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A Brief History of St. Vincent
The first settlers in St. Vincent and the Grenadines were a group of hunter-gatherers called the Ciboneys, (sometimes spelled Siboneys or Ciboneys) who arrived here from South American approximately 7,000 years ago, around 5,000 BC, before the time of the Pharaohs. Later settlers on these islands assimilated the Ciboneys, who used rough hand-made tools but did not make pottery, and the Arawaks, who settled in the islands about 200 BC and were also of South American origin. Peace reigned in the eastern Caribbean for many years until the arrival of the Caribs who killed their male enemies and enslaved their victim’s women. The Caribs, who were cannibals, castrated and fattened the young male captives for their later pleasures. The Caribs were prevalent in the Eastern Caribbean inhabiting almost all the islands at one time or another and to them St. Vincent was known as Hairoun, or Youroumei, meaning land of the blessed.
The Admiral of All Oceans, Christopher Columbus, discovered the island on Jan. 22, 1498, and named it St. Vincent after the Spanish saint whose feast day it was. Although a few missionaries did live among the Caribs on St. Vincent after the turn of the 16th century, it was not until almost two centuries after Columbus that the Europeans were able to establish any kind of permanent settlement on St. Vincent. Early attempts at landing on St. Vincent were met with fierce resistance from the indigenous Caribs who fiercely resisted the imposition of the European community upon them.
Sir Walter Raleigh anchored off St. Vincent in 1595 and reported that “savages and cannibals” inhabited the island. The first European settlers were two French missionaries that are thought to have established a camp near Chateaubelair. One, Father Aubergeon, was actually invited to the island by the Caribs in 1653 for his role in the release of captured Caribs who had been abducted for questioning. The two priests took an informal census and estimated that there were over 10,000 Caribs on the island. Soon thereafter, a lack of communication led to a slaughter of the missionaries and the burning of their mission. When word of this reached Martinique, a trio of ships full of troops sailed to St. Vincent and many Caribs were slaughtered and their crops burned.
The Caribs lived in the mountainous interior of the island of St. Vincent, well protected by the topography. Many Caribs who were defeated on other islands fled to St. Vincent for the protection offered amd Carib population increased rapidly, swelled even further by escaped slaves from Barbados and St. Lucia as well shipwreck survivors. In 1675 a Dutch ship carrying settlers and slaves wrecked in the waters between St. Vincent and Bequia. The slaves were the only survivors and were accepted by the Caribs. They eventually intermarried and were later joined by escaped slaves from St. Lucia and Grenada. They became known as the Black Caribs (sometimes called the Garifuna), as opposed to the Yellow Caribs, those of pure Carib descent, and St. Vincent was divided between the two groups with the western side of St. Vincent being allocated to the Yellow Caribs and the eastern side to the Black Caribs.
Even with this sharing of the island, their differences eventually led to a civil war among the Yellow and Black Caribs in 1700. Fearing domination at the hands of the Black Caribs, the Yellow Caribs sought help from the French and allowed French settlers to build a small community on the island in 1719 where the settlers sought to live in harmony with both tribes of Caribs. In reality, the French considered St. Vincent theirs and wished to remove the British from the island and they foresaw a way of acquiring new slaves through the conflict. The British, had earlier moved into St. Vincent in 1627 by way of a series of royal grants and treaties when Charles I granted St. Vincent’s rule to the Earl of Carlisle. However, the first real attempt at British colonization came nearly a century later, in 1722, when King George I gave St. Lucia and St. Vincent to the Duke of Montagu and a Captain Braitwaite was sent to St. Vincent to start a settlement at which point the series of private land treaties between the French and the Caribs were declared null and void.
Both the British and the French sought to use the tension between the Yellow and Black Caribs for their own causes by enlisting their help in battle. Seeing that the Black Caribs were the more successful soldiers, winning several battles with British settlers in the early 1700s, the French farmers provisioned the Black Carib leaders with wine, cognac, and weapons, which in turn encouraged more trade with the French and caused the Black Caribs to take up the French language, some of their customs, and even some of their names.
