Cornish in the Caribbean

Sue Appleby

Description

The first book to look specifically at the movement of Cornish men and women to and from the Caribbean from the early days of colonialism. A fascinating subject for those with an interest in all things Cornish, be they in Cornwall, in the Caribbean, or in the wider Cornish diaspora.The Cornish in the Caribbean is the first study to tell the stories of some of the many Cornish men and women who went to the Caribbean. Some became wealthy plantation owners, while others came as indentured servants and labourers. Cornish men were active in the armed services, taking part in the numerous sea and land battles fought by the competing European powers throughout the region. Cornish officers and crew sailed on the ships of the Falmouth Packet Service which took the mail to and from the Caribbean. Methodism was strong in Cornwall and Methodist missionaries and their wives came to the Caribbean to evangelise both the enslaved and the newly free.The most striking transfer of Cornish skills to the Caribbean was to be found in mining. As Cornish mining declined, and the Great Emigration of miners and their families got underway, Cornish mining engineers, captains and miners went out to mines throughout the Caribbean."Meticulously researched and highly readable"Bridget Brereton, Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Cornualles
• History
• Cornwall

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789019834
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 14 Mo

Extrait

The
CORNISH
in the
CARIBBEAN
From the 17th to the 19th Centuries
Sue Appleby



Copyright © 2019 Sue Appleby

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

All images used are from Wikimedia Commons and,
unless otherwise noted, are in the Public Domain

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ISBN 9781789019834

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For my brother,
John Appleby (1928–2017),
with love and respect.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction


1. The British Leeward Islands
2. J amaica and the Cayman Islands
3. In Defence of the Empire
4. The Falmouth Packet Service
5. Barbados, the British Windward Islands and Trinidad
6. Gold and Diamonds: The Mines of British Guiana and Aruba
7. Men of God: Methodist Missionaries
8. Gold and Copper: the Mines of Cuba and the Dominican Republic
9. Copper and Guano: the Mines of Virgin Gorda and Sombrero



Appendix 1

Background History of the British Leeward Islands
Appendix 2
Indentured Cornishmen who Sailed from Plymouth to St Christopher in 1634
Appendix 3
Background History of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands
Appendix 4
Major Military Conflicts that Impacted the Caribbean During the 18th and 19th Centuries
Appendix 5
Background History of Barbados, the British Windward Islands and Trinidad
Appendix 6
Background History of British Guiana and Aruba
Appendix 7
The Early History of Methodism and the Development of its Popularity in Cornwall
Appendix 8
Background History of Cuba and the Dominican Republic
Appendix 9
Background History of Virgin Gorda


