Our Caribbean: A Journey Through the Mysterious Antilles

By Bernard C Theobalds

The book is about all the islands of the Caribbean, presented from a very promotional perspective, commencing with the first adventures of Columbus five hundred years ago, through colonialisation and slavery, to the present day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480892477

Bernard C Theobalds

Bernard C. Theobalds O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire, for services to the electricity sector in St. Lucia) is a St. Lucian and a graduate of the University of Glasgow. As a young engineer in the 1970s, he worked with the then highly regarded Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) of the UK, throughout South-Eastern England. He was part of the team of electric power professionals who worked, through the 1980s and 1990s with the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), on electricity projects throughout the wider Caribbean. He served as CEO of the St. Lucia Electricity Services Ltd. and was a founder-member and also Chairman of CARILEC, the regional grouping of electric power utilities. In 2016 the Government of St. Lucia awarded him the Medal of Merit (Gold) for services to the electricity sector. His first book, Landing on Solid Ground, chronicled developments in the electricity business in some islands in the Caribbean. He is now retired and living in St. Lucia.

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Copyright © 2020 Bernard C Theobalds.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9245-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9246-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9247-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020913461

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/20/2020

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In the Beginning…

The Scramble

Eden (and Hell)

The Present

THE ISLANDS

The Bahama Islands

Turks and Caicos Is.

Cuba

Hispaniola

Haiti

The Dominican Republic

Jamaica

The Cayman Islands

Puerto Rico

The US Virgin Islands

The British Virgin Islands

Anguilla

St. Kitts and Nevis

Saint Martin/Sint Maarten

St. Barthelemy

St. Eustatius

Antigua, Barbuda,

Montserrat

Guadeloupe,

Dominica

Martinique

St. Lucia

St. Vincent

Barbados

Grenada, Carriacou

Trinidad and Tobago

The ABC Islands

The End

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Bernard C. Theobalds O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire, for services to the electricity sector in St. Lucia) is a St. Lucian and a graduate of the University of Glasgow. As a young engineer in the 1970s, he worked with the then highly regarded Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) of the UK, throughout South-Eastern England. He was part of the team of electric power professionals who worked, through the 1980s and 1990s with the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), on electricity projects throughout the wider Caribbean. He served as CEO of the St. Lucia Electricity Services Ltd. and was a founder-member and also Chairman of CARILEC, the regional grouping of electric power utilities. In 2016 the Government of St. Lucia awarded him the Medal of Merit (Gold) for services to the electricity sector. His first book, Landing on Solid Ground, chronicled developments in the electricity business in some islands in the Caribbean. He is now retired and living in St. Lucia.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the peoples of the Antilles, in the hope they will get to know each other and each other’s homelands better, and that they will try to re-capture, notwithstanding the trials and tribulations of our times, the extraordinary quintessence that the early European explorers concluded after their first meeting with our Caribbean antecedents:

…they are the finest people on earth…having good customs…always gentle…and always laughing…

PREFACE

This not so little to me is certainly not a lesson in history. In-fact, there is nothing original in here, and I make no claim to be a professional historian, although history was among my favourite subjects through my early school years; and neither is it an all-embracing visitor guide to the islands. This work is instead, unashamedly, a promotion of the Caribbean and its entire environment, and seeks to extol the lands, the virtues, the attractions, and the peoples of the Antilles, from an entirely local perspective. While some historical background is necessary, the intention is to present the region, from its turbulent evolution to the current period, in as much a promotional tone as possible. Each territory is given its own emphasis, highlighting its origin and diversity while recognizing its homogeneity with the entire region.

Perhaps, no other region of the world has been so hotly contested, and its environment and people so exploited, so bloodily, by so many contenders, for so long, as the Caribbean, while still maintaining its equanimity; and equally, no other part of the world is so diverse in its origin and ethnicity, yet homogenous, creating a rich mélange of identities, cultures, histories, and cuisines, that taken all together make for a very fascinating tale. The intention is to create a story that is deliberately exuberant if brief, despite the dark background of the past, and if this book excites the reader’s interest sufficiently to make a visit to one of the most captivating destinations in the world, then it would have met one of its prime objectives.

I have had the good fortune to live, work, and travel around the Caribbean region and to visit most (but not every one) of the islands. Also, being a founder-member and for many years Chairman of the Caribbean-wide grouping of electric power utilities, Carilec, offered an unparalleled opportunity to meet with colleagues and develop relationships across the region. I have remained in touch with friends all over the island-chain, and their support and contribution to this effort has been invaluable.

Throughout the book I have made extensive use of some excellent maps by World Atlas, who have given permission to use their watermarked images of the islands.

Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. have also agreed to the use of an image depicting the Journeys of Columbus.

