WEST INDIES 1.0
…I said, “Omeros,”
and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Derek Walcott (Omeros 14)
…I will address questions of Caribbean culture and identity. I want to suggest that such questions are not in any sense separate or removed from the problems of political mobilization, of cultural development, of economic development and so on. The more we know and see of the struggles of the societies of the periphery to make something of the slender resources available to them, the more important we understand the questions and problems of cultural identity to be in that process.
Stuart Hall (Negotiating 3)
 |
| <http://caribbean-map.org/> |
What is “The Caribbean” anyway? There is more than one recognized meaning for the term. One is the body of water, the Caribbean Sea, itself. Another is the grouping of countries in and around the Caribbean Basin, which include the Southern United States, Mexico, Central America, and several South American countries. Another, that used here, is the grouping of the islands in the Caribbean, together with the mainland countries of Guyana, formerly British Guiana; Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana; and French Guiana which were initially treated as a single area and called Surinam. Over the centuries, different political and cultural mappings have used different names for the islands and island groupings – West Indies, Antilles, Caribbean. Here, we will use frequently use the term “West Indies” since that is the British term for the Caribbean in the 18th century.
In this unique region, our pre-conceptions of countries are challenged. A tiny island can be an entire country. There is sometimes more than one country on the same island. Likewise, the populations of the Caribbean are unique. Over the centuries of immigration the people have mixed and blended, have creolized (a word which originated in the Caribbean.)
Initially, each of these islands was peopled by aboriginal groups now almost gone, killed off by a combination of factors resulting in part from their own internal conflicts, but mostly from the presence and actions of fifteenth and sixteenth century European explorers, and later, European colonizers. The smallest number of colonists came as wealthy white European landowners, a larger number as poor but European, white and “free” immigrants, albeit some were indentured servants or transported convicts. The largest proportion, by far, were black slaves from Africa, involuntary immigrants, stolen and transported in conditions of unimaginable brutality from Africa in the hellish slave-ships of the Middle Passage to grow, cut and process sugar cane and other crops (see Fig. 2).
Initially, each of these islands was peopled by aboriginal groups now almost gone, killed off by a combination of factors resulting in part from their own internal conflicts, but mostly from the presence and actions of fifteenth and sixteenth century European explorers, and later, European colonizers. The smallest number of colonists came as wealthy white European landowners, a larger number as poor but European, white and “free” immigrants, albeit some were indentured servants or transported convicts. The largest proportion, by far, were black slaves from Africa, involuntary immigrants, stolen and transported in conditions of unimaginable brutality from Africa in the hellish slave-ships of the Middle Passage to grow, cut and process sugar cane and other crops (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 1. Captives embarking to slaveship for voyage into slavery.
After emancipation, in the 19th century, the Africans were supplemented by indentured laborers from India and China, imported in their turn as human capital to do the arduous wealth-making agricultural work of the “Plantation Society” in the islands of growing, harvesting, and processing sugarcane (Knight, 120 et seq.).
Fig. 2. Cutting Sugar Cane. (Downloaded 3/30/07)
http://www.plantationadventure.com/images/caneslaves.jpg
http://www.plantationadventure.com/images/caneslaves.jpg
Each of these groups came with its own ethnicity, flag, values, language, and culture. The Africans, though sans flags, were not homogenous, but came from different tribes and locations in Africa and had a multiplicity of ethnicities, homelands, cultures, and languages.
From the first time Columbus set eyes on the Caribbean islands, they have been viewed by Europeans, and later Americans, as a place of wonder and exoticism, in Christian terms, “prelapsarian,” that is, the Garden of Eden before the fall of Adam” (Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions, 14). Columbus himself was infatuated with the beauty of this new world. He never tired of describing it to the Ferdinand and Isabella, the Sovereigns who had dispatched him on his voyage. He marveled at deciduous trees fully green in November, at “six or eight kinds of palm trees,” all “a wonder to behold…[in] their beautiful variety.” He marveled at the fish,“ . . . of the finest colors in the world: blues, yellows, reds, and of all colors; and others colored in a thousand ways.” He marveled at the “flocks of parrots that obscure the sun; and birds of so many kinds and sizes, and so different from ours . . . “ (Greenblatt 76,78). All of this tropical world was new to him, a European from a temperate climate.
