Burning of Goziria

An Amerindian, in fact a Carib presence, haunts the origins of calypso in Trinidad. Over the last 100 years or so, this presence has been thickly overlaid by an Afro-French veneer, displacing this strand that forms a rich and significant part of the fabric that is part and parcel of our national festival. The story goes like this.

The Caribs had all but faded away from Trinidad by the 1840s. They had been wiped out with the advent of western civilisation and their remnant had retreated to Venezuela. With the arrival of the cocoa planters of the 1870s to the 1890s, they had faded back into the wilderness of the Northern Range and had drifted into urban life. This is where we pick up a little-known story, which Mitto Sampson in his paper on calypso legends recounts.
Jo Jo was the son of Thunderstone, who was the chantwell of a band called the Congo Jockos, that once dominated upper Nelson Street. He was reputed to have lost his wife Cariso Jane to Surisima the Carib, a well-known calypso singer. Jo Jo, in his 90s, told Mitto in 1947 about Surisima the Carib. The word cariso, by which term calypso was known prior to the 1890s, is descended from the Carib term “Carieto,” meaning a joyous song. Surisima was famous also as a folklorist and raconteur. He would be paid by people to come to their homes to tell stories of long ago. He was a wayside historian in the style of the late Jose Ramon Fortune, Harry Pitts and Alfredo Codallo. Whenever he spoke, people gathered.
Jo Jo possessed the Carib tradition. Carietos, he said, could heal the sick with music, embolden the warrior and seduce the beautiful. It is said that during the reign of the cacique Guamatumane in Spanish times (before 1797), singers of carieto were rewarded with special gifts of land, and, apart from the caciques themselves, they also had the most beautiful ladies.
It is related that during the regime of the cacique Guancangari the two great singers were Dioarima, a tall, good-looking, powerful personality, and Casaripo, an “undersized weakling” who had a voice that was capable of making cowards brave, invigorating the poorly and calming the crazy.
Dioarima had two lovely daughters who were watched over day and night. One dark and windy night, a singer hid in the bushes and proceeded to sing several beautiful and hauntingly soulful songs. The songs had a very upsetting effect on the lovely daughters of Dioarima. The singer returned the following night and once again sang his haunting songs. The two girls slipped out into the night and met the singer in the high forest that surrounded the village in which they lived and went with him to Conquerabia (now Port of Spain). The three lived together for many years “in regal splendour”, and Dioarima was never able to get back his daughters.
When the Spaniards came to Trinidad, they heard of these wonderful singers whose voices spurred men to battle even in the face of fearful odds. According to Mitto Sampson, “they used bribery and clever manipulation and finally ambushed the two [singers] through the treachery of the Carib slave-woman Goziria. The singers were subjected to unspeakable tortures, and molten lead was poured down their throats.”
After Casaripo and Dioarima had been killed, the power of the Caribs began to fade in Trinidad until they were eventually conquered by the Spanish. Guandori, a famous stickman of the 1860s, was the last descendant of the daughters of Dioarima, the fabled singer. He was a great stickman in the tradition of  Tiny Satan, Rocou John and Cutaway Rimboud.
“Surisima himself used to organise a procession of Carib descendants from the city of Port of Spain to the heights of El Chiqueno,” relates Mitto Sampson. “Up in the mountains of the Northern Range, they would make a huge figure of the Carib slave-woman Goziria, the betrayer of their ancestors, and burn this giant figure after much feasting, drinking and singing of obscene songs. The song remembered from those times went:

‘Cazi, cazi, cazi, cazi,
Dende, dende, dende, dariba.’”

Shiffer Brathwaite told Mitto Sampson that his father said that when the people sang this song, they remembered and felt the sorrow experienced by the Caribs for the loss and betrayal of Casaripo and Dioarima.

Centennial Impulses

 The emergence of a national society evolved in cycles of centuries.

“The turn of the century” is a phrase pregnant with a sense of the auspicious, the momentous. For Trinidad and Tobago, the turn of the 18th century and the turn of the 19th century did in fact mark turning points in the overall development of the two islands.

