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99 Chapter 5 A Pity It Belongs to the Caribs “Chattoway, as having headed them during the Charaib war, and having a powerful Family, has much Influence amongst them . . .” —Governor James Seton, January 1789 St. Vincent formally passed back to British rule on 1 January 1784. The Caribs would now have to deal directly with their sworn enemies. Undefeated but traduced by the French, the Caribs greeted the arrival of the British troops who arrived to take possession of the island with “visible surprize and consternation.”1 Under the terms of the 1773 treaty the Caribs had promised allegiance to King George III. Clearly, siding with the French over the previous five years had put them in breach of that treaty. The British, however , did not take punitive measures against them. The planters would later deplore what they saw as an example of misplaced humanity, much as they had deplored the 1773 treaty for terms which they considered overgenerous. The local authorities once more lobbied for the Caribs’ removal from the island but the metropolitan government was more circumspect. British restraint was conditioned by the daunting prospect of launching a military campaign to dislodge the Caribs, with Lord Sydney believing such a measure “to be attended with so many difficulties, that there would be little hopes of succeeding were it to be attempted.”2 The Caribs adopted a conciliatory stance towards their new, unwanted neighbors and, in the sarcastic phrase of Charles Shephard, “professed themselves enraptured admirers of the mild and benevolent Constitution of Great Britain.”3 The new governor, Edmund Lincoln, reported that to the local military commander, Major Chester, “they appeared well disposed, peaceable and tractable—which I can very readily suppose, as it must be so much to their interest to be so.”4 Carib chiefs came in to Kingstown and promised to behave peaceably provided they were left unmolested on their lands. The view of the ejected French was that “the [British colonial] Government’s aim is to win A Pity It Belongs to the Caribs 100 the Caribs’ affection through good treatment; and in this way to weaken the hatred and aversion of these people.” However, they noted that “this hatred is a feeling which the Caribs suck in with their mother’s milk and which has become among them a national prejudice.”5 For the time being, the Caribs were left to their own devices and life returned to a semblance of normality. Carib women, who remained those responsible for growing the crops, particularly cassava, yams, and potatoes, would walk into Kingstown to sell their produce in the market. The men fished and hunted wild pigeon, agoutis, and opossums. One of the fishing techniques, in use for hundreds of years, was to poison rivers with juice extracted from plants such as the dogwood or erythrina linn and the sigesbeckia, sometimes damming streams to make the process more effective. In late July the mass spawning of river fish would allow the Caribs to scoop up huge quantities of tritrixes (as the fry were known in French). At sea fishermen might use harpoons for larger prey and the Caribs also fished from the beach using huge nets pulled in by up to a hundred people. George Davidson, a Methodist who pioneered a mission to convert the Black Caribs in the 1780s, wrote his own observations of their way of life. What is striking is how similar his picture of Carib culture is to that painted by the French missionaries a century or more earlier when their observations largely concerned what would come to be called Yellow Caribs. Davidson, like most European observers, was struck by what he saw as the subservient position of women, contrasting their labors in the fields and the home with the “indolent” lifestyle of the men. “No slavery can be conceived more wretched than that of the women,” he felt. Given that Davidson actually lived in a slave society, this is a remarkable statement, and one wonders how much better the lot of women in Hogarth’s London was. A man could take a number of wives (marriage was usually at an early age) and would establish each new one in a different house but could also simply abandon a wife he wished to divorce. Female adultery, even the mere suspicion of it, was punished with death, and women, it was claimed, were often injured in men’s drunken rages. “In no part of the world are women more chaste, owing, possibly...

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