The people, likewise, were exotic and unknown. Despite their beauty and comeliness, Columbus had no scruple about stealing their land. Stephen Greenblatt opines that intellectual dishonesty was used to make these newfound lands eligible for possession under the medieval doctrine that “uninhabited” land was free for the taking. The meaning of “uninhabited” might seem obvious to the modern reader--“without inhabitants,” but not to the medieval territorially acquisitional mind. Instead, if the agent of the crown, with the “royal standard unfurled,” proclaimed the land to be the Crown’s and if the claim was unprotested, the land was technically considered “uninhabited” and it became a possession of Spain, on the spot. Columbus did this, reported it to the Crown, and the deed was done. Or, the title deed acquired, as it were (Greenblatt 52).
Starting with that first claiming, Europeans continued claiming with a vengeance, and continued acting with indifference to the other, whether Amerindian, African, East Indian or any other ethnicity. Only the European view counted. Every island and the Guineas on the coast of South America were fought over, both on the site and in the wars of Europe. The islands were immensely profitable. They had fertile land, something long past in Europe, low indigenous population density, easily wiped out, and the capability, with slave labor, to supply huge amounts of products desperately desired by Europeans in the first flush of capitalism. The Triangular Trade is a term frequently used, but in fact, there was more than one triangle.
Left: Depiction of the classical model of the Triangular trade with Europe as the third corner.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Triangle_trade2.png/175px-Triangle_trade2.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Triangle_trade2.png/175px-Triangle_trade2.png
Right: Depiction of the Triangular Trade of slaves, sugar, and rum with New England instead of Europe as the third corner.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Triangular_trade.jpg/175px-Triangular_trade.jpg
Both American and British ships were engaged in the slave trade, and the ships sometimes carried different cargoes during the transshipping of Caribbean products to the United States and to England, and then the shipping of U.S. and British products to Africa to trade for slaves. The Middle Passage was the leg of the trade, which carried slaves back from Africa. The Caribbean products most in demand were sugar, spices, coffee, indigo and cotton, both for use in the United States and Europe, and as raw materials for the manufacture of products to be used for trading for slaves in Africa. For instance, sugar was shipped to New England to be distilled into rum, which was shipped both to England and to Africa for trading purposes. Cotton and indigo were shipped to England to make fabrics, some of which, in turn, were shipped to Africa for trade. This glorifying of lucre over humanity is viciously satirized in a song from the Broadway musical 1776: "Shall we dance to the sound of the profitable pound/ in Molasses and Rum and Slaves?” (To hear an audio clip, go to http://www.1776themusical.us/audio.htm and click on page 6, Molasses to Rum 1998.)
According to Gert Oostindie, a professor of Caribbean Studies at Leiden University, Holland, in Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean: Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies, “But the crux of this devil’s triangle was slavery, a form of labour (sic) which gradually became stigmatized in Western Europe; if not perceived as economically obsolete, it was increasingly deemed morally reprehensible” (Oostindie 10).
Literature about the West Indies became the rage in England during and after beginning of the period of exploration. People sat in their armchairs in front of the fire in chilly, rainy countries and read of warm and beautiful places, experiencing vicariously the very different scenery, temperatures, and cultures of foreign lands, and later, the lifestyles of the Plantation Society. The 18th century texts we have studied in this course are rife with references to the region, even where the main plot of a play or novel was not about the West Indies. The West Indies, African slavery, and sugar were the basis of the riches being piled up in England, and many people were involved in these various trades. So we find in the texts frequent references to someone “going out” to Jamaica, or the West Indies, or Barbados. This was a common phenomenon as the mercantile system developed. Some went to settle, many went to supervise their holdings.
