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The tragedy of slavery came to Trinidad with the Cedula of Population. This remarkable document, promulgated by the Spanish Crown, made it easy for Catholics to arrive in this deserted, neglected, but in terms of the times very strategic island. In terms of significant beginnings, this was a big one for Trinidad.

Prior to 1788 the island had no economy and was very impoverished. The difference in life style between the few enslaved and their owners was made even more opaque by the status of the children they shared.

One of the significant things that occurred with the Cedula of Population was the arrival of a large quantity of black people who were not slaves. Some had been born into slavery but had gained their freedom in various ways, for example as rewards for acts of kindness, faithful service or heroic action. Some bought their freedom. Others had been born that way as a result of parents being themselves free.

The fact is that of the ten or twelve thousand free people of colour who came to Trinidad with the Cedula, the majority were slave owners and a handful were big time slave masters. As an institution, the ownership of your fellow human being was an economic necessity. There was no economy outside the plantation system, except in shipping and trading, and money did not change hands as we have seen from earlier articles on the history of banking.

It has been put forward by Vidia Naipaul in his ‘Loss of El Dorado’ that part of the British government's disaffection with Sir Thomas Picton was that he followed the lead of the planters, both French and the coloured, and made Trinidad into a slave island by the 1800s. What was becoming policy was to offer Trinidad as being soft in slavery as a sop to the abolishment. Be that as it may, by the time the British government announced its decision to free the slaves, the real reason was not humanistic, but purely economic. From one day to the next, black slave owners and the previously held slaves were one and the same in the eyes of the law, society and to each other, although this may have been very one sided view. Both the white planters and their coloured counterparts were faced with economic collapse as their workforce walked.

Equally keenly felt was the hard-won ‘maintenance of status’ by the  black former slave owners. The terms of the Cedula by which they had come to Trinidad provided a very unique arrangement for free black people at the time. They could own land, slaves, benefit from tax relief, inherit property, educate their children in respectable professions, become commissioned in the militia, make a lot of money: in short, live life for all intent and purpose like the white people.

With the conquest of Spanish Trinidad by Britain in 1797, these terms relating to the free blacks were enshrined in the articles of surrender. In the period after the Napoleonic wars, that is in governor Sir Ralph Woodford's time (1813 - 1829), there was a move to repeal those articles relating to the free coloureds. Fortunately for them, produced from their ranks a wealthy, highly educated, politically active and energetic person, whose name was Jean Baptiste Philippe.

Philippe travelled to London, armed with a petition, and made important representations. His case for the rights of the free coloureds in Trinidad was upheld in the House of Lords. Free blacks and people of colour were able maintain their status under the law. Racial prejudice, dished out to them by the Europeans under the Woodford administration, was dealt with. At the end of the day there still existed a social abyss between them and their slaves, which was not to change before emancipation in 1834.

This awesome dichotomy between the people of African descent, slave and former master, has eroded through the centuries, and the real historic reasons have long been forgotten. The myth that black people naturally do not like to see their own prosper has its foundations in the class structure among people of African descent, which has been formalised by the end of the 1900s. Those were the years that local political movements began to group themselves, but  later the successors of those same political organisations could not fill the lack of unity. People of African descent became mixed up about whether they are Trinidadians or merely the ‘African problems’ of the segmented society. The social problems of this segmented society, and this has not to do with tribalism, may be summed up in the obituary of a well-off coloured businessman:

"Rich, educated, strictly moral, yet he had no place in society, because of those social distinctions with which the country is cursed. And he was not without manly pride, which enabled him to be satisfied with a very small number of chosen companions rather than to court those whom he felt to be his inferiors morally and intellectually, and whose only claim to consideration consisted . . . in the purity of their Caucasian blood . . . He felt keenly the disabilities under which certain races, notably that to which he himself belonged, were subjected." 