Bibliography
Notes
Foreword
Cornwall, at the southwestern end of Britain, is not just another English county. With only one land border, the River Tamar which divides it from Devon, it is, as Sue Appleby writes, almost an island with its three sea coasts. There always was, and still is, a distinct Cornish ‘ethnic’ identity, forged through its unique history, its language, and its Celtic culture. Indeed, in 2014 the Cornish people were recognized under EU law as a distinct, minority ethnic group. Cornish, a Celtic language with similarities to Breton, Welsh and Gaelic, was a living language up to the late 1700s. As a result of efforts to revive it, an estimated 300 people now speak it fluently, and it was recognized as a minority language of the UK in 2002. Anglo-Cornish was a distinct variant of English at least up to the early 1900s. Cornwall’s economy was traditionally based on mining (tin and copper), fishing, sea-faring, smuggling and wrecking—activities which have entered into British popular culture through the novels by Daphne du Maurier (and the movies made of them) and the TV series Poldark , based on the twelve books by Winston Graham.
Historians of the Caribbean have long been aware of the important role played in the British islands by another, even more distinctive ethnic group, the Scots. After the Act of Union in 1707, the inhabitants of the small and impoverished former kingdom grasped the opportunities offered by the expanding empire, especially the West Indian islands. The eminent historian Richard Sheridan published a pioneering article on ‘the role of the Scots in the economy and society of the West Indies’ in 1977, and full-length books followed, like A. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740– 1800 (1992), T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire: The Origins of the Global Diaspora (2004), and Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (2005). Scottish surnames and place names are all over the English-speaking Caribbean.
But, though there is considerable literature on the Cornish Diaspora, the Caribbean has been largely omitted from it. This is the gap filled by Sue Appleby’s meticulously researched and very readable book. It tells the stories of the many, and very diverse, Cornish men and women who went to the Caribbean, and worked, exploited and fought (and sometimes died) there, over a span of nearly three centuries starting in the 1630s.
Some were wealthy plantation owners who made fortunes out of the labour of enslaved Africans who they owned. In Jamaica, Britain’s biggest West Indian colony and the most profitable until after 1807, the Price dynasty belonged to the elite of planters and slave-owners. Rose Price, who died in 1834 just as slavery was abolished, combined his Jamaican plantation business with an active involvement in the public and economic life of Cornwall. (When Jamaica was divided into three counties in 1758, one was called Cornwall, with its chief town named for the Cornish port of Falmouth.) Another such Cornish planter and slave-owning dynasty was the Mathew family, which owned estates in several islands in the 1700s, including Antigua and Tobago. At the other end of the social scale, many Cornish men and women came to the early English colonies like St Kitts and Barbados as indentured servants in the 1600s, shipping from the West Country port of Bristol to lives little better than those of the enslaved Africans.
Cornish men were active in the armed services, taking part in the innumerable sea and land battles through which the Western European powers vied for supremacy in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Others were missionaries, especially Methodist clergy coming to evangelise the enslaved people from the late 1700s—Methodism was especially strong in Cornwall, particularly among mining families. They worked in many of the islands, British, Danish, Swedish and Dutch.
Appleby shows how the heritage and occupational skills traditional in Cornwall were applied to the West Indies. For instance, a lively trade developed between Penzance and Jamaica in the 1770s with the main commodity being salted Cornish pilchards. Sea-faring had always been crucial to the Cornish economy, and many younger sons of the gentry in the 1700s and 1800s joined the Royal Navy as officers, seeing action in the Caribbean in the protracted conflicts with Holland, Spain and France. The Pellews were the outstanding Cornish naval dynasty of the period. Others worked in the merchant marine, like the ‘Packet Captains’ who commanded the sailing ships of the Falmouth packet service which took the mail to and from the Caribbean in the 1700s and up to 1823. It ran two services, one to Jamaica, and one to Barbados and the Leeward Islands.
But the most striking transfer of Cornish skills to the Caribbean was to be found in mining. As the Cornish tin and copper mines declined, and often closed, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the ‘Great Emigration’ of miners and their families got underway. They went all over the world, often to work in the very overseas mines which had put them out of employment at home, mines that could produce metals more cheaply than the older Cornish ones that had been worked for centuries. Appleby follows Cornish mining engineers, foremen and labourers to mines in Jamaica in the 1840s/50s, to guano mining on Sombrero Island near Anguilla in the 1860s to 1880s, to copper mines on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands in the mid-nineteenth century, to gold and diamond mining in British Guiana in the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s, to gold mining on Dutch Aruba in the late 1800s, and to Cuba for copper mining around the same period. These men, often accompanied by women and children, were highly mobile, as they had to be, for many of these Caribbean mining ventures lasted only a few years. Though the underground workers, and the engineers and ‘mine captains’, were all men, some women did work at surface jobs in these West Indian mining operations. Besides the expertise and personnel, much of the equipment and machinery also came from Cornwall.
This book makes an original and valuable contribution to the literature on the Cornish Diaspora, and to the historiography of the Caribbean. And its focus on the many human stories of Cornish people in the islands makes it a readable and engaging study.

Bridget Brereton
University of the West Indies, St Augustine
Trinidad & Tobago
August 2018
Acknowledgements
Researching and writing about the Cornish in the Caribbean has taken me on a long journey. In the literal sense, I travelled from Antigua to Cornwall, and also from Antigua to the British Virgin Islands, Barbados,