I am not a historian. I am by profession a barrister and solicitor
of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in private practice, first in St Kitts
from 1971 and then in Anguilla from 1981. I was born in St Kitts in 1946, the son of
Arthur Donaldson Mitchell born in St Vincent of Grenadian parents and Murielle,
nee Owen, of Molyneux, St Kitts, the daughter of the late Albert Elliot Owen of
North Hill, Anguilla, and his wife Elise, nee Uddenberg, of St Kitts. I received my secondary schooling at the Roman
Catholic Benedictine boarding school of Mount St. Benedict in Trinidad. In 1964 I went to London where I completed my
secondary schooling and later went on to study law at the Inns of Court School
of Law as a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. I returned to the West Indies in 1971 to do my
pupillage in St Kitts with my uncle, Frank Henville OBE, QC. I first hung out my shingle in Basseterre in
early 1972 and began my practice of law as barrister and solicitor of the West
Indies Associated States Supreme Court.
In 1976, at the invitation of the
Government of Anguilla, I gave up my private practice in St Kitts and came to
Anguilla with my wife Margaret on a four-year contract as Magistrate of
Anguilla and Registrar of the Supreme Court. As the only lawyer, other than the Attorney
General, working for the Government, my duties took an interesting number of
turns. The Magistrate's Court, it is
true, seldom took more than a half day each week. The Judge, for whom the Magistrate clerked as
Registrar, came on circuit twice a year for no more than four weeks at a time. Besides being the Magistrate and Registrar of
the Supreme Court, other duties included being the
Coroner; Registrar General of Births Deaths and Marriages; Registrar of
Companies, Deeds, Insurance, Trade Marks,
Patents, Co-operative Societies, Credit Unions, Friendly Societies, Newspapers,
Trades Unions; Secretary to the Medical Board; and Archivist.
During 1977 and 1978 our office was called
on to assist the Attorney General with the revision of the Laws of Anguilla
inherited from the previous relationship with the Associated State of St Kitts,
Nevis and Anguilla, from which Anguilla successfully unilaterally seceded by
force of arms in 1967. With the help of
the Registry staff of Mary Richardson and Marjorie Connor, we also set up the
first Registers of Companies and Insurances and Trade Marks, and sorted out the
post-Revolutionary registry files from the cardboard boxes and shelves where
they lay in untidy heaps. Until 1977,
for example, companies were registered by placing the documents in a box under
a table. With Anguilla beginning to
develop as a tax haven, several hundred companies needed to be sorted out,
numbered, registered and filed away in suitable metal filing cabinets, which we
acquired for the purpose.
During this work in the Registry, I came
across a bundle, perhaps six inches thick, wrapped in brown paper and tied with
string and lying in the back of the Registry vault. When I opened it I saw that it was made up of
a large number of very old, frayed and disintegrating pages. As I turned the first page over, I felt how
brittle and fragile it was. A piece of
it fell off. I read the page with
difficulty. The spelling and punctuation
were seventeenth century. Parts of the
top of the page and bits of the right-hand margin were missing. It was a copy of a 1673 patent from deputy
governor Abraham Howell to Ensign Thomas Romney of a piece of land in Blowing
Point. I was interested and determined
to read every page in the bundle. I was
certain this was an archival treasure undiscovered for a hundred years. I did not yet know that the Baker Report of
1965 listed this bundle as "Court
Records, Kings Bench and Common Pleas, Vice-Admiralty, etc, Council Minutes,
Deeds, etc, c.1740-80 (1 bundle) (fragmented)," nor that Miss Kathleen
Manchester and Dr SB Jones relied on it for their historical works on Anguilla.
At that time, I was ignorant of the
techniques for preservation of archives.