It was not in England's interest to deal with the social, moral and economic fallout of these beginnings. The responsibility lies with us at any point in time, because history is about capturing a beginning and following its resulting course of events in an attempt to organise meaning.

Nothing much has changed in 200 years

Very early Port of Spain

Port of Spain was probably not founded by the Spaniards at all. “There is no reason to suppose that its importance to the indigenous inhabitants was not supplemented in time by the activities of migrants, refugees and transients,” writes architect John Newel Lewis in his book ‘Ajoupa’. The tribal people had a name for it; they called it ‘Conquerabia’. The Spaniards merely referred to it as ‘Puerto de los Hispanioles’.

By 1560, the Spanish placed troops there. Historian P.G.L. Borde says in his book ‘The History of the island of Trinidad under the Spanish government’ that there was a fort and a trading post. The mangrove swamps that we can glimpse at today off the foreshore for example, covered all of today’s downtown Port of Spain. Huge silk cotton trees and other forest giants grew, and housing consisted almost entirely of open ajoupas, scattered here and there in bush. There was a small,mud-walled enclosure with a shack inside, a flagpole, two or three cannons and some dishevelled, unshaven Spanish soldiers. The Caribs came and went; there was some traffic with the mainland and up the Orinoco river a couple of times per year.

In 1680, when the French naval commander Comte D’Estrées visited, he reported that there was no Port of Spain at that time, only a military post, an earthen mound with two guns and some fishermen’s huts. In 1690, governor Don Sebastien de Roteta reported in writing to the King of Spain:

“Already six houses have been made and others have been started. There is already a church in this place, so that it was unnecessary to build a new.”

It was hard for the Spaniards to establish a settlement. The natives were always restless, even hostile, and that is to put it mildly! Even the ‘pacified’ ones “were in the habit of showering scorn and abuse upon the Holy Faith and ridiculed with jests the efforts of the Holy Fathers”, as the alcaldes of Trinidad reported to the King in December of 1699.

But notwithstanding something of a permanent settlement, meaning permanent occupation, did begin around 1700.

A fragment of a letter survives in Tom Cambridge’s collection, written by Martin Perez Anda y Salaza. It says in part that a church was erected in 1722 with the assistance of the parish of the town. But in truth, the place was a port, not a town. It was around the grass market, Besson Street, or thereabouts, that there was activity. Traders from ‘down the main’ and illegal immigrants came and went; contraband goods were stored in temporary shelters.In 1739, there was fear of smallpox. Newel Lewis comments that this laissez-faire, free-for-all style is a characteristic of Port of Spain up to the present.

In 1768, an area around what is known today as George, Nelson and Duncan Streets and about as far west as Frederick Street was settled. A plaza was staked out in conformity to the King’s ordinance of 1573 for the laying out of towns in the Spanish colonies. There was an Amerindian village called Cu-Mucurapo nearby.

By 1777, Philippe Roume de St. Laurent, a Creole from Grenada who was seeking new land to settle, could report that there were eighty houses made of light cane, plastered with a mixture of mud and grass, then whitewashed and covered with with thatch. He goes on to say: “The Governor lives here.”

The problem with the mud buildings, whether fort or house, was of course that the rainy season dissolved them. They ran and bent, and when dry season came, they dried up and cracked and became completely misshapen. Also, the bush never ceased to grow. The alligators ate the dogs and the chickens.

With the arrival of the French in 1783, the pace of development accelerated. Better port facilities came about as there was much landing of cargo, both animate and unanimate. The jetty was lengthened, the mangrove cut away, and most important the Rio Santa Anna was diverted. Captain Ricketts of Barbados wrote in 1788 (Public Records Office, quoted in ‘Ajoupa’):

“The present capital of the island three years ago contained only a few mud houses; the inhabitants of which were fishermen. Now it contains 600 houses, mostly built of wood, and shingled. They are laid out in eleven streets at right angles of a good width, but unpaved. They are very dirty after rain. The number of inhabitants is about 3,000, of which 1,500 are supposed to be white.”