In the case of Trinidad, the end of the 1790s, 1797 to be exact, marked the close of 300 years of Spain’s dominion over this island. 300 years of studied neglect, in fact. Various points of view have been put forward as to why Trinidad ‘de Barlovento’, “to the windward”, was not developed by Spain. Some sources say that it was because the original inhabitants, the Caribs, were man-eaters. This is true, as it was commonly put about by the Caribs themselves that Spaniards tasted much better than the English or the Dutch. Other sources say that these warrior tribes were in the process of conquering the island at the same time when the first Europeans arrived. One of the results of this conquest of Trinidad by the Caribs was their eating of the Aruac men and the marrying of the Aruac women. The equally conquering Spaniards, however, didn’t plan to either eat nor marry any Amerindians, but to enslave the whole lot. Different strokes for different folks!

Another reason for Spain’s neglect of Trinidad may have been the island’s proximity to the Orinoco delta. This river system, one of the world’s largest, could take ships right into the upper reaches of the South American continent, to the Guyanas, to Venezuela, Columbia, almost to the Andes themselves. If Trinidad had been developed, with a busy port, infrastructure for ships, provisions and labour, the island might have become a stepping stone, a base camp, from which all sorts of expeditions up the Orinoco could have been launched. The Spanish Crown had good interest in avoiding that. History had taught them that the rumour of a “Golden Civilisation” on the level of Peru and Mexico existed upstream of the Orinoco. It had already brought English conquistadors like Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1590s to Trinidad. In search of the fabled El Dorado, he had burnt the port of Trinidad, which is where Port of Spain is today, taken the island’s capital, San Jose de Oruna, released the governor’s prisoners, the island’s principle caciques, taken the governor captive and sailed up the Orinoco in search of the gold of El Dorado. And all that Raleigh was acting on was a rumour! The fact that he ‘lost his head’ (literally) a couple of years later perhaps makes the point about acting on rumours...

For whatever reason, the island of Trinidad remained uncultivated and basically uncolonised. It was not, however, entirely neglected. Early on, it was discovered that rich beds of pearl-bearing oysters lay just offshore all along the Western coast, from the Naparimas in the south to Chaguaramas in the north. This was, in fact, our first “industry’ - pearl fishing. So many tribal people died in this work of diving for pearls that the Gulf of Paria was called by the Spaniards the Gulf of Tears. Capuchin missionaries came from Aragon in Spain to convert the natives who had not died as the result of European contact, or who had not been captured and sold into slavery. These, the remainder, they “pacified” by robbing them of their culture.

Tobago during this period was having a very different sort of experience. Quite contrary to Trinidad, Tobago was being settled and also hotly contested. The United Provinces, now the Netherlands, was seeking to break away from Spanish rule. One of their ways of doing this was to establish for themselves a viable economy. Tobago became an object of opportunity for the Dutch. By the early 1600s, they were on the island, cutting the forest, importing slaves from Africa, and building windmills - cutting edge economical reasoning and technology at the time!

But the Dutch were not alone. The Courlanders, one of Europe’s mini states, not much bigger than Tobago, had been given the Caribbean island by James of England. (Not that it was his to give in the first place.) The Courlanders were settling around Courland Bay, and the Dutch on the other side of the island, around what is now Scarborough. For a while, they were unaware of each other’s presence, but upon discovery, they promptly had it out.

Tobago was much fought over by European leading nations of the day during the centuries that followed. The Dutch, the French, the English delivered an appearing never-ending round of conquest and settlement.

Tobago acquired institutions that were out of the ordinary in other colonies of the time. A House of Assembly, for example, occupied by the white planter interest, was already in existence in Tobago, while Port of Spain had nothing much going on.

Tobago was laid out in parishes. By the mid-1780s, towns were planned and a forest reserve created. For a tropical island in that period that was quite advanced. It is interesting to note that just as Trinidad was coming out of its long 300-year Spanish slumber with the conquest of the island by the British in 1797, Tobago was just about to enter a twilight that was to last almost a century and a half.

