The period before the American Revolution
saw several efforts to persuade the people of Anguilla to move to different
locations. We shall deal with them
separately below. So far as the records
permit, we shall use the various official invitations to the Anguillians to
emigrate as a framework for looking at the conditions of life and the struggles
of the second and third generations of Anguillians.
Antigua
It will be recalled that after the 1689
evacuation to Antigua of the people of Anguilla by Lieutenant Edward Thorne,
Governor Christopher Codrington Sr attempted in vain to persuade the
Anguillians to abandon their homes and to resettle in Antigua.[1] We learn something about his scheme because
Codrington was severely criticized by the planters of Nevis, and he wrote at
length to the Committee explaining his intentions. It is that exchange of correspondence,
preserved in the Colonial Office records in the British National Archives in
London that we must rely on. The
Nevisians, he wrote, were jealous of Antigua as they wanted the Anguillians to
work on their own sugar estates.
While Codrington and the Nevisians
wrangled over which one was more entitled to the refugees from Anguilla, most
of the Anguillians quietly returned from Antigua to their island, and the impoverished
settlement of Anguilla continued to grow.
Developments in the early part of the eighteenth century were,
therefore, all part of the continuing saga over the survival of the settlement. Nothing in this respect changed with the
birth of the new century.
After the death of
his father, Governor Christopher Codrington Jr arrived in Antigua in 1701 and assumed
the government of the Leeward Islands.
He continued his father's policy of attempting to resettle the
Anguillians in Antigua. He characterised
them as a thorn in the side of the Government of the Leeward Islands, and a
drain on the revenue.[2] He devised a scheme to tax the undeveloped
land of large landowners in Antigua. He
persuaded the Assembly in Antigua to pass the appropriate law. His hope was that the tax would prove so
burdensome that the owners would willingly part with some of the land that they
were not using. These recovered areas of
land he proposed to dole out in parcels of five or ten acres to small farmers
from Anguilla and Virgin Gorda. He hoped
by this measure to draw off a great many of the inhabitants of those two
islands, whom he considered were perfect outlaws.
There is no record whether this tax
measure imposed on the Antiguan landowners in fact resulted in any land being
made available to any planter from Anguilla.
If any Anguillians did take up the offer, it was certainly not in large
numbers. The census of Antigua taken in
1753 shows only one or two members of each of the Welch, Roberts, Carty, Gibbons,
Richardson and Coakley families living there.
Deputy governor George Leonard and his family were Quakers. His family, which held a cotton estate in
Antigua during the 1720’s, appear to have all departed thirty years later. This was the period when the Quakers of
Antigua and Anguilla were flocking to the Quaker colony of Tortola, so it is
fair to conclude that is where George Leonard’s family ended up.
The Windward Side of St Kitts
With the outbreak of Queen Ann’s War in
1702, the need to strengthen the major islands of the colony, such as Antigua
and St Kitts, against French attacks grew urgent. The colonial authorities in Antigua
considered the males of Anguilla and Virgin Gorda as so many potential militia
members wasted on those unimportant islands.
The St Kitts planters joined in looking on the Anguillians as cheap
labour wasted on their scruffy and unproductive island. In 1702, the Council of St Kitts learned that
Monsieur de la Gennes, the commander of the French forces in their part of St
Kitts, had sent for the French forces from St Martin and St Barts to reinforce
him. The St Kitts Council, therefore,
petitioned Governor Codrington expressing their fear that the French were about
to attack the island.[3] They requested that the people of Anguilla
and Virgin Gorda should be ordered to remove to St Kitts. They offered to send the necessary sloops to
bring over the Anguillians to settle the windward side of St Kitts. Codrington Jr was able, however, to drive the
French from St Kitts in 1702, almost without firing a shot.
Nothing more is heard of this plan to use
the Anguillians to strengthen the settlement on the windward side of St
Kitts. Edward Lake’s 1704 patent from
Codrington refers specifically to the need to give encouragement to the
settlement of Anguilla by granting land at peppercorn rents.[4] This suggests that the planters of St Kitts were
not successful in their effort to have the Anguillians removed to St Kitts to
work on their plantations.
