The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna

1. Youroumaÿn

9 Chapter 1 Youroumaÿn “The first view of St Vincent’s is magnificent: its noble mountains rise in masses, each higher than the one before it; until the mountains of the centre, crowned with mists, seem to look down with majesty upon the subject hills around, which gradually decrease in height, until they approach the Caribbean Sea, whose deep blue waves fling their snowy foam, conch-shells, sponges, marine eggs, and white coral, at their feet. The fertile plains and vales are hidden by these mountains, which have perpetual verdure: yet, owing to the cultivation of their bases, sides, and even summits , and the ever-varying kaleidoscope of light and shade caused by the shifting clouds, the surface of this island has a singularly part-coloured appearance; and, when the traveller looks from its elevations, his eye is gratified with the sight of the Grenadines, which, although no longer fertile, are so beautifully placed and so fantastically formed, that they heighten in an eminent degree the beauty of the sea-view . . .”1 —EL Joseph, Warner Arundell, the Adventures of a Creole, 1838 Youroumaÿn. That was the name the Caribs gave to the island Europeans knew as St. Vincent—or at least that was how it was recorded by Adrien Le Breton, a Jesuit missionary who spent ten years living there at the end of the seventeenth century.2 No more than twenty-two miles from north to south and fourteen to sixteen miles wide, with fertile land to grow crops, woods to hunt game, and a surrounding sea abundant with fish, Youroumaÿn had everything that the Caribs needed. The mountain at its center is a volcano, responsible in the geological past for the island’s very existence, and from its flanks ridges extend down towards the sea dividing the land into a series of wooded valleys. Alongside the streams that flow down to the rugged coast the Caribs made their homes. “The Island of St. Vincent is the most populous of any possess’d by the Caribbians,” asserted Charles de Rochefort, a Protestant pastor who visited Youroumaÿn 10 The Caribbean with modern place names and boundaries Youroumaÿn 11 the West Indies in the mid-seventeenth century. “The Caribbians have many fair Villages, where they live pleasantly, and without any disturbance.”3 Other lands were also home to Caribs at the time of their first contact with Europeans. The Caribs ranged over the whole island chain, stretching some five hundred miles from Grenada and Tobago in the south, through St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Dominica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, up to Antigua and St. Christopher (St. Kitts) in the north. Trinidad was largely the province of Arawaks, and Barbados, it seems, was no longer permanently occupied. By the time that Rochefort was writing, though, the Caribs’ territory was already beginning to shrink in the face of European encroachment. At the turn of the eighteenth century St. Vincent was described as “the head-quarters of the Caribs.”4 To the outsider’s eye it seemed as if the topography of Youroumaÿn/St. Vincent was uniquely conducive to the Carib way of life. Le Breton wrote that “the fortunate complicity of the country astonishingly encourages the people’s frenzy for total independence . . . the island . . . is riddled with bays and hollows . . . [and] . . . offers each father of a family the opportunity to choose . . . his ideal site, far from any foreign constraint and completely safe . . . to lead his life exactly as he pleases with his wife, children and dear ones.”5 This spirit of independence was remarked upon by nearly all early European accounts of the Caribs. Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, a French soldier-turned-missionary in the West Indies in the 1640s, wrote: “No polity is seen among them; they all live in freedom, drink and eat when they are hungry or thirsty, work and rest when they please; they have no worries . . .”6 Adrien Le Breton spent more time among the Caribs of St. Vincent than any of these writers but he told the same story. “Even from the very beginning of their communal living, they were filled with hatred of not just slavery, but any form of injunction, authority or submission, to the extent that these very words themselves are unbearable to them. Yielding to someone else and obeying an order is for them the ultimate indignity. Even today, this explains the virulence of their total freedom...