What sort of persons were the early settlers of Anguilla? What attractions made desperate men abandon
the wealthier, if overcrowded, colonies of St Kitts, Barbados and Nevis and
prefer this thirty-five square mile, barren, drought-ridden outpost of empire? Were there any advantages that encouraged
some of them to opt for Anguilla as an alternative to the new and land-rich
settlements in Virginia and Maryland?
The answers must be as varied as the different types of persons that
arrived to try to make a living here.
There can be no one clear-cut explanation. Due to the absence of written records left by
our ancestors from those early days, we are left to infer and to
speculate. We ask ourselves, what were
they doing in Anguilla? What, other than
subsistence agriculture, the breeding of small stock for meat and milk and
export, and fishing, were they occupying themselves with?
Besides privateering, trading, and smuggling in their sloops
between the islands, the main commercial occupations on land were the growing
of tobacco and cotton, the reaping of salt, and the raising of food crops and
cattle, ie, goats and, in the wetter years, sheep and cows. Tobacco and cotton were small-planter cash
crops that survived in Anguilla long after they were replaced in the larger
islands by sugar. It was not until the
middle of the eighteenth century that a very few Anguillian farmers accumulated
sufficient capital to invest in the mills and coppers and slaves necessary at
that time to make sugar.[1] Alternating cycles of drought and rain last
in the Leeward Islands for up to forty years.[2] Those islands with mountains have the
opportunity to attract rain at least during the rainy seasons. In a flat island such as Anguilla is, during
the periods of drought little would live but the goats. It is not for nothing that the children’s
geography textbooks say dismissively about Anguilla’s climate, “Anguilla participates in passing Atlantic weather systems.” The keeping of sheep and
cows, and the cultivation of cash crops, were limited to the periods when there
was enough rainfall to permit their survival.
Tobacco was originally grown in Anguilla by the Amerindians. The industry in all the islands was taken
over by the newcomers. It seemed to be
an ideal small-farmer cash crop. Apart
from its small bulk and its ability when dried to survive the long voyage
across the Atlantic, tobacco possessed other advantages to recommend it. Its cultivation could be undertaken on a
small scale. It did not need the outlay
of much capital. The settlers could grow
their crop on a comparatively small area of land. They needed only a few helpers, perhaps the
members of the family.
West Indian tobacco competed in England unfavourably with Virginia
tobacco. It paid a higher duty and
fetched a lower price. West Indian
tobacco was less mild and less palatable than that of Virginia. Besides, Virginia enjoyed the advantage of
being able to produce tobacco in great bulk from a large area of land. Merchants found it more convenient to deal
with Virginia. Her supplies came near to
meeting the demand of the English market.
There was less risk than trading with the scattered islands of the West
Indies.
Already, by the year 1639, the price of tobacco on the London
market dropped alarmingly. Barbados and
the other English islands looked for other crops. The first choice was cotton. In Barbados, this was soon replaced by sugar
cane. In Anguilla, tobacco cultivation
lasted longer, probably for want of any alternative. The last reference to tobacco being grown in
Anguilla in the Colonial Office papers is an unattributed memorandum probably
prepared by Under-Secretary Joseph Williamson in 1667.[3] He begins with the words, “From Major Scott’s mouth . . .”[4] Then, he notes that salt was made on Anguilla
and tobacco was grown there.
Subsistence farming was the major effort of many so-called
planters. Anguillians then as now grew
their food crops in numerous ‘bottoms’.
The origin of the word is curious.
Very early, even before the first arrivals came from St Kitts to
Anguilla, the Dutch settled in several nearby islands, namely, St Maarten,
Saba, and St Eustatius. They are
responsible for naming the relatively stone-free ‘bottoms’ in all these islands
that they cultivated for food crops.
