You
stand tonight on sacred ground. The
British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean are hallowed ground for those of
us who are native to these lands. I
invite those of you who are not so fortunate as to have been born among us to
join me in that conviction.
We may be small in land mass, and miniscule in population
compared with others. But, the blood of
great men and women flows undiminished in our veins. Their indomitable spirit, honed through
centuries of adversity and achievement, fashions our will to overcome and to
accomplish. We can trace some of this
character through the achievements of the great and the good who once walked
among us, and through the suffering and survival of those of our ancestors who
once trod these special lands. We are an
integral part of the West Indian Civilization.
The
Virgin Islands. British
Virgin Islanders have always been noted for their enterprise and
achievement. During the eighteenth
century, the Medical Society of London was the premier medical institution in
the United Kingdom. I wonder how many of
us remember that that Society was founded by a native British Virgin
Islander. Dr John Lettsom was born on
Little Jost Van Dyke, not a stone’s throw from where we sit tonight. He later earned the right to be appointed
surgeon to the King. He was the premier
surgeon of his day, master of the latest medical techniques. Of him it was said,
“I, John Lettsom,
Blisters, bleeds, and sweats ‘em.
If after that, they choose to die,
I, John, lets ‘em”
There have been other noted Virgin Islanders, who have
distinguished themselves in quite a different way. One of these was the Hon Arthur Hodge of Tortola. In the year 1811, he was a member of the
Assembly, and of the Council of the British Virgin Islands. He was, in his day, one of the wealthiest and
most powerful sugar planters and slave-holders of this territory.
To his annoyance, his mangoes were at risk. Not from theft, no one would be so bold as to
attempt that. They were at risk from the
elements. The wind was dashing those of
them that were ripe to the ground, bruising the fruit. So, he set his slave Prosper the task to
guard them.
Hodge, in his later defence, testified that he had warned Prosper
what would happen if he should fail. His
tongue-lashing had no effect. Prosper missed
the catch when one of the fruit fell from its branch to the ground. Hodge was livid. He would show these lazy good-for-nothings
the need to be diligent at their tasks.
He ordered Prosper to be lashed.
This was no ordinary lashing. He
had Prosper lashed until his back was flayed.
Then, he flung him into the estate punishment cell without medical
attention. Prosper’s wounds festered, and
he died several days later.
Such punishment, was not exceptional, for the time. It was normal in the Navy, in the Prisons,
and on the sugar estates. However, on
this occasion, it was considered by the authorities to have been inflicted in
circumstances of extreme triviality.
After much dithering and hesitation, the Hon Arthur Hodge was brought to
trial on a charge of murder before a jury of his peers. No doubt, this was as a result of excessive
pressure being brought to bear from London – something that, I am pleased to
say, you will not yourselves be familiar with.
The trial was of interest to the plantocracy of the region for an
unusual feature that it possessed. The
witnesses at the trial were all slaves belonging to the accused. The British Virgin Islands Assembly had never
got around to passing the law on the books in all the adjacent colonies that prohibited
the giving of evidence by a slave against his master.
The legislature of the British Virgin Islands was then barely two
decades old – modern, compared with that of nearby St Kitts that was nearly two
centuries old. When, in 1778, London had
appointed George Suckling to come out to be Chief-Justice of the British Virgin
Islands, he had been forced after a delay of many months to give up his post
and return to England. The recently
elected Assembly had not got around to passing any laws that would permit him
to hold the Assizes. Persons who had
committed murder remained at large, unless they did not boast friends in high
places.
Unfortunately for the Hon Arthur Hodge, those happy days were now
over. The charge was laid. His peers duly listened to the evidence and
unanimously convicted him of the offence of murder. The only sentence available in law to the
judge in relation to such a conviction was the sentence of death. The gallows were erected and the no longer honourable
Arthur Hodge was taken to it and the sentence carried out. And so, Tortola received the distinction of
being the first of the British Sugar Colonies to see a white planter sentenced
to death for the murder of his slave – and, convicted for that on the evidence
of his slaves. Oh, brave land! Land of pioneers!
Montserrat. Montserratians have their claim to fame. Few of us today are old enough to remember
the famed Rose’s lime juice. Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this Montserrat product was the sole
source of bottled lime juice available in the United Kingdom. When Joseph Sturge sailed through the islands
in 1837 to report on the outcome of the Apprenticeship system that followed the
abolition of slavery, his heart went out to Montserrat. Then, as now, well, perhaps not quite as now,
its people suffered from the disadvantage of a lack of opportunity. There were fewer enterprises than were to be
found in the neighbouring islands.
