A Historical Geography of the British Colonies (of the British Empire)

Preface

. The statistical parts of this book have mainly been written by Mr. Harris, of the Colonial Office, Secretary to the late Royal Commission to the West Indies, and he has also kindly revised the book throughout. My warm acknowledgements are due to him and also to other friends who have been good enough to give me the benefit of special local knowledge. C. P. LUCAS. September, 1890. CONTEN TS PAGE

Introduction

I

Section II. The West Indian Dependencies Ok Great Britain

Chap. I. European Colonisation in the West Indies . . 32 Chap. II. The Bahamas 75 Chap. III. Jamaica and its Dependencies . . • 90 Chap. IV. The Leeward Islands 133 Chap. V. Barbados 168 Chap. VI. The Windward Islatuis ..... 200 Chap. VII. Trinidad ana Tobago ...... 231 Chap. VIII. British Guiana 263 Chap. IX. British Honduras ...... 293

Section III

The Falkland Islands and South Georgia LIST OF MAPS AND DIAGRAMS. I . Map of the Atlantic (to illustrate European colonisation in America) .... Tojace Page i 2. Diagram to show the respective size of the Colonies mentioned in the book ... ,, ,, 2 3. Map of the Bermudas .....„,, 5 4- ,, ,, ,, West Indies and Central America . „ ,, 32 5. ,, ., Bahamas ...... » >• 75 6. ,, ,, Map of Jamaica . .... ,, „ 90 7. ,, „ Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Barbados ,, ,, 133 8. „ „ The Windward Islands and Tobago . ,, ,. 300 9. „ ,, Trinidad „ „ 231 10. , ,, British Guiana ..... ,, ,, 263 ii- ,, ,, British Honduras .... ,, „ 293 12. „ ,, The Falkland Islands and the Straits of Magellan „ To face -p.l Oxford. Uniieitrsity Pns BRITISH COLONIES. VOL. II.

INTRODUCTION.

. British colonisation began in America. In America it received outwardly its greatest check, when the United States declared and made good their independence. In America notwithstanding, at the present day, the area of British possessions is, owing to the vast extent of the Canadian Dominion, larger than in any other part of the globe. The following is a table of the American dependencies of Great Britain, showing the mode and date of acquisition in each case, the area and the population at the last (1881) Census. VOL. II. B COLONLES. 1 The Newfoundland Census was taken in 1SS4 not in 1S81 Name of dependency. How acquired. Date. Area in sq. miles. Population at last Census [1881]. 1. British N. America. 1. Newfoundland and Labrador . Settled. . . . 1583- 1623 42,200 ) 120,000 \ i93>I24l 1 4,211 \ 4.324>8l° 2.

Dominion of Canada. Conquered [Quebec]. 1759 3,47°>257 2. The Bermudas . . . Settled. . . . 1609-12 '9 I3.948 3. The West Indies. I. The Bahamas . . Settled [New Providence], Conquered . . 1666 4.465 43,521 ( Jamaica and The 2. < Caymans. ( Turks Islands . . 3. Leeward Islands. ( Antigua . a. < Barbuda . . . ( Redonda . . j St. Kitts . . . b. < Nevis .... ( Anguilla . . . e. Montserrat . d. Dominica . . 1655 4,282 584. l1° Settled .... 1678 169 4.732 ,, .... 1632 1661-2 108 62 34,32 1 643 }j t ,, .... j, .... j, .... 1623 1628 1650 1632 1761 68 5° 35 32 291 29.137 11,864 3,039 10,083 28,211 e. Virgin Islands . JJ .... Settled and[i76i] conquered. Conquered [Tortola]. Settled. . . . 1672 5« 5.287 4. Barbados .... 1624-5 166 171,860 5. Windward Islands. a. St. Lucia . . . b. St. Vincent . . c. Grenada . . .

