Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (2 page)

It may not be true that Christopher
Columbus was the first European to set eyes, if not foot, on the empty and
obscure West Indian
island
of
Anguilla
. If he did, it was
during his second voyage to the
New World
in 1493. And
if so, it is possible he named it, since he did name just about everything else
round about. He may have done it in Spanish,
anguila
(eel), since he was
on the road for
Spain
;
or he may have done it in Italian,
anguilla
(eel), since he was Italian.
Or he may not have named it at all, and he definitely didn't land there.

There was no particular reason to
land.
Anguilla
was a small, dull and unpopulated bit of
dusty turf, one of many low coral islands along the outer edge of the
Caribbean
Sea
, far from the protection of the American continents and very
exposed to the storms of the
Atlantic Ocean
. Fifteen miles
long by two miles wide, the island possessed dozens of fine white beaches,
several bays, no mountains, no natives, erratic rainfall and scrub vegetation.
In the beginning there were some trees there, but most of them were cut down by
early settlers for firewood or to build houses and ships, and the rest were
swept away by droughts and hurricanes. One fat old mahogany tree still grows in
the middle of the island; the Anguil-lans have put a picture of it on their
stamps.

Even with all the trees intact the
island wasn't particularly alluring to passers-by. The first recorded landing
didn't come until seventy-one years after
Columbus
either did or did not open
Anguilla
's history. In 1564,
Captain Rene Laudon-niere dropped in, and it could be that he was the one who
named it, in French:
anguille
(eel). Whether he did or not, he didn't
stay long; nor did the first Englishman to arrive, one Captain Harcourt, who
merely stopped off for a minute in 1609 so he could afterward say, "I
think never Englishmen disembogued before us." He also became possibly the
first visitor who wasn't struck enough by the long, thin shape of the place to
call it, in one language or another,
Eel
Island
. Given that word
"disembogued" it may be a pity he didn't try his hand at nomenclature
after all.

Originally
Anguilla
had at least one other name, and possibly two. Before the Europeans came, the
Caribbean
had been populated by two different peoples: the Arawaks, a gentle, peaceful,
delicate folk, and the Caribs, who used to eat them. ("Cannibal" is a
Carib word.) If the Arawaks had a name for
Anguilla
it
is now lost, but the Carib name for the island was Malliouhana—but wasn't
Dorothy Lamour called that in one of the Road pictures?

Once it had a name,
Anguilla
was ready to start having a history, but unfortunately nothing happened for
quite a while. Throughout the sixteenth century the nations of
Europe
,
led by
Spain
,
colonized and plundered and warred their way through the
Caribbean
,
and nobody gave
Anguilla
a second look. The Arawaks and
Caribs were subjugated and enslaved and exterminated; there are no Arawaks
anymore, and only one last dwindling Carib reservation. Five million African
slaves were imported to the
West Indies
in their stead
to work on the plantations growing tobacco and sugar and cotton and bananas.
The slaves survived, the islands produced wealth, and the wealth was exported.
Still today the population in most
Caribbean
islands is
divided between the white landowners, whose roots are still in
Europe
,
and the black workers, whose roots are now in the
West Indies
.

Anguilla
's
story is different, and the difference is poverty. Having so little to offer by
way of natural resources,
Anguilla
wasn't settled at all
until 1650. "It was filled with alligators and other noxious animals,"
historian Thomas Southey said, not very encouragingly, "but the soil was
good for raising tobacco and corn, and the cattle imported multiplied very
fast. It was not colonized under any public encouragement; each planter labored
for himself, and the island was frequently plundered by marauders." An
inauspicious beginning that, apart from the alligators, pretty well set the
tone.

These first arrivals were swelled
in number sixteen years later by a group of English settlers who had just been
driven from the
island
of
St.
Kitts
by the French. At around the same time some
shipwrecked Irishmen also arrived and stayed, and now and again in the next
several years the white population was added to by deserters from one or
another of the European navies constantly warring among themselves in the
surrounding waters. And of course there was for a while an influx of black
Africans, imported as slaves.

But a slave plantation economy on
Anguilla
never did become a roaring success; the island was just too poor in soil and
rainfall to produce good plantation crops. Still, its poverty was a mixed
curse; on
Anguilla
, slavery never became the deeply
engrained life-style common to all the other
Caribbean
islands.

As V. S. Naipaul wrote in a
London
newspaper in 1969, "This feeling for their island, this sense of home,
makes the Anguillans unusual among
Caribbean
peoples.
The land has been theirs immemorially; no humiliation attaches to it." Or,
as Lord Caradon, then chief British delegate to the United Nations and Minister
of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, said to me in December of 1969,
"For a number of strange and historical reasons the inhabitants of this
island are passionately devoted to the spirit of independence. And this is, I
think, the root of it all. It's not surprising, it's happened before in the
world, and it's in many ways admirable."

Passionately devoted to the spirit
of independence. Back when there
were
slaves, the white owners couldn't
afford to feed them and so gave them four days off a week—Sunday for church,
the other three to tend their own crops on their own lands. By the time slavery
was officially ended in the British-controlled islands in 1834, every Anguillan
family, white or black, owned its own home on its own plot of land, with its own
chickens and goats. Many Anguillans had become craftsmen and tradesmen and
fishermen, and Anguilla-built boats were already famous up and down the
islands, as they still are today. White or black, slave or free, every last
Anguillan was a property-owning middle-class petit bourgeois.

