Island Hopping BVI History

ISLAND HPPING

A Brief History of the British Virgin Islands

Although archeologists have discovered traces of the Ingeri civilization in the Virgin Islands dating back to 3,000 BC, the first real settlers of these islands are usually conceded to be the Arawaks (Tainos) who inhabited these islands from 650 AD until 1450 AD when the fierce Caribs decimated their numbers and became the local inhabitants.

As is so often the case in the eastern Caribbean, the first European to sight the Virgin Islands was Christopher Columbus. The Viceroy of the Indies, set sail on his second voyage to the New World with a fleet of 17 ships arriving at Dominica and working his way to the northwest along the chain of islands in the eastern Caribbean. After being blown of course by southwesterly winds, Columbus anchored off St. Croix, which he named Santa Cruz, Holy Cross, on November 14, 1493 on his second voyage to the New World. Columbus sent a party ashore, the only landing Columbus and his men would ever make on U.S. soil, and the men of the landing party found only Arawak slaves inhabiting the village. Columbus’ men promptly stole a slave from the Caribs and fled back to their ship, but hot on their heels were the enraged Caribs who sent a war party out to attack the Niña in a canoe. When it was over one Spaniard and one Carib lay dead and Columbus, happy to have survived the attack, sailed northeast exploring the United States and British Virgin Islands on his way to Puerto Rico. Columbus named the area El Cabo de Las Fleches, the Cape of the Arrows for it was a poisoned arrow that killed his crewman, and when Columbus turned his bow to the northeast, lo and behold, he discovered the United States and British Virgin Islands.

Columbus named the numerous islands that lay before him Las Islas Virgenes (some scholars say Las Once Mil Virgines) for St. Ursula and her 11,000 martyred virgins. Ursula was a Princess, the beautiful daughter of the King of Brittany, who lived sometime in the 3rd-4th centuries AD. Her father’s kingdom was threatened by a group of Huns and their Prince asker her father for Ursula’s hand in marriage and Ursula, who had taken a solemn vow of chastity and had no intention of marrying the pagan prince, agreed to the union in order to save her father’s kingdom, but with one stipulation. She would gather 11,000 virgins from the two kingdoms and live with them for a period of three years, and legend has it that Ursula used those years to train the virgins as an army. The Princess and her 11,000 virgins went on a pilgrimage to Rome to pledge their allegiance there while the angry Hun Prince went to Cologne to await Ursula and her army. Again asking for her hand in marriage, and Ursula again refusing, the Prince and his Huns killed Ursula and her 11.000 virgins companions creating the martyrs for which these islands are named. St. Ursula is the patron saint of maidens and her feast day, though no longer celebrated except in the Virgin Islands, is October 21.

Columbus claimed the islands for Spain who cared little for the islands, preferring instead to concentrate on the richer islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. Even the British passed the islands by for half a century, considering them too dangerous for navigation. However, for the very reasons the Spanish and British shunned the islands, another group found them quite adequate for their needs. The pirates were happy with the hiding places the islands offered just off the shipping routes and many islands in the archipelago bear piratical names. Little Thatch Island received its name from Blackbeard, Edward Teach, and Norman Island was also the namesake of a buccaneer who is said to have buried Spanish gold on the island. Jost Van Dyke and Bellamy Cay are also both named after pirate figures (although it is also said that Jost Van Dyke was named after a planter).

By the mid-1600s, the British realized the importance of the Virgin Islands who used the waters to stage attacks on nearby Puerto Rico. In 1595, Sir Francis Drake, who had first stopped in the islands in 1585, stopped at North Sound on Virgin Gorda to prepare for his unsuccessful attack on the Spanish fleet at San Juan. Gradually the Spanish lost control of the islands and the British made their first claim to the Virgin Islands in 1628 when some of the islands were given to the Earl of Carlisle. The first European settlers arrived around 1640 when a group of Dutch colonists/pirates set up a colony at Soper’s Hole on Tortola. The pirates were soon followed by other Dutch settlers who built a small fort for self-defense and began growing sugar cane. The colony thrived for almost three decades until most were driven away by British pirates in 1666. In 1672, at the outbreak of the Third Dutch War, Colonel William Stapleton captured Tortola, demolished the fort, moved the remaining Dutch settlers to St. Kitt’s, and annexed the Virgin Islands to the government of the British Leeward Islands. With the Crown firmly in control, Virgin Gorda became the capital of the British Virgin Islands (Road Town became the capital in 1742) and British settlers arrive from Anguilla…a year later the first boatload of African slaves arrived. By 1680, Virgin Gorda and Anegada had been settled and the colonists in the British Virgin Islands created huge cotton and sugar cane plantations as well as several rum distilleries to process the molasses produced by the plantations, all powered by slave labor imported from Africa. In fact, some of the rum produced here was traded for slaves who in turn would produce more rum.

