbus: Meryl Bowden

In 1513, during the reign of Charles V - the new Spanish monarch, and Holy Roman Emperor - Juan Esquivel, the first Spanish governor of Jamaica, was allowed to bring to the island three persons to work for his family, provided that these esclavos were Christians. It is likely that these three persons were the first Africans to arrive in the island.¹¹ A little over a decade later three hundred persons of African origin, including women, were brought to work as slaves in the homes of the Spanish settlers. The Spanish historian, Francisco Morales Padron, tells us that that by the mid sixteenth century, one of the four militia companies that had been established by the Spaniards was a company comprised of Creole blacks, while another one consisted of Tainos and mulattoes. Armed with bows and arrows these men were expected to defend the island in the event of invasion by enemies of the Spaniards: Dutch, English and French privateers. Spanish occupation of Jamaica lasted for one hundred and sixty-one years. During this period, there were Africans who escaped enslavement and fled to the most inaccessible parts of the island, where in earlier times some Tainos had taken refuge.

Place names like Kings Valley, Point Pedro, Spanish Hill, Spaniard Hill, Carvil Bay, and Lucea, point to a Spanish presence in Hanover. Archaeological research in the years to come will certainly reveal many fascinating facts about this little known history of the Spanish in the west and possibly their contacts with the mainland of Central and South America.

In May 1655 Jamaica was invaded by English Cromwellian forces led by Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables. On the whole, the slaves of the Spaniards remained loyal to their owners and were a formidable enemy to the English invaders. Upon Spanish defeat in 1658, many followed their masters into exile in Cuba but some 300 Africans refused to do so and instead took refuge in the mountains, where in earlier times Taino had already hidden. The Maroons (a name of Spanish origin) were to form the nucleus of a guerrilla group which would make it difficult for the English newcomers to settle the remote parts of western Jamaica.

The ceiba or silk cotton tree is also known as the duppy cotton tree.

Zemis were carvings of Taino gods which played an important part in their religious ceremonies.

After Duerden’s work in the late nineteenth century, there appears to have been little interest in Taino archaeological sites in the parish of Hanover though in 1925 Charles A. Sangster, a Jamaican planter (1880-1953) did report his discovery of a cave on Abingdon property.

Dudley Heslop, The Story of Hanover Parish, 2003, p. 30.

William Goodwin, Spanish and English Ruins in Jamaica, 1946, p. 33.

Ibid. See map on p. 100.

Jamaicans call a type of sour orange which still exists in the island a Civil (that is Seville) orange.

Goodwin p. 216

The old Spanish port of Oristano on the south coast is now the site of Bluefields in the parish of Westmoreland.

E. Kofi Agorsah, ed. Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, 1994 pp. 163-187.

Francisco Morales Padron, Spanish Jamaica, 2003, p. 153.

CHAPTER TWO

English Settlement in the Remote West

With the capture of Jamaica by Cromwell’s Puritan forces in 1655 and the expulsion of the soldiers of Don Cristobal de Ysassi in 1658, English settlement of the island commenced in earnest. However, the presence of the Maroons, who maintained an unremitting opposition to the new owners of the island, impeded settlement at the eastern and western ends of the island.

It was a matter of urgency that the island should be settled as quickly as possible as the Spaniards had every intention of recapturing Jamaica. With the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, attempts to settle the island accelerated as land grants of 300¹ acres or more were offered by Charles II as an incentive for settlement; patents were issued guaranteeing ownership to settlers.

A decade after the ill-fated 1656 expedition of Luke Stokes,² settlers began coming in waves to Jamaica, from both Nevis and Barbados in the years 1666, 1667, 1668, 1671 and 1678. In some instances, it is hard to discern exactly who these new settlers were; buccaneer, mate,³ and planter may have been one and the same person on any given day.

The establishment of cane lands and cattle pens on the Liguanea Plain on the northern side of Port Royal Harbour and on the savannahs of the parish of St Catherine surrounding Spanish Town, the old Spanish capital, took place rapidly in the first thirty years after the conquest of 1655. These areas were more or less safe from the Maroon threat.

Early maps of Jamaica, drawn by English, French and Italian cartographers, show that in western Jamaica, townships like Lucea/Lucy and Green Island were in existence before the English established parishes in the island.⁴ Such places in which the English began to live were likely to have been settled previously by the Spanish; in an even earlier period, they may have been settlements of the Taino.

