One of the strangest chapters in the
story of the first generation of Anguillians concerns their repeated efforts to
colonise the island named by the Spanish after its Amerindian name ‘Vieques’, supposedly
meaning little island. Vieques lies
seven miles east of Puerto Rico and is now a part of that US territory (see
illus 1). The English-speaking
Anguillians sometimes called it ‘Bieque’.
The change in the initial consonant of the name is easily
explained. The Castillian version of
Spanish pronounces the letter ‘v’ as if it were a ‘b’, as in the familiar
‘Benezuela’. To the English-speaking
Anguillians, it seemed the Puerto Ricans were calling Vieques [Vi-ai-que]
‘Bi-que’. English speakers do not
normally emphasise the last syllable.
Rather, they place the emphasis on the first syllable. So, the Spanish sounding ‘Bi-que’ becomes in
English ‘Bieque’. It was the Danes who
named the island ‘Krabbeninsel’ or Isle of Crabs. The Anguillians of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries more commonly knew it as Crab Island.
1. Vieques, lying a few miles to the east
of Puerto Rico.
Following several unsuccessful earlier
attempts, the Danes began their official settlement of St Thomas in the year
1672. They gradually took possession
also of St John, and later of St Croix in 1733.
Governors Lorentz and Esmit made efforts to add Crab Island to the King
of Denmark’s Caribbean holdings. From
1689 to 1693, the Danes of Brandenburg-Prussia controlled Crab Island. But continuous disputes with the Spanish, and
with the Scots in 1698, culminated in the Danes formally giving up Crab Island to
the Spanish in 1811. The Danish West
Indies were finally sold to the United States in 1917.
The story of Anguilla’s interest in
Crab Island begins in 1683. It is the
ultimately tragic epic of various Anguillian attempts to settle Crab
Island. The Anguillians were attracted
to Crab because it was so much greener and more fertile than their
drought-affected island. As a sea-faring
people, they particularly noted its excellent harbour. They knew Crab Island well, as their ships
habitually visited it in search of valuable dyewood and building timber. They traded these commodities with the
merchants in the other Leeward Islands, where it was used in local construction
or exported to Europe. In pushing their
case, the Anguillians claimed that Crab Island was unoccupied by either the
Spaniards from Puerto Rico or the neighbouring Danes in St Thomas. They considered it was available for the
English Crown to authorise their settling it.
Anguillians were involved in three
attempts to occupy the island. The first
was in the year 1683, then in 1688, and then again in 1717. We shall deal here only with their first two
attempts of 1683 and 1688. In the
following chapter we shall look at their final, abortive attempt of 1717.
We first learn of the intense interest
of the Anguillians in Crab Island in August 1683 when Governor in Chief Sir
William Stapleton wrote a dispatch to the Committee for Foreign Plantations in
London.[1] He revealed that he was petitioned by the
inhabitants of Anguilla to let them settle Crab Island. He wrote that he refused to give them
permission for fear that the Spaniards and buccaneers of Puerto Rico might cut
them off in one night. He sympathised
with the Anguillians, since, as he put it, “Anguilla
is fit for little or nothing but goats.”
Throughout the correspondence, he was generally supportive of the
Anguillian initiative to settle Crab Island.
He recommended to London that if two or three hundred men could be found
to put on Crab Island and build a fort, there was no doubt that it would be a
successful settlement. But, at no time
did the English authorities in London respond by showing any sign of encouraging
the Anguillians in this enterprise.
Despite what he wrote, the Anguillians
in 1683 under the leadership of Abraham Howell did more than merely ask
Stapleton for permission. Without
waiting to hear whether they had permission or not, they went off to occupy
Crab. Then, as now, Anguillian
leadership followed the dictum, “If it is
a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is
much easier to apologise than it is to get permission.”[2]
The mass descent of Anguillians on Crab
Island caused Adolph Esmit, then Danish Governor of St Thomas, to dispatch a
military force under the command of a captain to Crab Island. He also signed and delivered to the Governor
in Chief in Antigua a formal diplomatic protest. For one reason or another, probably more
related to the Danish Captain and the strength of his military force than to
the official protest, the Anguillians under Howell showed discretion. They ceased temporarily on this occasion to
occupy Crab Island, at least in any large numbers. Howell and his men returned to Anguilla,
frustrated, but, as we shall see, still determined to claim Crab Island for
themselves.
