SECTION II

CHAPTER I

EUROPEAN COLONIZATION IN THE WEST INDIES

THE West Indian Islands belonging to Great Britain are at present divided into six colonies or sets of colonies, scattered through the whole semicircle of islands from Florida to the Orinoco, and not grouped in any one corner of the Archipelago.

They are the Bahamas, Jamaica with its little dependencies of the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Caymans, the Leeward Islands, Barbados, the Windward Islands, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Great Britain owns also two mainland dependencies in this part of the world, British Guiana and British Honduras.

The name West Indies recalls the fact that the discovery of the new world originated in an attempt to find a western route to the eastern seas, and that, when Columbus crossed the Atlantic and sighted land on the other side, he fancied he had reached the further coasts of the Indies. 'In consequence of this mistake of Columbus,' says Adam Smith', 'the name of the Indies has stuck to those unfortunate countries ever since.' The islands, or some of them, have long borne the name of Antilles. Antillia or Antiglia was a mythical

1 Wealth of Nations: chapter on Colonies.'

2

2

The motives for establishing New

Bryan Edwards, in his History of the West Indies, Book I. chap. i. note, quotes the above from Peter Martyr as the right derivation and meaning of Antilles, and gives two alternative but incorrect derivations, the first making Antilles equivalent to the Caribbean islands, 'quasi ante insulas America, nempe ante majores insulas Sinus Mexicani'; the second identifying them with the islands opposed to (ante) or situated against

island' which found a place on mediaeval maps, and the name was applied by geographers to Hispaniola and Cuba upon their first discovery. In modern times Cuba, Hispaniola or Hayti, Jamaica, and Porto Rico have usually been known as the Greater Antilles; and the ring of smaller islands, including the Windward and the Leeward Islands, as the Lesser Antilles.

The terms Windward and Leeward themselves demand some notice. The prevailing wind in the West Indies being the north-east trade wind, the islands which were most exposed to it were known as the Windward Islands, and those which were less exposed were known as the Leeward. Accordingly, the Spaniards regarded the whole ring of Caribbean islands as Windward Islands, and identified the Leeward Islands with the four large islands which constitute the Greater Antilles as given above.

The English sailors contracted the area of Windward and Leeward, subdividing the Caribbean islands into a northern section of Leeward Islands and a southern section of Windward Islands, which project further into the Atlantic. In 1671 this division was made a political one, and the English Caribbean islands, which had before constituted one government, were separated into two groups, under two governors-in-chief; the islands to the north of the French colony of Guadeloupe forming the government of the Leeward Islands, the islands to the south of Guadeloupe forming the government of the Windward Islands. Latterly the signification has been again slightly modified; and, for administrative purposes under the Colonial Office, the Leeward Islands group now includes the more northerly section of the Caribbean islands belonging to Great Britain, from the Virgin Islands to Dominica; while the Windward Islands are artificially restricted to St. Lucia, St. Vincent,

the continent, and contrasting them with the Caribbean islands: according to this latter explanation Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Porto Rico would be the Greater Antilles, and Curaçoa, &c., the Lesser Antilles.

1 Compare the mythical island of St. Brandon referred to in page 177 of vol. i. of this work.

the Grenadines, and Grenada, the two most windward of all, Barbados and Tobago, being separated from the group.

Before giving any detailed account of the islands or groups of islands now belonging to Great Britain, it is almost necessary to sketch in outline the main features of West Indian history. So far as the British possessions in the archipelago are concerned, the history of the larger islands, Jamaica and Trinidad, is plain and simple; they were definitely conquered and settled by Spain, and definitely conquered and annexed by England. The smaller islands, on the other hand, with some exceptions, notably Barbados, were visited, settled, abandoned, and resettled, handed about from one owner to another, in the competition of nations thrown first into the one scale and then into the other, in order to adjust for the time being the claims of rival governments.

The West Indies have been in the past the hunting-ground of European peoples. They are the outskirts of tropical America, and they are opposite to the home of black labour, tropical Africa. They are islands, mostly of small size, and therefore easy to deal with, to conquer, and to settle, easy to depopulate, easy to repeople, attractive, not only on account of their own wealth, but also as a starting-point for the vast and rich continent off which they lie. Given an European race from the extreme south and west of Europe, hailing from and making for southern sunny climes, if it sent its sailors across the Atlantic, the West Indies would naturally be the first point of call and, for a while at least, the most suitable resting-place. Such a race were the Spaniards; the West Indies became the private property of Castille, the northern coast of South America was known as the Spanish main1;

1 The Spanish main was simply the mainland, terra firma, of Spanish America as opposed to the islands: but the term 'terra firma' was specially applied to the northern part of South America, extending 'all along the North Sea from the Pacific Ocean to the mouth of the river of Amazons upon the Atlantic' [Burke, European Settlements in America, Pt. III. chap. xvi], and comprising the towns of Panama, Cartagena,