Monsieur Picot de Lapeyrouse established the first sugar cane estate on the island. The Otaheite variety of cane had been introduced by St. Hilaire Begorrat in the 1780s.

Benoit Dert became the first worshipful master of the freemason’s lodge ‘Les Frères Unis’, which was brought by himself and others form St. Lucia in 1795.

The Spanish authorities could hardly handle the locals - much less the high style emigré French creoles. Noone really expected that the French Revolution would send whole communities of French creoles with their slaves, ‘octaroon’ mistresses and ‘pass-for-white’ children tumbling in backwater Trinidad by the the 1790s. In that period, the town grew not as a result of town planning, but inspite of it.

The town was a haven for the flotsam and jetsam of the Caribbean in 1797. It was peopled by half-caste Spaniards, broad-nosed zambos, high-strung mestizo women, French republican soldiers, retires pirates, French nobility and the ghosts of the conquistadors who had died in the previous centuries in search of El Dorado, eaten by the anthropomorgai people in the jungles of Guiria.

All this disorder gave the English their chance. With war generally in the air and Governor Chacon fearful of republicanism, they took the island in 1797 without hardly a shot being fired. Although it was recorded that the guns at Fort St. Andres fired round after round.

But they too had many problems with the mixed population, squatters, vendors, transients, more traders, free Africans, itinerant mainlanders and illegal immigrants. Bearing all the above in mind, one comes away with the feeling that nothing much has changed in the last 200 years in Port of Spain!

Raleigh

All that is Gold doth not glitter

He came to find gold and saw oil: historical ironies of Sir Walter Raleigh

In the 16th century, England expanded into the West Indies. The reasons were purely economical: she had to find a new market for her goods, outside of Europe where there was money. To break Spain’s hegemony in the New World, Englishmen began to wage attacks upon the closely guarded Spanish ships. During this period, ‘might was right’ in the Caribbean, as the courageous privateers and pirates attempted to break the Spanish monopoly in the West.

When Queen Elisabeth decided to take up the cause of the United Provinces of Holland against Philip II of Spain, she knew that the West Indies were the most vulnerable part of his empire. Therefore, in the 1590s, many transatlantic expeditions were ordered by the Queen, and her captains sacked and burnt many fledgling Spanish-American towns: Caracas, Santa María, Río Hacha, Puerto Bello etc.

In 1595, it was San José de Oruna’s (St. Joseph) turn. No other than Sir Walter Raleigh navigated up the river Caroni and destroyed the little capital of Trinidad. Sir Walter, however, was not only Her Majesty’s faithful mariner, but also one of those conquistadors who dreamt of ‘el dorado’, the golden man, the riches of the unknown golden city somewhere in South America, where precious stones and nuggets as big as fists were lying in the streets.

The stories of El Dorado were not the only ones: there were also tales of man-eaters, and of Caribs who ate other Indians and who seized and killed white men in the most cruel ways possible. Stories of anthropohagi, men whose heads grew between their shoulders, of jaguars, of swamps, mosquitoes, the silence and ‘hardships so dire and grave when they are known, appear fables in the telling’ made the rounds. But there was always the lure of gold, and Raleigh was hoping that the Orinoco would turn out to be the waterway to El Dorado.

Raleigh weighed anchor in England on 6th February 1595 and arrived at Icacos in Trinidad on 22nd March. Just several weeks before, another English conquistador, the young Sir Robert Dudley, had visited our shores, and who, after consulting with the Aruacs (who reaffirmed the Orinoco as the right way to El Dorado, possibly to get rid of Dudley as quickly as possible) sailed on towards Tobago. Raleigh, however, was to see the real gold of Trinidad, but since it did not glitter but was a dull black, he did not recognise it. He spent five days surveying the island and discovered the magnificent pitch lake, never knowing that this was the real wealth of the future. He did, however, use the pitch to caulk his ships after the long voyage across the Atlantic, and remarked that it was finer than that of Norway. Sailing from the Gulf of Paria, he beheld the Marcasite cliffs. Taking their glitter for gold he sent a boat ashore. But alas - it turned out to be ‘fool’s gold’ as they called it. “All that glitters is not gold!” sighed the conquistador, coining the phrase for centuries after.