John Gay’s Polly and Afra Behn’s Ooronoko were some of the first of these texts, but we must not forget Shakespeare’s earlier use of the West Indies as the location of The Tempest, and his reference in a different play to the naming of the West Indies. But wait, why say “West Indies”? This is because the islands in the Caribbean were mistaken by the fifteenth century European explorers for the East Indies treasure-chest they were seeking, and the misnomer has stuck ever since, even though two whole continents lie between these Caribbean islands and the true India. We know that these twin terms were in common usage as early as 1602, because we find a passage in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff is referring to two women whom he plans to seduce to get each of their husband’s money. “…[S]he bears the purse too; she is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty. I will be cheaters to them both, and they shall be exchequers to me; they shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both” (I.III. 28-32). The Guinea that Shakespeare references and where Behn situated her novel was located on the North coast of South America. First called Surinam and Guinea, this area was divided into three separate countries, Guyana (British), French Guyana, and Suriname (Dutch.)
At the beginning of the period of exploration and colonization by the Spanish, the indigenous Amerindian population of Arawaks and Caribs was nearly obliterated by massacre, suicide, and disease. The Europeans wrongly believed that the Amerindians had an unending supply of gold. Once the actual supply of gold was exhausted, the Europeans turned to another sort of exploitation of the islands – growing crops for the world market. The first efforts were in the production of indigo, spices, cotton, coffee, and sugar. When these initial crops did not do well or were not profitable, the colonists turned to growing sugar cane and producing sugar for the burgeoning world market of the emerging industrial world. The Amerindians would not willingly work the sugar plantations of the Europeans, and also were vulnerable to many European diseases. The indigenous population of Amerindians therefore largely perished within a hundred years in most of the islands. Patrick Fermor, writing in 1950, describes a visit to the Carib reserve in the center of the island of Dominica, which had been created by the British government in 1903 in an attempt to prevent the extinction of the dwindling Carib population. As of Fermor’s visit in the late Forties, only about five hundred Caribs remained, many of whom were part African (118). Some larger populations of Amerindians exist to this day in the mainland enclaves of the former non-Spanish “Guineas” – now Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname – the locus of Afra Behn’s Oorooko. (CIA Guyana, France and Suriname). These groups survived only because they were able to retreat far into the mainland jungle and avoid capture by the invaders. For example, Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, in his authoritative history of the Caribbean, estimated that the native population of the island of Hispaniola (now divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti) numbered 200,000 to 300,000 people when Columbus arrived in 1492. By 1548, after the arrival of the Spanish colonists and the imposition of the encomienda, only 500 natives remained (Williams 33).
The encomienda was a form of Spanish feudalism, in which the possession and supervision of the aboriginal residents of the land was included with the land grant from the Spanish Crown, along with the responsibility of saving their souls by converting them to the Catholic faith. The Spanish were eventually persuaded, mostly by the work of Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas, that it was wrong to enslave the Amerindians. One, of course, cannot ignore the fact that this humane act toward the Amerindians occurred when most had been exterminated by brutal practices and too few of them were left to furnish a labor force. At this point, the Spanish turned to enslaving Africans, about whom Las Casas initially had no similar scruples. He later regretted his actions in encouraging the important of Africans, but it was, by then, too late to prevent the unspeakable (but we must speak of it) cruelty of the slave trade and its effects on Africa and the Western Hemisphere (Williams 32-43). (Slaves were not only imported to the Caribbean and to North America, but to South America. It is estimated that nine million slaves were imported to Brazil alone.) The capitalist planters in every area considered it more economical to replace dead slaves than to treat them well enough so they could live more than five to ten years.
The kidnapped Africans were brought across the Atlantic in sailing ships in the horrible and horrifying “Middle Passage” leg of the slave trade voyages to work in the mines, the sugar cane fields, and the other agricultural enterprises of the Caribbean. The slaves were chained and confined below-decks. These living human beings were jammed in like living sardines in a sardine can, in order to transport as many as possible. They lived (and died) like that for the weeks of the voyage, in filth and fetid air. Some captains were more humane than others in the transport, causing a continuing difference of opinion about which was more profitable – to pack in more slaves and suffer the deaths in route, or to pack in less so that more slaves would survive for sale on arrival. It was purely an economic issue, with no empathy for the involved Africans whatsoever.