In 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle officially made St. Vincent a neutral territory. A few years later, in 1762, the Treaty of Paris allocated certain territories to the British, and in 1763, after the first Carib War, the British took control over the island and settlement began in earnest. In 1773, George II drafted a peace treaty with the Caribs and the two dozen Carib chiefs who signed the treaty could not read English so it was not until later that the true meaning of the treaty manifested itself as the Caribs were unknowingly restricted to smaller and smaller areas of the island.
Hostilities renewed and in 1779, the Black Caribs requested assistance from the French in Martinique. So it was that a French ship sailed to St. Vincent with 500 troops and the French took over St. Vincent with little resistance. The British soldiers were all at the northern end of the island working on the Governor’s plantation, and no one could find the key to the battery. The French won in a matter of a few minutes and were able to keep the Black Caribs from massacring the British settlers, troops, and the Governor.
The Treaty of Versailles gave the island to the British in 1783, and the island was restored to British control. In 1795, the Black Caribs, with the aid of the French, went on the offensive in what is called the Second Carib War, sometimes called the Brigands War. A French radical, Victor Hughes, after a successful uprising in Guadeloupe, incited two Black Carib chiefs, Chatoyer and Duvalier (sometimes spelled Duvallé), to attack the British and drive them from the island. Duvalier’s forces burned British plantations along the eastern coast, often putting the owners themselves through the gears of their own sugar mills, while other Black Caribs under their great chief Chatoyer, killed many people without destroying property and forced British forces southward along the western coast to Kingstown. In short order, the two chiefs met in the hills above Kingstown when Duvalier took Dorsetshire Hill, removed the British flag, and replaced it with the French Flag. British troops stormed Dorsetshire Hill and in a battle that lasted ten days, Chatoyer was killed in a swordfight with a British officer, Major Leith. Today Major Leith’s remains lie buried under the chandelier in the Anglican Cathedral in Kingstown, and on Dorsetshire Hill there is an obelisk memorializing the great chief Chatoyer.
The Black Caribs, although deprived of their great leader, continued to fight for a year after Chatoyer’s death. General Abercrombie had already taken St. Lucia where the Black Caribs, without the assistance of the French, were quickly overcome and surrendered. Abercrombie then moved his troops to St. Vincent where the British soldiers destroyed the Black Carib villages and crops, and a year later, delivered an ultimatum to the Black Carib chiefs that the Black Caribs would be shipped to the Bay Islands off Honduras. Only 280 Caribs surrendered for the shipping, arriving at Balliceaux enroute to Honduras. The British then hunted down over 5,000 Black Caribs who were deported to Roatán, off the coast of Honduras. Meanwhile, the Yellow Caribs, who had not taken part in the hostilities, moved to the northern part of St. Vincent, near Sandy Bay, where they were given some land and where their descendants still live today. A few of the hardiest of the Black Caribs escaped into the wooded areas of Greiggs and were, years later, granted a reservation near Petit Bonhomme. A few Caribs attempted to remain at Morne Ronde but fled just before the 1812 eruption and a few went as far as Trinidad.
Because of the two centuries of Carib hostilities, St. Vincent never really shared in the sugar boom that so many islands in the Eastern Caribbean enjoyed even though slaves continued to enter into the islands to work the plantations until 1834 when the slave trade was abolished. The year 1838 saw an influx of Portuguese settlers who soon were running shops and other small trading ventures and in 1861, indentured servants from India took the place of the slaves and many of Portuguese, Lebanese, and Syrians established successful businesses in the islands while many Scottish mariners and shipwrights emigrated to the islands of the Grenadines.
In 1871, St. Vincent became part of the British colony of the Windward Islands. In 1969, St. Vincent became a British Associated State, and a decade later, on October 27, 1979, St. Vincent and the Grenadines became an independent state within the British Commonwealth.