Barbuda
In 1706, Colonel Daniel Parke of Virginia
was appointed Governor-in-Chief of the colony of the Leeward Islands, on
Governor Codrington’s transfer to Tobago.
He too entertained designs on the persons of the Anguillians. He also considered the Codrington family had
no right title to the island of Barbuda.
He conducted a long-running battle with them. At one time, he toyed with the idea of
re-settling the Anguillians in it. He
put this suggestion forward to the Privy Council as one of his justifications
for wanting to confiscate Barbuda.[5]
Daniel Parke was not a popular man. There were several complaints against him
made to the authorities in London. These
complaints related mainly to his avariciousness and his sexual harassment of
the wives of the Antiguan merchants and planters. In 1709, he replied to 22 Articles of
Complaint made against him by the Antiguan planters. He wrote to the Council that he hoped to
bring up from Anguilla, Virgin Gorda and Tortola between 150 and 200 families
to settle on Barbuda. At present, he
wrote, those families were lost to the Crown of England. What little cotton they made, they sold to
the Danes. He claimed that these Anguillian
families were formerly driven off from Antigua and St Kitts by the large sugar
planters forcing them off their land. As
they led a very hard life in Anguilla and the Virgin Islands, he was sure that
they would be glad to come and settle on Barbuda. There, he theorised, they would be much
better off, raising horses, cattle and corn for sale in Antigua, and cotton for
export to Britain.
Before Parke could take any steps to carry
out his plan for the re-settlement of the Anguillians on Barbuda, he was killed
in 1710 by an angry Antiguan mob from the business and planter community. That was the last that was heard of his Barbuda
project. The life he described of these,
the second generation of Anguillians, was one of extreme deprivation. Even allowing for the fact that he had a
reason to exaggerate, in that he was arguing to save his career, it is certain
that by the early eighteenth century, conditions in Anguilla were severe, and that
life on Anguilla was punishing. It was
to continue so until the mid-1720s when the long drought at last broke.
The French Lands on St Kitts
The beginning of the eighteenth century in
the Caribbean saw the accession to the throne of Queen Anne, 1702-1714. Her reign was marked by the War of the
Spanish Succession, 1702-1713, referred to locally as Queen Anne’s War. During this war, insignificant Anguilla
escaped invasion, unlike Nevis, St Kitts, Antigua and Montserrat, the four
major islands in the Colony of the Leeward Islands. Thanks to Marlborough's successes in the
European war theatre, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 saw the British in a strong
position. They could refuse to hand back
certain war-time conquests, including the French part of St Kitts. In this treaty, the French ceded permanently to
the British their half of that island, thus ending eighty years of troubled
joint occupation.
For a while, it seemed that the
Anguillians might be settled en bloc on a part of these St Kitts lands. General Walter Hamilton was appointed
Governor-in-Chief in 1715. Hamilton was
to have a greater impact on Anguilla's destiny than any previous
Governor-in-Chief. He was an intelligent
and dynamic administrator. During the
five years he held office, he bombarded the 'home government' with information
about his Colony of the Leeward Islands and his ideas for its development. In the year 1716, he mooted for the first
time his plan for resettling the Anguillians on the conquered French lands.
In his April 1716 dispatch, Hamilton
included a petition from Abraham Howell, on whom he conferred the honourary
title of 'Governor of Anguilla', and which we will look at in more detail in
the next Chapter.[6] Howell had ceased being deputy Governor of
Anguilla since 1689, and George Leonard was supposed to be the replacement
deputy Governor. But Leonard spent most
of his time in Antigua and Howell was left to represent the interests of the
Anguillians. Howell’s petition asked him
to allow the Anguillians to settle St Croix.
Governor Hamilton had a better idea.
