In the 1630s English settlers extended their wave of colonization southwards from St Kitts and Nevis and began to establish settlements on the Kalinago (Carib) islands of Oüaladli and Oüahómoni. From their bases in the mountainous Windward Islands the Kalinagos reacted violently. During the 140 years since the arrival of Columbus in these parts, their people had already experienced Spanish slave raiders in the early 16th century stripping the Leewards of their native populations. From 1500, they had witnessed Taino refugees escaping the Spanish onslaught in the Greater Antilles and this gave them warning of the genocide that threatened. For most of the 17th century the Kalinago carried out a guerilla war on land and sea so as to ward off similar aggressive occupation of their islands. It was an attempt to both recapture territory and to create a buffer zone in the southern Leeward Islands. This would provide a protective shield between themselves and the advancing settlements of English yeoman farmers, Irish and Scottish servants and enslaved Africans.
In the middle of this poisoned arrow curtain stood Oüaladli (now popularly known as Wadadli), the indigenous name for Antigua, and the neighbouring island of Oüahómoni, now Barbuda (Breton, 1665). The two islands were of key ecological importance in providing natural resources on which Kalinago culture was based. Freedom of movement to access those resources was now threatened and the manner of the European exploitation of coastland, forest and water was totally alien to Kalinago concepts of relationship with the land. In attacking the fledgling English settlements, Kalinago cultural perceptions of landholding, war, women and the trophies of victory clashed with those of Jacobean, Stuart and Cromwellian England. This conflict is the theme of this paper.
Kalinago names of the Leeward Islands
The Caribbean that Columbus entered in 1492 was not a simple division between the so called Caribs and Arawaks. Historical and archaeological evidence from the Lesser Antilles suggests that there was more cultural heterogeneity than has previously been recognised:
Although speculative... it is more likely that the prehistoric and early historic Lesser Antilles contained a complex mosaic of ethnic groups which had considerable interaction with each other, the mainland and the Greater Antilles. As now, the individual islands and island groups would have become populous trading centres or isolated backwaters according to the abundance of their resources, the strength of their social and political ties with other centres, and their unique histories of colonisation and cultural change (Wilson, 1994).
That there was a 'complex mosaic' composed of popular trading centres and isolated backwaters is supported by Allaire (1977), and it appears that the cultural distribution of pre-Columbian groups in this part of the Lesser Antilles was far more diverse than originally thought (Allaire & Mattioni, 1983). People who described themselves as the Kalinago, traded and raided between the islands, capturing women as wives and absorbing captives into their social kinship so as to strengthen the group and cement alliances. When seen through the eyes of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, the islands of Oüaladli and Oüahómoni were resource centres for flint for tool-making, clay for pottery, and a whole range of ethno botanical supplies for medicines, building materials and craft items. Marine resources within their coral reefs and mangrove swamps ranged from manatees, lobsters and fish to coral for graters and conch for food, while the versatile shell of this mollusc was used to fabricate a variety of objects. Forests provided cover that sustained ponds and water sources. The Kalinago methods of agriculture were based on the clearing of small spaces in the forest that were changed regularly allowing for fallow periods and soil rejuvenation. All this was backed by a religion and rich mythology in which the human relationship with the natural cycles of the islands was kept in balance. Cultural practices that had originated among the tributaries of the Orinoco Valley in South America were reordered here to reflect the island world that they had entered. When this culture was suddenly challenged by guns, steel, alien germs and a militant Christianity at the end of the 15th century, the delicate interconnections that had made Kalinago society possible quickly fell apart. The people utilised tactics for survival from their culture in attempting to deal with the newcomers.
The human ecology of the indigenous people before and after contact is linked to the geology, climate patterns, vegetation and maritime features that influenced the ways in which the islands' natural environment was utilised. Comparative studies of such practices as ethno-botany, sources of raw materials for tools and other technology, the knowledge of hunting and gathering areas, fishing grounds, routes of navigation and mythical geography are all dependent on a comprehensive understanding of the geology, geophysics and natural history of the area. Such an exercise requires us first to revisualise the region, stripping it to a purely geographical entity, seeing it from the perspective of the cultural interaction of a horticultural and hunter-gatherer people and the human ecology of their survival within the natural environment of these oceanic islands.
