-
3. Quel Roi?
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
51 Chapter 3 Quel Roi? “We were greatly surprised to find them in a fixed resolution not to consent to our settling any part of the country claimed by them . . .” —Report of the Commissioners for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands to the Lords of the Treasury, 16 October 1771 On 10 February 1763 Paris was witness to a display of diplomatic pomp and circumstance as the representatives of the crowns of France, Great Britain, and Spain assembled to put a formal end to seven years of warfare. The negotiations had taken months. John Russell, the fourth Duke of Bedford, had been dispatched to the French capital the previous September and had spent an uncomfortable time troubled by gout and chafing at the restrictions imposed by his masters in London. Representing Spain (and Portugal) was Pablo Jerónimo Grimaldi y Pallavicini, the Italian-born Marquis and Duke of Grimaldi, minister plenipotentiary and ambassador to France. The third participant was César Gabriel de Choiseul, the recently created Duke of Praslin-Chévigny, and secretary of state for foreign affairs. The treaty they signed was breathtaking in the way it redrew the map of the world, with territories changing hands in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as the Americas. The French surrendered Canada to the British, and the boundary of British territory in North America was extended westward to the Mississippi river and shifted southward with the acquisition of Florida from Spain. The French handed Sumatra to Britain, which also regained Menorca, and numerous forts changed ownership. Cuba, briefly British, would be Spanish again, as would Manila. France took back the West African slave station of Gorée and, in the Caribbean, regained Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Marie-Galante. And down in Article IX, along with the islands of Grenada, Dominica, and Tobago, we find St. Vincent, one of the smaller spoils of a worldwide war, declared to be, “in full right,” a possession of Great Britain. A later historian wrote, with particular reference to the provisions for North America, that Quel Roi? 52 “half a continent . . . changed hands at the scratch of a pen.” For the Black Caribs, it was their whole world. St. Vincent had not been a battlefield in the war and had been occupied— the French-controlled leeward side at least—without a fight by a British force under General Robert Monckton and Admiral George Rodney in February 1762. The British were in no doubt about the significance of the transfer of sovereignty, which definitively ended, to British and French satisfaction, the “neutral” status of the island. The Caribs were not consulted about nor even mentioned in the treaty. It was never explained how by some diplomatic sleight of hand France could cede an island to Britain which since 1660 both countries had recognized as belonging to the Caribs (a status that had been ratified as recently as 1748). While the French had occupied only the leeward coast, the British had no intention of confining themselves to just a part of the island and quickly set about the business of turning St. Vincent into a profitable colony. Having seen how the haphazard agricultural development on other British islands had led to soil exhaustion and what today might be called environmental degradation, the Privy Council gave detailed consideration to the best way of exploiting the lands in the four “ceded” islands: St. Vincent, Dominica, Grenada, and Tobago. It was decided to limit the size of individual lots to five hundred acres to prevent estates becoming too large and conditions were stipulated to encourage white immigration.1 A Commission for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands was appointed in 1764 to survey and sell off the newly acquired agricultural land and its members departed for the West Indies by the end of the year. The commissioners were led by Sir William Young, a baronet and leading sugar planter in Antigua and himself the son of a sugar planter of Scottish origin. His son, also called Sir William Young, would go on to write one of the most important histories of the period based largely on his father’s papers. He and his three fellow commissioners set about their business energetically—Young said he made some 110 sea voyages over the nine years of the commission’s work. In a prospectus for planters, Young contrasted the bounty of St. Vincent (“remarkably fertile,” “plentifully watered”) with Britain’s more established West Indian colonies: “in our...