Grenada had become a French
possession in 1674. For some 20 years the Caribs had held out, boldly meeting
their foe, matching weapons of wood and stone against cold steel and gunpowder.
They had fought the French on the beaches and in the steep inland valleys
amongst the towering trees of the islands interior. The ancient volcano
belching fire and sulfuric flames, forming a hideous backdrop to this their
doomsday scenario, which finally came with a mass suicide when the last
remnants, hounded by the invader, leaped to their deaths in a mad forecast of
the things to come some three hundred years earlier.
The island was cultivated and an
African slave society was introduced. The plantocracy comprised in the main of
the French provincial gentry with money to sustain their endeavor until profits
could be realized. The other French islands in the Caribbean, apart from Haiti,
comprised of Dominica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and St. Vincent.
Professor Gordon Rohlehr observes "The island of Grenada was captured by
the British in 1759 and ceded to Britain in 1763. The British sought to
accommodate the French residents whom they included in the limited assembly of
the time." The British were aware of the necessity to maintain a united
European front against the free blacks who outnumbered them. These arrangements
in the main did not last as the French were more than a little sympathetic with
the rebellious American colonists who were seeking to over throw British rule
on the North American continent.
The French government did all in
its power to undermine the British imperial expansion. In response Britain
attempted a few years later to capture Haiti from both the French and the Black
Jacobins who had risen in revolt. As the winds of the European wars surged back
and forth in the Western oceans, Grenada was captured by the French in 1779 at
the height of the American War of Independence. However it was returned to the
British under the Treaty of Versailles. It was against this background of being
fearful of British recrimination, for the discrimination which the French had
perpetrated against the British over the previous four years, made the planters
glad to take advantage of what was being offered to them under the Cedula of
population of 1783. This accommodation by the Spanish crown to fellow Catholics
in the Caribbean, that was increasingly torn apart by war, was in fact a
defining element in the history of Trinidad. The inability to recognise the bicentennial of this event in
1983 by the government of the day in Trinidad was a testimony of our social and
political immaturity. Significant anniversaries are important landmarks which give us the opportunity to
re-examine these special events. The French entry into Trinidad was very
significant. French researcher F. P. Renault wrote:
"The French inhabitants of
the islands considered themselves as brothers, jointly responsible to each
other and hardly coming to care for a nationality which they would probably
never employ for long. Also, they were more attached to the islands where they
had established themselves, to the islands in which they were united in
memories and interest, than to a mother country which they had left with no
thought of returning. It was because of this that the all powerful tradition of
kinship developed and became central to the French Creole character.
The original colonists were known
as the new colonists to distinguish them from the old Spanish settlers ... Many
had left the land of their fathers several generations before, and had helped
to colonise French possessions in other parts of the New World. Some families
began their colonial experience in Acadia, in what is now Canada, in the 17th
century, others in Louisiana and New Orleans.
In their migrations, subject as
they were to changes political, economic and climatic, they found themselves at
times completely uprooted; their circumstances substantially altered, often
having to start afresh; and because of the fortunes of war, families would find
themselves distributed among several islands whose ownership would change hands
from one year to the next, while in reality they would continue to share
identical interests and a way of life that had evolved as a result of living in
the tropics, on cocoa and sugar plantations operated by slave labour for, in
some cases several generations. All the while they maintained the language and
traditions of the land of their origins. All these factors contributed to the
fostering of a West Indian spirit, a West Indian French Creole way of life, as
well as to produce a community of opinion between the colonists of various
islands, in spite of the strict application of the various colonial laws."
Other French elements made their
way to Trinidad, as Professor Bridget Brereton wrote in 'Book of Trinidad':
"Right from the start of the
French Revolution, in 1789, privileged Frenchmen, and especially members of the
noblesse, fled from their native land to the comparative safety of exile. This
exodus stepped up during the first half of the 1790s, when the revolutionary
regime was at its most extreme.
Although the emigrés included thousands of clergymen and members of the Third
Estate (commoners), it was the noble exiles who gave the emigrés as a group
their main characteristics: royalist, fiercely Catholic, and bitterly opposed
to the revolution and all its works.
Since many of the noble emigrés
had been military officers (the army being one of the few acceptable careers
for young noblemen), it was natural that they would want to serve the great
counter-revolutionary military alliance spearheaded by Britain, Austria and
Prussia. And of these, large numbers did enlist in the armed forces of these
three powers as officers, to such an extent that special French units were
organised in each army. The British military authorities allowed many emigrés
to raise regiments for regular service with the army, such as the 'Chasseurs
Brittaniques', only one of many. Royalist emigrés often bought commissions in
regular British companies or regiments.