The importance of Oüaladli and Oüahómoni as resource centres is first understood through geology. The Lesser Antilles is made up of two volcanic island arcs adjacent to one another. The outer arc, lying to the east, is older, having been formed in the pre-Miocene. Because of their age, the islands of this arc are more severely eroded and their peaks have been worn down to less than 1,000 feet above sea level. Coral reefs have developed upon the coastal remnants and the accumulated sediment, creating white coral sand beaches. These older islands of the Lesser Antilles are: The Virgin Islands, Anguilla, St Martin, St Barthelemy, Barbuda, Antigua, the eastern wing of Guadeloupe and the island of Marie Galante (Multer et al., 1986).
The inner, younger arc is characterised by islands or parts of islands, with high volcanic peaks rising to almost 5,000 feet above sea level, rugged, sharply falling coastlines, black sand beaches and the remnants of volcanic activity in the form of sulphur springs, boiling craters and intermittently active volcanoes. With human occupation, these zones were utilised in contrasting ways according to the resources which they provided.
Neighbouring islands, formed at different geological eras, provided resources which were not available on the others. In the case of Oüaladli for instance, flint deposits on Long Island and extensive reefs drew settlements to particular locations and stimulated widespread trading contacts with groups on other islands for a rock type which was rare in the region (Olsen, 1974: 147) (Nicholson, 1991). Marine resources which were prolific on low, coral-encrusted islands would have been complimented by more extensive forest resources and volcanic rock materials available on adjacent mountainous islands. In considering the exploitation of these zones and the relationships which were stimulated by this activity among groups inhabiting the islands, one is led to assess the continuous inter-island movement of people and goods between South America and the islands, either for hunting, gathering, trade, war, or retreat from Spanish slave raiding, which was recorded well into the seventeenth century and it was to confound the Europeans during the period of indigenous resistance (Breton, 1665: 379; Davies, 1666: 7; Du Tertre, 1667: Vol.II: VII: I: 385). Such inter-island travel for resource procurement is another subsistence factor that is often overlooked.
A fleet of seventeen Spanish ships packed with over a thousand prospective settlers lead by Christopher Columbus sailed past Oüaladli in November of 1493 while on his second voyage. Columbus christened the island Antigua, but well into the 17th century, the native Kalinago still described it to French missionaries by its native name. In the years that followed the Columbus voyage, the impact of the Spanish conquest on Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, the effects of European diseases and the systematic genocide of the Taino people throughout the Greater Antilles became known to the people of Oüaladli and Oüahómoni. Taino refugees fleeing Spanish persecution, appear to have filtered southwards into the Leeward and Windward Islands during the thirty or so years it took the Spanish to decimate the aboriginal Taino population in the Greater Antilles (Helps, 1868; Las Casas, 1992; Walker, 1992: 274-316). Seventeenth-century Kalinagos maintained an oral history of this infiltration from the north (Davies, 1666: 206).
The destruction and enslavement of the Tainos during the first years of the 16th century has received much attention from historians, but it is often overlooked that this was occurring concurrently with an equally aggressive slave-seeking policy by the Spanish among the Kalinago populations of the Lesser Antilles and on the coast of the mainland. This lead to the depletion of indigenous populations on Oüaladli and Oüahómoni over one hundred years before English colonization began. Sued Badillo has shown that the real proportions of this period of slavery have not yet been properly assessed (Sued Badillo, 1995: 65).
From as early as 1500 to the 1540s orders or cedulas had been issued by the Spanish Crown giving permission to wage war upon, enslave and sell duty-free any Kalinagos on these islands south of Puerto Rico and were aimed not only at providing slaves but at the same time clearing the islands of dangerous neighbours (Beckles, 1992: 1; Borome, 1972b: 70; Jesse, 1963: 27; Sauer, 1966: 161). It is likely that all along the islands, both the remnants of the refugee Tainos and as well as the Kalinagos, took up arms in defence of their communities. This further confuses European accounts of the inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles at the time, for whoever took up arms to defend themselves south of Puerto Rico was identified as "a warlike Carib" whatever their cultural affinities may have been:
As for the Spaniards, at the first discovery of America, the Caribbians who were then possessed of all the Caribby Islands, were cruelly treated by them; they persecuted them with fire and sword and pursued them even into the woods as wild beasts that they might carry them away Captives to work in the Mines (Davies, 1666: 324).