With Trinidad, the 1780s on through the 1800s saw the most rapid development that could be imagined. This was the result of the French colonisation of this Spanish island. History has asked the question why after some 300 years of virtual abandonment did Spain suddenly allow a French creole from Grenada by the name of de St. Laurent create a population here? It has been put forward that because the Kings of Spain were now of French descent, they were more keen on the development of their territories. It has also been said that the Spanish government needed to develop the island because the British or some other European power might seize it and in so doing gain a foothold on the continent.

Be that as it may. The facts are that the French came to Trinidad in 1783, brought thousands of slaves and opened up the island and created an agricultural economy which was to last until independence. But more than that, they established a cultural frontier. The French “colons”, both of European extraction and the more locally assembled variety, set the tone for how Trinidad’s dominant cultural forms in music, festivals and song (calypso) were to take form.

The century from the 1800s to the 1900s was a French century in Trinidad, despite the fact that the island was a British colony. Perhaps with exception of the Indian immigrants of the second half of the 19th century, Frenchness touched everyone's life, black and white alike. After 1845, the coming of the East Indians, however, was of great significance. By virtue of their separate rural and agricultural lifestyle, they retained their religious, cultural and social moiré, without impacting on the overall body politic for perhaps the first century of their immigration. The Indianness of Trinidad can only be compared in the Caribbean with that of Guyana.

Without doubt, the century between 1800 and 1900 saw the foundation for Trinidadianness put into place, comprising several ethnicities and economies. Sugar, cocoa and oil have helped to make this place so unique amongst emerging nations.

From 1900 to 2000, Trinidad has developed significantly, building on and benefitting tremendously from the institutions that were established by the British colonial system: the judiciary, the police service, educational, health and infrastructural amenities.

In keeping with the various economies, Trinidad has undergone a remarkable degree of industrialisation. Similar to other emerging industrial nations in the first decades of the 20th century, local labour had to struggle hard to maintain its dignity vis-à-vis the colonial power. The same accounts for voter franchise and the distinctive freedom of speech, expression and behaviour that is so much our own.

Looking back over the close to 220 years since the Cedula of Population presents the student of history with an amazing landscape. Class, race, skin colour, caste, gender: all were combined to produce immensely complex and fascinating patterns of human relationships. Notwithstanding the relatively healthy state of the country’s economy at any point in time, its success was really only ever due to its people and the evolution of a national society.

Don Antonio and the Amerindians

In 1524, an elderly Spaniard set out to become a conquistador. His quixotic attempts to settle the economically worthless island of Trinidad was met with furious opposition from the tribal people.

Don Antonio Sedeño was Trinidad’s first governor, if one doesn’t count Christopher Columbus. Sedeño arrived in 1530, personifying the first serious attempt by the Spaniards to settle in Trinidad after its discovery by Columbus some 32 years before. In the meantime, only sporadic visits had been made by Spanish captains, who tried to obtain Amerindians as pearl divers. Upon enslaving them and taking them away to the pearl islands of Cubagua, Coche and Margarita, most of the Amerindians died.

A previous attempt to settle the island of Trinidad had failed in 1513, when two Spanish Dominican missionaries came. Their names were Francisco Cordova and Juan Garces, and they were very successful in making friends with the local Amerindians, even though they didn’t know each other’s language.

When a Spanish ship arrived, the Amerindians, used to the Spanish friars and trusting them, welcomed the sailors with tokens and gifts. A number of Amerindians was invited on board the ship, and no sooner had they arrived there, that the captain hoisted the anchor and abducted them to Santo Domingo, where they were sold into slavery!

The Spanish friars were as upset as the Amerindians about that, and short of being lynched by the tribal people, they begged them to let them try and free their brothers. With the next ship, they sent their complaints to the authorities in Santo Domingo and to the superior of the Dominican order. Unfortunately, the Amerindians from Trinidad had been bought as slaves by officials of the supreme court, so nothing was done about the matter!

For eight months, the Amerindians and the monks waited in Trinidad. Eventually, the Amerindians lost their patience and the friars were put to death, becoming the first martyrs of their faith in Trinidad.

