Tobago is a
small place, but it has about it a sense of distance. As you drive from the
airport along the swift highway, the land falls away, sometimes undulating,
sometimes flat, but always windy.
Between the
ever so tall coconut trees and tangled shrubs, you can glimpse the windmills,
their gaping doorways, hollow interiors, and sense of abandonment so long ago
make them seem as ancient as the pyramids or Stonehenge.
Like those
antique monuments of the old world, the windmills of Tobago served useful
purposes as they were engines of the great estates. Their huge spinning sails
served to turn the great millstones in the heart of their cavernous interiors.
The Dutch, who
in the 16th and 17th centuries had established themselves in Tobago, had
brought with them these marvels of European medieval engineering. In Holland,
they had ground the harvest and served as pumps to drain the sea-soaked low
countries and create the polders, new land won from the North Sea.
In Tobago, the
windmills drove the millstones that ground sugar cane, producing the juice from
which sugar, rum and molasses came. The great plantations of Tobago show in
their overgrown ruins more than one heir of economic activity and the progress
of industrialisation. For as you leave behind the dry and windy lowlands and follow
the winding coastal roads on either side of the island, the waterwheels become
more apparent. Stopped still in time, rusting, the giant cogwheels of the
apparatus are seized in rust. There is a stillness, the rivers’ gurgling sound
in the distance, a donkey’s bray, loud, startingly, in the bushes. Look, the
old bell from the estate, half sunken in the earh, and the huge iron pots,
called ‘coppers’ to boil the sugar. Now they are used to water the animals.
Franklyn’s
estate, St. David, is a fine example of the ruins of a sugar estate complex.
Today, its machinery is known as the ‘Arnos Vale Waterwheel’. It is off
Franklyn’s Road, where one can see one of the most impressive plantation sites
of Tobago in a scenic setting. One can visit three different sugar cane
crushing technologies next to each other. There are the foundations of a
windmill, the ruin of a chimney next to a well preserved steam engine, and an
iron wheel about 12 m in diameter, on which is stamped 1857. Just behind are
the ruins of an aquaeduct which once brought water to the wheel from the nearby
river.
At Courland
Bay estate, there is a fine windmill that has been converted into a house, and
other ruins of previous industry. The windmill at Grange estate, north of
Montgomery Road, is now a house as well. Mount Irvin estate, now a grand hotel,
has its windmill built into the hotel itself. There are three mills at Riseland
estate in St. Andrew, and two at Golden Grove. There are two at Bon Accord,
converted into houses. Friendship estate has two, also converted into houses.
There is also a large windmill at Lowlands.
Windmills
exist at Killgwyn, Cove, Shirvan and Bacolet. These ancient monuments to our
past are much more than just old things. They are the history books. If told
well, stories of 16th century adventurers against the backdrop of Europe’s wars,
of conquest, of slavery, the origins of various economies in the 18th and 19th
century, the establishment of churches, the creation of village life, the folk
institution, cultural traditions, folklore and dance: all may be gleaned in the
shadows of the windmills of Tobago. If only they could talk!
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