Oüaladli and Oüahómoni and the islands to the north are smaller and flatter than those to the south and would have been more easily raided and swept clean of people by Spanish slavers. In contrast, the knotted terrain of the mountainous Windward Islands, particularly Dominica and St Vincent, provided protection within a short distance of the shore. Any attempts to effect Spanish settlement in these islands were defeated and Spanish missionaries who ventured into this zone were massacred or held captive and the islands only remained of value as refreshment stops for Spanish ships (Borome, 1972b: 71).
At the same time there was a bow wave of European diseases that traveled with the retreating Tainos. Studies have considered the effect which the gradual introduction of alien diseases into these relatively isolated areas may have had on ensuring the survival of predominantly Kalinago communities. "In other words, isolation may have gained for the Caribs the kind of time that was denied the Tainos - the time to host new diseases one at a time with interludes in between that promoted a gradual development of immune systems over generations" (Kiple & Ornelas, 1996: 56). Oüaladli and Oüahómoni had been severely affected by over half a century of slave raiding. As raids declined from the 1560s there appears to have been an attempt to reoccupy the islands at the end of the 16th century, but the Kalinago settlements here had not been effectively reestablished by the time the first English settlers arrived.
The voyager narratives and the seventeenth-century French texts makes it clear that entire islands north of Guadeloupe and south of Puerto Rico such as Oüaladli and Oüahómoni were largely depopulated by the time the English and French began settling the islands in 1625. Many vacated islands were being used only as gardens by neighbouring Kalinagos (Davies, 1666: 8, 15). Spanish interests were shifting to the mainland and after the 1580s Spanish control of the Lesser Antilles was being seriously challenged as other European nations joined in the frantic grab for a share of the New World.
Concurrent with the early phase of European colonization was the fabrication of the first documents of possession by the English and the French. The introduction of documented treaties was a crucial watershed in the occupation of the islands:
Fully aware of their interloper status in the distant tropics, but arriving from a civilisation in which the legal inheritance and the legal transferability of geographical space had long been established, the Europeans frequently attempted to legitimise the spread of their power by quasi-legal methods ... reconstructing the property history of their new possessions (Anderson, 1991: 174).
By matching 'legitimate' claims almost island for island, the French and English set the stage for almost two centuries of continuous military and naval conflict over possession of the islands which was only put to an end at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Caught between the two nations, the Caribs attempted at first to play one nation against the other, but "the Caribs would find that the nationality of the trespassers was the only difference in the case, and the English took up the aggressions where the French had left them off" (Bell, 1902: No. 17). Although the Kalinago often fought beside the French in their struggle against the English they would shift allegiance depending on signs of failed sincerity, for they gained full protection from none of them (Roberts, 1971: 54).
When the legitimising concept of treaty was introduced into the conflict the colonising powers effectively negated Carib rights to the use of large swathes of territory. Treaties of 1660 and 1667 were made with the Kalinago, purporting to give them land rights and protection, but by determining what could be left for the Caribs, it was established ipso facto that the rest was legitimately possessed. Ownership of land was a concept alien to the Kalinago. It was use and access that was crucial. As in North America, with colonisation, Europeans and Native Caribbeans came into competition for the use of the land. On islands as small as those of the Lesser Antilles competition for land was even more acute. Colonial agricultural practices were destructive to the Kalinagos' methods of food gathering and swidden agriculture. The sheltered forest clearings that sustained their agriculture were swept away and replaced by open European-style fields. Kalinago provision grounds were overrun. The trees for canoe building that sustained their freedom of movement were transformed into mill rollers and furnace fuel. Within 30 years of English settlement the environmental degradation of Antigua was well advanced (Watts, 1992: 221).
Raiding tactics that had been active between indigenous communities before Columbus were maintained in the attacks on European settlements. The methods of guerilla-style attack and retreat, capture and withdrawal and the particular seasons for warfare were the hallmarks of Kalinago assaults. The warfare they practiced was swift and fierce. They even captured ships in mid ocean and depended on stealth, ambush and surprise (Davies, 1666: 324). For years during the Spanish settlement of Puerto Rico the Kalinago harassed the east and south coasts of that island in order to prevent further expansion southwards into the Virgin Islands. Documents in the archives of Santo Domingo record: "each year they go to steal by the months of June, July and August, to the Island of Puerto Rico and other parts. In this manner they have captured many Negro slaves and some Spaniards in some haciendas by which fear many lands have been depopulated and two mills that make sugar".1 In the process they plundered plantations, fired buildings, sacked churches, slayed livestock and took away trade goods, guns and clothing as well as captives.
