St. Vincent
A Brief History
The Kalinago (or ‘Caribs’ as they were named by the Europeans), knew St. Vincent as ‘Hairoun’ - Land of the Blessed.
Fields of cassava being farmed in the lush mountainous agricultural village of Greiggs Photo: Calvert Jones
The first inhabitants of the Caribbean were Amerindians who journeyed here in ocean-going dugout canoes from the mainland of what we today call South America some 4,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence indicates that by 500 BC these highly skilled navigators, mariners, pottery makers, weavers and basket makers, had introduced agriculture into the islands, mainly in the form of cassava, their staple crop. Their name for the island that the Europeans would later call St. Vincent was ‘Hairoun’ – ‘Land of the Blessed’. Extensive research, conducted under the auspices of the National Trust of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, has shown that Amerindians settled here at least as early as 160 AD. Pottery from that Saladoid period, which can be found extensively across the island
30 St. Vincent MAYREAU
but particularly in low lying coastal areas, bears the same patterns as pottery from the Saladero region of the Lower Orinoco, providing a direct link with mainland Amerindian culture. The Europeans who came to the Caribbean after Columbus had first visited in 1492, called the indigenous people ‘Island Caribs’. The Caribs vigorously defended their Hairoun homeland against any attempts at foreign occupation and, thanks to the valiant resistance of its inhabitants, St. Vincent was not colonized until long after most other Caribbean islands had well-established European settlements. Interestingly, the Amerindians from the Lower Orinoco were not the only people who arrived in St. Vincent prior to colonial conquest. As early as 1676, Philip Warner wrote that St. Vincent had “some 3,000 negroes and no other island as many indians”. The most popular explanation as to why the island had so many negroes is that they were slaves from the Bight of Benin in West Africa who escaped from a Dutch ship, wrecked off the east coast of Bequia in 1675. However, it is hard to believe that slaves chained to the bottom of a ship could have survived a wreck in such high numbers. Another theory is that Caribs lured Spanish ships to their shores in order to capture the negroes to enslave them. A more plausible theory is that they were escaped slaves from Barbados and other European held islands who sought refuge in St. Vincent, the land of the free. There is another theory, albeit difficult to prove, that Africans may have navigated their way to St. Vincent, even before the Europeans, by following the Trade Winds and ocean currents. However they got to St. Vincent, the ‘Black Caribs’ were reported by the British to be more warlike than the ‘Red or Yellow Caribs’ and they provided the fiercest resistance against the colonists. The term ‘Black Carib’ has today become synonymous with the term ‘Garifuna’, (or ‘Garinagu’ in the plural), which means ‘cassava eating people’. It is the commonly held belief that the ‘Black Caribs’ evolved from the intermarriage of Caribs from the Lower Orinoco with Africans. However, another reading of history indicates that