 |
Fig. 5. Slave ship plan. Slaves were shackled and chained together, stowed like cargo on shelves only 2 feet 7 inches apart. <http://0.tqn.com/d/africanhistory/1/0/1/J/SlaveShipBrookes002.jpg> |
The slaves were brought on deck only to exercise, although the least threatening sometimes were housed on the deck, as shown in the wrenching photograph of enslaved children in Fig 6 below.
 |
Child slaves on deck of slave ship. 1869. Photo taken during interception of slave ship after trade illegal. |
It is difficult to even conceive of the violence and cruelty exercised in the slave trade and the plantation structure, much less to write about it objectively. It is, however, the core of the development of the Caribbean, and it must be addressed. In the judgment of Guyanese-born scholar and Wayne State University Professor of Africana Studies Dr. Perry Mars, “the brutality the Europeans meted out to black slaves was/is an indication of the former's inhumanity to the latter and conditioned the very meaning/definition of black diasporic, and therefore Caribbean, identity” (Email, 17 Apr 2007).
 | |
| Mr. Bungatuffy Amedd (1818-1865) | http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e116/bungatuffy/amedd_1818-1865_pic591.jpg |
As European social consciousness and moral opposition to slavery arose, as economic return from the plantation export economy fell due to global financial factors, and as violent and deadly slave rebellions rose, first the slave trade, and then the entrenched institution of slavery itself, were abolished in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. At first, slavery had been accepted by most Europeans and British as being justified by the “good” being done for the “savage Africans” by removing them from their benighted circumstances and giving them a chance to learn of the “one true God.” Later, as the Abolitionist movement took hold in England and the United States, attitudes changed, slave labor was eventually outlawed. There is a gripping account of the abolition of the slave trade in the film Amazing Grace which includes a brief portrayal of Ouladah Equiano, looking exactly like himself.
Emancipation in the Caribbean took place in different years in different colonies, starting in 1834 in the British colonies and ending in 1886 in Spanish Cuba (Williams 167). In the British islands, emancipation began in the year 1834, but was gradual, administered through the "apprentice system," which required four more years of forced labor, with lashing as a penalty for disobedience and "laziness." The final freeing of the slaves left the white European sugar planters without a steady source of reliable labor for the backbreaking work that the slaves had done. The British West Indies then looked to another of their colonies, ironically the same country for which this place had been named in error three hundred years earlier -- India.
This time the colonial establishment used a new system of servitude -- voluntary, but just barely. The new immigrants from India signed indenture contracts, agreeing to a certain number of years of work, generally five, to pay off their passage. They were paid a small salary, given housing and medical care. The housing was abysmal, in “barracks” without sanitary facilities or privacy. Entire families lived in one room. At the end of their term, they were promised a free passage back to India. They agreed to this arrangement because they had no economic prospects at home, and they saw this, in the same way as do today’s migrant workers, as a ticket out and back -- a way to make a living in a different country, remit much of it to their families at home in India, and then return to their homeland on a better economic footing.
 |
| Indian Indentured Workers Cutting Cane |
Initially, most of the East Indians chose to return home. This system was expensive for the British colonies, which had to pay their way back and then pay the way of replacement laborers. The colonial governments then changed the system to provide for a plot of land rather than a return ticket, hoping to keep the imported laborers as employees. However, after the indentured workers completed their contracts and received their parcels of land, many did not continue in the service of the colonists, but chose to service of the colonists, but chose to farm on their own in the countryside, just as the escaped (marooned) and freed slaves before them had done. This development created problems for the European colonists, because not only would these Indian immigrants no longer work on the plantations, they were creating actual competition for European farmers.
Caribbean immigration during this period was massive. Williams estimates that between 1838 and 1924, a total of nearly a half million East Indians came to the British, French and Dutch colonies (Williams 347-360). Many other countries furnished immigrants as well. They came from Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Spain, the Madeiras, China, West Africa, Java, and even a small number from Japan (Franklin 186-7, Williams 349). Only the countries of Haiti, Spanish Santo Domingo, Spanish Puerto Rico, and British Barbados did not participate in this huge wave of immigration: “Elsewhere the simple population pattern at the end of the eighteenth century – a few whites of the metropolitan country, some mulattoes, and a majority of Negroes—became a heterogeneous mixture which included Indians, Chinese, Javanese and Portuguese, with all the infinite gradations, shadings and mixtures produced by miscegenation” (Williams 350).