Several notable planters during this period were Quakers, a pacifist religious group known as the Society of Friends, members of whom were also abolitionists in an area dependent upon slave labor. The first Quaker to settle in the BVI was John Pickering who arrived in 1741 and eventually became Governor. But the best known of the Quakers was William Thornton who was born on Tortola in 1761. Thornton learned medicine in England and eventually returned to Tortola to practice and run the family plantation. Thornton sailed to America to enter a design competition for the capital building in Washington D.C. and won. He remained in the U.S. and became had of the first U. S. Patent Office. The Quakers did not remain in the Virgins long due to their unpopular views of the wars and slavery issues and by 1786 only a handful were left in the islands.

The 1700s and the 1800s found wars abounding and several different countries vying for control of the Virgin Islands; the British, the French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Spanish, and even the Knights of Malta had a stake in the islands at one point or another. The Crown set up a series of forts on the islands including Fort Charlotte and its substantial armaments above Road Town, and Fort George and Fort Burt above Road Harbour. Fort Recovery and Fort Purcell guarded the western shores of Tortola while Fort Hodge protected the eastern access.

While all this was going on the first slave code was enacted on Tortola in 1783 wherein slaves were considered property and their owners were protected against damage to their “property”. The hardships the slaves endured resulted in unsuccessful slave riots in 1790, 1823, and 1830. The slave’s conditions were improved ever so slightly by a law enacted in 1798, but their gain was minute. Slowly the abolitionist movement gained strength aided by an event in 1811 when one of planter Arthur Hodge’s slaves was fined for eating one of the plantation’s mangoes. The slave, unable to come up with the money to pay the fine, was flogged and eventually died. This act of cruelty enraged the populace and Arthur Hodge was tried and executed. In 1834, on the first Monday in August, the Emancipation Proclamation was read in Road Town and the 5,000 slaves throughout the islands became free men. Today this event is celebrated by the week-long Emancipation Festival.

Freed slaves could now earn 12 cents a day working in the fields they once toiled in for nothing, but the plantation era was rapidly drawing to an end as the cheap (free) labor force was forever gone. A hurricane in 1850, a drought, and a riot over a cattle tax, which left one man dead, and much of Road Town and many of the great estate houses burned to their foundations, hastened the end of this era. The Unencumbered Estates Act of 1865 simplified the sale of the debt-ridden former plantations, but only former slaves and their descendants remained to purchase the properties so the lands went into local ownership. The majority of the people took to farming and fishing, raising cattle and goats, trading with St. Thomas, and even a bit of smuggling to survive and prosper.

The government of the British Virgin Islands, by now part of Britain’s Federation of the Leeward Islands, later to be known as Britain’s Federation of the West Indies, was ineffectual in fostering growth and often enraged the citizens by their actions. A rather unique incident occurred in 1890 when British Customs officials seized a local fishing boat enraging the local populace. Led by Christopher Fleming, a resident of Long Look, the islanders stood up to the government forcing the Governor to flee to St. Thomas to seek aid. In his absence Fleming, although unable to read and write, sat at the Governor’s desk and cleared boats through Customs with no duties charged.

The government continued in its ways for many years until 1901 when the Legislative Council dissolved and the BVI were administered to solely by the officials of the Leeward Islands with the Virgin Islanders having little or no say in their own affairs. This came to a head in 1949 in an open demonstration in front of the Governor of the Leeward Islands. A year later the British Virgin Islands again had their own Legislative Council and the islanders were progressing once again, slowly but surely. In 1956, the Virgin Islands National Park was created and thanks to contributors such as Laurance Rockefeller and his Rock Resort Foundation, much of the land and waters of the British Virgin Islands was protected forever.

In 1966, a new constitution was adopted which granted the territory, no longer referred to as a colony, a much greater measure of self-government. The entire decade of the 1960s was a coming of age for the British Virgin Islands as the islands entered the mainstream tourism industry with the construction of the first luxury hotel at Little Dix Bay on Virgin Gorda in 1964. By the end of the decade many charter boats were operating in the waters of the BVI and by the end of the 1970s the BVI was recognized as a major yachting center and the bareboat charter capital of the world. The prosperity brought about by the tourism industry was a terrific boost for British Virgin Islanders who soon entered the financial services industry with the passing of the International Business Companies Ordinance (IBC). This act exempted offshore companies from BVI income tax making the BVI’s one of the world’s major registers of offshore companies with over 20,000 registered corporations.

Today the British Virgin Islands are a Crown Colony and the government of the islands is headed by the Queen’s personal representative, the Governor, who is responsible for all internal and external affairs and is the head of the Executive Council, which is comprised of a chief minister, attorney general, and other ministers of government. The governor’s term of office is set by the British government, while all other elected officials serve 5-year terms.