By 1670, the Lords of Trade and Plantations, the Board of Trade and the Secretary of State in London, England, had developed a highly organized system of control over all the new plantations both in North America and the Caribbean. Although British colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did have considerably more freedom than French and Spanish colonies in the New World, the control of the British Crown through its agencies was, nonetheless, extensive. Certainly for Jamaica, several of the instructions from the Lords of Trade and Plantations had lasting implications for the island, influencing patterns of settlement permanently. Plantations should be near each other on the seacoast was the text of an instruction issued in 1670 so that invasions may be better discovered and prevented.⁵ The estates on the northwest coast are a good example of how these instructions were carefully followed. They stretched inland in large strips from the coast: Round Hill, Hopewell, Orchard, Flint River, Tryall, Blue Hole, Barbican, Point (the estate nearest to Lucea Harbour and the town of Lucea) and Fat Hog Quarters, on the other side of Lucea. The instructions noted that large tracts of land had remained uncultivated and had they been used would have greatly contributed to the security, wealth and defense of the island.

Settlement of those remote parts of the west began approximately two decades after the English capture of Jamaica in 1655, as dates on a number of plats to be found in the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town indicate. The area was marked unnamed on early maps and it was not until 1671 that a very large parish of St Elizabeth was created; it stretched from the south coast to the Great River in the northwest.

2.1 Plat of John Southern in the parish of St Elizabeth now in Hanover

Sometimes settlers, already in the island, found it necessary to relocate and were able to obtain land by patent or purchase in the remote parts of the island, far from the main centres of settlement on the southeastern side. Possibly some persons from Luke Stokes’ settlement in St Thomas-in-the-East, 1656 went west. Others like John Breeding of Port Royal acquired lands at Prospect near Green Island in 1683, while John Childermas, a pewterer, also of Port Royal, who died in that same year, is recorded as having patented lands in the west

A map dated 1675 shows the Westmoreland Barracks on 2,000 acres of land in St Elizabeth. The old Spanish road, then the King’s highway, ran from the north coast to Bluefields and traversed the property, close to the barracks building. Today, the bridge known as Barracks Bridge, near Montpelier, on the border of St James, is a reminder of this old military site. The safety and protection which it afforded at this strategic point was certainly recognized by the settlers, approximately twenty of whom obtained land near to it. Many prominent families who were to play important roles in the establishment of the west are among these early proprietors, including Richard Brissett, Phillip Haughton, John Childermas, and John Rusea Junr.

2.2 Map showing site of Barracks

Throughout Jamaica, among those first to obtain patents and plats of land were former captains and soldiers of lesser rank who had fought under the Puritan cause. The Old Standers as they came to be called, played a notable part in Jamaican history in securing the island for the English in that early period of uncertainty caused by Maroon and Spanish threat. Col. Whitgift Aylmer, from Balrath, County Meath, Ireland, was one of these Old Standers who had been granted land in several areas of the island. In 1670, one of his real estate transactions had to do with the sale of land to a John Grizzle. Other Old Standers in the west included men like Henry Long and Peter Clarke, who settled in the area around the Flinty River. As early as 1667, Ensign David Howell, who came via Barbados, obtained eighty-three acres of land "in the parish of St James at or near a hill called the Round Hill eight miles distant from Manteco Bay westerly it being part of his propozcons which is 150 acres." The patent was signed by Richard Witter, Surveyor and Sir Thomas Modyford, Lt. Governor.

In 1671 Theophilus Clare with wife and negro woman came from Nevis under Capt. John Hughes’ Company of Division. Two years later, in 1673 he obtained the patent for 90 acres of land in St. Elizabeth at Fat Hog Quarters. The patents of Long and Clarke⁶ show that they were issued in the parish of St Elizabeth as does the plat of Henry Fairchild, the first owner of Tryall Estate.

Also important in the establishment and protection of the remote west were members of the wealthy Haughton family of Lancashire, England. Two brothers, Jonathan and Valentine Haughton, came with their families from Barbados and settled in Jamaica in 1670. Other members of the family who settled in Jamaica were Thomas Haughton and Philip Haughton. Over the years, the Haughton name was to become strongly associated with western Jamaica.

Already living in the island from Spanish times was a small but influential group of Sephardic Jews, often referred to as Portugals. Because of the relationship that existed between the