In the early twentieth century, the United States exercised a pattern of colonial control in the region that led political leader and historian Eric Williams to refer to the Caribbean Sea during that period as the “American Mediterranean.” The United States used a heavy hand, entering the area militarily over and over, starting with the invasion of Cuba in the Spanish-American War, accompanied by the takeover of Puerto Rico. President Theodore Roosevelt declared a new interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, called the Roosevelt Corollary, stating that the United States was bound to act as an international police force in the Western Hemisphere in cases of “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society” (422). From 1915-1924, the United States occupied the Dominican Republic, controlling its government and finances, occupied Haiti from 1915-1934, imposing a “receivership” by use of U.S. Marines, and in 1917, purchased the Danish Virgin Islands in order to acquire the harbor of St. Thomas. During World War II, the United States negotiated 99-year leases for naval bases in the British colonies of Trinidad, Guyana, Antigua, St. Lucia, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Bermuda – and also Newfoundland, far from the Caribbean but a strategically important part of the Atlantic World. Britain, desperate for naval strength, accepted in exchange fifty reconditioned destroyers for use in the war (426).
The United States supported dictators in many Caribbean and Latin American countries, for the declared purpose of helping the people of those countries, but with the true motive to exert and maintain control over the entire region. Many of these dictators were brutal, most were corrupt, but these shortcomings were irrelevant to the United States, whose goal was control, not truly independent governance or nationalistic identity formation. President Franklin Roosevelt made this clear when he remarked about one of these tyrants, Trujillo, dictatorial president of the Dominican Republic, “’He may be an S.O.B., but he is our S.O.B.’”(465). When Trujillo was assassinated in 1965, the United States, seeking to avoid “another Cuba,” that is, a Marxist takeover, sent 22,000 troops to intervene and occupy the country (466).
 |
| VP Richard Nixon and Gen. Rafael Trujillo <http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/dominican/trujillo-11.gif> |
During this period of flagrant sub rosa political control, the United States simultaneously and disingenuously created a “sugar kingdom” and “banana republics” in the region, with massive investment in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. These countries, which the United States was ostensibly helping to obtain “democratic governments,” actually furnished a profitable plantation economy for the United States. The methods of cultivation and production were the equivalent of the “factory farming” in the United States today, and in essence drove the rest of the Caribbean out of the sugar business, bankrupting the other islands. All over the Caribbean, in and out of the U.S. possessions, life for the workers was abysmal, with rampant malnutrition, unsanitary living conditions, disease, and illiteracy. Thus, “the stage was set for the emergence of the nationalist movement” (Williams 443-462).
Because of the poverty and misery caused by the overbearing colonialism, protests, strikes, and riots broke out all over the English-speaking Caribbean from the Thirties to the Fifties (Mars Caribbean (147), independence movements generally were linked to labor organizing efforts. Mars points to “the rudimentary beginnings of the labour [sic] movements in the Caribbean” with the formation of the Trinidad Working Men’s Association in 1919 (Mars Ideology 41). Eventually, independence movements in each island were successful. By 1969, Williams writes optimistically: “In its quest for identity and self-realisation [sic], the Caribbean in 1969 starts with certain favourable [sic] conditions—young populations, affected by the world-wide restlessness and idealism of youth, relatively high rates of literacy and education, relatively high levels of per capita income; and a long history of contact with the Western World” (504).
The forms of government today vary from place to place, but, with the exception of the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe (and its dependents), are largely independent, though most voluntarily maintain an advantageous financial and diplomatic relationship with their former colonizers. All except Cuba are democratic, in many cases combining home rule with subsidization by the former colonial powers. It is important to understand that this is not a fixed situation. The political situation is continually changing in the Caribbean, just as it is all over the world. The quest for self-determination and national identity goes on.
Mapping the 18th Century Literary West Indies by Sharon Tevis Finch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This license applies only to text not otherwise attributed, and does not apply to images unless specifically designated.