Conquered . . Occupied . Conquered 1803 1762 23S '47 133 38,551 40,548 42,403 „ , ( Trinidad . . . j Tobago .... Settled and [1 S03] conquered. 1797 1S03 1.754 "5 I53,I28 18,051 7. British Guiana . . 8. British Honduras . Conquered . . Settled and [1 798] conquered. 110,000 252,186 179S 7.5^2 27,452 4. The Falkland Islands and South Georgia. Occupied [finally] !832-3 7.5oo 1,553 Total Area of the America! Total Population of ,, dependencies of ( Jreat Brit ain 3,769,7 6,o36,S, 1 1 sq. miles. 33- ,, J, ,, ,, Diaobam i. Showing tho area in square miles of tho colonies named as compared with Wales. DIAGRAM 2. Showing tho area in square miles of the colonies named as compared with the IhIc of Wight. Note. British Guiana is about the size of the United Kingdom. \Ttt pt,

INTRODUCTION.

. 3 Nearly all the dependencies enumerated in this list fall into two main groups, the North American and the West Indian. Two alone belong neither to the one nor to the other, viz. the Bermudas in the North Atlantic ocean, and the Falkland islands off the Straits of Magellan. Geography and History alike have drawn a distinct line between the North American and the West Indian dependencies. Though the former include the islands of New foundland, Prince Edward's Island, Cape Breton, Vancouver, and others, yet this group of possessions may be said to be a continental province. The West Indies, on the other hand, though they include tracts of the mainland in British Honduras and British Guiana, are on the whole a collection of island dependencies. In Canada and Newfoundland the drawbacks to colonisation have been ice and snow, in the West Indies they have been tropical heat and hurricanes.

In British North America colonists have come straight from the opposite shores of Europe to a similar if a colder climate, and, with the exception of a few aboriginal Indians, all the inhabitants are of European origin. The West Indies on the contrary, lie over against West Africa ; their tropical heat and tropical products called for a black population; and though the islands have contained European settlers from the beginnings of modern history, they have become in the main a home for the African negro, supplemented in later times to a certain extent by the Indian coolie. Two European nations only, the French and the Englis , have been directly concerned in Canadian settlement. On the West Indies, on the other hand, the stepping stones to the great Western continent, nearly every colonising nation has set its foot.

Here Spaniards, French, English, Dutch, and Danes have played a part and still retain a hold. Here the Swedes once owned an island, and the Portuguese on their way to Brazil are said to have intruded into the Spanish seas so far as to give Barbados its name. In the seventeenth and B HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE COLONLES. 4 eighteenth centuries most of the smaller islands were con stantly changing hands. In some, as St. Kitts, colonists from rival nations settled side by side ; and, wherever the buccaneers established themselves, they united adventurers of all nationalities against the power of Spain. There is however one point which all the American colonies of Great Britain, North American and West Indian alike, have in common. They are settlements and not mere dependencies. The heat of the West Indies has not prevented the British race from colonising the islands, and though the negro element has long been greatly superior in numbers to the white, the history of an island like Barbados shows that even in the tropics the connexion between Great Britain and America has been that of permanent settlement rather than of passing trade or of foreign rule.

Section 1 Historical and Geographi cal Interest ofthe Bermudas. Section I. THE BERMUDAS'. The smallest, one of the earliest, and the most 2 secluded of all the American dependencies of Great Britain, the Bermudas or Somers islands have an interest out of all proportion to their size and importance. Geography and history have made them a connecting link between the British colonies in North America and the British colonies in the West Indies. Their early story is full of romance, the history of their growth and development has much that is instructive in it. A point of call, a possession of a trading company, an emporium for pass ing traffic, a military and naval station, the home of a slave-holding community, a depot for convicts, and a colony in the fullest sense with representative institutions from the very first, this little group of coral islands only wanted native inhabitants to have been a miniature world, exhibiting every phase of colonisation and containing every kind of colonist.

The Bermudas were discovered at the beginning 3 of the 1 As the colony consists of a group of islands, the plural ' Bermudas ' seems more correct than the singular 'Bermuda.' 2 The Bermudas are farther from the mainland than the Falkland Islands. 3 The exact date is uncertain. See the Memorials of the Bermudas, by Sir J. H. Lefroy. sixteenth century by a Spaniard, Juan Bermudez, from whom L they take their first and best known name. His ship is said , 7" M to have been called La Garza (the Heron), and that name Discovery x andearliest also was for a short while borne by the group. notices of gome years later J the King of Spain received a proposal the islands. J * • _r l. from Ferdinando Camelo, a Portuguese and a native ot the Azores, for colonising the islands. The scheme, however, was apparently never carried out, although an inscription on the main island, containing the figures 1543, has been taken as evidence that Camelo took possession of it at that date.