Joseph Sturge, as a member of a famous and wealthy Quaker merchant
family, determined to bring employment to the people. He acquired a large Montserrat estate and
employed free men and women to plant and tend to his orchards of lime
trees. These were, after only a few
years – limes, unlike oranges and grapefruit, are notoriously quick to mature -
ready to be reaped, and the juice squeezed from them, and to be shipped back to
the UK by the barrel-full. There it was
bottled and marketed to a public grateful for any additional source of vitamin
C. The Sturges lived in Montserrat into
the twentieth century, their family-owned estates continuing to produce the
famed lime juice.
Until Sainsburys more recently started selling fresh limes on its
grocery shelves, Montserrat lime juice, marketed under the name Rose’s Lime
Juice, was the principal source in Britain of bottled lime juice. The estates are now not only abandoned, but
their location unknown to either the local population or to the visitors who
come to gawk at the devastation caused to the land by the Soufriere
Volcano. Sic Transit Gloria, indeed. Montserratians are now the Phoenicians of the
Leeward Islands. By force of
circumstance they are obliged to venture overseas to find employment and
livelihood. I like to think that a faint
memory of the achievement of Joseph Sturge and his descendants has helped
fashion their famed enterprising nature.
Turks
and Caicos Islands. And
who of us can be left unaware of the role played by the Turks and Caicos
Islands in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in provisioning the sailing
vessels that left the Caribbean on the long haul back to the shipping ports of
the United Kingdom, or to the ports of the Northern Colonies of New
England? It was the salt of Sal Cay that
was used to preserve the fish and meat required for use on the voyage. Canning, as a method of preserving meat, was
not available until the chemists of Napoleon discovered the technique in the
early Nineteenth Century. The sailors
and salt workers of Bermuda annually sailed south to Sal Cay and helped to
develop the industry and to people the Turks and Caicos Islands, making their
contribution to the development of the character of the people, now enjoying a
prosperity unknown to their forebears.
Cayman
Islands. And, the famed Cayman
Islands, the home of the Boddens and the Ebanks, descendants of free men who
would not live as slaves in mainland Jamaica.
These sturdy sea-farers and fisher-folk of Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac
have given rise to progeny who are no less enterprising and ingenious. It is the culture of independence and
self-reliance that characterised these early settlers that is responsible for
the social and commercial success enjoyed by the islanders today. This is hallowed land! For over half a century, one of the top five
banking centres of the world!
Bermuda. And, Bermuda, famous from so early that even
William Shakespeare is said to have based a play on it! When Sir George Somers’ ship, the “Sea
Venture”, was shipwrecked on its shores, the incident was widely reported. At least two published accounts of the fierce
storm that caused the catastrophe, and the terrors of the landing on the wild
shores, were available to him before he wrote “The Tempest.”
And, which other British territory can boast of such a long
period of parliamentary government? Why,
the legislature of the Bermudas is even older than that of England, interrupted
as it was by Cromwell’s Commonwealth and his abolition of the Rump
Parliament. Bermuda, the location since
1621 of the longest continuous history of parliamentary sittings in the entire
Commonwealth of Nations. Sacred
territory, indeed!
When Churchill sent Bill Williamson out to the West Indies, even
before the United States joined the War, with the mission to steam open and to
read every letter leaving the USA that might carry information on the war
preparations of the allies, where else but Bermuda did he select to set up his
teams of searchers for micro-dots and secret inks? This man called “Intrepid” was the precursor
to the fabled insurance brokers who during and after the War stopped off on the
long flight from Heathrow to Shannon to Bermuda to New York, and who would
found the Re-Insurance subsidiaries that to this day underlie the International
Financial Service industry of Bermuda.
Oh, happy land, indeed! One of
the most prosperous in the entire Western Hemisphere!
Anguilla. And my own Anguilla? The land of Johanna. Have I never ever told you of Johanna? In the year 1825, for administrative reasons,
Britain condemned us to live under the government of the Council and Assembly
of St Kitts. In that year, the colony of
St Christopher and Anguilla came into being. It was to last until the year 1967, when the
first successful armed revolt in the British West Indies brought about a
permanent separation of the two islands.