Trinidad’s Governor Don Antonio de Berrio was suspicious of his visitor. He sent soldiers to check Raleigh out, and the Englishman greeted them with the utmost courtesy on board his ship. Then, on 7th April, Raleigh gave the signal to murder the nine Spanish soldiers on his flagship. The following day he and 100 English soldiers sailed up the Caroni and took the town of San José. After taking the governor and his administration as prisoners, the English plundered and burnt down the little town, which consisted of tapia and thatch.

Some three weeks later, Sir Walter led his expedition up the Orinoco river. De Berrio - himself a conquistador who was dreaming of ‘el dorado’ - had tried to dissuade him from his venture, but Raleigh persisted. He still thought the riches of South America were to be found in El Dorado, and knew nothing of the vast deposits of oil and gas in these latitudes. And even if he had known, it would more likely than not have been of no particular interest to him. The invention of the fuel-driven engine was still in the far future days.

In Trinidad, the pitch lake quietly bubbled away for many years, while Sir Raleigh had to return to England without recognizing what ‘El Dorado’ really looked like. He never found his City of Gold, and was finally executed due to the fact that he had spent too much of the British Crown’s money on his voyages.

The Early History of Trinidad

Columbus discovers Trinidad

“We saw houses and people on the spot and the country round was very beautiful and as fresh and green as the gardens of Valencia in the month of March.”

wrote Christopher Columbus in his log on 31st July, 1498, the day he discovered Trinidad on his third voyage to the New World.

Columbus sailed through the straits which he called the ‘Serpent’s Mouth’ between the South American continent (which he thought to be another island and called it Isla Santa, Holy Island) and Trinidad, named for the Holy Trinity. His immediate predicament was to get fresh water for the crew of his three ships, the ‘Santa Maria de Guia’, the ‘Castilla’ and the ‘Gorda’.

“I then gave up our northward course and put in for the land; at the hour of complines we reached a cape which I called Cape Galera, having already given to the Island the name of Trinidad, and here we found a harbour which would have been excellent but there was no good anchorage.” (Christopher Columbus)

Sailing along the south coast of Trinidad, looking for a bay to anchor, the Spaniards gave names to Trinidad and to several features on the island. In the Gulf of Paria - which they named ‘Mar Dulce’, due to the high percentage of fresh water, they had an encounter with the Amerindians, marvelling at both the nakedness of the tribespeople and at the beautiful gold and pearl jewellery they were wearing.

“These people, as I have already said, are very graceful in form, tall and lithe in their movements and wear their hair very long and smooth. They also bind their heads with handsome worked handkerchiefs which from a distance look like silk or gauze; others use the same material in a longer form wound round them so as to cover them like trousers and this is done by both the men and the women.”

The Indians told Columbus that there was a vast land southward, but after sailing some miles along the southern part of the Paria peninsula the ageing explorer decided to go northward, to Hispaniola which was familiar to him. 18 days later, on the 17th August 1498, Columbus and his ships left the Gulf of Paria through the Dragon’s Mouth. The island of Trinidad became a colony of Her Most Catholic Majesty, Isabella of Spain. And the arrival of the Admiral opened the flood gate for treasure seekers which resulted in almost the whole native population being wiped out.

“The sun was then in the sign of Virgo over their heads and ours; therefore all this must proceed from the extreme blandness of the temperature which arises, as I have said, from this country being the most elevated in the world and nearest to the sky.”

