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bastioned fort after the method
they had practised on the
Amazon-an earthen rampart
encircled by a ditch and sur-
mounted by a wooden palisade.
By so doing they kindled the
first feelings of distrust in the
minds of their Carib hosts;
but Warner was a prudent
man,
man, whose experience had
taught him to leave nothing
to chance. Then, whilst work-
ing upon their tobacco-fields,
they lived on the fish, fruit,
and fowls supplied by the
Indians.

-by the autumn of 1623. they built a loopholed and There he fell in with a London merchant named Ralph Merrifield, and persuaded him to invest the money necessary for beginning a modest plantation. Sailing again about the beginning of December, Warner landed with seventeen Englishmen upon the island on 28th January 1624. On that day, On that day, therefore, was founded the colony of St Christopher. The occasion has been generally antedated by a year, even in an official matter like the celebration of the tercentenary; but the explanation is simple. The only contemporary authority who specifies the date is Captain John Smith, the hero of Virginia, who in his 'True Travels,' published in 1629, states that the landing took place on 28th January 1623. Smith copied a journal kept by one of the planters, and his information was doubtless accurate. But the English calendar of the seventeenth century differed from ours: new year began, not on 1st January, but on 25th March; consequently when Smith spoke of January 1623, he meant what we call January 1624. A parallel instance is afforded by the well-known death-warrant of Charles I. He, according to our modern chronology, was executed in January 1649; but the document itself is dated January 1648.

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Dependence of white men upon savages leads inevitably to disaster for one party or the other: it was the common tragedy of the early settlements. After the first novelty had worn off the Caribs grew tired of supplying the wants of the colonists. An old woman who hung about the fort gave warning that the chief and his warriors were engaged in the drinking bout which was to nerve them to an assault. Warner had learned the art of colonisation in a rough school. He attempted no parley, but smote the Caribs before they were ready to smite him. He fell upon the village whilst the orgy was still in progress. Togreman was stabbed as he lay drunk in his hammock, and his followers were massacred without pity. Those who escaped made off in their Warner and his party settled canoes, to return for vengeance at a spot in the centre of the at a later date. The story is not leeward coast, where the anchor- a pretty one, but in some form age was good. For security it was bound to happen, for

the Caribs of the Antilles were took up quarters ashore, buildincurably warlike, and untamable to the standard of conduct which the white man of the old colonial days demanded from his coloured neighbours.

For a time there was peace in St Christopher. New men arrived from England, well supplied with necessaries by the merchants who were financing the colony. The tobacco-fields extended, and ship after ship appeared to take home their produce. Yet the English were still only a handful, and there was ever the menace of a return of the Caribs. They were a roving race, often on the move from island to island in great fleets of canoes, fighting one another, raiding the main of South America, and devouring their prisoners in the cannibal banquets which Defoe has so vividly described. Nothing was more certain than that the storm would one day burst upon the little colony. In these circumstances Warner was ready to welcome recruits from any quarter, and in 1625 he obtained some in an unexpected manner.

A ship came one day to the anchorage, a French privateersman which had suffered heavy damage in an action with a Spaniard. Her commander was a Norman gentleman named Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc. Warner proposed that he should leave roving and settle to planting on the island, where there was plenty of land still unoccupied. D'Esnambuc consented, and he and his men

VOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCXCIX.

ing a fort of their own near the south-eastern end. Not long afterwards the expected Carib invasion took place. The savages landed in force, killed a number of the Frenchmen, and beset their fort. An English boy who was there offered to go for assistance. Armed with a pair of pistols he made his way through the besiegers and carried the news to the English quarter. His countrymen hastened to the rescue, and after a terrific fight the Caribs were driven back to their canoes.

Another strange ship appeared in the first part of 1625, bringing tidings which had a great influence upon the fortunes of English colonisation in the Antilles. She belonged to Sir William Courteen, a London merchant prince of Flemish extraction, whose father had come to England as a refugee from Alva's atrocities in the previous century. This ship was commanded by Captain John Powell, and was homeward bound from a trading voyage to Brazil. On her way she sighted Barbados, hitherto a little-known island and used only for victualling purposes by infrequent visitors. Powell landed, found the place untenanted, and at once recognised its value as a site for the new industry of tobacco-planting. Its soil and water were good, and it was free from Caribs, for its position, eighty miles to windward of the main chain, rendered it inaccessible

B 2

to their canoes. Powell at once proclaimed annexation, setting up a cross with the inscription: "James, King of England and this Island"not knowing that King James was then on his deathbed at home. He intended to report the find to Sir William Courteen, whose immense wealth was always ready for promising investments of this nature. But unhappily for himself and his employer, Powell touched at St Christopher on his way to England. There, if he did not talk unwisely, his men did; and Thomas Warner was apprised of the discovery.1

Warner possessed foresight and lacked scruple. His visions of the future were not restricted to a mere sharing of St Christopher with the French. What he looked for was a dominion covering all the Caribbees, every fair island peopled with English planters, pouring its riches into the English commonwealth, employing hundreds of merchantmen and thousands of English mariners. It was a dream to be realised step by step; and the next and easiest stage was the planting of Barbados, whose profits would finance the more difficult schemes of the future. The obvious course was to send

the next available ship with a party to seize the empty island. But he saw that this would not do. Sir William Courteen was a man of power in London, a creditor of the Crown and a consorter with the great. He would crush the unknown Suffolk squire with a lift of his finger. The obvious course would fail: the occasion demanded something more subtle.

