Black Carib Wars

Christopher Taylor

Description

The Garifuna people today live all along the Caribbean littoral of Central America, from Belize, through Guatemala and Honduras down to Nicaragua, and also in some of the biggest cities of the United States. For more than two hundred years they have preserved their unique culture and language--the direct descendant of that spoken in the islands at the time of Columbus. All of them, however, trace their origin back to the island of St. Vincent--YouroumaA n in their own language--where shipwrecked and runaway slaves joined together with the local Carib Indians to form a distinct society, known to the European colonists as the Black Caribs. Relations with the French veered between conflict and cooperation but when a deal struck in Paris in 1763 ceded the island to Britain, the stage was set for the Black Caribs final, desperate struggle to preserve their freedom. What followed was a series of bloody wars punctuated by periods of wary coexistence in which a small but determined people stood up to the might of the British Empire. The product of extensive original research in St. Vincent, the United Kingdom and France, The Black Carib Wars combines a compelling narrative with new details of the Black Caribs' fight to stay free. It draws in characters such as Daniel Defoe, the first man to describe an eruption of St. Vincent's volcano, and Captain Bligh, who belatedly brought Tahitian breadfruit to the island after his mission was interrupted by the mutiny on The Bounty. It looks at who the Black Caribs were, why they fought so tenaciously and how leaders such as Tourouya, Bigot and Chatoyer managed to marshal a fiercely individualistic society against the external threat. In the wake of the revolutions in France and Haiti, the Black Caribs fought their last battle, ending in agonising defeat and decimation in British captivity. The Black Carib Wars recounts how the survivors were shipped off to the faraway shores of Central America and what became of those who escaped deportation from St. Vincent.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Ethnic studies
• History of the Americas
• Central America
• SS Central America

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 03 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908493729
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Title Page
THE BLACK CARIB WARS
Freedom, Survival and the Making of the Garifuna
by
Christopher Taylor



Publisher Information
First Published in 2012 by
Signal Books Ltd
36 Minster Road
Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Christopher Taylor, 2012
The right of Christopher Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-908493-04-0 Paper
Production: Samantha Halstead
Cover Design: Daisy Leitch, Barry Ainslie
Cover Illustrations: from Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, courtesy of The British Museum
Illustrations: courtesy The British Museum
Maps: Paul Taylor



Dedication
For my mother, Kathleen Taylor



Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank all the members of the delegation, organized by the Garifuna Coalition Inc and led by its president, José Francisco Avila, who visited St. Vincent in July 2009 and who so generously allowed me to share the experience of their return to Youroumaÿn. In particular, I’m grateful to Carlos Gamboa and Angel Guity Fernández for several illuminating and thought-provoking conversations about Garifuna life and history.
Also in St. Vincent I would like to thank Vanessa Demircyan, for sharing her interest in contemporary Caribs there and for pointing me towards some French sources, to David Fergusson for steering me in the direction of some interesting items in the Vincentian archives, and to Edwin Johnson, a champion of St. Vincent’s Carib heritage, for his views on the history of Greiggs and for accompanying me to the summit of the Soufrière.
I am very grateful to Professor Peter Hulme of the University of Essex for kindly agreeing to read an earlier draft of this manuscript. His comments and suggestions for further research were much appreciated. Any errors of fact or follies of interpretation are, of course, my own.
Thanks to James Ferguson of Signal Books for all his work in getting this book into print and for lending me his copy of Sir William Young’s An Account of the Black Caribs of St Vincent - I may be in a position to return it soon.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Deena, for everything, and for introducing me to Andy Palacio’s Wátina.