Hurrying on to and from tropical America and the sunny West Indies, intent on the wonders of Mexico and the gold of Peru, the Spaniards were not likely to take heed of the insignificant islands, which lay in the middle of the stormy Atlantic, almost beyond their beat. They passed them by, as the Portuguese passed by Mauritius on their way to the spice islands of the East, their first discoverer, so the story goes, merely leaving on them a number of pigs for the benefit of after comers 2. Rock-bound, storm-beaten, and desolate, the group was styled by the Spanish sailors the ' isles of Devils,' though ' all the devils that haunted the woods were but herds of swine 3.' Ships on their way from Havana to the Azores and Spain steered north towards them to take advantage of the Gulf Stream and to avoid the easterly trade winds ; but they were warned to keep 1 Probably about the year 1527. 2 The Portuguese, in like manner, landed live stock at Mauritius, see vol. i. of this work, p. 163.

Bermudez is credited with having introduced the hogs, but they were apparently landed subsequently to the first discovery of the islands [see the Memorials of the Bermudas]. May found the descendants of these pigs ' so lean that you cannot eat them.' It is stated that the name Bermudas was falsely derived from an old Spanish word meaning ' black hogs.' 3 From a tract published in 1610, and entitled, A true Declaration of the estate of the colony in Virginia. It is quoted in the Memorials of the Bermudas. Section I sar away from the islands, and to shun their storms and reefs. Nor was it the Spaniards only who dreaded and had cause to dread the dangers of the Bermudas. In 1591 three trading ships were sent from London to the East under the command of James Lancaster. On their return voyage they found their way to the West Indies ; and at Hispaniola, at the end of 1593, Lancaster sent on one of his followers, Henry May, in a French ship bound for Europe and com manded by a captain named La Barbotiere.

The ship was wrecked on the shoals of the Bermudas ; May with about half of his companions remained on the islands for nearly five months, when they found their way to Newfoundland ; and on his return to England he published a short and simple account of the place where he had been so ' ill welcomed by the rocks V which is to be found in the pages of Hakluyt. To the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, one discoverer after another, whether they went to north or south, continued to bear ill-witness against the Bermudas. Writing in 1595 of his voyage to Guiana, Sir Walter Ralegh speaks of them as a ' hellish sea for thunder, lightning, and storms2'; Champlain, the great pioneer of French colonisation in Canada, who sighted them about 1600, has left a record of ' a mountainous island, which it is difficult to approach on account of the dangers that surround it 2 ' ; and when British colonisation in America began in sober earnest with the incorporation of trading companies, and the era of spasmodic discovery was followed by that of systematic settlement, the curtain rises on the ' still vex'd Bermoothes3' in shipwreck and storm. 1 From the Historye of the Bermudaes, attributed to Capt. John Smith, edited by Sir J. H. Lefroy for the Hakluyt Society. 2 Given in the Appendix to vol. ii. of the Memorials of the Bermudas. 3 From the Tempest, act i. sc. 2.

It is generally admitted that in I The I 'irginia Company and Sir G. Somers. Wreck of the Sea I 'enture. The Virginia Company * received its patent from James the First in 1606, and on New Year's day 1607 its first colonists were despatched to America. In 1609 the Com pany was re-organised, and nine ships were sent out under three of its most prominent members, Gates, Somers, and Newport. The second of the three, and the leading spirit, Sir George Somers, was the man after whom the Bermudas were called the Somers islands. Somers was well worthy to be the eponymous hero of a British colony. Like many other great English sailors, he was a West country man. born at or near Lyme Regis in Dorset. He had been trained in the wars with Spain. In his passionate daring2, his con stancy, and force of character, he was a typical representative of the race of Englishmen who made the reign of Elizabeth famous, and he carried on into the more prosaic seventeenth century the best and brightest qualities of the older generation.

