Getting to Nevis, a small idyllic island in the Caribbean that spans just 36 square miles, is a long journey by today’s standards. After a ten-and-a-half-hour flight to the neighbouring island of St Kitts, it’s another taxi to the far side of the island to pick up a water taxi or a ferry. It is worth it in the end for the breathtaking scenery and tranquil atmosphere that draws in holidaymakers from around the world year after year, myself included! But it is difficult to complain when we imagine the mammoth, almost incomprehensible two-month journey that Christopher Columbus undertook over 500 years ago.

Before 1492
While it’s easy to think that the story of the Caribbean and the ‘New World’ began with Columbus, in fact the people he met when he landed on Guanahani in 1492 – an island in the Bahamas, though we are still not completely certain which one – had a long and varied history, completely separate from our own.

The main tribes in the Caribbean were the Arawaks or Taíno, and the Kalinago or Caribs, from which the islands take their name. Both had their own customs, traditions and way of life. Though there are few written records, archaeological evidence has helped us to uncover more about them.

The Caribs, originally from South America, were war like and expelled the Arawaks to occupy the Lesser Antilles – the Caribbean islands closest to South America. There has been speculation that they were cannibals and believed in human consumption as part of a kind of spiritual ritual and in fact the word cannibal derives from ‘Carib’. However, this may well be a myth, invented by Columbus and later explorers to justify the brutality they enacted upon the tribes when they arrived.

The housing that these early tribes built for themselves and their development over time have been recreated in the Heritage Village on Nevis, along with ancient relics and some plants that are unique to the Caribbean. There are also many museums across the Caribbean containing native pottery and weaponry from each different island, although it is worth remembering that the different tribes on the different islands did not live in isolation but in fact travelled freely between them.

Taking over
When Genevan explorer Christopher Columbus, working for Spain, set out on his famous voyage, he had no intention of discovering America or the Caribbean because he did not believe either place existed. While it was now generally accepted that the world was spherical and not flat, Columbus had miscalculated the size of the earth, thinking that it was a third smaller than it actually is, with all of the world’s land mass on one continent. The purpose of Columbus’ trip had been to establish a new trade route to Asia, which is why he assumed the new land he had stumbled across was the west part of India or the ‘West Indies’.

Although he wrote in his journal of his first voyage that he liked the native tribes he found in the Caribbean, finding them generous and welcoming, Columbus also saw their potential for exploitation and enslavement. He and explorers to come would participate in a murderous struggle, which would result in the deaths of millions of native Caribs and Americas.

One such event and one that symbolises one of the many difficulties we have with understanding the early history of the Caribbean is the Kalinago Genocide.

It is alleged that in 1626 the Caribs and Arawaks intended to attack St Kitts, recently colonised by the English but disputed by the French, so the English and French set aside their differences and joined forces to murder many of the tribesmen and women in their beds. When a retaliation attack began, English and French butchered nearly 2000 native Caribs and Arawaks in a ravine, today known as bloody point because the blood from the bodies was supposed to have flowed into a nearby river for several days. Yet we only have the European version of this horrific incident, and that version suggests the massacre was in retaliation to the planned invasion by the tribes when it is perfectly plausible that this again may have been a lie told by the Europeans to justify their crimes.

If the Europeans didn’t kill them deliberately then many native Caribbean people died as a result of diseases brought to the New World by the Europeans from which they had no immunity.

Sugar, spice and slavery
Looking around Nevis and indeed any Caribbean island it is easy to see why Europeans wanted to take over, despite the unimaginable human cost to the native tribes. Almost everywhere you look there are ruins of plantations. By the end of the 17th century, the Caribbean must have been like one giant factory, dotted with plantations owned by men who had left everything behind to set up a new life, harnessing the abundance of new crops such as sugar, indigo and tobacco, never seen before in Europe. So profitable was this industry that it helped fuel economic growth perhaps never seen before in Britain.

One such plantation and one of the earliest in English Caribbean history is the Wingfield Estate on St Kitts. It is unique because it was the first land grant in the Caribbean given by King Charles I in 1625 to Samuel Jefferson, the direct ancestor of US President Thomas Jefferson. A recent archaeological excavation as part of plans to turn the estate into a museum has revealed a rum distillery and a giant sugar mill but in its early days the estate produced indigo and tobacco. In fact the tobacco crop, some 350 years old, can still be seen growing around the estate today.

The people who worked the plantations through were not well paid skilled workers. Initially, the British brought over workers over from Ireland and also from Britain itself. Officially they were indentured servants, having sold their freedom for a number of years in order to pay for their voyage to the New World. Many were eager to cash in on what was potentially a lucrative venture – once they had worked the years of the indenture contract there would be plentiful space and an opportunity for them to build their own house on a generous plot of land – whilst some were keen to escape the political and religious turmoil that engulfed England in the middle of the 17th century. But as Don Jordan and Michael Walsh explain in their seminal book, White Cargo, these dreams were often dashed.