We know that Howell returned to
Anguilla. We see him in the following
year 1684 granting land to John Lake at Stoney Ground.[3] The year after, in a 1685 dispatch to London
on the state of his colony of the Leeward Islands, Governor Stapleton mentioned
that Howell was still the deputy governor of Anguilla.[4] We also know from Chief Justice George
Suckling of Tortola that around this time Anguillians were settling in the
Virgin Islands.[5] “The
toil and merit,” he wrote, “of first
cultivating the Virgin Islands were reserved for the English of Anguilla”. Chief Justice Suckling claimed that Anguilla
was first possessed by English, French and Dutch persons. Some of them, he wrote, sailed from Anguilla
with their families and fortunes and settled in the Virgin Islands about the
year 1680. Besides Suckling, there is no
other reference to French and Dutch occupying Anguilla in 1680. The usual claim, for example by de Rochefort
in 1658, is that the English alone first settled Anguilla.[6] But, considering the disorganised state of
society at the time in Anguilla, there is nothing unlikely about Suckling's
statement that there were people of other nations, including free Africans and runaway
slaves, who settled on Anguilla.
However, the island was never, throughout its history, possessed by any
other European nation.
Nothing further is heard of Crab Island
in the correspondence about Anguilla until five years later, in 1688. The long drought, which began in about 1680
and which lasted until about 1725, was now well under way. The poor and landless class of Antiguans,
Nevisians, Kittitians and Anguillians were desperate to get fertile land that
they could work to ensure their survival.
That, Crab Island possessed in abundance.
In February 1688, Governor in Chief Sir
Nathaniel Johnson raised with London the matter of the poorer Leeward Island
subjects, including Anguillians, wishing to move to Crab Island.[7] He still had not heard back from London in
reply to his earlier correspondence on the subject commencing five years
previously. He reported that they were
seeking his permission to settle Crab Island in the name of the English
Crown. He wrote,
My Lords, there have been several petitions presented me by the
poorer sort of people of these islands and all those settled upon Anguilla and
Tortola which may amount to 200 men able to bear arms that they might have the
liberty to go and settle upon Crab Island for that those upon Anguilla want
water and most of them live and trade only upon stock which is much decayed by
the great drought we have had in these parts, they making no sugar, indigo or
cotton by which His Majesty receives any benefit, and those at Tortola being every day liable by His Majesty’s instructions to be
delivered up to the Dutch when demanded, so that they will not improve any
plantations there, and those in these islands not having wherewith to subsist
are daily going to other parts.
But I have for
the present deterred them till His Majesty’s pleasure be further known, because
the said island is so near a neighbour to Porto Rico which is well settled by
the Spaniards, though it be an island well-watered and of larger extent than
any of these and in all other respects very fit for the produce of what our
islands afford, so that if His Majesty shall think fit either to settle that or
any other of the adjacent islands which of right he hath laid claim to, I
should be glad to know His Majesty’s pleasure that if I might take his frigate
and some of those forces which are at St Christopher with ammunition
proportionable, I would not doubt by God’s assistance to go down and to settle
those people there so as to give His Majesty a good account of them and to make
no breach of the Articles of Peace with the Spaniards, designing no attack upon
them but to defend ourselves in maintaining the King’s just right.
All which I
refer to your Lordships’ judgment and beg a speedy answer fearing else some of
them may venture without leave and so be cut off as they were formerly at
Tortola (see illus 2).
2. First page. An extract from the
dispatch from Sir Nathaniel Johnson to the Council of 20 February 1688:
CO.1/64. (UK National Archives®)
A few months later, Governor Johnson’s
qualms about granting permission without authorisation from London
notwithstanding, he allowed another attempt at settling Crab Island. He wrote to London that he permitted about
fifty men to go to Crab Island from Nevis.[8] He granted them no commission, so that they
were without the protection of official sanction for the settlement. Governor Esmit of St Thomas again sent him a
diplomatic note of protest.[9] In this 1688 protest Esmit wrote that in 1682
he planted the Danish flag on Crab Island and claimed the island for the Danish
King. He related how in 1683 he placed a
Captain with his men or Crab Island when Abraham Howell tried to take
possession of it. Since that time, he
asserted, the English left the island undisturbed. He therefore protested at this latest attempt
by the English to settle illegally on a Danish island.