I was aware from touching the first page that the very act of turning
the page to read the other side would likely result in damage to the sheet of
paper. There were no micro-film
facilities on the island. I needed to do
something to preserve the contents of the bundle, while at the same time
satisfying my need to read the pages. The
solution I settled on was to obtain from Accountant-General Ralph Hodge at the
Treasury four large hard-cover notebooks. Onto the first page of the first volume I
wrote out in long hand exactly what I read on the first page of the bundle. I carefully turned the fragile page over, and
on the next page of the notebook I wrote what I saw on the reverse. I continued in this way for some 927 pages. I copied the spelling and punctuation as
accurately as I could. Where words were
missing, I marked a space between square brackets thus: [ . . . ]. Where the missing words seemed obvious, I
wrote them in between the same square brackets so that it would be clear that I
was supplying the missing words. This
exercise took concentration and patience and nearly a year of time, but
eventually it was all done.
To my disappointment, there was not a
single document in the bundle dating back to an earlier period of the island's
history than that first one that started me off. I placed the bundle of old pages back in its
original brown paper wrapping and tied it firmly with string between two hard
board covers and marked it "Fragile.
Not to be opened" and placed
again at the back of the vault. This
work is mainly the product of the notes I made in those four ledgers that Ralph
Hodge gave me.
The oldest of the deeds and patents for
land I found in the bundle are not themselves the originals. They are copies, or perhaps copies of copies,
made by the Clerks to the Council during the period 1750 to 1780, when
litigants submitted their deeds in evidence during disputes being heard before
the island Council. The copies were made
as part of the taking of evidence during these trials of land and boundary
disputes. Errors may have crept in
during these repeated copyings over such a long period. However, that bundle, and the copy of it I
made in the four note books, makes up the only archival material that we know
of located in Anguilla shedding light on the earliest period of Anguilla's
history.
In subsequent years I collected additional
material when I visited the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens in London. There I examined the Colonial Office records
and took many copies. The Colonial
Office documents provided additional material for the text and helped me to
understand the background against which the Anguilla archives must be read to
be properly understood. I was also helped
by the many old volumes on the Caribbean that I read at the magnificent library
at the Royal Commonwealth Society in Northumberland Avenue, where I stayed when
I visited London. Gina Douglas at the
Linnean Society produced copies of geological, zoological and botanical works
on the island, some written over a hundred years ago.
Nat Hodge at Radio Anguilla is responsible
for this work being started back in 1978. He was frequently at the Court House seeking
news items for the government radio station and his then recently started
Government Information Service (GIS) Bulletin. He sometimes met me working at transcribing
the fading and tattered sheets of the archives.
He sometimes helped as I tried to put together the jig-saw bits of
disintegrating pages. It was at his
request that the following chapters were first written, and published chapter
by chapter in the GIS. It was this form
of publication that determined the original chapter lengths and the general
format of the text. For this new
publication, I have corrected several errors that have come to my attention
since then and added further material I later discovered.
Of the hundreds of decisions of the Council
that have survived, only samples are reproduced, to give the flavour of the
time. I have tried to limit the
documents quoted to those that give an insight of this earliest period, 1650
the year of the island's first colonial settlement to 1776 the year of the
Declaration of American Independence. A
more comprehensive history, including the modern period, must wait for a
professional historian.
These chapters were first written on
Government time. For that reason, I have
transferred the copyright to the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society
in the hope that it will one day find a publisher and sell many copies to help
raise the funds that the Society will need to establish the Museum that will
serve to preserve the archives which started it all off.
Most of the illustrations I have selected
for the work I have taken off the internet, and I believe they are all out of
copyright. I must thank Penny Slinger,
premier artist of the Amerindians of Anguilla, for giving permission for her
paintings to be used to illustrate the Chapter dealing with them. I also thank the British National Archives
for permission to use extracts of the documents relating to Anguilla as
illustrations. If there is any other
illustration that I should acknowledge or seek permission to use, I shall be
happy to do so.
Don Mitchell
Chambers
Anguilla
1978 1st edition [published by the GIS of Anguilla]
Revised 1990
Revised 6 July 2017
Revised August 2019 6th edition [published on my blog only]
Next: Chapter 1: The
Geology and Botany of Anguilla