Many of these emigrés serving as
officers with the British armed forces fought in the Caribbean campaigns of the
1790s. As early as 1792, before Britain was at war with revolutionary France,
plans were being hatched among emigrés in Britain with property in Ste.
Domingue (Haiti) to ship an army of emigrés to the Caribbean, presumably to
crush the revolution in the French colonies. This came to nothing, but many
French emigrés from the Antilles received commissions in the 9th, 10th, 11th
and 12th West India Regiments, which were raised in Guadeloupe and Martinique
and were taken into the British Establishment (i.e. as regular British troops)
in 1798. White French Creole officers serving with British-raised black troops
in Ste. Domingue during the British occupation (1794-1798) often remained in
the British service after the occupation was over. Many emigrés without
Caribbean connections, who had received commissions in regular British troops,
took part in the West Indian campaigns of 1793-1797, in one of which Trinidad
was conquered. Several of them stayed on in Trinidad."
Apart from the military men,
there were other French royalists from Haiti who offered their services to the
British forces during their ultimately abortive campaign to undermine the
Haitian revolution and wrest Haiti from both the blacks and the French
republicans. Rejected by the British in Jamaica because the assembly there
feared that their Haitian slaves might have absorbed the dangerous doctrine of
republicanism, Haitian planters and their slaves were re-settled in Trinidad.
The impact of the Haitians, both planters and slaves, was felt in Trinidad. The
Haitians tended to settle in the south of the island, and, whether true or
false, the planters found themselves stigmatized as being licentious and
accused by the other French colons of indulging in outrageous orgies. Their
slaves introduced the syncretic African religion, 'voudoun', and with it the
pathological fear of poisoning and the creation of the 'zombi', or the living
dead, a cult that was unknown in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles.
Mistrust, financial insecurity, an atmosphere bordering on hysteria, all this
helped to determine the spirit of the first years of British rule in Trinidad.
The British did not trust the loyalty of the French, whether freshly arrived
royalists or seasoned Creoles in their second or third generation. They trusted
the free coloureds and free black people even less, fully aware that the
Grenadian revolution of 1795 was led by Fedon and other free coloured
republicans. This revolution had cost the lives of some 7,000 persons on that
island. Dr. James Millette in "Genesis of Crown Colony Government"
tells us of the great care that was taken by the region's military governments
with regard to slaves from Haiti. In the case of Trinidad, taking all but 39 of
300 Haitian negroes refused at Martinique, there were plots or rumours of plots
to wipe out the entire European population. This was dealt with by Governor
Thomas Picton very harshly. Notwithstanding poisoning did take place on several
estates. One case, a serious one, occurred at Coblentz in St. Anns.
The year 1803 proved to be very
fatal for the Coblentz estate, as the owner, Baron de Montalambert, lost 70 out
of 150 slaves in a period of nine months. Governor Colonel Hislop commissioned
St. Hilaire Begorrat, a member of the Council of Government, and Louis François
Sergeant, a French notary from Martinique, to inquire into the circumstances of
this tragedy. Eventually the principal driver, the hospital orderly and three
slaves of the estate were convicted of poisoning and executed. During the
inquiry, it became known that amongst the slaves on the estate were some who
had been brought by Monsieur de Mallevault, the previous owner of Coblentz,
from his estates in Martinique, where in 1793 a similar excessive mortality had
occurred, where as well the use of poison had been suspected. Was one of the
Africans he brought Trinidad's first (and thank God so far only) mass murderer,
hitting his victims both in Martinique and here?
As the report of the
Commissioners states:
"Every experienced planter
knows that the negro doctors, obeahmen, are nothing but poisoners who profit by
the ignorance and credulity of their comrades. They sell them some
insignificant powders to which they attribute miraculous virtues, and after
carrying on with this trade for some time to acquire reputation, always finish
by selling poisons extracted from plants with which they are well acquainted
and can always find. The police can never be too vigilant of these sort of
doctors, as they are dangerous from their principles and from the consequences
they produce."
The Baron de Montalambert was
near total ruin by the loss of almost half of his slaves. In 1806, he sold his
town house property on Frederick Street between Woodford Square and Park
Street, and in 1808 he put up large sections of his St. Anns estate for sale.
That same year, the planter died as well.
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