From the documents preserved in the UK
National Archives we learn some of the details of this 1688 incident. It was a Scots adventurer from Nevis, William
Pellet, who led this second attempt of the islanders to settle on Crab Island. He landed there with a group of his fellow
Scots, accompanied by persons from Anguilla and others from Tortola. Two of these adventurers were Abraham
Howell’s sons, but exactly which ones we are not told. They elected Pellet to be their captain and
leader. These Scots of 1688 were
probably Presbyterian refugees from King James II's policy to Catholicize
Scotland. They would shortly be followed
to the West Indies and the Americas by Roman Catholic Scots, persecuted in
their turn when the Protestant King William and Queen Mary came to the throne
and Catholic King James II fled to France.
The correspondence reveals that the first 50 settlers on Crab were
followed by over 200 women, children and slaves. By December 1688, there were over 350 English
and Scots settlers, including many Anguillians, on Crab. Their troubles were just about to begin.
On 23 December 1688, two Spanish ships,
a sloop and a brigantine, arrived at Crab Island from their failed assault on
Anguilla which has been previously described.[10] On Anguilla, they were beaten off by Abraham
Howell and his militia. They were to
have more success on Crab.
From the enquiry into the debacle
conducted by Governor Johnson, we have the depositions of Mannin Rogers,[11]
Peter Simmons, Edward Noy, John Price, and John Hilton.[12] As Rogers and Simmons explained, the Spanish
flotilla arrived at Crab Island and anchored offshore. The Spanish captured Hilton’s sloop Neptune
anchored in the bay and made Hilton and his men their prisoners. The Spanish captain next sent a boat with a
white flag of truce and three men to the little settlement on the island
intending to trick them.
3. Second page. An extract from the
dispatch from Sir Nathaniel Johnson to the Council of 20 February 1688:
CO.1/64. (UK National Archives®)
The Spanish landed unopposed and
explained to the settlers that they were sent to find out whether they were
French or English. If they were French,
they were in peril. However, as they
were English, they would not be hurt.
They asked Captain Pellet to come with them to their ship as their
captain wanted to meet him. If he did
so, they promised, not one hair on his head would be touched. They warned him that if he did not go
voluntarily with them, their commander would sail closer to the shore and
destroy them all with his great guns.
Pellet did not fall for their
stratagem. He replied that he and his
men did not fear, for they had enough ammunition to defend the place. He explained that they were there in Crab
Island by the authority of the King of England.
Their instructions were to defend the island from the Danes or anyone
else who would attempt to settle there or to oppose their presence. He was prepared to defend the settlement
against any enemy that should oppose them.
He and his men would fight until they died. However, he counter-offered, if the Spanish
captain would come on shore, he would receive such entertainment as the island
could afford.
The ship’s boat with its flag of truce
then returned to the Spanish ships. The
reconnaissance party accomplished its purpose, which was to determine the
approximate number of settlers and the presence of any cannon. Once they were safely back on board, the
Spaniards commenced firing at the settlement.
They fired both cannon and small arms in the direction of the settlers
on the beach. Pellet’s response was to
order his men to lie down low and to secure themselves from the Spanish shot.
Rogers reported that Pellet’s initial
courage seems to have melted away. He
lay down behind a barricade and called out to his men not to fire back. Rogers approached Pellet and found him lying
down against a barricade on his back and with his eyes closed tight. Rogers asked permission for the men to fire
back. Pellet’s response, Rogers claimed,
was, “Let no man fire on pain of death.”
Simmons on his part testified that the
cannon shot cut down the limbs of the trees around. Several of the men became frightened which
caused them to run from the beach into the forest. Rogers asked for permission for the men to
withdraw to a safer spot. But Pellet ordered
them to stay where they were, and he lay back down again behind the
barricade. Simmons then told him that
several of the men were running away and asked Pellet to call them back. Pellet, still lying low on his back called
out to the deserters, “Where are you
running? What are you afraid of?” He shouted to them to come back. But they did not pay any attention to him.
Several other men then crawled up to
Pellet through the cannon and musket fire and demanded that they be permitted
to fight back. But most of the Scots
sided with Pellet in refusing to return fire against the superior Spanish
force. They persuaded him to surrender
the island, provided the Spaniards would give them a vessel to carry them off
in safety.