Violence breeds violence which breeds violence. In 1516, Juan Bono from the Biscay in Spain, came to Trinidad with 70 men. Ostensibly a peaceful settler, he won the trust of the Amerindians. After a while, Bono invited a large group of tribal people to a feast of friendship. When everybody was gathered in a large hut, Bono's men surrounded the hut, overwhelmed the gathering by force and abducted many tribal people to their boats. The ones he could not fit into the hold, he burnt to death inside the hut which was set on fire. The ones in the boat were sold as slaves in Puerto Rico.

Trinidad, discovered in 1498 by Columbus, was not really conquered until Don Antonio Sedeño, seeing himself as a conquistador in the wake of Vasco de Balboa, Fernand Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, obtained letters of patent as governor and captain general of the island. The Royal Court requested that his conquest should be completed, and that he would erect forts and churches in the conquered places.

Sedeño arrived in Trinidad in November 1530, with two caravels, 70 men, food, arms, horses, domestic animals and trinkets for barter with the tribal people. He landed in the Bay of Erin - the only coastline known at the time.

The Amerindians did not resist him. Rather, they came to the bay to welcome him, with their cacique Maruana as the leader. Sedeño distributed gifts, and Maruana made him understand that he would appreciate him as an ally against the Caribs.

Other Indian chieftains came to greet Sedeño, who was, however, cautious and built a fortification for his men and his possessions. After a while, the Spaniards’ food stocks began to run out. In true Spanish style, they decided to raid the conucos (villages) of the Amerindians in the northern part of the island, Cumucurapo, in the dead of night. When the Amerindians heard of this, they decided to expel the intruders - all with the exception of Maruana, who had come to see himself as Sedeño friend and did not join the conspiracy.

The attack of the Amerindians was sudden, but the Spaniard were able to hold them off for a while thanks to their fortifications and firearms. After losing many soldiers, Sedeño decided to back off for the moment, sending the remaining men to the mainland and going himself to Puerto Rico for reinforcements and food. Maruana helped the Spaniards to escape in the two caravels in which they had come.

It was not as easy as expected for Sedeño to raise men and provisions in Puerto Rico. Everybody had heard of the conflict with the Amerindians there and was reluctant to join. Sedeño traveled for six years between Trinidad, the forts on the South American mainland, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. Fort Paria, which was where the remainder of the Trinidad soldiers had settled, was taken by another Spanish conquistador, Diego de Ordas. Unbeknownst to that, Sedeño sent a ship to Fort Paria with supplies. Fearful of de Ordas, the caravel turned away from the Fort and landed instead in Cumucurapo in Trinidad. The Amerindians seemed to be welcoming enough, and gave the 30 men of the ship a place to settle. A week later, 24 of the sailors  were killed by the tribal people, who obviously did not trust any Spaniards anymore. Six men escaped with the caravel and went to report to Sedeño.

At the end of 1532, Sedeño sailed to Trinidad with 80 men with a plan to attack the Amerindians. The tribal people, however, had been warned of the nightly attack, and fought fiercely. However, Sedeño overwhelmed them, and only a couple women and children were left of the village of Cumucurapo, fleeing into the mountains. Nothing was left of the village, and having no provisions, Sedeño withdrew to Margarita.

A year later, Sedeño returned with 170 men with the intention to conquer and settle the island of La Trinidad. The Spaniards built a stockade at Cumucurapo. Many men fell ill, and even though he suspected another attack from the Amerindians, Sedeño could only rely on the food supplies from Maruana and wait.

On the 13th September 1533, the second battle of Cumucurapo began. The Amerindians swept down from the mountains with loud battle cries. Many Spaniards were killed, and the Indian attack was only broken up when the Spaniards counter-attacked on horseback (a sight totally unknown and surely quite terrible to the Indian warriors).

Sedeño prevailed, rebuilt the fortifications, motivated the remaining men. A couple months later, however, he had to give up, since everybody left to seek the riches of Peru with Pizzaro. On the 27th August, 1534, Sedeño left Trinidad and never returned.

He went to Fort Paria, where de Ordas imprisoned him for six months. Eventually, he was released and returned to Puerto Rico, regaining his health. Like so many others he was still bitten by the El Dorado bug, and after gathering yet another following, set out for the South American mainland in search for gold.