This word ‘bottom’ is one of the few relics that remain of the early
Dutch influence on Anguilla. They are so
called, according to the Dutch historian of the Netherlands Antilles, Dr Hartog,
from the old Zeeland word ‘botte’, meaning ‘bowl’.[5] The English transformed the strange Zeeland word
to the more familiar ‘bottom’. So, the
main town on the neighbouring Dutch island of Saba sits at the top of the volcano
in its eroded bowl-shaped crater and is incongruously named ‘The Bottom’.
There are few other remaining signs of Dutch influence on
Anguilla. Statia Valley Estate may be
named after the early Dutch settlers who moved there after the English captured
the islands of St Eustatius (Statia) and Saba in the English-Dutch wars of 1665-1667
and 1672-1674. The present familiar
Anguillian surname Hazell is Dutch in origin.
It appeared in Saba, according to Dr Hartog, as early as 1677. In the same year, the name Van der Poll also
appeared in Saba. This was later
anglicised in Anguilla to Vanterpool. In
Saba, the name Zeegars also appeared at an early date. This later became Sagers or Zagers.[6] These were all well-known names in Anguilla
in later years.
In Anguilla, within a few years cotton replaced tobacco as the
planters’ cash crop, certainly within the first generation of settlers. It proved to be more successful than tobacco
ever was. Cotton too was originally
grown on Anguilla by the Amerindians.
Cotton was in some ways, like tobacco, an ideal cash crop for the
settlers. It too required little capital
outlay. It could be reaped by the
settler and his family with a few helpers.
It did not spoil once kept dry.
Cotton continued as the main cash crop of the islanders until the middle
of the eighteenth century, a run of nearly a hundred years. But it was never very profitable since Europe
received adequate supplies from elsewhere.
1. Gossypium ‘anguillense’ growing wild at
Corito in Anguilla (by the author).
The
demand for cotton was comparatively small.
Wool was more popular in Europe for the manufacture of clothing. The need for cotton in Europe did not
increase substantially until the late eighteenth century when the Industrial
Revolution produced the automated ginning and spinning mills that made it more
economic than wool.
2. Close-up of a cotton boll of Gossypium
‘anguillense’ growing at Corito in Anguilla (by the author).
The strain of cotton that is native to
Anguilla possesses an unusually long strand or staple. It was from Anguilla that cotton seed was
exported in the eighteenth century to the Bahamas. There, its superior quality was first recognized. After the Declaration of Independence in
1776, the British government provided loyalists and partisans of Great Britain homes
and land in the Bahamas. An 1835 anonymously written article in The Farmer’s Register
explains how the new settlers in the Bahamas procured cotton seed from
Anguilla.[7] In 1785 they successfully introduced the
culture of cotton on several of the Bahama Islands, particularly on Long island
and Exuma. The anonymous author relates
how in the winter of 1785 his Georgia cotton farmer father received a bag of
cotton seed from Col Roger Kellsall, then a planter on Exuma. Several other Georgian cotton planters
received at the same time cotton seed from their old associates or friends now
exiled to the Bahamas. Among the
planters who received cotton seed was Josiah Tattnall of Savannah, from his
father then the Surveyor General of the Bahamas islands. The Anguilla cotton seed was eventually found to
flourish best in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, from which
islands that strain of cotton now takes its name. From there, its cultivation spread to the coast of South Carolina, and thence to
Alabama and Mississippi, thereby beginning the cotton belt in the United
States.
The Vick family, after whom the city of
Vicksburg in Mississippi is named, took up planting the Anguilla cotton seed which
they got from South Carolina. They named
their Mississippi cotton farm 'the Anguilla Plantation'. The railroad was later given a right of way
through the plantation on condition that they named the depot, which they
planned to build at the nearby town of McKinneyville, ‘Anguilla’. The town for a while carried both names,
McKinneyville and Anguilla. To avoid the
resulting confusion, the US Postal Department agreed to the change of name to
Anguilla. The town of Anguilla,
Mississippi, has now sprawled out into the area that used to be the Anguilla
Plantation (see illus 3).[8]
Anguilla Cotton is not now cultivated in Anguilla for export but grows
wild throughout the island. It lives for
several years and can grow into a tree some 20 feet high. The botanical name for Sea Island cotton is Gossypium barbadense, but as Dr Jones ruefully
remarked in his Annals of Anguilla, it ought properly to be Gossypium anguillense.