The little fleet left Plymouth on the second of June, the three leaders sailing in the same ship, the Sea Venture. On or about the twenty-fifth of July a violent storm scattered the vessels. On the Sea Venture Sir George Somers alone of the company, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert years before, remained watchful and unmoved ; and, when all had been given up for lost, he sighted land at the Bermudas. The story of the storm and shipwreck reads curiously like the account of the tempest which cast St. Paul on Malta. The ship was wedged fast between two rocks3, and on the twenty-eighth of July all the company reached the land in writing this play, which was produced in 161 1, Shakespeare had in his mind the wreck of Sir G. Somers' ship on the Bermudas two years previously. See App. 2 to vol. ii. of the Memorials of the Bermudas. 1 For the Virginia Company and its connexion with the Bermudas, see Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i. 2 See what is said of Sir G. Somers in Fuller's Worthies of England, among the Worthies of Dorsetshire. 3 One of the shoals off St. George's island is still known as Sea Venture Flat.

Section I, Death of Sir G. Somers. safety. There they stayed till the tenth of May following ', finding the islands better than their repute ; and finally, having built two ships, they set sail and reached Virginia2. As far as their own comfort was concerned, they had better have remained at the much maligned Bermudas. They sound the Virginian colony nearly starved out, ' in much distress of victual, so that the overplus of their Sommer islands store relieved many and saved some lives '.' The abandonment of the colony was only prevented by the arrival of fresh ships and a new governor from England ; and, towards the end of June, Somers undertook to fetch food from the Bermudas, ' the most plentiful place that ever I came to for fish, hogs, and fowl *.' He reached the islands in safety, but reached them only to die.

His body was embalmed and carried to England by his com panions, under the command of his nephew Captain Matthew Somers, and laid to rest at Whitchurch in his native county ; but his heart is said to have been interred in Bermudian soil 5, where the town of St. George now stands, and that name with those of Somers islands and Somerset (Somers seat) have perpetuated his memory in the lonely land where he died. 1 During their stay a boy and girl were bom, and were christened respectively, with some want of invention, Bermudas and Bermuda. 2 There are the fullest authorities for this celebrated voyage. Sir G. Somers' own report, and two fuller accounts by men who accom panied him, are given in the Memorials of the Bermudas. 3 F'rom the Historye of the Bermudaes. * From Sir G. Somers' report to the Earl of Salisbury, referred to in the note above.

It is dated Jamestown, the twentieth of June, whereas he is said to have sailed for the Bermudas on the nineteenth. 5 A few years later, in 1620, Governor Butler put the following inscription over the spot : — 'In the year 161 1 Noble Sir George Summers went hence to heaven. Whose well-tried worth that held him still imploid Gave him the knowledge of the world so wide; Hence 'twas by Heaven's decree that to this place He brought new guests and name to mutual grace ; At last his soul and body being to part, He here bequeathed his entrails and his heart.' As a matter of fact, however, he died in 1610 not 161 1. Section I Favourable notices ofthe Bermudas. Marvell. The return of Somers' companions drew public attention in England to the Bermudas. There was much to attract in the tale which they had to tell.

The islands now recalled the adventures and death of a leading Englishman. While Virginia had been tried and found grievously wanting, the Bermudas, so long dreaded and shunned, had proved a spot from which the Virginian colonists might find relief. Romance always exaggerates; and, the dark picture hitherto given of the islands having been proved to be untrue, no colours were thought too bright for future descriptions. Henceforward the Bermudas are constantly spoken of as a kind of islands of the Blest. The author of the ' Historye of the Bermudaes,' who wrote probably soon after the first settlement of the islands, speaks of them as 'being in an equal elevation with that of the Holy Land, and in par ticular very near with the very city of Jerusalem, which is a clime of the sweetest and most pleasing temper of all others.' A letter written in 1611-12 alludes to their being called ' Sommer islands as well in respect of the continual tem perate air as in remembrance of Sir George Sommers that died there V Their climate, beauties, and products became a favourite theme for English poets.

