Jumby Bay

Chapter 5

The History of Antigua and Jumby Bay

frigate.jpg (1544 bytes) Frigate Bird. A predacious seabird of the genus Fregola having fully webbed feet.

Antigua is the largest of the British Leeward Islands with 65,000 people, 24,000 of whom live in the capital city of St. Johns. This tropical paradise has 365 beaches with enough white sand, sun and palm trees for any Caribbean tourist. Birds are plentiful with 140 species on Antigua and Barbuda, 90 of which are seen regularly. Antigua is a beautiful gem with coves and inlets where you can find ultimate serenity, a land of endless summer. Christopher Columbus sailed by on his second trip to the "New World" on November 11, 1493 and named it, without so much as landing on the shore, after Santa Maria de la Antigua, the miracle-working saint whose relics rested in Seville, Spain. The first European settlers were British who came over from the colony on St. Kitts in the 1630s, a few years after the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It is pronounced An-tee-ga in the British manner, not, as virtually everyone else insists, An-tee-gwah.

Antigua is mostly a large mass of volcanic rock, occupying 45% of the 108 square miles of the island. The rest is formed of sedimentary rocks, mainly limestone. The highest point is Boggy Peak at just over 1300 feet. Many bays and harbors are deep enough for cruise ships. The hills and harbors of Antigua are why the island has never fallen into other hands except for an incident when it was briefly captured by the French in 1666. On Shirley Heights you can still see the ruins of British gun emplacements and fortifications. Antigua has been a permanent naval station for the British since 1725. A dockyard is named after Lord Horatio Nelson, the British hero of the battle of Trafalgar, who first stopped by in 1784 when he was a 26 year old admiral to command the Leeward Islands Squadron. He returned in 1805 on his way to make world history by defeating Villeneuve at Trafalgar. A major tourist center today is the 18^th century port of English Harbor.

The island was settled long before the Europeans came. In 10,000 B.C. Paleo-Indians navigated to the islands by primitive canoe. Sea levels were 275 feet lower than today, so Antigua and Barbuda were linked together. There is evidence of habitation during the Meso-Indian age around 1775 B.C. on Jolly Beach. To put it in perspective, four hundred years before Ramses II ruled as Pharaoh in Egypt, the Siboney, or stone people, inhabited Antigua.

Around 500 B.C. nomadic warriors lived and fished at North Sound, but there were no major settlements on the island until 35 A.D. when the Arawak came up from Venezuela and settled near Indian Creek where they practiced their arts of fishing, agriculture and pottery. The Spanish described them as peaceful, gentle, hospitable and friendly. Arawak men and women painted their bodies and ornamented them with gold, stone, bone and shell. When they were not hunting or fishing, the Arawak spent much of their leisure time in games. They believed that good and evil spirits inhabited both human bodies and material objects. They controlled these spirits through their priest or shaman and by capturing them in statues called zemis, sometimes made of gold. Gold proved to be their undoing as it attracted the attention of the Spanish who enslaved the Arawaks.

Around 1200 A.D. another tribe, the Caribs, came up the chain of islands from South America. Carib men lived together in communal houses and kept their wives in separate huts. They treated their wives as servants, who had to dress and feed their husbands, clean their houses as well as working the soil. Carib men were experts in building boats. They were also fearless warriors. They considered war the highest art or game. They established settlements in Dominica and St. Kitts from where they attacked the Arawaks, taking the women and children as slaves and killing the men. Because the Caribs fought attempts to enslave them, the Spanish described them as bloodthirsty savages. The term cannibal is derived from their Spanish name caribal. Cannibalism was practiced as part of a solemn religious rite in which the captors tortured, killed and ate the bravest warriors taken in battle. They called Antigua, "waladli," Barbuda "wa’omoni" and Redonda "ocanamanru." Eventually, the Spanish wiped out the Carib. The only ones left today live on a reservation on Domenica.

Charles I, King of England granted Long Island, now Jumby Bay, to the Duke of Carlisle in 1625. Charles later lost his head during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Sir Christopher Codrington created the first sugar estate on Antigua in 1674. He named it Betty’s Hope after his daughter. The plantations brought African slaves to clear the fields for sugarcane. The island was essentially a giant sugar factory, producing sugar and rum to send home to London. There were 170 sugar mills by 1705 for crushing the cane. Today you can see the remnants in the tall brick chimneys of the colonial era scattered about the island. There is one sugar mill that bears witness on Jumby Bay not far from the Estate House. There were 23,350 slaves emancipated in Antigua on August 1, 1834 along with those in The Bahamas and Bermuda. Freed men rented plots of land and built over a thousand houses in 27 villages. After working a full day on the sugar plantations, they went home to cultivate their front and back gardens with plantains, yams, bananas, pineapples and sour sop. The fate of the island has depended on sugar until relatively recently. Antigua gained independence from Great Britain in 1981 under the stewardship of Papa Bird, the first Prime Minister. Today's economy is largely based upon tariffs and tourism.

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