Table of Contents
It may be worth while to spend a few pages in telling something of the history of this lovely island since the 31st of July 1499, when Columbus, on his third voyage, sighted the three hills in the south-eastern part. He had determined, it is said, to name the first land which he should see after the Blessed Trinity; the triple peaks seemed to him a heaven-sent confirmation of his intent, and he named the island Trinidad; but the Indians called it Iere.
He ran from Punta Galera, at the north-eastern extremity—so named from the likeness of a certain rock to a galley under sail—along the east and south of the island; turned eastward at Punta Galeota; and then northward, round Punta Icacque, through the Boca Sierpe, or serpent’s mouth, into the Gulf of Paria, which he named ‘Golfo de Balena,’ the Gulf of the Whale, and ‘Golfo Triste,’ the Sad Gulf; and went out by the northern passage of the Boca Drago. The names which he gave to the island and its surroundings remain, with few alterations, to this day.
He was surprised, says Washington Irving, at the verdure and fertility of the country, having expected to find it more parched and sterile as he approached the equator; whereas he beheld groves of palm-trees, and luxuriant forests sweeping down to the seaside, with fountains and running streams beneath the shade. The shore was low and uninhabited: but the country rose in the interior, and was cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations. In a word, the softness and purity of the climate, and the verdure, freshness, and sweetness of the country, appeared to equal the delights of early spring in the beautiful province of Valencia in Spain.
He found the island peopled by a race of Indians with fairer complexions than any he had hitherto seen; ‘people all of good stature, well made, and of very graceful bearing, with much and smooth hair.’ They wore, the chiefs at least, tunics of coloured cotton, and on their heads beautiful worked handkerchiefs, which looked in the distance as if they were made of silk. The women, meanwhile, according to the report of Columbus’s son, seem, some of them at least, to have gone utterly without clothing.
They carried square bucklers, the first Columbus had seen in the New World; and bows and arrows, with which they made feeble efforts to drive off the Spaniards who landed at Punta Arenal, near Icacque, and who, finding no streams, sank holes in the sand, and so filled their casks with fresh water, as may be done, it is said, at the same spot even now.
And there—the source of endless misery to these happy harmless creatures—a certain Cacique, so goes the tale, took off Columbus’s cap of crimson velvet, and replaced it with a circle of gold which he wore.
Alas for them! That fatal present of gold brought down on them enemies far more ruthless than the Caribs of the northern islands, who had a habit of coming down in their canoes and carrying off the gentle Arrawaks to eat them at their leisure, after the fashion which Defoe, always accurate, has immortalised in Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe’s island is, almost certainly, meant for Tobago; Man Friday had been stolen in Trinidad.
Columbus came no more to Trinidad. But the Spaniards had got into their wicked heads that there must be gold somewhere in the island; and they came again and again. Gold they could not get; for it does not exist in Trinidad. But slaves they could get; and the history of the Indians of Trinidad for the next century is the same as that of the rest of the West Indies: a history of mere rapine and cruelty. The Arrawaks, to do them justice, defended themselves more valiantly than the still gentler people of Hayti, Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico, and the Lucayas: but not so valiantly as the fierce cannibal Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, whom the Spaniards were never able to subdue.
It was in 1595, nearly a century after Columbus discovered the island, that ‘Sir Robert Duddeley in the Bear, with Captain Munck, in the Beare’s Whelpe, with two small pinnesses, called the Frisking and the Earwig,’ ran across from Cape Blanco in Africa, straight for Trinidad, and anchored in Cedros Bay, which he calls Curiapan, inside Punta Icacque and Los Gallos—a bay which was then, as now, ‘very full of pelicans.’ The existence of the island was known to the English: but I am not aware that any Englishman had explored it. Two years before, an English ship, whose exploits are written in Hakluyt by one Henry May, had run in, probably to San Fernando, ‘to get refreshing; but could not, by reason the Spaniards had taken it. So that for want of victuals the company would have forsaken the ship.’ How different might have been the history of Trinidad, if at that early period, while the Indians were still powerful, a little colony of English had joined them, and intermarried with them. But it was not to be. The ship got away through the Boca Drago. The year after, seemingly, Captain Whiddon, Raleigh’s faithful follower, lost eight men in the island in a Spanish ambush. But Duddeley was the first Englishman, as far as I am aware, who marched, ‘for his experience and pleasure, four long marches through the island; the last fifty miles going and coming through a most monstrous thicke wood, for so is most part of the island; and lodging myself in Indian townes.’ Poor Sir Robert—‘larding the lean earth as he stalked along’—in ruff and trunk hose, possibly too in burning steel breastplate, most probably along the old Indian path from San Fernando past Savannah Grande, and down the Ortoire to Mayaro on the east coast. How hot he must have been. How often, we will hope, he must have bathed on the journey in those crystal brooks, beneath the balisiers and the bamboos. He found ‘a fine-shaped and a gentle people, all naked and painted red’ (with roucou), ‘their commanders wearing crowns of feathers,’ and a country ‘fertile and full of fruits, strange beasts and fowls, whereof munkeis, babions, and parats were in great abundance.’ His ‘munkeis’ were, of course, the little Sapajous; his ‘babions’ no true Baboons; for America disdains that degraded and dog-like form; but the great red Howlers. He was much delighted with the island; and ‘inskonced himself’—i.e. built a fort: but he found the Spanish governor, Berreo, not well pleased at his presence; ‘and no gold in the island save Marcasite’ (iron pyrites); considered that Berreo and his three hundred Spaniards were ‘both poore and strong, and so he had no reason to assault them.’ He had but fifty men himself, and, moreover, was tired of waiting in vain for Sir Walter Raleigh. So he sailed away northward, on the 12th of March, to plunder Spanish ships, with his brains full of stories of El Dorado, and the wonders of the Orinoco—among them ‘four golden half-moons weighing a noble each, and two bracelets of silver,’ which a boat’s crew of his had picked up from the Indians on the other side of the Gulf of Paria.
He left somewhat too soon. For on the 22d of March Raleigh sailed into Cedros Bay, and then went up to La Brea and the Pitch Lake. There he noted, as Columbus had done before him, oysters growing on the mangrove roots; and noted, too, ‘that abundance of stone pitch, that all the ships of the world might be therewith laden from thence; and we made trial of it in trimming our shippes, to be most excellent good, and melteth not with the sun as the pitch of Norway.’ From thence he ran up the west coast to ‘the mountain of Annaparima’ (St. Fernando hill), and passing the mouth of the Caroni, anchored at what was then the village of Port of Spain.
There some Spaniards boarded him, to buy linen and other things, all which he ‘entertained kindly, and feasted after our manner, by means whereof I learned as much of the estate of Guiana as I could, or as they knew, for those poore souldiers having been many years without wine, a few draughts made them merrie, in which mood they vaunted of Guiana and the riches thereof,’—much which it had been better for Raleigh had he never heard.
Meanwhile the Indians came to him every night with lamentable complaints of Berreo’s cruelty. ‘He had divided the island and given to every soldier a part. He made the ancient Caciques that were lords of the court, to be their slaves. He kept them in chains; he dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other torments, which’ (continues Raleigh) ‘I found afterward to be true. For in the city’ (San Josef), ‘when I entered it, there were five lords, or little kings, in one chain, almost dead of famine, and wasted with torments.’ Considering which; considering