When the men saw that Pellet would not
permit them to resist the landing, a great many withdrew to the forest to save
themselves. Rogers and Simmons and the
others who did not side with Pellet took to the woods and hid themselves until
the Spaniards departed. Among the
Anguillians who managed to save themselves were Mannin Rogers and Abraham
Howell's eldest son. Another of Abraham
Howell’s sons who is not named perished in the enterprise. If he took after his father in courage, the
likelihood is that he gave his life ensuring the safe escape of his countrymen.
Pellet was content to go along with the
suggestion that he surrender the settlement.
He approached the water’s edge waving a white flag of surrender. Ensign Mathews ran at him with the butt end
of his gun to knock him down. Pellet
dodged the blow and, turning to the remaining men, asked if they really wanted
to fight. Richard Hays called out that
there were not twenty men left who wished to fight. At that, Pellet became more convinced that
there was no point in putting up any resistance. He continued waving the white flag.
The Spaniards sent a small boat to the
shore, and Pellet, accompanied by Michael Webb, went on board one of the
Spanish ships. The Spanish then sent a
boat to the shore demanding that the settlers give up their guns. When asked why they should want to disarm the
settlers who did not return their fire, the Spanish replied that their
commander was concerned that they might come on board the ships in the night
and make a disturbance. The settlers
then gave up and surrendered their small arms.
The Spanish confiscated about seventeen guns and some swords and
ammunition. It seems that, as they had
no cannon, they decided that resistance against the heavily armed Spanish ships
was futile. The Spaniards permitted the
surrendered settlers to spend the night quietly on shore.
The next morning, Pellet sent a note to
the remaining settlers on shore. He
ordered them to give up and bring their wives, children, slaves and private
possessions to the settlement which the Spanish now controlled. He explained that the Spaniards just wanted
to interview them. He warned that if
they did not do so immediately, the Spaniards would send ashore 300 cow killers
or buccaneers to destroy them all, men, women and children. However, the majority of Anguillians appear
to have remained in hiding.
The Spaniards next sent an ex-slave,
Tony Croker, together with some of the surrendered settlers into the forest to
hunt for the rest of those that were hiding.
Several, both white and black, were found and surrendered
themselves. The Spaniards promised the
remaining hidden settlers that if they would bring in their slaves, they would
take nothing else, and would let them continue with the settlement. However, the survivors knew better than to
trust the promises of the Spanish and remained in hiding. Not capturing as many of the fugitives as
they hoped, the Spanish kept watch ashore to seize any more of the people who
might wander into the settlement. At the
end of the third day they gave up waiting and sailed away to Puerto Rico.
Edward Noy explained what happened
next. He arrived at Crab Island on board
his sloop at about 10:00 PM on the night of 27 December, four days after the
first arrival of the Spanish expedition, and anchored offshore. He hailed the settlement, expecting to find
all things as normal. No one replied to
his shout at first. He called out
several times to Peter Winkle whom he knew was among the settlers. Eventually Peter Simmons responded. When they were sure of each other’s identity,
Simmons called out to him that the island was cut off by the Spaniards and that
most of the inhabitants were taken away.
Noy then landed on the island and discovered that the settlement was ruined. He found between 40 and 50 survivors, both
white and black, whom he transported to the various islands they belonged to,
including St Thomas and Anguilla.
As we have seen, Abraham Howell did not
accompany those that followed William Pellet to Crab Island. He was in Anguilla, we recall, some days
earlier, on 21 December, when the same two Spanish vessels attacked the island
before going on to Crab Island. While
the Spaniards were rebuffed in their assault on Anguilla, they had no such
difficulty in dealing with the settlers on Crab. As Howell lamented in his 1689 letter to
Governor Johnson (see illus 4):[13]
Had it been manfully lost,
it would not have caused so much trouble to their friends, and grief too, nor
so much dishonour to the nation . . . There were sufficient men to maintain the
King’s interest and their own, but God gave them not the hands. Want of good conduct has occasioned this
disaster. Mr Edward Noy, who is the
bearer hereof, whom I did dispatch away to give notice to the Leeward Islands
has with all his power done his best, and has hazarded his life to save and
carry off those that were lost to other islands. Arriving there six or seven hours after the
Spaniards had gone, they made inquiries for my son who was there, declaring
they would not have sacrificed him, sending out parties to search for him, but
God did preserve him.
I humbly beg of your
Excellency to be kind to the said Noy in case he has any occasion, he having
done much on behalf of His Majesty’s subjects.