3. Map of the town of Anguilla, Mississippi
There are several salt ponds in
Anguilla. These were created millennia
ago when coves and bays became cut off from the sea by sand bars forming across
their mouths. As with similar sea-level
salt ponds in other islands, they never completely dry out. Their bottoms are a few inches below the level
of the nearby sea. As the brine becomes
concentrated by evaporation, the salt precipitates out on the bottom of the
pond. It forms a crust on the bed a few
inches below the surface of the pond
(see illus 4). This underwater salt deposit was reaped by
the workers bending over, breaking off and lifting bits of the slab of
salt. These were thrown into the small
salt barges, or ‘flats’, floating alongside the pickers. It was back-breaking work.
Several ponds in Anguilla were
originally picked in this way. The more
important salt works were at the Road, Long Path, Rendezvous, Cove, Maundays
Bay, Savannah Bay and West End Ponds.
Most were abandoned years ago.
Until recently, when Hurricane Klaus in 1984 forced Anguilla’s principal
market in Trinidad to seek salt elsewhere, only the Road Salt Pond and the West
End Salt Pond produced salt for export.
The Dutch were responsible for
developing the salt industry of the West Indies.[9]
Since the sixteenth century, they were the major traders in salt in
Europe. Their principal source was the
salt flats of Portugal. They used large
quantities of it for curing their herring.
Salt herring was and still is an important Dutch industry, both for
local use and for export. Spain was
earnestly Roman Catholic, while the Netherlands became adamantly
Protestant. In 1580, Portugal came under
Spanish rule. The Protestant Dutch were
already at war with Roman Catholic Spain.
The Spanish barred their entry to the Portuguese salt flats. Dutch salt traders were forced to look
elsewhere for supplies. This was one
reason the Dutch originally came to the Caribbean. They were far more interested in reaping
salt, and in trading with the English, French, and Spanish settlements, than in
planting cash crops. Dutch ships would
sail to the West Indies filled with trading goods and return to the Netherlands
filled with salt. That explains why they
were content to occupy islands that were all unsuitable for agriculture. St Eustatius (Statia), Saba, St Maarten,
Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire were notable principally for their salt ponds. These islands were also strategically placed
for trade with their neighbours. Neither
the French nor the English settlers were interested in trade in dry goods. This was a niche the Dutch were happy to
fill.
4. The Road Salt Pond, July 2009, with tufts
of salt deposits visible (by the author).
The industry was carried on in Anguilla from the earliest days of
settlement. As we have seen earlier, in
1624 Anguilla was described by a Dutch sea captain as having “no fresh water, but a salt pan with enough salt for two to three ships a
year.”[10] This refers to the Road Salt Pond, the most
productive of all the salt works in Anguilla.
The early references that we find in the records give us an indication
of how the salt industry was operated in Anguilla. Originally, the ponds were communal
property. Each man owned only the salt
that he reaped. He heaped it up under
palm-frond shelters on the beach. There he
stored it, awaiting ships that would visit the island for the sole purpose of
purchasing it, since there was little else of value that Anguilla produced.
There are few references in the Archives to this ancient salt
industry. Vere Langford Oliver records a
grant of the Road Salt Pond made by Governor Daniel Parke in 1708 to one John
Brady (see illus 5).[11] Brady appears to have done nothing with his
prize. He promptly transferred the pond
to one Martin French of Antigua and Montserrat.
What use Martin French made of it is not recorded. His name does not reappear in the Anguilla
records.
5. Extract from VL Oliver, History of
Antigua, p.275.