The Legend of El Dorado

The Spaniards were convinced of the existence of the legendary City of Gold, and ‘el dorado’ or golden man. All over South and Middle America, the conquistadores, dauntless iron-clad men, heroically battled against nature herself and against Amerindian tribes to win the gold-rich civilization for the Spanish crown. They were told by the Amerindians of the vast riches to be found up the Orinoco. These ignorant Europeans never considered the possibility of the mere ritual use of gold or the distortion of the Indian’s stories, they heard only what they wanted to hear - El Dorado. They imagined it to be a great king, covered in gold, and a city literally made from the precious metal.

Trinidad became a very strategic island. It became the port of the Spaniards - Puerto d’España, the starting point for the journey up the Orinoco River. The island was the stepping stone for the heroic men who were filled with the passion of conquering the splendid treasures of the Golden City. Four conquistadores came to Trinidad: Don Antonio Sedeño in 1528, Don Juan Ponce de Leon in 1571, and finally Don Antonio de Berrio y Oruña in 1580, and finally the British Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595.

Today we know that El Dorado did not exist in the imagined form of the Iberians. But what were the origins of the legend?

Some tribal peoples of South America assigned great significance to the summer solstice to mark the passing of time. On that day, the 21st June, when the sun passes through the highest point in the sky, the zenith, a festive ritual was enacted by some Amerindians in an area in present-day Colombia. A circular lake still exists there, and on the 21st June the sun’s golden reflection filles the surface of it. On that special day, a cacique was covered with resin and sprayed with gold dust. So ‘el dorado’ was actually a ‘Golden Man’ and not a ‘Golden City’!

But the swamps, the mosquitoes, the silence and the noises of the jungle continued to breed tales of huge buildings made of gold, a mountain of crystal that sparkled in the sun, golden nuggets as big as fists and emeralds and sapphires in abundance. Those tales were spiced by stories of man-eaters, who poured molten gold into the white victims’ mouths, who fattened up negroes in order to eat them later, and of ‘anthropohagi’, men whose heads grew between their shoulders.

Trinidad from 1592 to the 1770s

With the foundation of San José de Oruna (St. Joseph) in 1592, Trinidad had acquired the formal structure of a Spanish colony. But for nearly 200 years it remained undeveloped and isolated. It had no gold or silver, and lay far from the main shopping routes to Spain. So instead of large plantations, worked by gangs of slaves, producing food crops for export to Europe, Trinidad was the scene of little cultivation by a few Spaniards, Indians, a handful of African slaves, preoccupied with survival on scattered clearings in the vast forest.

Early in the 17th century, cotton and tobacco began to be cultivated. Cocoa became Trinidad’s major product between 1670 and 1725, but in 1725 the crop failed, probably due to disease. Up to the 1770s, agriculture was small-scale, with the Indians and Spanish settlers producing small food crops in their gardens.

But already the island’s significant feature, its cosmopolitan people, began to take shape. The cross-breeding of its first settlers produced the ‘mulatto’ - half African, half European, the ‘mestizo’ - half Amerindian, half European, and the ‘zambo’ - half Amerindian, half African.

After the failed cocoa crop in 1725, the non-Indian population declined to a mere 162 adult men, of whom only 28 were described as ‘white’, that is Spanish. Forty years later, the population was estimated at 2,503, with the Christianised Indian population at 1,277.

Up to the 1780s Trinidad remained a mainly Amerindian society, though the Indian population had declined rapidly after the encounter with the Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s. Capuchin missionaries were given the task of converting them between 1687 and 1708, and they established mission settlements, some of which survived as Indian villages well into the 18th century, e.g. Savanna Grande.

In 1784, the Spanish governor left the derelict little settlement of San José and established himself in Puerto d’España. Eight years before, in 1776, one year after the Spanish Empire had come under the influence of the comparatively reform-minded Bourbon kings of France, a decree had authorised foreign Catholic settlement in Trinidad and other colonies. It was under this decree that Trinidad would suddenly awaken into life in the late 18th century.