Appropriate authorisations and my deepest gratitude are given to both of these in the Appendix.

I have to acknowledge the support of many people who read the script and made valuable suggestions, including Guy Ellis, my Editor and Advisor, whom I must particularly thank. Dr. Sir Vaughan Lewis and Trevor Cozier were also very supportive with their advice.

Many sources of information about the Antilles exist, and where appropriate I have sought to provide references. I must thank Gillan Adjodha for his loan of Bryan Edwards’ fascinating History of The British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), and I also recommend Thomas Coke’s A History of the West Indies (1811), Henry Breen’s History of St. Lucia (1844), and A History of St. Lucia by Harmsen, Ellis, and Devaux (2012). They all provide copious data and very graphic impressions of the post-Columbian history of the islands. The Appendix also provides links to relevant Internet-available data. However, I remain singularly responsible for any errors, omissions, or incorrect impressions created, and all judgements, interpretations and conclusions are solely my own.

INTRODUCTION

IN THE BEGINNING…

The Caribbean Islands, spanning the shores of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico and curving to the coasts of South America, an arc of over 2500 miles, have been known as the Mysterious Antilles since Medieval Times. Today, shorn of their mystery, the islands remain among the most exotic and romantic of destinations in the world.

The designation Antilles apparently originated from a mythical landmass, Antillia, which appeared in ancient maps, and was thought to lie far out into the vast then uncharted Atlantic Ocean, to the west of Portugal; the designation Caribbean came from European explorers, in reference to the early inhabitants who roamed the islands, the Kalinago or Carib people who had migrated from South America up through the island chain and supplanted the Taino or Arawak people who had pre-dated them.

Bizarrely, the tranquil waters and serenity of the islands today, belie their violent and bloody history, from the time the first European explorers set foot on their shores half a millennium ago, and left behind a legacy of greed, genocide, and through the ages, some of the worst atrocities ever committed against humankind. In fact, the Caribbean is perhaps home to the only society in the world, spawned entirely out of the violence and depravity of slavery, and where the original natives had been virtually exterminated. Nowadays the region is referred to by some as the American Mediterranean, and US influence is pervasive, but that in no way has detracted from the individualism of the islands or the self-assertiveness of their people.

The islands are really parts of two distinct geological systems. The larger ones nearer the Gulf of Mexico (Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, with over 90% of the region’s population) are clearly part of the North American landmass and known as the Greater Antilles; the smaller islands to the east and south, geologically newer, volcanic and with heavy coral infusion are known as the Lesser Antilles. The Bahama and Turks and Caicos Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Southern trio of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao near the coast of Venezuela, though included here, arise from other geological formations. While most of the islands comprising the Lesser Antilles clearly exhibit their volcanic origin, those of the far north and those of the far south indicate only slight or no sign of such activity; and those of the Greater Antilles, in spite of their mountainous features, also show only slight evidence of a volcanic past. Lush, green islands, thousands of them (if you also count the rocks), golden-sand shores, each bathed in a tropical environment with a diversity that defies description, each different from the other and, on a clear day, almost every one in plain sight from the next. Columbus called them The Indies and their inhabitants Indians (the man thought he had made it to The Orient and the already known islands (East Indies) of Asia, and died with the conviction), and forever so classifying all the original inhabitants of the islands of the Antilles. The Spanish called them the Windward Islands after the powerful Trade Winds that carried their sailing ships westwards from the coast of Africa. These same winds immerse the islands in an almost constant breezy and sometimes even cool environment despite their near-equatorial location; in parts of Jamaica and Dominica for example, temperatures can fall to as low as ten degrees centigrade. The eighteenth-century British referred to the easternmost arc as the Forward Islands, because they lay forward of the larger islands to the west. Thousands of islands of all shapes and sizes; Cuba is twice the size of Hispaniola and ten times the size of Jamaica; populated Saba is just five square miles, and in the Grenadines, some are no more than large rocks, with hardly a soul in sight. The Caribbean Sea is vast, over one million square miles in area and mostly empty, but sheltered from the turbulent Atlantic Ocean by the island chain; and once Columbus had stumbled on his first island, he simply followed the sequence to the next one, in clear view on the near horizon. There was then probably, little obscuring Sahara dust in the air. Today the islands are better known and grouped by their geopolitical acronyms: The West Indies, the entire island chain, so named to distinguish them from their counterparts in the Indian sub-continent, The East Indies. (The title derives from the river Indus which flows through today’s Pakistan, which also gave India its name). The USVI (US Virgin Islands), the small US territories near Puerto Rico; The BVI, (British Virgin Islands), the small British territories near Puerto Rico; The Leewards, all the islands lying between Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico; The Windwards, from Grenada to Dominica though politically excluding the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe; The French West Indies (Antilles Francaises), applied to the French territories of Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Martin and St. Barthelemy; The Netherlands Antilles, the Dutch territories of Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten, Saba, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (the last three called the ABC Islands); The British West Indies, applied collectively to all the former British and English-speaking territories in the region, and their inhabitants, West Indians. Surprisingly, only former British subjects are so called today; and their Oriental equivalents are distinctly not referred to as East Indians. Collectively however, Caribbean people are all Antilleans.