Another early reference is met in 1769 when Jehabed Clark swore a
formal protest. A ‘protest’ is a
notarized report of loss or damage to a ship or its cargo for insurance and
other purposes. Clark’s protest relates
to the sinking of his brigantine Elizabeth. From this document, it appears that the Elizabeth
was wrecked on Sandy Island. This is the
name of a small sandy shoal enclosed by a little reef just outside of Road Bay
in Anguilla. The protest reads as
follows,[12]
Anguilla. I,
John Payne, Deputy Secretary and Notary Public for the Island aforesaid, do by
this Public Instrument of Writing make known to all people to whom the same may
or shall come that on this twenty ninth day of April one thousand seven hundred
and sixty nine, Jehabed Clark, Master, David Cullam, Mate, and Benjamin Welch,
Mariner of and belonging to the late Brigantine Elizabeth owned at
Piscataga [ . . . ] personally appeared before me and being duly examined and
sworn on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God deposeth and says that
On Sunday the 23rd day of this
instant sailed from the island of Grenada bound for this island aforesaid for a
load of salt; on the 28th day instant turning up that shore, there being a
small sandy key off the harbour being enclosed with a parcel of shoals and
shallow ground and not being acquainted, the Brigantine miss-stayed and sailed
on the reef, who immediately bilged and found it was impossible to get her off,
in a short time after some people from this island came to our assistance and
saved all they could having on board four casks of coffee, one hogshead of rum
and two bales of cotton.
Wherefore, I the said John Payne,
Deputy Secretary and Notary Public, do at the special instance and request of
the said Jehabed Clark, David Cullam and Benjamin Welsh, master mate and
mariner of the said Brigantine Elizabeth, and to and for the benefit and
advantage of all and every the person or persons that now are or shall or may
be any ways interested in or entitled to either said Brigantine Elizabeth
and her lading on board or any part thereof, protest against the vessel's
mis-staying and all accidents herein mentioned and for and in respect of all
costs, charges, losses, damages and expenses whatsoever that already have or at
anytime hereafter shall or may happen to be sustained for touching and
concerning the aforesaid Brigantine Elizabeth and her lading being run
on shore or any ways however suffered.
In Faith and Testimony whereof
I have hereunto set my hand and affixed my seal the day and date first above
written.
(sd) Jehabed Clark
(sd) Benjamin Welch
(sd) David Cullam
(sd) John Payne
Notary Public and Deputy Secretary
In his protest, Clark relates that on 28 March 1769, he and his
crew were on their way to Anguilla from Grenada for a load of salt. Their brigantine Elizabeth was
registered at Piscataga (now Portsmouth) in the colony of New Hampshire. The Elizabeth’s trade in salt in the
West Indies was lawful under the Navigation Acts, as New Hampshire was a
British colony. The brig rounded the
little islet of Anguillita at the western tip of Anguilla. It sailed eastwards up the northern coast of
Anguilla. It was heading to Road Bay to
collect the required salt. The crew was
not acquainted with Road Bay. Clark
accidentally sailed his brig onto the reef at Sandy Island. There, it
immediately bilged and took in water.
Shortly after, people arrived from Sandy Ground Village. They saved all they could of his ship’s simple
cargo. This amounted to four casks of
coffee, one hogshead of rum and two bales of cotton. Of interest is the additional fact that he seems
to have employed an Anguillian, Benjamin Welch, among his crew.
Not all the ponds in Anguilla are salt ponds. There are also three brackish-water ponds
situated away from the coast. These are
Cauls Pond, Bad Cox Pond and East End Pond.
They each have a limestone outcrop at the water’s edge on the northern,
more elevated shore. Fresh-water springs
feed into the ponds from fissures in the limestone outcrops. Besides the Fountain Cavern and the several
Indian Wells, these springs were the only sources of fresh, if brackish, water
on the island available to the settlers.
There are no rivers flowing on the island, even in the wettest years.[13]
The springs supplying the three ponds are not the only source of
potable water. There are in all fourteen
springs in the island. Most of them are saline.
