Tobago

From the Diary of a Retired Naval Officer, Commander C.E.I.R. Alford, who lived in Tobago, which was later made into a charming travel book in the 1930s.

We read of his visit to Fort King George, overlooking Scarborough, 452 feet above sea level. The old barracks in his day hardly a tourist attraction, overgrown. The wind in the tall trees, the silence, humming with birdsong and insects. The row of ancient cannons, standing in the ruined embrasures, pointing mutely out over the town as he says “in silent contemplation of the past”.

Below the hospital to the left of the old prison and behind it are the condemned cells. In 1801, a slave riot was quelled by a clever strategy. The ringleader and a number of his associates were caught and taken to prison. The ringleader was then hung in full view of the town and, when dead, his body was lowered. A few minutes later the crowd again saw a body swinging aloft, to be lowered in due course and followed by another and another, until, to their terrified eyes, all the captured men had been hung. Actually however, only one man suffered death, the ringleader, for it was his body that was raised and lowered repeatedly on the gibbet.

The old fort contained some twenty guns in those days. Many of them have been removed to other sites, and there are only one or two of the great grapeshot mortars left. One of these is engraved “Great Charge, 9 pounds, range 2,800 yards”. The fort was active during the Napoleonic wars in the Caribbean and watched the harbour in Rockley Bay.

It is remembered that a ship attempted to sneek out under cover of darkness. The fort opened fire. Her captain was forced to bring her to, as a shot could have taken his main mast down. Carlton P. Ottley, writing in the same period, relates that after “centuries of war, peace finally came to Tobago. The old guns continued to serve a very useful purpose in keeping the people of Scarborough and the surrounding countryside informed of the time for closing their business places, and also for retiring for the night.”

Ottley tells us in his ‘Tobago Legends and West Indian Lore’ that nightly, whether rain or shine, on the stroke of eight, one of the cannons would boom out. This was the signal for all the rumshops in the town to shut their doors, and so would all heads of homes.

The sound of the gun meant the end of activities for all. The children who had been playing in the full moonlight went home. It was the same for the lovers sitting among the ruins of the fort, and neighbours resting on the doorsteps, and for the young man who had come to court his bride: when the eight o’clock gun boomed, everybody went home.

A man by the name of Clay was the last timekeeper to fire the gun. Unfortunately, he blew off one of his arms one night, but this did not gainstay him from his post.

The story is told how he got the time from the wardens office clock. Well, one night the clock had stopped. Clay had no idea and had not noticed. By the time he had discovered this, it was nine o’clock. He fired the cannon all the same. This was the cause of much confusion, and it was several days before the ‘time’ was re-established in Tobago.

Commander Alford describes Plymouth as a town abandoned in the 1930s. He remarks on the old grave, whose enigmatic inscription reads “Within these walls are deposited the bodies of Betty Stivens and her child. She was the beloved wife of Alex Stivens, who to the end of his day will deplore her death, which happened on the 25th day of November 1783 in the 23rd year of her life. What was remarkable of her was she was a mother without knowing it, and a wife without letting her husband know it, except by her kind indulgences to him.”

It is interesting to note Ottley’s reference. There is in the archives of the Anglican church in Scarborough an old register of baptisms, marriages and deaths 1781 - 1817. On page two of this old volume reads: “Three mulatto children of Alexander Stivens, one son by the name of Alexander and two daughters, one by the name of Sally and the name of Mary. The date September 25, 1781.” There is no record of marriage to a Betty Stivens who lies beneath the stone. Perhaps she was a faithful slave who by her goodness had endeared herself to her master Alexander Stivens, who in turn dared to do on her death what he could not do while she lived - pay tribute to her qualities as a devoted wife and fond mother of his children. But who knows for sure?

Tobago Stories

Tobago possesses a fascination that has drawn people to it for close upon five hundred years. In myth and in recorded history, in stories told and in very old books, one finds all sorts of curious references.

Historian Jack Archibald said to me that old Mr. Bullbrook, past curator of the Royal Victoria Institute, told him that one such myth had to do with Caribs and how they maintained the notion that Tobago was the ‘earthly paradise’ of their people. In their belief system, the island contained a ‘porthole’ to heaven. When approaching the end of their lives, Caribs would leave other islands to the north and even as far away as ‘down the main’. They would turn the bows of their long canoes to beach them on some shingled shore in Tobago, journey into the mountains of the island’s central ridge and find the ’porthole to paradise’.

The island is about 26 miles long and 7.5 miles wide, with an approximate area of 116 square miles. It is situated about eleven degrees fifteen minutes north of the equator and sixty degrees forty minutes west longitude, being approximately twenty miles to the north east of the island of Kairi, now known as Trinidad.

In the late 15th century, the 1490s, it has been suggested that Tobago possessed a population of tribal people that may have numbered about 1,500. Their villages were situated mainly in the western and low lying areas.

Centuries before a great migration process had commenced, a warlike people - today referred to as Caribs - came from that vast and ancient wilderness on the mainland of South America. They came from the Amazon basin, followed the mighty Humboldt current, and drove their corials towards the long blue mountains on the furthest horizon. They settled on some of the Caribbean islands in great strength. Their descendants were essentially Carib, though their genes became mixed with that of the women of other Amerindian tribes who had been captured and taken as wives during the years of migration.