The Anguilla Revolution lives on in song and literature and life of the
islanders, as they celebrate their freedom and true, not mere symbolic
political independence.
In that year, 1825, the Chief Justice of St Kitts, the Honourable
Richard Pickering, sailed his sloop from his estate on the north-west coast of
St Kitts to hold the first Assizes in Anguilla under the new regime. The Chief Justice of those days was a
planter, not a lawyer. He knew no law,
not unusual, some might say, of judges today.
But his heart was in the right place, unusual for those times. To arrive at the port of Road Bay, he had to
sail past the small Anguillian Cay known as Dog Island.
The Honourable Peter Lake was then the owner of the Road
Plantation and one of the leading citizens of Anguilla. He had been smitten by the beauty of his
slave Johanna. Consumed by passion, he
brazenly conducted an affair with her that soon came to the knowledge of his
wife. Mrs Lake, with the cunning of a
woman scorned, hit upon a device to get rid of Johanna. She secretly cut up her own clothes and linen
and torched them in her yard in the absence of her husband, falsely placing the
blame on Johanna.
She gave evidence, at the subsequent trial before the magistrates,
that she had observed Johanna committing the act. Johanna’s protestations of innocence could
not squelch the guilt felt by the magistrate at the infidelity that her beauty
had incited in his colleague towards his own wife. She was convicted of the arson, and sentenced
to be marooned on Dog Island for a month, as punishment. Now, Dog Island was, and is, a tiny, barren cay,
with just a shed and a shallow well on it for the use of the shepherds placed
there to keep an eye on the goats and other small stock that it was home
to. And then, as now, marooning was and
always has been an illegal punishment, not sanctioned in any legal text.
As Chief Justice Richard Pickering sailed past Dog Island, whom
should he spy on its shore but the beautiful Johanna, illegally marooned on the
cay in punishment. The Chief Justice was
smitten, as were most men who crossed Johanna’s path. On his arrival in Road Bay, accompanied by
Johanna, he brought charges against Dr Benjamin Gumbs-Hodge for unlawful
assault in taking Johanna out to Dog Island to serve her illegal sentence. By this time Dr Gumbs-Hodge had been elected
to be Anguilla’s sole representative in the St Kitts House of Assembly. Sometime later, the Chief Justice had the constable
drag the unfortunate doctor before him and his assessors. The charge was drawn up by the chief justice
himself. The Attorney General from St
Kitts read it to the magistrate who pleaded not guilty.
We know about all of this because of the records of the
impeachment proceedings brought by the planters of St Kitts and Anguilla
against the Chief Justice. These records
are preserved in the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens. Unable under the laws of St Kitts, which had
by now been extended to Anguilla, to call Johanna or any other slave to
testify, the Chief Justice could find no free Anguillian who would testify at the
trial. The Chief Justice did what no
judge, hopefully, would do today. He
tore off his wig from his head, stepped down from the bench upon which he sat
with the two local assessors who by law joined him at the trial, and entered
into the witness box to testify. When he
had finished, he put back on his wig and resumed his seat. He then bullied his assessors to join him in
bringing in a verdict of guilty against Johanna’s owner, the Hon Dr Benjamin
Gumbs-Hodge. However, they refused to
convict their fellow white Anguillian planter, and the case was dismissed by a
verdict of two to one. So far as I am
aware, Anguilla thereby became the first colony in the British Empire where the
chief justice acted not only as judge but also as witness in the prosecution
and trial of an offender at the Assizes.
Who can say that these are not special lands!
And so we continue to survive.
Some would say, at the margins of legality. Others would say, with ingenuity. We, citizens of the British Overseas
Territories in the West Indies, are nothing if not enterprising. We continue to live by our wits; resisting powers and princes more powerful
than we are; scurrying around the
corners, just out of reach of claw and tooth;
scuttling over the obstacles and hazards put in the way of the
advancement of the interests of our people;
dodging unseen and unexpected missiles thrown our way. But, we do it because these are special lands
that have produced a special people: successful
against overwhelming adversity. We are
survivors all.
An after-dinner speech given to the Attorneys General of the
United Kingdom and the British Overseas Territories, at Peter Island in the
Virgin Islands, on Wednesday 18 February 2004 while I was temporarily assigned
to the High Court in Tortola