An unpredictable combination of trade and armed resistance had been the most obvious Kalinago approach to Europeans from the time of first contact. They carried on a vibrant tobacco trade with Europeans while at the same time taking advantage of national divisions among them to redirect goods from one nation to traders of another and in so doing obtain items of most advantage to themselves (Barbour, 1969: 129-30; Honychurch, 1996). The desire for European trade goods and more efficient tools led to a breakdown in the network of production of stone tools also influenced raiding. The dugout canoe, for instance, manufactured from trees in the island rain forests was, for the seafaring Kalinagos, their most valuable item of material culture. Its fabrication had been dependent on the stone axe and shell gouge. By the 1630s the European axe, adze and hatchet, which replaced the stone implements, became prime tools for the manufacture of canoes. Access to these tools for the production of the vehicles for their attacks was satisfied both during raids and tobacco trading.
Marxist readings of these events paint a picture of a heroic clash between colonial oppressors and the nationalistic oppressed (Beckles, 1992). But that angle does not translate so tidily into the cultural realities of the 17th century Kalinago. There was a fluid unpredictability about the Kalinago approach, combining pragmatism and cultural factors. A range of traditional responses were applied to deal new and unusually stronger enemies.
The colonization of Oüaladli was begun from St Kitts in 1632, although itinerant settlers may have established small plots a year or two before, but it was not administered until 1635. The colony was a focus for Kalinago attacks and this contributed significantly to its slow progress. Initially conditions were so primitive that for a time Lieutenant Governors preferred to administer from Nevis. At the height of Kalinago attacks in the 1650s the English had occupied Pond Division, Rendezvous Bay, Leeward Division, Crab Valley, Bermuda Valley, Old Road, Falmouth, Willoughby Bay, Parham and St Johns. With a population of only some 1500 persons, each settlement had an average of 150 persons, with areas around Falmouth, the first administrative centre, having more.
Earl Settlements in Antigua
The limited number of men available was hindering effective defence of the settlements. When Penn and Venables sought to recruit volunteers for their mission against Santo Domingo and the later capture of Jamaica, it was felt unwise to take any men because "the island ... is much molested with the Indians of Guadeloupe, Dominica and St. Vincent, which made me unwilling to entertain any of the inhabitants for soldiers, there not being on the island above 1200 men" (Oliver, xxv). On full moon nights there was a demand for doubling men on guard duty because these were the most likely times for Kalinago raids. Attacks often came from windward and focused on the main settlement of Falmouth. Fire, boutou clubs, arrows and intimidating body paint and noisy aggression were designed to strike terror into the settlements. Trophies of war in the form of enemy limbs were kept for display. In 1684 Kalinagos from Dominica offered the French priest, Père Labat, a smoked human arm belonging to one of six Englishmen that they had killed in a raid on Barbuda, where they had also taken women and children captive. Being a Frenchman, they assumed that he would delight in a trophy of his enemy. It had been tied on the stern of their canoe and since the most recent recorded raid on Barbuda had been made in 1681, the arm may have been thus preserved for three years.
In 1659 Governor Keynell was calling for more guns and ammunition and more white servants, "Scotch and Irish". He decreed that no able bodied man be allowed to leave the island until the colony was in a condition to be able to defend itself (Oliver, xxvii). In 1660 Acts were passed to force the reduction of the size of Crown Land grants so as to encourage more settlers. In the meantime the Kalinago raids were continuing to sap the manpower that did exist in a combination of killing and kidnap. On returning to Dominica and St.Vincent with goods and captives they hid themselves easily in the mountainous jungles where skillfully laid ambushes awaited those who dared to follow them up the narrow valleys (Davies, 1666: 309-310).
The English and Africans from Oüaladli and Oüahómoni who were taken to Dominica found themselves in communities that were in the process of "creolisation". Reports of racial and cultural mixing in the Kalinago settlements date from the late sixteenth century and become increasingly numerous in the seventeenth. It was the emergence of a mestizo population in the Lesser Antilles. An intriguing collection of different nationalities was to be found in Kalinago villages on Dominica and the Windward Islands during this period. They were Africans and various Europeans who according to contemporary reports had either been captured by the Kalinago from neighbouring islands and passing ships, or who had escaped from slavery or indenture on plantations in Puerto Rico and later from French and British colonies on other islands. There were also survivors from shipwrecks or deserters in hiding.