‘…tens of thousands of whites were held as chattels marked like cattle, punished brutally and in some cases literally worked to death. For decades, this underclass was treated just as savagely as black slaves and indeed, toiled, suffered and rebelled alongside them.’

Not even children could escape this horrific nightmare; in fact they were some of the first people to be shipped over, as they could be exploited more easily.

Soon, however, plantation owners found a cheaper and more reliable source of labour: enslaved Africans. The triangular slave trade was created. Slave traders would set off from Europe with goods such as rum, guns or brandy which they would exchange for enslaved people in Africa before setting off on the so-called middle passage across the Atlantic where the enslaved were offloaded and sold at slave markets before loading back up with raw goods produced on the plantations for manufacturing and selling back in England and the American colonies. Conditions on board these ships were squalid and extremely cramped: enslaved people would have to lie or crouch down. But the conditions were nothing compared to the horror experienced on the plantations in the Caribbean once they arrived.

Although for many the experience of slavery was brutal and horrific, often lasting for generations, it is important to remember that every plantation owner ran their estate differently so it is unfair to generalise. Some slave owners did treat those they’d enslaved humanely, providing them with an education and lodgings that they may not have received elsewhere, while others had genuine relationships with the enslaved, even fathering children and getting married.

Pirates
The incredible profits that these new plantations generated, however, created a problem. Ex-mariners turned pirates would pillage ships heading back from the Caribbean, looting anything they could get their hands on and generally causing havoc. At first so-called buccaneers or privateers were sponsored by the state, through letters of marque and reprisal issued by the monarch, to capture the vessels of national enemies and take their precious cargo, with the government or sponsors receiving a share of the profits. However, with weeks and months at sea, many of these voyages turned into disaster with no enemy ships to be found and an often restless and mutinous crew, happy to forgo the law to ensure their trip was worthwhile by capturing vessels from countries that weren’t enemies.

Captains Henry Avery and William Kidd became notorious for going rogue and pillaging anything they could get their hands on. In September 1695 Avery attacked the Ganj-i Sawa’i, a Mughal ship, and secured a loot worth £52 Million in today’s money, a staggering amount. But the Mughals held the keys to lucrative trade with Asia and when they complained the English realised they had to act or risk losing vital trade with Asia.

It is believed Avery looted about a dozen ships and, when they arrived back home in England, Avery’s men were arrested, given a show trial and then executed. Avery himself, however, escaped, never to be seen again. The show trial of his men did little to deter others from joining; Avery’s escape made the prospect of a life at sea seem even more appealing. It certainly did nothing to stop William Kidd, another privateer who is said to have amassed a legendary treasure worth tens of millions of pounds which he allegedly buried somewhere in the British Virgin Islands before he was transported back to Britain and hanged.

The reason piracy caused such a problem for the people of the Caribbean was not just because it meant the plantation owners and merchants losing out on profits but also because it saw law and order almost completely broken down.

The island of Tortuga in modern day Haiti in the 17th century and then Nassau, the Bahamas, in the 18th century, became tantamount to failed states. Pirates took over the islands as hideouts, living by their own set of codes, burning down the locals’ houses and raping the women. The glorified tales of pirates as affable rogues that have entered our cultural imagination often overlook how frightening an experience this must have been for the people of the Caribbean.

The Industrial Revolution
The British finally managed to wrest back control of the Caribbean when they sent in governors like Woodes Rogers. He temped pirates to surrender by giving them the option of working for him as a pirate hunter, turning over their former comrades.

But piracy didn’t really cease until the industrial revolution caught on, back home. It was this which brought the industrial Caribbean age to an end. With new factories employing hundreds of people en-masse and the sugar beet now able to be grown in Europe, the tides were turning. America declared its independence in 1776, meaning Britain no longer had a stronghold on the mainland and, more crucially, thanks to the efforts of William Wilberforce and Thomas Babington, the slave trade was officially abolished in 1807, with slavery itself abolished in the British West Indies, South Africa and Canada in 1833.

In the 500 years since Europeans first stepped foot in the Caribbean these islands have changed irrevocably. Anyone linked to the Caribbean in any way, either as an enslaved person from Africa, a white slave owner, a ruthless pirate or just an early colonist trying to get by, all will surely have seen their lives turned upside down by one of the most turbulent and fascinating periods of history.

Sources
June Goodfield, Rivers of Times: Why is everyone talking to Philippa? (Matador, 2011)
Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge University, 1891)
‘Taínos: Spirits of the Jaguar’, BBC, 1996.
‘Britain’s Outlaws: Highwaymen, Pirates and Rogues, Episode 2: Pirates,’ BBC, 2015

With sincere thanks to Julie Claxton and Devon Liburd of the Nevis Tourism Authority, Sarah Clifford, Alban Millas, June Goodfield, John Ford Parris, Maurice Widowson and the St Kitts Tourism Authority for their assistance in this feature.