Introduction
THE SUN PEEKED timidly through the clouds above Dorsetshire Hill as the last flourish of the Vincentian national anthem lingered on the steel pan. The schoolchildren fidgeted through the brief speeches which the eye of the television camera dutifully recorded. Then came a sound, a tune vaguely familiar, but sung in a language few present could understand. It had been heard in St. Vincent the previous day in Kingstown’s Catholic cathedral and now the sixteen-strong delegation, returning from exile, were once again singing the Lord’s Prayer in Garifuna, a language known on this island long before people speaking English, French or Spanish cast covetous eyes upon it. As they sang the Garifuna women rocked back and forth, bending low in unison in a simple dance that had the force of generations behind it, recalling both an African and an Amerindian past. A wreath was laid at the foot of the simple obelisk commemorating the Black Carib resistance leader Chatoyer - officially the Right Excellent Joseph Chatoyer, First National Hero of St. Vincent - and, as the hand drummers beat the retreat, the rain swept in once again to bring the ceremony to a hurried end.
The members of the Garifuna delegation - men and women, young and old - were completing an emotional return to a long-lost homeland more than 200 years after their ancestors were forced into exile. They had come from New York, scene of a second, voluntary, displacement; all were originally from Honduras or elsewhere along the Caribbean coast of Central America. Brimming with emotion, they had burst into song on arrival at the airport terminal building. For some of the Vincentians they met, the veneration the exiles felt for this small island towards the bottom of the Windward chain was fascinating, inspiring but also slightly puzzling, like being informed that they were already actually living in the promised land. For most people in the West Indies their idea of an ancestral homeland is usually somewhere else.
My interest in the story of the Garifuna people began about twenty years ago in Nicaragua. In the village of Orinoco on Nicaragua’s remote (from Managua) Atlantic Coast I watched a baseball match and heard in outline the story of the people’s origin in a shipwreck and a war on the island of St. Vincent. I visited the north coast of Honduras and, on a voyage from the village of Nueva Armenia, experienced first-hand the fabled excellence of Garifuna seamanship. It was only years later, on hearing an album by a Garifuna musician from Belize, with its lyrics in the Garifuna language and evident pride in Garifuna culture, that I began to wonder what the real history behind the music was.
The Garifuna story is unique. While the history of all but the most recently arrived black populations of the Americas passes through the experience of slavery, Garifuna people take pride in their past as a free people living for generations according to their own customs on St. Vincent. Their language, passed down from the Amerindian side of their heritage, bears living witness to their radically different history. In colonial times they were known to antagonists and allies alike as Black Caribs, a name which encapsulates their mixed African/Amerindian heritage, and their story - from their traditional origin in a shipwreck, to their battles against the French and British, to their final, cataclysmic struggle to retain their independence at the end of the eighteenth century - is the subject of this book.
The Black Caribs lived on the island of St. Vincent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They resisted the designs of European colonizers for generations after the native people of other Caribbean islands had succumbed to white conquerors. After Britain was awarded St. Vincent by treaty (with the French, not the Caribs) in 1763 the struggle to maintain their independence intensified. The Black Caribs fought the British army to a standstill in a gruelling sixmonth war in the early 1770s, rose again at the end of the decade to help the French oust the British, and, after the island had again been returned to their antagonists by treaty between the two European powers, waged one final struggle to kick the British out. Led by Chatoyer they came within an ace of succeeding, but at the decisive moment their leader fell in battle and the tide of the war turned. The Black Caribs fought on for another year before, abandoned by their French allies, they were starved into submission.
Countless Caribs were killed in the struggle, after which the desperate and famished survivors of the war were interned on a waterless islet where half their number died. Finally, in March 1797 the remnants of the Black Carib nation - barely two thousand men, women and children - were transported in British ships 1,700 miles away to the northwest where they were deposited on the Spanish-controlled island of Roatán off the coast of Honduras.
The defeat and deportation of the Black Caribs marked the effective end not just of their presence on St. Vincent but of an entire way of life in the islands of the Caribbean. By the time of their climactic struggle against the British Empire the native populations of Cuba, Jamaica and the rest of the Greater Antilles were long since dead, the victims of warfare and disease. Elsewhere in the Caribbean only a few families held on at the margins of the new colonial societies. St. Vincent was the site of the last battle of people living a traditional lifestyle against the European colonialists anywhere in the islands. It was here that the Caribbean saw its Little Big Horn and its Wounded Knee.
The mountains and the wind shaped the stage upon which the tragedy was played out. The centre of St. Vincent is a volcanic massif through which even today no roads pass. The Caribs were the only ones who knew the secrets of the mountain passes and the tracks through their densely wooded slopes. Settlement, whether Carib or European, was and is concentrated around the coast where the few tracts of relatively flat land lie. The key division of the island is between windward and leeward - essentially east and west. The trade winds blow steadily from the east and send the waves crashing against the rocky headlands of the exposed coast. It was on the sheltered, leeward shore that the sailing ships of the Europeans could find anchorages and where they gained their first footholds on the island. It was to the rugged windward where Africans fleeing slavery on the island of Barbados could drift on the current towards freedom. It was here that the Black Caribs made their home, raised their families and where they made their last stand, because it was also the place which British planters believed was best-suited to growing sugar for export and which they were determined