In 1569 it was estimated that there were more than 30 Spanish and 40 Africans living among the Kalinagos (Cardona Bonet, 1989: 167).2 Blacks found in these settlements have frequently been described by European writers as having been enslaved by the Kalinagos:
In the islands of St. Vincent and Dominica there are some Caribbians who have many Negro slaves; some of them got from the English plantations and some from the Spanish ships wrecked on their coasts; they are called tamons, that is slaves, and the Negroes serve them with as much obedience, readiness and respect, as if they were the most civilised people in the world (Davies, 1666: 295).
The use of terms such as "slaves" and "captives" by these writers when referring to Africans and Europeans living among the Kalinagos, calls for further analysis because it is none too clear whether all such people were actually captured or whether they had used the opportunity of Kalinago raids to escape from worse situations in European colonies and on sailing ships. The accounts given of Kalinagos capturing and taking away slaves may also have been given to exaggerate the danger that the Kalinagos posed to property. Certainly in the letters sent by French and British colonists appealing to their home governments for permission to make war on the Kalinagos in contravention of the treaty of 1660, the "capture" and harbouring of slaves is emphasised (CSP: 1675-6: No. 861). In Antigua, Stapleton asserted that the French had supplied the Kalinagos with "firearms, powder and bullets. They [the French] buy the plunder and Negroes taken from English islands" (CSP: 1681-85: No. 1126). The French on the leeward coast of Martinique accused the Kalinagos on the windward side of harbouring escaped slaves "negres marrons" (Du Tertre, 1667: Vol.I: XIV: I503). It is clear that the presence of Europeans and Africans in Carib villages had stimulated racial and cultural intermixture from the earliest years of contact, or as Sir William Young put it in the eighteenth century: "It is natural to suppose that they soon solaced themselves with their female friends of the party; and as the state of nature is no enemy to propagation, they of course gave birth to a free people" (Young, 1764: 9). Abbé Raynal describes the children produced as a result of the union of Kalinago women and blacks "as having preserved more the colour of their fathers than their mothers, being tall and stout in contrast to the stocky appearance of the Caribs" (Kirby & Martin, 1985: 21).
In 1493 Columbus had met women captured from the Greater Antilles living in Kalinago settlements in Guadeloupe. One hundred and forty years later, a similar pattern of female capture was being directed against the English on Oüaladli and Oüahómoni. As European settlement closed in on the Windward Islands, there were frequent reports, particularly from Antigua, of Kalinagos kidnapping white women and children during their raids and taking them back to Dominica from where some of them never returned: "if they can get any of the Women and Children, they carry them away Prisoners into their own Territories" (Davies, 1666: 19). In capturing women from leading settlers of Antigua and Barbuda, it was the equivalent of taking the wives of chiefs and the most hurtful act that they could perpetrate in retaliation for the ills they had suffered. In the Kalinago culture, the taboos associated with the division of labour among the sexes were balanced heavily in the men's favour and even 17th century European observers considered Kalinago women to be as slaves to their men. In Kalinago eyes, depriving the men on Antigua of their women was to undermine the whole framework of the society that they were attempting to establish.
In 1640 the Kalinago on Oüaitoucoubouli (Dominica) attacked and pillaged Oüaladli carrying away Mrs Warner, "then great with child", who was the wife of the Governor Edward Warner, and their two children. During the next twenty six years they abducted the wives and children of many of the most important settlers on both Oüaladli and Oüahómoni. Among them we find mentioned Mrs Cardin and children, Mrs Taylor and children, Mrs Chrew and children, Mrs Lynch and children, Mrs Lee, wife of Captain Lee "and many other females".
This came at a time when there was increasing concern about the shortage of white people on the island and white women in particular. The imbalance of the sexes was so severe that as late as June 1665 a newly arrived settler's wife, writing to her cousin in New England, despairs at Antiguan society, complaining that "they all be a company of sodomites that live here, and truly Cozen, I ... can not comply with their ill manners" (Oliver, xxvii).
The white children who were made captive with the adults were totally acculturated by the Kalinagos within a short time. "Some English boys and girls, who being carried away very young, have forgot their parents; they are pleased with the Caribbians, who for their part treat them as mildly as if they were of their own nation; they are known only by the fairness and flaxenness of their hair, whereas the Caribbians are generally black haired" (Davies, 1666: 324). Père Labat's meeting with a Frenchman living in the "savage way" among the Kalinagos on the east coast of Dominica shows that, contrary to Davies' assertion that all white men were killed (Davies, 1666: 19), adult males were equally assimilated into the host communities (Labat, 1931: 95).