He urged the Committee that instead they be encouraged by granting them
small plantations in the former French part of St Kitts. This, he said, would be vastly to the benefit
of the British Crown and the strengthening of the chief British islands of the
Leewards. He repeated the proposal in
almost identical terms in October of the same year.[7] Not hearing anything from the Committee, he
reminded them again in a dispatch of July 1717, written at Antigua, his home
island.[8] From a colonial point of view, he was right
to be concerned. Settlement of British
citizens in St Croix would mean that they would be lost to the British and
become Danish citizens. While the
Anguillians remained in Anguilla, it was always possible to call the men up and
force them to join an Antiguan or a St Kitts militia force.
The Privy Council took up with the Lords
Commissioners of the Treasury the matter of resettling the Anguillians on the
French Lands in St Kitts. In October
1717, they urged the Treasury to accept Governor Hamilton's suggestion.[9] They recommended that about 3,000 acres
should be reserved to be distributed without any payment, in small plantations
of from eight to ten acres each, for the encouragement of the poor families of
the Leeward Islands to resettle there to improve the defence of the
island. They urged that Governor Hamilton
be authorised to promise the inhabitants of Anguilla that they would be given
portions of the land.
That same month, the Committee wrote back
to Governor Hamilton.[10] They were as yet unaware that half the
population of Anguilla had already, in desperation, gone off under the
leadership of Abraham Howell in their third abortive attempt to settle on Crab
Island.[11] The Committee considered what he wrote about
the poor inhabitants of Anguilla. They explained
to him that the Lords of the Treasury were responsible for the disposal of the
French lands in St Kitts. They had recommended
to the Treasury that as many of the Anguillians as could be persuaded to settle
in St Kitts be given small plantations, after the poor inhabitants of St Kitts were
provided for. They warned the Governor
that he would do well to encourage the people of Anguilla to remain where they
were. He was to endeavour as much as
possible to prevent any of them from removing to any foreign settlement. The
Anguillians must await His Majesty's decision on the method and manner of the
disposal of the former French lands in St Kitts. It was too late. All the Anguillians who considered moving
from Anguilla to greener pastures had already left for Crab Island with Abraham
Howell.
In the end, few Anguillians are recorded
as acquiring parcels of this land in St Kitts.
For better or for worse, they escaped the Council's closing strictures
to the Governor, and took their fate into their own hands. As we have seen, in early August 1717, unable
to plant their lands because of the severe drought which persisted for decades,
and suffering from starvation and want, half of the Anguillian men emigrated
under the leadership of Abraham Howell to Crab Island.
On hearing of this exodus to Crab Island,
Hamilton visited Anguilla on 11 November 1717.
In his dispatch to London concerning his visit, he described the island,
as we have seen, as being so worn out that the inhabitants could hardly feed
their families from it.[12] He repeated the lament that the people of
Anguilla, Virgin Gorda and Tortola were not yet granted land out of the French
half of St Kitts, which would greatly strengthen the population of the chief
islands and increase the revenue. As it
was, they were, in his view, altogether useless as contributors to the revenue.
As more and more Anguillians emigrated to
Tortola and St Croix, Governor Hamilton continued to urge that land in the
French part of St Kitts be allocated to the Anguillians. In July 1719, he wrote warning that they were
inclined to remove to the other smaller islands of the Virgins for want of land
in better places.[13] He pleaded that he could not prevent this
continuing emigration to the Dutch and Danish islands unless the Council would
allow him to distribute some of the lands in the French part of St Kitts among
them. He concluded that the Anguillians
must desert that island. It was so
barren that it would not grow even ‘indian provisions’, ie, corn and cassava,
sufficient to feed them. Hamilton was to
continue to pursue this idea for several more years.
It was not until 19 November that the
Committee in London received Governor Hamilton’s dispatch of 26 August
concerning the exodus to Crab. William Popple, the Secretary to the
Committee, wrote to Charles Stanhope,
the Secretary to the Treasury, setting out the known facts.[14] He enquired laconically, with no apparent
appreciation of the urgency of the situation in Anguilla, whether there was any
hope that General Hamilton might be able to suggest to the Anguillians that
they would be taken care of when the French part of St Kitts was disposed
of. The Treasury does not appear to have
responded.