During those years in faraway Europe men were nurturing dreams of ‘islands in the furthest west’ for generations. One of them was Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), the great English statesman and scholar, who in his steadfast refusal to recognise any other head of the church than the pope, was beheaded by King Henry VIII. More expressed these dreams of another world in his Latin book ‘Utopia’ (written in 1516, translated into English in 1556). Other tales that made the rounds in Europe in those years were the ones of the St. Brendens islands, and of islands that were sometimes found by chance and then lost again. Europeans dreamed of warm places where spices could be had, spices and hot peppers to relieve the boredom of their food. Tabaco - the name given by the Caribs to their long-stemmed pipes - ‘cohiba’, the leafy plant, was soon known as ‘tobacco’ and also lent its name to the island of Tobago.

Tobago was presented to Jacobus, Duke of Courland, by his godfather James Stewart, King of Scotland and England. A dubious gift, however. It happened perhaps in 1651 that Duke Jacobus had come to an amicable arrangement with the Earl of Warwick, whereby he had purchased the letters patent that included Tobago in their grant in the belief that possession of such would strengthen his right to settle the island.

The Dutch, wresting the Low Countries from their Spanish overlords, also made for this magical island, and had in fact stumbled upon it long before the Courlanders. A Dutch man called Jan de Moor came to Tobago, after whom ‘Jan de Moor Bay’ was named, which was eventually corrupted into ‘Man of War Bay’.

Jan de Moor was a merchant and a member of the State Council of Holland. A rich man, he financed some of the earlier Dutch attempts at settlement in the Amazon and on the Guyanese coast in the years 1613 - 1614. He did business with the Courteen family, and Anglo-Dutch trading firm who maintained a settlement at Kykoveral on the Essequibo and who had settled Barbados on their own account.

Jan de Moor had this too in mind for Tobago and made two attempts. Both failed, the last in 1633, when he sent his people under an English man named Gayner. They set up themselves at Toco, Trinidad, and then in Tobago. This came to nought as the energetic Captain Diego Lopez de Escobar, the governor, routed the would-be colonists.

Almost too numerous to mention are the battles for Tobago. For over 150 years, the Courlanders transported Africans to Tobago to grow spices and tobacco. Spain, who reserved first claim to the island, challenged them. There was cotton in quantity, and eventually sugar cane was introduced. The Courlanders, however, were eventually driven off by the Dutch, who faced a new foe, the French, who in turn were challenged by the English. Tobago was a major arena in the European wars!

Sea rovers or privateers, sometimes sailing from the North American colonies, who were making a dash for freedom from British rule, sometimes struck Tobago as well. In March 1777, at Queen’s Bay, a “private schooner came up to the bay under the cover of darkness and sent armed boats to seize whatever they could find. In this case, the raid was successful, and the surprise complete. Without meeting any resistance, they cut out a sloop belonging to a Tobago planter named Hackett, loaded with goods and having on board several sailor negroes. They captured another belonging to the Campbells, loaded with 30 hogsheads of sugar from the Betsy’s Hope Estate, various other goods with six prime sailor negroes of great value.” (K.S. Wise)

In a compromise, Tobago was declared a desert island. Eveyone was meant to leave it. But a remnant population lingered on, made up of ex-slaves, intermingled with the black Caribs who had come from St. Vincent, and Europeans who had somehow missed their returning boats. There is the story of a catholic priest who was sighted by a ship that had dropped anchor in Great Courland Bay. He refused to be ‘rescued’ and the ship sailed away. That was perhaps in the early 18th century; noone seems to know for sure.

Pirates on Tobago

Men dressed themselves in skins and lived in carat-roofed lean-tos. There was no paper and no woven materials for clothes. The gunpowder had become solid in the barrelds; the old muskets were now used for structural purposes. English writer Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) used this scenario for an adventurer’s tale, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, which was first published in 1719.

Pirates discovered Tobago, giving the name to ‘Pirates’ Bay’. Many pirate stories are told concerning their depredations on or in the waters off Tobago.

One of them, Captain Anstis, came to the rescue of another equally infamous one by the name of Fenn, whose ship had run aground. Anstis took his ship to Tobago, successfully escaping His Majesty’s ships of war, the ‘Hector’ and the ‘Adventure’. In April 1723, Anstis and Fenn found a quiet spot in Man-o-War Bay, in which there was a sandy cove now called ‘Pirates’ Bay’. Just when all the guns and stores had been landed and the ship, the ‘Good Fortune’, had been put ashore and careened (that is layed over on its side), ill luck would have it that H.M.S. ‘Winchelsea’ was sighted far out at sea. Now began the race for life between the pirates and the navy, and with great effort the former were just able to get their ship afloat and escape under the cover of night before the gunship could block the bay.

The pirates had, however, to abandon their guns, cannons and stores. They also left Captains Anstis and Fenn and nine others on Tobago, who fled into the woods. When the ‘Winchelsea’s Captain, Mr. Orme, realised that he had lost the main prize, he determined to search Tobago from end to end and at least secure those who had been left. Dragging themselves through the woords, living on nuts and lizards, afraid to remain in one place, afraid to light a fire or shoot game, the pirates lost courage. Blaming Captain Anstis for their misfortune, they chopped him to death as he lay asleep.

Shortly after, they were captured by the British sailors. No doubt the Caribs had betrayed them. One of the pirates, Will Ingram, was hanged right there in the forest. He was described as a “very hard and resolute man”, while Captain Fenn was taken to Antigua and hung in irons on Rat Island. Five of his fellows were hung at high water mark and the sixth was granted a reprieve.