The Present Outlook in the British West Indies

Abstract

IN the year I492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain in search of a western route to the Indies and when he sighted land he believed that he had reached their shores. The land he saw was, in fact, first the island of Salvador in the Bahamas, then Cuba, and later San Domingo. In consequence of this mistake he named them the West Indies, a name which has persisted in English terminology. The French and Spanish, however, renamed them les Antilles and las Antillas, after the mythical island of Antilla, supposed to have sunk under the Atlantic ocean. On later voyages Columbus discovered Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago. Following the discovery of the New World by Columbus, the sixteenth century became the great age of Spanish and Portuguese colonization. The Spaniards discovered and named all of the West. Indian islands, but they settled only in the two largest, Jamaica and Trinidad. By the opening of the seventeenth century Britain had defeated Spain at sea, France had begun to replace Spain as the leading European Power, the Dutch were fighting successfully against Spain for their independence, which they won in I648, and the rise of colonization in the New World by the British, French, and Dutch began. The British, French, and Dutch did not go to the New World for precious metals and gems, like the Spaniards, but to cultivate the land and to trade. British, French, and Dutch colonization began with grants to private proprietors or chartered companies, and was practically independent of royal authority. They took with them the institutions of the mother country at the time, some of which are retained to this day. The first British settlement was in St Kitts in I623, followed by that in Barbados in I625. The Leeward islands were settled by the British from St Kitts, the Windward islands, Trinidad, Jamaica, and what is now British Guiana were settled by the French, Spaniards, and Dutch, and were subsequently acquired by Britain by conquest or cession. British Honduras was settled by the British in i662 and has been in uninterrupted British occupation ever since. The first settlers found few aboriginal inhabitants on the islands; some were completely uninhabited. Today the aboriginal Carib race has almost disappeared from the islands although there are some IO,OOO aborigines in British Guiana and in British Honduras. The early European settlers intended to farm the land themselves, and for a few generations did so successfully, but mistaken ideas on the dignity of race, coupled with a certain indolence induced by the perpetual warmth '75