Andrew Marvell, writes of — ' This eternal spring Which here enamels everything2.' 1 Quoted in the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. i. p. 57. The false etymology no doubt helped to perpetuate the name. Writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, after the mistake had taken root, Fuller says, ' Possibly in process of time these Summer islands may be conceived so named because there winter doth never appear.' See the reference given in the note above, p. 8. 2 From the singularly beautiful little poem beginning — ' Where the remote Bermudas wide, In ocean's bosom unespied.' It was probably written about 1645. Section I Waller Moore. The Bermuda Company. Waller's 1 description is equally glowing, — ' So sweet the air, so moderate the clime, None sickly lives, or dies before his time ; Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncurst, To show how all things were created first.' While in our own century, Moore 2, whose poetry is inspired by the genius of the place, has sung of — 'These leafy isles upon the ocean thrown, Like studs of emerald o'er a silver zone ; ' comparing them to the ' pure isles ' — ' Which bards of old with kindly fancy placed For happy spirits in th' Atlantic waste.' Captain Somers returned to England in 1611.

In March 161 2 the Virginia Company procured an extension of their charter so as to cover all islands within three hundred leagues of the Virginian shore and thereby to include the Bermudas. In the autumn of the same year the Company sold the islands to certain members of their own body, who in 1615 were 1 From the burlesque poem, ' The Battle of the Summer islands.' It was probably written before 1639. The tradition that Waller visited the Bermudas is shown to be groundless in App. 8 to vol. ii. of the Memorials of the Bermudas. Moore commemorates his supposed visit in the lines (Odes to Nea) — 'May spring to eternity hallow the shade, Where Ariel has warbled and Waller has strayed.' 2 Moore was appointed Registrar of the Court of Admiralty in the Bermudas in the year 1803, but he only stayed a few months in the islands.

He held the office, however, the duties being discharged by a deputy, till 1 S44. Other writers besides poets have borne witness to the climate and soil of the Bermudas, notably Bishop Berkeley in discussing his scheme for the establishment of a college in the islands (see below, pp. 21,2). On the other hand a different picture is given in A Short Discovery of the Coast and Continent of America, by William Castell, published in 1644 (see the Harleian Collection of Voyages). The writer says, ' Besides it is as much if not more than any other place infested with most tempestuous fearful winds called hurricanes. The soil and temperature is far inferior to any part of Virginia, and yet is it inhabited no less than with 1000 English.' Labat, too [1705], speaks of the Bermudas, to which he gives the second name of Vermude, as being stormy islands.

Section I, First settlement ofthe Bermudas. Norwood's division of the islands. incorporated by Royal Letters Patent as ' The Governor and Company of the City of London for the plantation of the Somer islands.' This Company owned the islands till the year 1684. The Letters Patent gave them full powers of government, with an absolute monopoly of the import and export trade of the islands, and among other provisions excluded from the settlement persons ' addicted to the super stition of the Church of Rome.' The first emigrants to the Bermudas, about fifty in number, were sent out in 161 2, before the new Company had been formed. Richard Moore, a ship's carpenter, was the first Governor, and the instructions given to him specified various sources of wealth which might be derived from the colony, including tobacco, pearls, silk, timber, salt, sugar-canes, ambergris, and whale oil.

The new comers were received on arrival by three men who had remained behind from Somers' company, and who were mainly concerned with trying to conceal from the Governor a large quantity of ambergris which they had found. Moore landed at Smith's island, but subsequently removed to St. George's, where he established his head-quarters. In his three years of government, he had, like the founders of other colonies, to confront mutiny and discontent on the part of his followers, he frightened away two Spanish ships with two of the only three gunshot in his stores, and he saw the infant settlement recruited by several hundred emigrants from England, who brought with them a blessing in the shape of potatoes, a curse in the shape of rats '. One of the first settlers was Richard Norwood, a surveyor, whose name is very prominent in the early records of the Bermudas.

He carried out the division of the islands according to the terms laid down in the Letters Patent. 1 Smith's History of Virginia ascribes the ' increase of silly rats ' which devastated the islands and their subsequent disappearance to divine interposition. Compare the trouble caused by rats to the early settlers in Mauritius, vol. i. of this work, p. 146, note I. Section I Represen tative in stitutions in the Bermudas. These terms were that part, not exceeding one fourth, was to be left for common land to defray the public charges of the Company, while the rest was to be divided into eight tribes, each tribe containing fifty shares of twenty-five acres each, making four hundred shares in all '. The tribes were named after some of the leading members of the Company, Hamilton, Smith's, Devonshire, Pembroke, Paget, Warwick, Southampton, and Sandys, while St. George's with the small islands around it and part of the main island was set aside for the common land.