Sedeño died in 1538 down the main, poisoned by a slave girl. Thus died Trinidad’s first designated governor.

Carib Tale

Mausica estate off the Arima old road is now no more. The giant immortelles, the mother of the cocoa, no longer house hundreds of yellow-tail bird nests. They were cut down years ago to give way to a school and housing development. The river that ran behind the old estate house has all but disappeared, and the ancient forest from which it sprang has also vanished. Mausica came into our family more than two hundred years ago when a distant relation of my father’s people, who had come from France in the 1780s, married a beautiful half Spanish, half  Carib girl named Mausica.

It was she who brought with her, as her dowry, her inheritance was the ancient Spanish title to this beautiful piece of Trinidad, and it was after her that the estate was named. This truly beautiful human being, who lived to a great age and was remembered by the older people of Arima up until a generation or so ago, also left behind a wonderful colletion of folktales and memories of her mother’s people, the Caribs. This is one such tale:

How the Caribs came to the earth

Once upon a time, the Caribs lived on the moon. They didn’t call it ‘moon’, but they lived there nevertheless, and the outlines of their land on the moon can be seen by everybody on a cloudless night.

Of course, the Caribs were looking at the earth from their land on the moon, and indeed they were wondering why the earth looked so dark and gloomy. One day they decided to come over and give it a good cleaning, so it would shine brightly. They rode on some clouds, descended on the earth and started to clean it, but when they found that they had done enough, they couldn’t find their clouds again to return to the moon. They started to pray to their Most Ancient One, but to no avail. As the day grew to a close, they started to be very hungry. On the moon, they would just pick up the nourishing moon dust, mix it with water, form it into pleasant shapes, bake it and eat those moon cakes. They tried to do that with earth’s clay, but it grew hard and wasn’t edible at all.

The Most Ancient One, however, sent them some birds - which the Caribs had never seen before - which showed them how to pick berries and fruit and eat those. So the Caribs also started to eat fruit and berries, which quelled their first hunger.

After a while, however, they grew tired of the berries. They again prayed to the Most Ancient One, and again their faith was rewarded. In the forest, they found a most miraculous tree, whose branches bore different fruit, and from whose roots sprang all kinds of vegetables: plaintains, cassava, corn and yam.

The Caribs were amazed at the tree, but since they were only used to moondust, again they did not know that this was food. A wild animal came to their help again: this time a wild hog or quenk, which showed them how to rummage in the soft earth and dig out the roots and provisions. The famished Caribs washed all the provisions, put them in the unpalatable clay vessels that they had made and cooked them. What a delicious innovation!

It seemed to become clear that they would not ever be able to return to the moon. When they saw that the fruit and provisions from the miraculous tree were diminishing, again they started to worry about the future. But the Most Ancient One again helped them out: in their sleep, he whispered to them to cut branches from the tree and plant them, so that they in turn would grow to become fruit-bearing. He also told them to keep grains of maize and how to plant some of the roots so they would grow into new plants.

The Caribs did as they were told, and soon, their settlement on earth was a beautiful little village, where everybody grew their food around their ajoupas. And they stayed on earth for a long, long time.

Every now and then, they would look up at the moon on a cloudless night, and think of the times when they ancestors ate moondust and in turn looked at the dark earth. And then they would sit down and tell this story to their sons and daughters.

The Land of Beginnings

A historical review of Trinidad and Tobago in the last 500 years, prepared in commemoration of the ‘Fin de Siècle’ 1999-2000

Amongst the earliest settlers of Trinidad’s of whom we have proof were the Banwari people, who lived in the Oropouche lagoon in south-west Trinidad. These Meso Indians, as archeologists call them, were fishermen, hunters of small game and collectors of wild fruits, vegetables, nuts and shellfish. They built canoes from the giant trees that grew in the ancient forest and had the ability to navigate, enabling them to explore and settle the islands of the Caribbean archipelago.