The degree of salinity depends to a
large extent on the amount of rain falling in that period. The settlers found water, too, in the wells
that the Amerindians left behind. The
settlers eventually dug some twenty-five others scattered over the island.
A few comments on the vegetation of the island at the time of the
earliest arrivals may be useful. When
the island was first settled by the Europeans and Africans, the surface was
covered in considerably more soil and vegetation than there is today. Once the forest cover was removed for
agriculture, the topsoil began to erode down into the ‘bottoms’ or out to
sea. Only low-lying scrub can now grow
on the higher ridges. The lack of tall
trees is unfortunate. Forests, besides
conserving the soil cover, encouraged more rain to fall from passing clouds
than falls today. The three inland ponds
were fresher than they are today. No
trace of alligator remains were ever found around any of these ponds, as
suggested by de Rochefort. If, as was
likely, the island was wetter than it now is, we can well understand that
tobacco and corn were easily raised, and that the cattle multiplied very fast
as he wrote.
The trees were cut down very early. Land needed to be cleared for
cultivation. There were also valuable dyewoods
to be cut for export to England. Dyewood
is today a forgotten, almost unknown product.
At one time, fortunes were made in the Caribbean by merchants who traded
in it. Dyewood used to be called by a
variety of names. The old Portuguese
word 'brazil' is the source of the English word brazen. 'Brazil wood' was one of the names for dyewood,
a reference to its ruddy colour. Another
was 'campeachy wood.' This name comes
from the Gulf of Campeche in Mexico, where it grew profusely. Near to the Gulf of Campeche was the territory
where woodcutters would eventually establish the British colony of Belize, a
rich source of logwood and brazil-wood. Depending
on which salts it was mixed with, campeachy could produce a red, blue or black
dye. Logwood produced a red dye when
processed in an acidic medium, and blue in an alkali solution. Nicaragua or peach-wood, also called by the
Dutch 'stockfish-wood', produced an inferior red dye. All these dyes were obtained from the wood by
rasping or grinding it fine, and then boiling it. These dyewood
trees grew on Anguilla in the seventeenth century, as they did on all the
neighbouring islands.
Old Fustic or Dyers’ Mulberry is made
from the heartwood of the member of the mulberry family originally found in the
forests of Brazil and the West indies.
This tree is also known as Chlorophora
or Morus tinctoria in the older
texts. It survives in forested valleys
in Anguilla such as the Katouche Valley.
It was used to produce the khaki colour much favoured among army and
school uniforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Wood was also useful as fuel. Until the 1970s, Anguillian trees were also
cut down to make charcoal, then the staple fuel available to the
islanders. If you turned your back for a
moment on your orange or soursop tree, you might find it cut down and removed. All the primeval trees were soon destroyed by
this combination of bad husbandry and the need for fuel. The first cylinders of propane gas for
cooking began to be imported as recently as the early 1970’s. At first these cylinders were inconvenient
as, until the early 1990’s, it was not possible to refill empty gas bottles
locally. They had to be shipped to
Puerto Rico for refilling. Today,
charcoal is a luxury fuel for barbecues, and the trees have begun to recover.
There was also a ready market among the planters of the bigger,
sugar cane-growing islands for building timber.
West Indian mahogany was much in demand from the
seventeenth century for furniture and panelling in the homes of the wealthy in
England. The largest trees on Anguilla
were soon cut down and exported.
Anguillian sloops began roaming the Virgin Islands of St Croix, St
Thomas, Tortola and Crab Island in search of timber for the markets of the
Caribbean and Europe. The mahogany trees
that presently dot the island are not true West Indian mahogany. They are the smaller Honduran mahogany,
imported into Anguilla and others of the West Indies by the Imperial Department
of Tropical Agriculture in the early decades of the twentieth century. This was the period when the colonial
authorities tried to help the dryer and poorer islands diversify their
agricultural industries by importing from Honduras new varieties of sisal for
rope making, lumber for construction, paw-paw for the then new papain or meat
tenderiser industry, and shade trees such as the Saman (albiza saman) for the cattle industry.