An increase in the numbers and diversity of nationalities among the Kalinagos continued to be reported into the eighteenth century. The fact that these people were actively participating in the cultural practices of the Kalinagos meant that they were contributing their labour towards maintaining major aspects of Kalinago life. The co-opting of community members in this way is similar to the process by which mainland Kalina adopted sons in law or poitos according to Whitehead (1988: 57).
If this absorption of other ethnic groups into their kinship system was a considered strategy, it would have been a continuation of the pattern active at the time of the first encounter when Kalinagos appear to have been taking wives from other groups and integrating men into their kinship network. In any case, by co-opting people of other ethnic groups into their communities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the face of their own demographic decline, they were able to continue to pursue cultural practices that had been reliant on large-scale cooperative action. The clearing of land, cultivation of crops, the processing of foodstuffs, manning of canoes and construction of shelters were activities which required teamwork and which were severely threatened by the pressures exerted by colonisation on their reduced numbers. As Anna Roosevelt has observed in the Amazon:
Despite the turmoil, many groups have managed to adjust to the changed conditions while at the same time retaining their traditional culture by retreating to isolated areas, avoiding permanent settlement, or collecting or making materials for exchange to non-Indians (Roosevelt, 1994: 10).
The episode which marks the climax of the battle for possession of Oüaladli and Oüahómoni came with the Antiguans' reprisal upon the half Kalinago, half English son of Sir Thomas Warner, the pioneer of English colonization of the West Indies. Carib Warner or Indian Warner, as he was called, was both a Kalinago Chief and a colonial Lieutenant governor of Dominica. This episode combines all of the elements in the fraught relationship between the Antiguans and their Kalinago neighbours. It represents the tensions which were inherent in the alliances being formed both through the ethnic exchange by way of intermarriage, and the political alliances being engineered by the British and the French with the Kalinagos, by the colonial convention of documented treaty. The life of Carib Warner was marked by the effects of both of these types of alliances. He was born in 1630. His father was the English Governor of St Kitts, his mother a Kalinago woman from Dominica who was working on his plantation. Du Tertre knew the boy and recorded his observations.
General Warner, a contemporary of General De Poincy, had a son by a Carib slave woman of Dominica. He recognised him as his own, he saw to it that he carried his name and saw to his education in his own house, together with his other children ... As was to be expected, his hair was jet black ... his height was below average but there was a fine proportion among all his limbs. He had an oval face and a large forehead with aquiline nose and his eyes shining and bright -- not slit. There was gravity on his face that bespoke the temper of his daring character (Du Tertre, 1667: Vol.1: 82-85)
During his boyhood Carib Warner lived among the English of St Kitts, enjoying the privileges of his father's household along with his English half-brothers Edward and Philip. But after Sir Thomas Warner's death, the youth was persecuted by his English step-mother and Carib Warner fled to Dominica. The windward coast of the island was at that time inhabited by Kalinagos more friendly to the French and Warner took refuge among his mother's people on the Leeward side of the island. Here he adopted the Kalinago way of life and was soon raised by the people of that section of the coast to be their chief (Du Tertre, 1667: Vol.1: 82-85). Having been brought up as part of a prominent English family on St Kitts at a time when it had been shared with the French, Carib Warner held a prime position during his chieftaincy which no other Kalinago commanded. His intimate knowledge of Kalinago and European ways and his fluency in the English, French and Kalinago languages provided advantages which he appears to have attempted to use in securing Dominica for his people in perpetuity. Hulme and Whitehead (1992: 89) observe that all narratives of culture contact throw up such a figure who inhabited "that treacherous zone 'between' cultures" which, at least in the early stages of colonial history, often meant moving uncertainly between two worlds, being at times on both sides as a valued intermediary, sometimes as a potential traitor.3