Which may be why
Anguilla
is the only populated
Caribbean
island that never had a
slave rebellion.

It may also be why
Anguilla
is the only former colony ever to revolt
against
independence.

And it may be why the Anguillans
are possibly the only rebels in history ever to have carried off a successful
rebellion without killing anybody.

Politically, the history of
Anguilla
began twenty-five years before it had a population. For centuries, it didn't
occur to Europeans generally that anybody anywhere else in the world might have
any law or history of his own, rights or property or land or anything of value
that was already claimed. There were empires to be carved out of the vast world
beyond
Europe
's shores, and if that vast world already
had a population living in it, "They should be," as Christopher
Columbus said of the Arawaks before the Spanish killed them all off, "good
servants of good skills." European kings tended to give away whole
continents to favorite nobles, without its ever crossing the mind of either
king or noble to check with the indigenous populations.

So it was with
Anguilla
,
which became a political entity in 1625, while it was still an empty island,
when it was given by the English King Charles I, who didn't own it, to the Earl
of Carlisle, who did nothing with it. This was part of an offhand grant to the
Earl of Carlisle of
all
the
Caribbean
islands,
including those with Spaniards and other ferocious Europeans living on them,
which may explain why the Earl never dropped by to see his new property. This
early political move, in which
Anguilla
was stuffed into
a package with several other more important items, set the tone for the events
of the centuries to come.

As the years went by, various
political divisions were made in the British Caribbean, with
Anguilla
always an odd-lot parcel in the bottom of the bag, but none of this shuffling
around ever had much effect on the Anguillans' lives. They didn't pester the
English administrators and the English administrators didn't pester them.

For example. In 1809 the Anguillans
were ordered to build a jail, but since they didn't have anyone to put in it
they didn't do it. Nine years later the Governor in St. Kitts got around to
asking about the jail and was told it hadn't been built because "the laws
of this island were lying dormant." It still didn't get built, and when
the Governor asked them four years later when they were going to set up a civil
court (something else he'd been wanting), they told him "it was useless to
erect themselves into a court of judicature for want of a jail."

I mentioned the Governor in St.
Kitts.
Anguilla
's connection with St. Kitts began in
1822, when
Anguilla
was stripped flat by a hurricane,
then dried out by a drought, then swept bare by a gale, then decimated by
famine. In response to all this, the English Secretary of State ordered the
Governor of St. Kitts, through whom Great Britain more or less administered
Anguilla, "to propose to the assembly of St. Christopher [the formal name
of St. Kitts] that one representative should be received from the island of
Anguilla which would enable the assembly to enact laws for the government of
that colony." Laws, presumably, against hurricanes, droughts and gales.

The St. Kitts Governor proposed
instead that
Britain
rule
Anguilla
direct, a suggestion that has come up more
than once since that time. But
England
would have nothing to do with direct rule of such a microscopic entity as
Anguilla
,
and forced the Governor of St. Kitts to take the smaller island under his wing
whether he liked it or not.

The Anguillans disliked the
arrangement as much as the Governor did. They sent a complaining letter to
England, saying, "Can we indulge a hope that laws enacted particularly for
this community, can or will be made with much regard to its interests, when
they are to be passed by a body of men living in a distant and remote island,
possessing no property of any kind here and having no connexion or relation
whatever?" But the British blithely went ahead, setting up the legal
framework in 1824, and the Anguillans obediently sent along somebody to St.
Kitts to be present in the assembly every time St. Kitts planned to do
something with, to, about or for
Anguilla
.

But all that was simply rigmarole
to satisfy the English; it gave them a neat colonial administration, nice
chain-of-com-mand charts back home in
London
.
On
Anguilla
, the islanders had their own government, the
Vestry, which had eleven members elected by the people themselves. The Warden,
the only official on the island from the St. Kitts Government, was invited to
attend the meetings, and so was the Anglican rector, but neither of them could
vote. The Vestry levied taxes, issued licenses, imposed export duties and
generally ran the island.

This too was a pattern that would
be followed throughout the island's history; one government, usually through
St. Kitts and always under protest, to satisfy the constructionary minds of the
English, and another government of Anguillans at home to get things done.

Fifty years later, in 1871, another
political reshuffling took place, when the British created the Leeward Islands
Federation, in which each island was to be its own presidency. Three years
before, in 1868, phosphate had been found at
Crocus
Bay
on
Anguilla
.
It was being exported to
Philadelphia
,
so the island was in one of its rare periods of financial well-being. The
Anguillans appealed to Governor-General Sir Benjamin Pine, asking if they could
be a separate presidency as long as things were being rearranged anyway, but when
the dust had settled the combination of St. Kitts and
Anguilla
was
one
unit in the Federation.

What is this St. Kitts, that
Anguilla
keeps being stuck into paper states with it? Is it an island at all similar to
Anguilla
?
No; it is volcanic where Anguilla is coral, mountainous where Anguilla is flat,
rainy where Anguilla is dry, plantation-ridden and slave-oriented where
Anguilla has always sheltered the independent poor.

Is it, then, the nearest island to
Anguilla
?
No; the nearest populated island is
St. Martin
, three
miles away; the next nearest is St. Barthelemy, twenty-five miles away; the
next nearest is
Saba
, thirty miles away; the next
nearest is
St. Eustatius
, fifty miles away. St. Kitts is
seventy miles from
Anguilla
.