The Anguillians in their sloops continued throughout our period to
trade in dyewood and building timber from one end of the Caribbean to the
other. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century,
there are several references in the Colonial Office records to this Anguilla
trade. One such is a 1719 dispatch by George
Lillington of Barbados, shortly after the Anguillian settlement on Crab Island was
destroyed.[14] He reported that the Spaniards burned a large
quantity of dyewood that the settlers collected before the destruction of the
settlement. The dyewood industry was eventually replaced by the cochineal
beetle of Mexico, and it fades from the scene.[15]
Climatically, Anguilla is described by geographers as a seasonal
forest island. In this it resembles
Antigua, Barbados, St Barts, Statia and St Martin. In all these islands, long-lasting changes
have taken place in the natural vegetation and wildlife. There is presently more rain falling in
Anguilla than would fall in a true desert.
Yet parched barrenness generally pervades the island, save for
exceptional years of heavy rainfall.[16] It is the livestock that reduced Anguilla to
the scrubby state that it is in since the eighteenth century. Goats played the most important role
here. They denuded the land. Where they roam, all is picked bare. Much of the soil has, as a result, eroded
away. Until the goat is recognized as
the dangerous vermin it is and completely banned from the island, it will
always be difficult to grow anything successfully in Anguilla.
All these ancient industries are now closed. The occasional tobacco plant may survive in
someone’s grandfather’s hedge. Sea
Island cotton shrubs are hardy plants and grow wild all over the island. The birds scatter their seeds and ensure
their survival while using the lint to make their nests. A few surviving grandmothers can recount
stories of the hardships involved in picking salt. Sugar cane grows in a few back gardens, for
the enjoyment of the children, but will flourish only if it is watered from
time to time. The best agricultural
lands are planted over now with houses, offices and hotels. No longer is the young Anguillian boy
presented at his seventh birthday with a goat kid to look after, so that when
it is grown, he can sell it for pocket money.
Instead, both he and his sister have the latest electronic gadgets and
toys to play with. The Anguillians of
the twenty-first century find more productive crops to reap than their
ancestors ever enjoyed. Some of these
new crops, such as tourism, even flourish in long periods of drought.
Next: Chapter 12 -
[1] See Chapter 18: Sugar Arrives.
[2] The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
[4] For Major Scott see Chapter 4: The
First Generation.
[6] Ralph Hodge, then the Accountant General
in the Government of Anguilla, told me that when as a schoolboy he assisted an
English mapping team in the 1960s, it was he who provided the unusual spelling
to the surveyors who asked him how Zagers’ land at South Valley was
spelled. There was no written document
available in Anguilla at that time that provided any clue to the spelling. He suggested that it must be ‘Sachassas’. His odd spelling stuck.
[7] Cotton: Its Introduction and Progress
of its Culture in the United States, from the Southern Planter. In Edmund Ruffin, ed - The Farmer’s
Register, A Monthly Publication Devoted to the Improvement of the Practice and
Support of the Interests of Agriculture. (Shellbanks, Va: Published by the
proprietor, 1835) Volume 2, pages 354-355.
[8] Personal correspondence in 1996 with Billy
C Fields, Tom Greer, and Henry Kline of Anguilla, Mississippi, following a
visit of a scout troupe from their town to take part in a scouting jamboree
organised by the scouts of Anguilla.
[10] Chapter 3: The First Settlers and the
Carib Raid.
[11] Vere Langford Oliver, History of Antigua,
(3 vols, 1894-1897) p.275.
[12] Anguilla Archives: Jehabed Clarke’s 1769
Protest.
[15] The cochineal beetle was in its turn made
obsolete in the 1850s by the discovery of synthetic aniline dyes.