Their history is a book now forever closed. Their legacy, however, consists of middens, mounds containing sherds of broken pottery, shells, bones and clay figurines, and of course many place names. Erin, Piarco, Mayaro, Cumana, Moruga, Ortiore, Oropouche, Guayaguayare, Ariapita, Couva: many of these names represent Amerindian names of plants, trees and animals. Mucurapo means ‘place of the silk cotton tree’, Chaguaramas is the name for the palmiste palm, and Tunapuna means ‘on the river’.

Whereas other Caribbean islands were inhabited by only one or two Amerindian tribes, Trinidad was settled by many, due to its close proximity to the South American mainland. When Columbus discovered Trinidad in 1498, he encountered several tribes, who spoke a variety of languages, some known today as Arawak and Cariban. Early records show that at that time, Trinidad was inhabited by 40,000 Amerindians. On the south coast Shebaio and Aruac (Lokono) had settled. The Nepoio lived on the south east and east coast of Trinidad. The Yao settled along the south west coast, and the Carinepagoto occupied the north west of Trinidad. In central Trinidad, the Tamanaque must have had their villages. The Quaqua, the Salive, the Chaguane, the Pariagoto and the Chaima complete the number of eleven tribes of which the names survived.

Besides those, several other tribes must have lived in Trinidad, but their names are not preserved. It is likely, for instance, that Cariban-speaking groups occupied most of Trinidad circa A.D. 1500, since also Tobago was inhabited by the Cariban-speaking Kalina in the early seventeenth century.

The Trinidad Amerindians were entirely naked except for girdles and headbands of multi-coloured cotton cloth. Bodies were painted red with roukou and feathers were used for decoration. Tribal headmen wore a golden crown and golden eagle-shaped ornaments on their breasts.

The tribes in Trinidad engaged in trade with those on the continents via the Gulf of Paria and the waterways: stone for making axes and other implements were obtained from Paria and the Guianas. Golden objects and other products of South America were bartered with the Orinoco Indians for pearls, salt and probably tobacco.

The Amerindians practised shifting cultivation. Fields were burned in the dry season and planted at the beginning of the wet season. When the soil was depleted after a couple of harvests, they were abandoned. The crops consisted in cotton, cassava, tobacco, maize, beans, squashes and peppers. Generally, their diet was very rich in protein, legumes and fish.

Society was loosely organised. Their villages with their bell-shaped houses moved frequently. The village headman was an elder kinsman and most of the people of the village were related to him. Religion was characterized by a universal belief in spritis of nature; deities were not worshiped. Medicine men served as curers and advisors due to their ability to contact spirits. Villages often formed alliances against villages of other tribes. Men fought with darts, sling stones and bows and arrows. They also practised ritual cannibalism.

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the outgoing 15th century, the days of the Amerindians were numbered. Their culture was destroyed by the Catholic missionaries of the Cisterciensan and Capuchin orders, who set up missions along the east and south coasts of Trinidad, and by the more modern and brutal European civilisation which brought many deseases that decimated the natives. A lot of the Amerindians were massacred by the colonizers, who were much better armed. Those who survived had to adapt to the Cross, the Book and to labouring for somebody else. Their villages and extended families disintegrated within a few generations. Many re-crossed the Gulf of Paria to the mainland.

But their legacy is still with us today, even as we drive through the countryside. Many of the major streets in Trinidad are built on Amerindian footpaths, such as the Eastern Main Road all the way to Mayaro, the Royal Road, the Mayaro-Rio Claro Road, and even the road to Maracas. ‘Indian Walk’ in southern Trinidad is reminiscent of the Amerindians who came to Trinidad from Venezuela, landed with their canoes on the south coast, and walked with all their goods to peddle them in the little markets of Mission Village.

Missions of the Catalan Capuchin Priests (established between 1687 and 1708)

- San Jose de Oruna (St. Joseph)

- Arouca

- Arena

- Montserrat

- Savonetta

- Naparima

- Savana Grande

- Moruga

- Guyaguayare

- Mayaro

Missions of the Aragon Capuchin Priests (established between 1758 and 1837)

- Port-of-Spain

- Arouca

- Arima

- Salibia

- Toco

- Cumana

- Matura

- Siparia