Genocide on Saint Kitts: how did the British exterminate the Indians?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

395 years ago, the British founded the first colony in the Caribbean - the settlement of St. Christopher, which is now called Old Road Town. The construction of a port on the island of Saint Kitts allowed London to significantly increase its influence in the region. At the same time, the colonialists cruelly dealt with the indigenous inhabitants of the island, who kindly greeted the Europeans and allowed them to settle on their lands.

According to the British version of events, the Indians planned to expel the settlers, and they struck first. However, historians tend to believe that this legend was invented by the colonialists themselves to justify the massacre.

In pre-Columbian times, the islands of the Caribbean experienced several waves of Native American migrations. From whom exactly came the specific ethnic groups that existed in the region at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, is still the subject of scientific discussions. According to one of the most common versions, in the XII-XIII centuries, representatives of the Caribbean group of peoples arrived on the islands from South America. Being good warriors and sailors, they were able to win a number of victories over the local Arawak tribes, after which they partially mingled with them.

The Spaniards, who discovered America at the end of the 15th century, were able to quickly enslave the relatively peaceful purebred Arawaks, but they could not cope with the Caribs (self-name - Kalinago) - they put up fierce resistance to the colonialists. The invaders who tried to land on the islands controlled by the Caribbean were greeted with poison arrows.

In addition, the Kalinago made a frightening impression on the Spaniards with ritual cannibalism.

The Spaniards could not break the will of the Kalinago to resist and left them alone. However, the new generation of European colonialists - the British and French - approached the Caribbean issue in a different way.

Thomas Warner

The future governor of the British Caribbean, Thomas Warner was born in 1580 in England. He entered military service early and rose to the rank of Captain of the Royal Guard. At the age of 40, he was assigned to a British colony that existed for some time in Guiana. However, once there, the captain saw that the place for colonization was not the most suitable, and decided to establish a settlement on one of the islands of the Caribbean.

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In 1623, Warner toured several islands and realized that St. Kitts was the most convenient for his purposes. The British liked the island for its fertile soil, an abundance of fresh water and deposits of salt. In addition, Warner managed to win the trust of the local Caribbean and their leader, Oubutu Tegremante. The Indians, who usually met the colonialists with arrows and battle clubs, believed in the friendliness of the British and allowed them to settle on the island.

Leaving some of the settlers in St. Kitts, Warner returned to England and enlisted the financial support of the merchants Ralph Merrifield and the Jefferson brothers. To participate in Warner's venture, sponsors equipped a ship with colonists, loading all the necessary supplies onto it.

On January 28, 1624, Thomas Warner returned to St. Kitts and officially founded the first British colony in the Caribbean, St. Christopher, on the west coast of the island. Today it is the city of Old Road Town. Instead of sugarcane, which Europeans used to grow in the West Indies, Warner decided to cultivate tobacco.

In 1625, a French expedition led by Pierre Belin d'Esnambuca arrived in Saint Kitts. Warner allowed the French to stay, intending to increase the number of Europeans on the island.

Genocide of the Caribbean

Soon after the founding of the British colony, the Kalinaga Indians regretted that they had allowed the Europeans to their island. Nobody warned them that the number of colonists would increase dramatically. The Caribbean realized that if this continued, they would quickly become redundant at home.

According to the British version of events, at the beginning of 1626, the Caribbean chiefs of Saint Kitts and the neighboring islands allegedly held a meeting at which they agreed to amicably oppose the Europeans and expel them from their land. The Kalinaga's plans became known to a woman named Barb. She came from the Arawak people, but was captured and married to a Carib. Barb was in love with Thomas Warner and decided to warn him about Kalinag's plans.

Upon learning of the plans of the Indians to expel the colonists from St. Kitts, Warner decided not to enter into negotiations with the rightful owners of the land, but to strike first. At night, an Anglo-French detachment attacked a Caribbean settlement and first killed the leaders of the Kalinag, including Oubutu Tegremante, who trusted the British, and then attacked the entire tribe. The battle turned into a massacre of the indigenous population.

Historians estimate that the British and French killed about 4,000 Indians.

Of the captured Caribs, only beautiful women were left alive, whom the colonialists turned into concubines. The Indian sanctuaries were defiled by Warner's people. Despite the fact that the Caribs were taken by surprise, they, on the defensive, were able to destroy about a hundred Europeans. Several Kalinagas managed to hide from the attackers, but by 1640 they were completely ousted from Saint Kitts.

The cape, on which the main settlement of the local Caribbean was located, has since been called Blood Point (Bloody Place), and the river flowing nearby is called Blood River (Bloody River). According to eyewitnesses, because of the blood of the killed Indians dumped on the banks of the river, the water in it turned red for a long time.

Modern researchers believe that the story of the preparation of the Caribbean uprising could be a legend invented by the colonialists to justify the massacre of the Indians who amicably greeted them. The massacre took place in January, when the Caribbean traditionally flocked to St. Kitts for religious ceremonies. The Europeans could take advantage of the situation in order to cleanse the fertile islands of the indigenous population and intimidate the surviving Indians.

England vs France

Over time, Saint Kitts became difficult to compete with the North American colonies in the cultivation of tobacco, and sugar cane plantations appeared on the island. They used the slave labor of convicts from Europe and African slaves. Relations between the British and the French quickly deteriorated. After several bloody conflicts, the British expelled the former allies from the island in the 18th century.

Having begun colonizing the Caribbean from Saint Kitts, the British and French gradually drove the Spaniards out of most of the West Indies. Due to the mass extermination of Indians and the importation of African slaves, today the majority of the population of the Caribbean is made up of black descendants of slaves.

“The Caribbean Islands were the key to Central America. Here trade routes crossed and the routes of the Spanish galleons, carrying precious metals to the Old World, lay. Therefore, it was from the Caribbean islands that other European powers began to actively oust the Spaniards from America by other European powers, said Konstantin Strelbitsky, chairman of the Moscow Fleet History Club, to RT.

According to the expert, open hostilities of European countries for the islands of the Caribbean continued until the twentieth century. And the secret struggle for them continues.

“Now, however, the powerful powers are not interested in gold and sugarcane, but in oil and control over the routes leading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific,” he stressed.

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“The massacre of Indians was in keeping with the spirit of the policy pursued by the Anglo-Saxon colonialists. The Spaniards, of course, were also brutal, but they had two deterrents. First, they viewed the Indians as a future labor force and tried, despite the difficulties, to persuade them to cooperate. And secondly, the Pope demanded to expand the flock of the Catholic Church. Therefore, the killing of the local population was not an end in itself for them, but a means of intimidation,”said Yegor Lidovskaya, general director of the Hugo Chavez Latin American Cultural Center, in an interview with RT.

The British, according to the expert, approached the issue of relations with the local population more cynically, knowingly hoping that it would be more profitable for them to import slaves from Africa than to try to force the recalcitrant Indians to work for themselves.

“The British acted with the cruelty of a pragmatic maniac. They simply cleared the lands needed by the crown from the people they disliked … Of all the Europeans, it was the British who were the most cruel colonizers,”concluded Yegor Lidovskaya.