They have carried away from Crab Island, according to the best
computation, two hundred and fifty persons, men, women and children, black and
white. I humbly beg of your Excellency
that you will be pleased to furnish me with a barrel or two of powder and some
lead that you may not have the like relation of us. It is nothing other than the lack of supplies
that caused this disaster and so much dishonour to our nation.
4. Extract from Abraham Howell’s letter of 6 January 1689 to
Governor Johnson. CO.152/37. (UK National Archives®)
Governor Johnson had the last word on
the conduct of the Spaniards in their destruction of the settlement on Crab
Island. He wrote,[14]
Those of Crab Island were inexperienced men, and commanded by
a villainous coward (though he had formerly been otherwise esteemed) which
occasioned their disaster; yet I cannot but observe the perjuries and
stratagems made use of by their enemies to encompass their design, such as I am
sure an honest heathen, pagan, or Mahometan would be ashamed to put in
practice, but nothing better is to be expected of such sort of Spaniards as
people the West Indies . . .
Nine years later, the Scots were to
return to Crab Island, then firmly in Danish hands. After numerous attempts to buy the island
were unsuccessful, the Scots fleet in 1698, en route to the doomed Scots
settlement of Darien in Panama, made landfall on Crab and took possession of it
in the name of the ‘Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies’. Scots sovereignty over the island proved
short-lived, however, as a Danish ship arrived shortly after the Scots fleet
departed and reclaimed the island in the name of the King of Denmark.
From Governor Hamilton writing later,
we learn that the Spaniards took the prisoners to Santo Domingo.[15] They were kept there for several months
before they were released. While in
captivity, he reported, they were treated as slaves by the Spaniards. They were, as he described it, put to all the
hardships that slaves usually underwent at that time. In 1689, Sir Francis Watson, commanding the
Leeward Islands naval station, sent HMS Drake to bring the prisoners
back from Santo Domingo. We do not know
how many of them survived and returned to the Leeward Islands.
With conditions in Anguilla
deteriorating during the Nine Years War (1689-1697), Anguillians continued to emigrate
in numbers to the Virgin Islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda, St Croix and St
Thomas. Captain Thomas Southey recorded
for the year 1694 that at about this time some Englishmen with their families
removed from Anguilla to the Virgin Islands where they developed considerable
estates. As in Anguilla, government in
Tortola was at first quite informal.
They nominated their own deputy governor and his Council from among
themselves. We saw they did the same
thing when they landed on Crab Island.
Despite all the tragic outcomes, the
lure of Crab remained. So long as
Abraham Howell was alive, he repeatedly brought pressure on the Governor in Chief
to permit him and his fellow Anguillians to settle on Crab Island. If permission to occupy Crab Island was not
forthcoming, the desperate and starving Anguillians had alternatives available
to them in the Virgin Islands. Those who
left Anguilla and emigrated to St Croix and St Thomas did so illegally, as they
became Danish subjects. Those who
shipped out to Tortola and Virgin Gorda needed no permission to do so. Those islands were British, so that no
consent was required.
In the following Chapter we will look
at the final effort in 1717 of this indomitable old man, Abraham Howell, in the
closing years of the long and terrible drought, to move his people to the greener
pastures of Crab Island.
Next:
Chapter 10 – Crab
Island Revisited [Part 1]
[4] CO.1/58, No 126, folio 370: Stapleton to
the Committee with a List of the Deputy Governors of the Leeward Islands.
[5] George Suckling, An Historical Account
of the Virgin Islands in the West Indies (London, 1780).
[6] Charles de Rochefort, Histoire
Naturelle et Morale des Isles Antilles de L’Amerique (1658).
[9] Calendars of State Papers: Governor
Esmit’s Protest.
[10] Chapter 6: War and the Settlers.
[11] The
name Manning Rogers crops up in other early Anguillian and Tortolan deeds. It
is likely that he was one of the early Anguillian settlers of Tortola.
[12] All of which are enclosed with Johnson’s
dispatch No 5 of 8 January 1689.
[13] CO.152/37, No 5, folio 348, enclosure 6:
Howell to Johnson on 6 January 1689.
[14] CO.152/37, dispatch No 5, folio 338:
Johnson to the Committee on 20 April 1689.
[15] CO.152/11, No 6: Hamilton to the Committee
on 10 April 1716.