The eight tribes and St. George's constitute the nine parishes, into which the Bermudas are still divided for ecclesiastical and political purposes at the present day. The division into tribes formed the basis for the representative institutions which were established in the Bermudas after the first few years of the settlement, subject to the authority of the Company at home. In addition to the Governor and his Council, mainly composed of officials, there were General Sessions held twice a year for judicial purposes, to which each tribe sent six representatives and the common land twelve ; and a General Assembly, held once in every two years, which included the Governor and Council, and to which each tribe sent four representatives and the common land eight. The Bermudas were the second British colony to receive some form of Representative Government.

The first 1 The survey was carried out about 1618. There is a chart of the islands in the British Museum, showing the survey, and dated 1626. A reproduction is given in the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. i. Norwood executed a second survey ofthe islands in 1662-3. The division into tribes did not exhaust the whole of the islands. There was an overplus, the application of which gave rise to a sus picion of jobbery against the Governor and some members of the Company. It may be mentioned here that the Virginia Company, ' in consideration of the great defect of the quantity of land in the Summer islands conceived to have been at the time of the sale thereof' made over to the Bermuda Company certain land in Virginia. Hence the 'Bermuda hundred,' said to be still so named in Virginia. See the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. i. p. 228, and note.

HLSTORLCAL GEOGRAPHY OP THE COLONIES. 14 Section I. The Bermudas under the Company. Political and religi ous discord. Assembly was held in 1620, one year after a similar insti tution had been established in Virginia, and the constitution was revised and fully detailed in 1622. The Bermudas were under the government of the Company during the reigns of James the First and Charles the First, the period of the Commonwealth, and the reign of Charles the Second. By 1629 the population had grown to between two and three thousand, and the colony attained sufficient importance to be described as ' an excellent bit to rule a great horse1.' In 1656 the number of inhabitants was given at about 3000, and by 1679 it had risen to 8000, including women, children, and slaves 2. The elements of the population included English planters, tenants of absentee proprietors, negro slaves, first mentioned about 161 7, Indian slaves shipped off from Massachusetts by a law passed in 1652, and white bond-servants, in great measure Scotch and Irish political prisoners 3.

Though, during the long strife between King and Parlia ment, the authorities at home had little leisure and perhaps little inclination to interfere with this small and distant dependency, yet the political and religious discord which raged in England throughout these years, found its counter part to some extent in the Bermudas. From the first the Puritan ministers and their followers seem to have caused constant trouble. About 1620 certain modifications in the forms of the Church of England were introduced, similar to those allowed in the Channel Islands. In 1643 the Independents formally seceded from the Church, and two years later an act of the Long Parliament established freedom of worship for the inhabitants of the islands. 1 From The Relation of Robert Chestevan and others, quoted in Smith's Virginia. 2 In Blome's Jamaica [1672I it is described as a powerful Endish colony, having about four or five thousand inhabitants. 3 In 1 66 1 the Governor issued a proclamation against a projected rising of Irish and negroes.

Section I. Eleutheria. Later, from 1660 onwards, the odium theologicum of this small community appears to have been turned against the Quakers, acts and proclamations were promulgated against them, and an order was made by the Company prohibiting their landing in the islands1. At the time of the execution of Charles the First and the establishment of the Commonwealth, the adherents of the Royalists appear to have been in the ascendant, and in 1650 the Long Parliament passed an act prohibiting trade with these islands as well as with Barbados, Antigua, and Virginia on account of the refusal of the colonists to recog nise the new order of things'2. The opposition however was not long-lived. Barbados was blockaded and re duced to order in January 1652 ; and in February of that year the Governor and Council of the Bermudas took the oath of allegiance ' to the Commonwealth of England as it is now established without a King or House of Lords.' On the other hand the Restoration of Charles the Second eight years later, in 1660, appears to have been at once welcomed in the colony; indeed it probably mattered little to the dwellers in this far off land what form of government existed at home, except so far as the success of Royalists or Puritans in England gave countenance to the partisans of the corresponding factions in the Bermudas.