Ominously, after his first encounter with the residents of the Antilles, Columbus, this deeply religious man, as history depicts him, would make the quite impious note in his diaries that they…would make good servants… (slaves, of course); although Europeans during that period, generally did not enslave each other, except for casualties of wars, particularly between Christians and Muslims.

The Papal Bull Dum Diversas (essentially: Until Instructed Otherwise), issued by Pope Nicholas V earlier in 1452, had given the then Catholic King of Portugal the right, in effect, to enslave in perpetuity, any unbelievers (non-Christians), where-ever they may be.

The Bull was really directed at the Islamic hordes, which were at the time besieging Constantinople (then capital of the Roman/Byzantine Empire), and posed a mortal danger to Christendom by threatening the eastern approaches to Europe and the Roman Catholic realm. However, on the eve of the great expansion westwards by Europeans, its wording would be taken by many as Roman Catholicism’s formal endorsement of the enslavement of Africans, though unjust slavery (whatever that meant) had always been condemned by the Church. It should also be appreciated that views and opinions expressed 500 years ago cannot be literally interpreted today, and the full extent of the meaning of the Bull, originally written in Latin (the language then of official documents), remains the subject of debate.

The two (naval) superpowers of the period, Spain and Portugal, both Catholic, would in their explorations, go on to conduct themselves as conquering Emissaries of Christ, while not ignoring their own secular ambitions. This was to have appalling consequences for the non-white and pagan peoples, native and subsequent, of the lands they occupied and claimed. It is said that Spain, in one generation, amassed more territory than Rome had conquered in five hundred years, with the difference that the Romans chose to keep the subjugated people alive and grow their empire; even slavery (no cakewalk at the time) was seen differently in Roman society and slaves could earn their freedom; not so with the Spanish, who engaged in repression and genocidal suppression based essentially on racial characterizations, in their new colonies, simply to plunder and acquire wealth. Their European contemporaries, following in their footsteps, would be no different.

The initial object of Spanish and European interest in sailing westwards, was to find an alternative passage to the East Indies and China, bypassing both the existing land route through the problematic Turkish Empire and the very long and dangerous sea route round The Cape of Africa. The journeys of Marco Polo (1254-1324), the Italian merchant and adventurer, were also well documented, and by the fifteenth century, there existed a valuable and thriving trade in spices and other tropical products with the East. Silk, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves were then highly prized in Europe, and made enormous profits for the merchants involved in the trade; also, sugar (from cane) was such a luxury, that the average citizen then, it was said, could only afford one teaspoonful a year; and coffee houses were becoming a fashion. City-States like Venice and Genoa became gateways and rich.

The chronicles of sugar and coffee (also cocoa and tobacco), which are at the heart of the entire history and very being of the Antilles and their peoples today, remain in themselves fascinating stories. The sugar-cane, a crop known in antiquity, was grown in the tropical islands of South and Southeast Asia where it was chewed for its flavour. The plant was introduced to India where sugar crystals were first made, allowing the spread of the delicacy through trade, and by the sixth century Arab traders were peddling the stuff in the Mediterranean. The Spaniards then introduced the crop to the Canary Islands, off the West coast of Africa, and Columbus himself would first bring the plant to the Caribbean.

The fruit of the coffee-plant, itself natural to the Ethiopian highlands of East Africa, was brought to the Middle East by Islamist dealers, enchanted by its energizing properties, and by the early fifteenth century, coffee houses proliferated across the Arab world. Muslim soldiers are said to have used it to boost their alertness, during the long tedious hours of duty. It was later introduced to the island of Malta and traded to Venetian merchants, and promoted for its vitality-giving qualities. Coffee-drinking then spread across Europe. The plant was taken by the Dutch to the East Indies and also to the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century, where it found a most fertile environment.

Cocoa, The Food of the Gods, a staple in Aztec society for thousands of years, was popularized in Europe by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and who went on to introduce the crop to the Antilles.

Tobacco, as we shall see, would be a legacy of our own Antillean predecessors.

The crops would, commencing from the sixteenth century, become the centre-piece of a vast and exceedingly lucrative commodity trading network all over Europe, underwritten by African slave labour on plantations mainly in the Caribbean and Brazil.