As early as 1716, short-term grants were
being made of tracts of land in the French part of St Kitts. In April 1716, Governor Hamilton dispatched
an ‘Account’ of these early grants.[15] This showed only two planters with Anguillian
connections holding any part of the French Lands. They were Philip Driscall with twenty-four
acres, and Peter Edney with seventy acres, thirty-three slaves and five
horses. Their names appear in the early
lists of inhabitants of Anguilla and Crab Island. It would not appear that any other
Anguillians were able to acquire holdings in the French Lands. Hamilton died in 1720. The pressure on the Lords of the Treasury to
apportion some of the French Lands in St Kitts to the Anguillians eased.
After William Popple's letter to Charles
Stanhope of 19 November 1719, the correspondence concerning the proposal
to offer the Anguillians land in St Kitts comes to an end. There is no indication in the Colonial Office
records that the Lords of the Treasury ever decided, even in principle, to
allocate land in St Kitts to the Anguillians.
The idea was most likely scrapped on the death of its most ardent
advocate, Governor Hamilton, and his replacement in 1720 by Viscount Lowther. John Hart, who followed Lowther in 1721, did
not take up the proposal either. Nothing
more is heard of the idea.
The land in the French part of St Kitts
was eventually auctioned off in large parcels, far beyond the price of
Anguillian small farmers, to the major sugar planters of St Kitts. In any event, the long drought in Anguilla
that caused the emigrations of 1688 and 1717 appears to have ended by
1725. With adequate rainfall to maintain
the subsistence agriculture that was all that the stony soil of Anguilla could
manage, the pressure from the Anguillians to allow them to emigrate lessened.
During the eighteenth century, Anguilla
was not considered a separate colony in the Leeward Islands. It was informally classed as one of the
Virgin Islands. Family relations
continued to be maintained with St Kitts, from where the original settlers arrived
in 1650. We see evidence of this in Joan
Richardson’s 1753 will.[16] She was the widow of the late deputy
governor, John Richardson. From her will, we learn that she removed from
Anguilla to St Kitts sometime after the death of her husband in 1741. Her maiden name was Edney, so that she was possibly
the sister, or at least a relative, of Peter Edney mentioned above. She probably moved back to St Kitts to live
with her daughter and principal beneficiary, Dorcas Scanlon. All the witnesses of her will are Kittitian
names of the period. One of them was Anthony
Sommersall who swore the affidavit of due execution of the will in Anguilla in
1754, after her death. Throughout our
period Anguillians continued to maintain and develop relationships not only
with St Kitts and Tortola but also with French St Martin and St Croix. The small-scale internationalist mindset
these relationships fostered continues to affect the Anguillian psyche to this
day.
The Bahamas
We have seen in the earlier chapter on
piracy that, towards the end of 1718, Governor Woodes Rogers of Nassau
attempted to entice the Anguillians away to his colony.[17] In July 1719, there was talk in Anguilla of
removing wholesale to the Bahamas. The
drought was still severe and was not to break until about 1725. Numbers of small homesteaders were giving up
and moving away from the island. As
Governor Hamilton reported in his dispatch of 15 July 1719, there were about
1,700 people in Anguilla.[18] He described them as industrious and
careful. He said he believed that they
would be of excellent use if they could be settled on the other main islands of
the Leewards. He also noted that there
were over 100 effective fighting men amongst them, meaning they could prove
very useful for the Leeward Islands militia in time of war, if they were not
lost to far away islands. He regretted
that, because of the delay in granting them land in the French part of St
Kitts, they were now talking of removing to the Bahamas. He need not have been concerned. There is no evidence that any Anguillian
families took up Governor Rogers’ offer to relocate to the Bahamas.
Jamaica
Jamaica was captured from Spain by Admiral
William Penn and General Robert Venables in May 1655. Roughly 5,000 civilians and soldiers joined
the fleet at Barbados and St Kitts. There
may well have been some Anguillians among them, but there is no certainty. The following year, some 1,500 more departed
from Nevis bound for Jamaica. Again,
there may have been Anguillians amongst them.
The governor of Jamaica was hungry for English settlers to develop the
large areas of land that were available.