Apart from Barbados, other circumstances required that Warner should go to England. He had as yet no commission or authority of any kind for his proceedings, and the French interest might at any time develop into some high-handed French annexation of the whole property. He must make himself known to his Government and enlist the power of the Crown in his support. sailed therefore for England in the summer of 1625, with a scheme maturing in his mind to fit all contingencies. It turned upon the existing vagueness of geographical knowledge of the Caribbees, and the fact that another island of the Leeward group bore the name of Barbuda - a barren unlikely place, which no man who had

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seen it felt any desire to colonise. He himself had seen it before settling at St Chris

1 Students of West Indian history will recognise that the account given here of this and other transactions throws upon them a different complexion from that given in works hitherto published. The statements made in this paper are the fruit of my own research among original documents, some of which have not been used by previous investigators. I hope shortly to publish a monograph upon the subject, and in the meantime shall be happy to indicate the sources of my information to any who may be doubtful on any given point. The collation and criticism of the evidence is too involved a process to be suitable for a short article intended for the general reader.

topher, and had decided against claiming four islands together it on account of its deficiency in a group, almost within sight of one another, and they seem to have had no suspicion that his eye was fixed upon their own discovery three hundred miles to the southward. Warner allowed that supposition to stand, for his time was not yet ripe; nevertheless he was careful to explain in private, to witnesses who would keep their mouths shut until called upon to speak, that the fourth island of his commission was the true Barbados in 13° N., and not the worthless Barbuda in 17°.

of water. Barbuda and Barbados were not standardised spellings as they are to-day. They were interchangeable, and had a dozen alternative forms -Barbada, Barbida, Barbudos, and the rest, affording opportunity for a joyous mystification in the hands of the men of law who drew patents in Chancery Lane. Warner determined to play his game with these aliases; and with them in the end he won it.

In September 1625, his new majesty, Charles I., then at Southampton, granted a commission under the Great Seal to Thomas Warner. The document recites that Warner, having discovered St Christopher and begun a plantation there by the good liking of the natives, and having likewise discovered three other islands -Nevis, Montserrat, and Barbados,—his majesty, for the enlargement of his kingdom and the extension of the Christian religion, takes the said Warner and the said islands into his protection, and appoints Warner to be his lieutenant for their government according to the laws of England.

So far all was well The name of Barbados, so spelt, had been slipped into the commission without, so far as we know, exciting any protest from Sir William Courteen or his servant John Powell, who had probably by that time reached England. They would naturally suppose that Warner was

Warner was now the lawful ruler of his colony, but the office, like any other of its kind, was terminable at the King's pleasure. And in the matter of Barbados his pretty scheme would collapse like a cobweb before the pressure which Courteen could bring to bear against it. It was therefore necessary to seek a patron more powerful than Sir William himself. For this purpose Warner and Merrifield approached two noblemen of the Court, the Earl of Marlborough and the Earl of Carlisle. They induced these two jointly to seek from the King proprietary letters patent for the whole of the Caribbee Islands. Before, however, the business had gone very far, Marlborough withdrew from active participation, leaving the whole thing to Carlisle on condition of receiving an annual pension out of the profits. James Hay, first Earl of Carlisle, became accordingly Lord

Proprietor of the Caribbee Islands, his patent for that end passing the seals on 2nd July 1627. He was one of the Scottish courtiers introduced and ennobled by James I., with whose son he continued in high favour. Of genial manners, richly endowed with lands and sinecures, he was a bright star in the social firmament of his time, and his expenditure exceeded even the wealth of Sir William Courteen. For this reason he was chronically in debt, and was deeply committed to push the fortunes of a certain group of London merchants who had lent him money. To forward their aims he had taken up the West Indian proprietorship. He had, of course, no intention of going out to govern his possessions in person. That was to be the part of Warner and the merchants.

Long before the passing of the patent Warner had gone back to St Christopher, leaving the London business in the hands of Merrifield and his partners. D'Esnambuc had gone to France to seek recognition, and had likewise been taken into the protection of his sovereign. Cardinal Richelieu, then at the beginning of his long term of office, was anxious to promote colonial enterprise, and ere long he founded the Company of the Isles of America to exploit the Caribbees. Hitherto the English and French had found plenty of room in St Christopher, but now the island was

filling up, and a definite partition was necessary. In the summer of 1627, after d'Esnambuc had returned from France with a commission as Governor, he and Warner framed a treaty to regulate their frontiers. The English took the central portion of the main oval, a broad strip extending from the windward to the leeward coast across the central mountain range. The French took the two ends of the oval, their property being thus divided into two parts with the English between them. The salt-ponds in the island's tail were agreed to be neutral for the common use of both parties. This division held good in the main until the wars of the early eighteenth century, when the whole island fell to the English by conquest.

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The progress of colonisation was rapid. John Smith, whose True Travels ' of 1629 have already cited, says that by that date there were 3000 English settlers. Ere long the leeward side of the English quarter was all taken up, and in 1627 one Anthony Hilton, a Durham man, broke new ground on the windward coast. A Carib raid, however, ruined his plantation, and after acquiring another on the leeward shore he returned to England, raised money from a merchant named Thomas Littleton, and led out a new party of pioneers to begin the colonisation of Nevis. This venture began in 1628, and soon showed signs of prosperity. English colonists

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