However, the rise of the Islamic Ottomans (The Turkish Empire) in the fifteenth century, and their uncompromising stand against infidels (non-Muslims), threatened the land route to the Orient and the lucrative trade that existed (the Suez Canal was then, possibly, only a dream). Also, Portugal, one of the dominant powers of the day, controlled the sea routes down the West coast of Africa and round the Cape, and saw no role here for Spain, the other European superpower at the time, although the two Christian nations had a close if convoluted relationship. That meant the only alternative for Spain was to find a route to the East by going West; by then, the Greeks had long proved, through mathematics, that The Earth was round (another hugely fascinating story), and that there was no cliff-edge on the horizon to fall over; but its size was disputed and no known person had, up to the time of Columbus, done a circumnavigation. The Western route was also thought by some, to be shorter than down past the Cape. The sheer audacity of Columbus’ plan, to sail westwards, must be put into perspective. At the time, it was generally believed that the entire western reaches of the Atlantic comprised sea, till the shores of the Orient, and no ship available then was thought capable of carrying sufficient food and water for the entire journey. Simply, no one expected ever to see our navigator or his crew again. It was only the desperation of the times, and buoyed by having finally evicted the Islamic Moors from Spanish soil (after nearly seven hundred years of occupation), that made King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain take a gamble on the man. Co-incidentally, King Henry V11 of England was also disposed to take up the Columbus proposal, but that offer came a little too late; fate does deal in very mysterious ways. Henry V11 would go on to sponsor the voyages of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) who made landfall on what is today Newfoundland (New Found Launde) in 1497, initiating the English conquest of North America. Incidentally, the land was neither New nor unknown at the time, then populated by the Inuit peoples and visited by the Vikings since the tenth century.

Columbus knew he was taking an enormous risk but gave himself one year to complete his First Voyage; he would be back home in just seven months.

One huge consequence of Columbus’ voyages, was the eventual shifting of the European economic centre-of-gravity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and to port cities like Antwerp, London, and Amsterdam.

It should also be appreciated that the Islamists, of identical worldly persuasion as their Christian rivals, and themselves forging westwards across the plains of Southern Europe and North Africa, felt threatened by European (and Roman) Christians pushing eastwards. This virtually prescribed confrontation, the seeds of which were first planted as early as the seventh century, and escalating during the Crusades in the eleventh century, would become the defining marker in religious intolerance for the world and mankind.

Both religions sought to expand their influence; the Muslims however were much more measured. Their concept of Jihad as warfare was not necessarily the conversion of non-Muslims, but suggesting instead that …all mankind either embraced Islam or submitted to the authority of the Muslim state…There was, literally, no room for another religion.

THE SCRAMBLE

Columbus (1450-1506) would make four separate journeys of exploration between 1492 and 1502, under the sponsorship of the then King and Queen of Spain, visiting almost all of the islands of the Antilles chain (but apparently and unimportantly, not setting foot on every one), the coastline of Central America and the coast of what is today Venezuela, and claiming dominion over everything he saw for Spain. Columbus, if anything, was a well-educated, professional navigator, and his letters, logs and diaries (and biographies by his own son and others) have provided a very graphic account of the man, his journeys, and his relationship with the peoples whom he encountered. To return to his homeland, our explorer used the main ocean current, the Gulf Stream, driven by the great clockwise pattern of wind and sea movements in the North Atlantic, today easily visible via satellite but then a highly complex plotting requiring skillful navigation with instruments, rudimentary and far from accurate, by today’s standards. Columbus’ discoveries would be given the collective name The New World (Mundus Novus), first suggested by another Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), who apparently realized that his colleague had not arrived at the edges of the Indian sub-continent (as Columbus himself thought), but had stumbled instead on the shores of a completely new continent that came to be called America, derived from Americus, the Latin version of Vespucci’s first name. Incidentally, the designation was really applied collectively, to The New Landmass and The Islands (like Asia), the landfall of the early explorers. This would tally with the naming convention for the continents, using the feminine of the Latin word e.g. Africa, Asia, and Europa, and led to the designation Amer-Indian (Indians of the Americas), the name applied since Columbus, to all the then inhabitants of this New World. Yet another explorer, Vasco da Gama, had by 1498 sailed south and east along the coast of Africa and reached India, initiating Portuguese dominion over the Indies islands of the South Pacific. Vespucci is also remembered for his exploration of the South Atlantic on behalf of the then king of Portugal, and blazed the trail for other later sea-farers to pursue the passage around the Southern tip of the new continent, and what became known as Cape Horn. Although the islands of the East had been known by outsiders for centuries (Arab and Indian merchants had traded in spices since medieval times), it took Europeans, seeking empire and loot in the fifteenth century,