The principal attraction of Jamaica was the offer of land. This was an opportunity to grow crops that
could sustain a family to a greater extent than the precarious living offered
by tobacco, cotton and the other minor staples available in Anguilla. Another incentive was the growth of the sugar
boom in the Leeward Islands. Small
farmers were squeezed out by the consolidation of small farms into sugar
plantations. Many of these small land
holders moved on to Jamaica or the mainland colonies in search of a better future.
In 1721, Governor Nicholas Lawes of
Jamaica sent notices to Anguilla and others of the Virgin Islands promising
land and offering encouragement to those that wished to emigrate. Hamilton in Antigua expressed his annoyance
at this attempt to poach his citizens to the Committee in London.[19] He wrote that he was struggling to keep up
numbers in his colony as a protection from the French and Spanish forces. Governor Lawes, he complained, wrote a letter
which was being handed about in a clandestine way in all parts of the Leeward
Islands. The letter provided
encouragement and offers of land to all persons who would come and settle on
Jamaica. Lawes proposed to the people of
Anguilla that if they moved with all their possessions to Jamaica, they would
have much better land, a greater quantity of it, and be secure from the Spanish
and other enemies. The result of
Hamilton’s complaint was a firm memorandum to Lawes from the Committee to the
Treasury which was responsible for the capture of Jamaica.[20]
However, there is a suspicious dip in the
population figures for Anguilla immediately after 1720.[21] In that year, Governor Hamilton recorded the
population of Anguilla and the other Leeward Islands (see Illus 1).[22] There were in Anguilla, he reported, 133
white men, some 121 of them fit to bear arms.
The other 13 were old or infirm.
In addition, there were 164 white women, 251 white children, and 879
black people. This adds up to 548 whites
and 879 blacks or a total population of 1,427.
Four years later Governor Hart supplies
the Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations with another estimate of the
population of the Leeward Islands (see illus 2).[23] This time, he gives the population of Anguilla
as being 360 whites, of whom only 85 were fit for the militia, and 900 blacks,
to a total of 1,260, down from 1,427 (see illus 3). This means that during the short period of
1720 to 1724, at the end of the forty-year drought, the population decreased
from 1,427 to 1,260, or by over 150 persons.
The evidence is that the harsh climatic conditions were forcing Anguillians
to leave for other colonies with better prospects. The periodic emptying of the island in times
of severe stress continues to the present day to be part of the dynamic that
affects Anguillians. The early twentieth
century saw hundreds of young people leaving for Cuba and the Dominican
Republic to find desperately needed work in the cane fields. The oil refineries of Trinidad, Aruba and
Curacao mopped up scores of otherwise unemployed young men. During the Second World War hundreds more were
lured to the USA by offers of citizenship on joining the armed forces, helping
to establish Perth Amboy, New Jersey, as the US capital of Anguilla. Hundreds more left after the war for the
United Kingdom mainly settling in Slough, Bucks, as part of the Windrush
Generation called on to work the factories that were short of local
labour.
1. Hamilton: List of the inhabitants of the Leeward Islands
on 18 July 1720. (UK National Archives®)
The Anguillians of the 1720s and 30s moved
in their sloops and schooners freely to and from the others of the Virgin
Islands, not caring whether they were British, Dutch or Danish. This is evidenced by the frequent complaints
from Antigua to London about them both settling in, and illegally trading with,
the neighbouring Dutch and Danish islands.
2. Hart's estimate of the population. Hart to the Committee on 10 July 1724.
CO.152/14. (UK National Archives®)
The preferred destinations of emigrating
Anguillians continued to be French St Martin and Danish St Croix. We will look at the Anguillian settlement of
St Croix in a later chapter.[24] As for Governor Lawes’ invitation, there is
no record of any of them moving to Jamaica.
3. Hamilton’s estimate of the
militia. CO.152/14. (UK National Archives®)
British Guiana
In the Anguilla of today, there is no oral history or other recollection
of any of the attempts described above to relocate our ancestors to Antigua, St
Kitts or the Bahamas as described above.