During those years, there was a great difference of opinion between the English in Barbados and those in Antigua and the Leeward Islands about the value of the Kalinagos as allies against the French. While many planters were eager to wipe the Caribs out once and for all, Governor Willoughby, then governor of the 'British Possessions in the Caribbee' stationed in Barbados, was trying, through Carib Warner, to come to a more diplomatic arrangement and also win over the French-influenced Kalinagos of the windward coast of Dominica and in St Vincent. With this in mind he made Carib Warner Deputy Governor in 1664, who then proceeded to lead 600 Kalinagos with 17 canoes to assist the English attack on the French settlement in St Lucia. They landed along with over 1,000 Englishmen from Barbados and the small French garrison of 14 surrendered without resistance (CSP: 1700: No. 873). Two years later, Carib Warner was captured by the French and treated harshly in Guadeloupe and St Kitts, but was released in 1668 on the grounds that he was an officer of England and not a "savage" (Burns, 1954: 343-344). Sir William Stapleton, who became Captain General of the Leeward Islands in 1672, was one of those who wanted the Indians driven from the area and when the Caribs of Dominica raided Antigua in December 1674 he decided that a harsh counter-attack should be made:
The islanders dread them [the Caribs] more than any other, because they can come with thirty or forty peria goes to windward and attack while they are defending the leeward coast against Christian enemies (CSP: 1669-74: No. 1201)
A militia of "six small companies of foot" was raised from Antigua and St. Kitts with Carib Warner's half-brother Colonel Philip Warner, then governor of Antigua, in command. They sailed to Dominica to "put down" the Caribs and "be revenged on those heathens for their bloody and perfidious villanies" (Stapleton CSP. 1681-85 No. 1126). It is said that no prior approval for this expedition was obtained from the new governor of Barbados, Sir Jonathan Atkins. Sir Jonathan viewed the situation differently, believing that any such conflict with the Caribs would make peaceful settlement impossible (CSP: 1675-6: No. 601). William Dampier has it that Philip Warner treacherously went among his half-brother's community, plied them with rum at a feast and then massacred them — the signal for the massacre was supposed to have been given by Philip stabbing his own half-brother (Dampier, 1699-1709: Vol. 2: 5-6).
Warner was arrested, transported to England and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was tried in Barbados and was, predictably, acquitted by a jury of planters. But the king dismissed him and ordered that he be barred from all further employment in his Majesty's service. In response, the Antiguans voted him into the highest position that it was within their power to give, electing him Speaker of the House of Assembly in 1679. The whole truth of the matter may now never be known, but the violent expedition had no immediate effect on the Kalinago assaults. In 1676 they murdered many colonists in Antigua and Montserrat in retaliation for the Dominica massacre, and again in 1681-82 Kalinagos from Dominica and St Vincent raided Barbuda and Montserrat, killing, burning and carrying off a few enslaved blacks (CSP: 1681-85: No. 1126). This was the period when the Kalinagos made their last major forays of resistance against the ever-encroaching colonies, whose advance was fuelled by the growing wealth in sugar that swept all before it.
Raids continued to be made from Dominica until the late 1680s but, in the following decade, French lumbermen began to set up their ateliers along the leeward coast of that island. Soon the Kalinagos were withdrawing to the windward side of Dominica exchanging land rights, a concept once alien to them, for rum, cloth and iron tools (Borome, 1972a: 81). It had taken two hundred years from the time of Columbus' arrival to effect the first physical breach of their control over the last of their islands. By Article nine of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the four Lesser Antilles islands of Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent and Tobago, which were still occupied by small Kalinago populations were decreed henceforth to be "neutral" and to be reserved to the resident Kalinagos for ever. But in fact small groups of poor white, 'petit blanc', French settlers had already gained a foothold in all of those islands.
By then, only the oldest English residents on Antigua retained memories of Kalinago raids, and the legislation passed to deal with the Kalinago threat was obsolete. The economic results of the shift from tobacco, indigo and cotton to sugar on Antigua as of the 1670s also altered the stakes. The landscape and society of the island were further transformed. The new sugar colony began to attract more investment and settlers, direct Crown control had given stability over government by proprietors, and the investment into more secure systems of coastal defence to protect the sugar trade had made Kalinago raids increasingly futile. But for all that, the Antiguans were not at peace. Other external threats persisted, specifically from the French. And with the importation of ever greater numbers of enslaved Africans to work the sugar industry, internal threats multiplied. The cultural tactics of resistance of the Kalinago was replaced by the cultural tactics of the African. Already, in 1736, this had manifested itself in an aborted attempt to blow up a large gathering of leading whites so as to trigger off a mass uprising of the enslaved. The fight for possession of Oüaladli and Oüahómoni had simply entered a new phase.
1
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