There is no folklore about Crab Island, or the settlement of St Croix
and Tortola. There is, however, an altogether
fictitious story that is regularly heard on the radio, and at gatherings of
Anguillians who discuss Anguilla’s struggle to become self-sufficient and
self-governing. That story is the supposed
epic tale of the refusal of our ancestral Anguillians, newly freed from slavery
in 1834, to be forcibly removed against their will by the British Government from
Anguilla and ‘deported’ to the new colony of British Guiana. We are assured of this fact by persons who
appear to know that the colonial authorities put pressure on our forefathers to
settle Guiana. They were told they must
leave the drought-stricken and infertile land of Anguilla and emigrate to the
lush and welcoming fields of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo. However, so the story goes, the stalwart
Anguillians stoutly resisted, refused to be moved, and clung patriotically to
their beloved ‘Rock’. As a result, we
are informed, the British were blocked in their plan to strip Anguilla of its
black ‘indigenous’ inhabitants and to re-populate the island with the white
unemployed and homeless of Britain.
As usual, this myth springs from a genuine historical event. The records show that, after the
Apprenticeship Period ended slavery in Anguilla in 1838, some three boatloads
of newly freed Anguillians boarded ships and sailed to British Guiana. The correspondence between Sir William
Colebrooke, Governor of the Leeward Islands, and Lord John Russell, the
Secretary of State in London, reveals that Anguillians were lured by promises
of free land, to be given to them if they would help to populate the supposedly
uninhabited interior of Guiana.[25] Far from encouraging the Anguillians to leave
their island, the colonial government was concerned at the Guianese attempt to
rob the Leeward Islands of much needed, newly-freed labour. Any mass-emigration of the Anguillians to any
far-away land would deprive the Leeward Islands of a supply of men who could be
enlisted into the militia in time of war.
The correspondence shows Governor in Antigua begging the Secretary of
State to register a protest with the Governor of British Guiana, and to demand
that he stop stealing Leeward Islands citizens.
And so it was with much relief that, some three years after they
departed, the majority of the emigrated Anguillians returned to their island,
disenchanted with the snake-infested conditions they met in the jungles of
Guiana.
None of the official efforts by the Governor in Antigua to move the
Anguillians to Antigua or to St Kitts succeeded. The attempts by the Governors of Jamaica and
the Bahamas to lure away the Anguillians to their colonies came to
nothing. The initiatives to emigrate en masse to St Croix, Tortola, Crab
Island and Guiana came from the Anguillians themselves. Other than St Croix and Tortola, most of
these efforts at bettering themselves were frustrated. The result was that the Anguillians in main
part remained clinging to the Rock.
Next: Chapter 14 - The
Third and Fourth Generations [Part 1]
[1] Chapter 6: War and the Settlers.
[11] See Chapter 10: Crab Island Revisited.
[15] CO.152/11, No 6: Hamilton to the Committee on 10 April
1716, enclosure No 3: An Account of the Grants of Land to the French Part of
St Christopher.
[17] Chapter 8: Pirates.
[18] CO.152/12/4: Hamilton to the Committee on
15 July 1719.
[19] CO.152/13: Hamilton to Popple on 19 May
1720.
[20] CO 153/14, folio 1: William Popple, Secretary to the
Committee, to William Lowther, Secretary to the Treasury, on 2 August 1721.
[21] Chapter 18: Sugar Arrives.
[24] See Chapter 15: The Settlement of St
Croix.
[25] CO.239/56, Despatch No 61/71 of 28 November
1838. Sir William Colebrooke, Governor of the Leeward Islands, to Lord John Russel,
Secretary of State.
CO.239/55,
Despatch No 40/2040 of 10 July 1839: Colebrooke to Lord Russel.
CO.239/59,
Despatch No 34/1620 of 15 July 1840: Colebrooke to Lord Russel.
CO.239/59,
Despatch No 35/1624 of 18 July 1840: Colebrooke to Lord Russel.
CO.407/6, folio
184, 23 January 1840: Lord Russel to Colebrooke.
