Page 4 - Friday, December 28,

Trinidad,

1984 - North Shore News

Strictly
personal

by

Bob Hunter

N A CLEAR DAY
you can
shoreline of the continent Columbus saw

in Port of Spain,
see Venezuela, the

and sailed along for four days but never r quite

realized what he’d seen.

His contact with Trinidad
was nearly as peripheral.
When several canoes of war-
nors rowed Out lo investigate
his ship, the Admiral of the
Ocean Sea had his men do a
dance, accompanied by
drums, to welcome the In-
dians on board. Instead, they
took this as a declaration of
war, threw some spears, and
retreated. Columbus claimed
the island, of course. But he
never actually bothered to
step ashore

As for the warnors, they
did well to flee. They should
have kept going. The early
history of Trinidad ww a
bloody tale of natives being

tricked into supposedly
peaceful gatherings in huts,
which were then burned

down by the Spamiards and
the survivors taken as slaves
Monks became martyrs by
virtue of being killed in
retahauon tor kidnappings
and massacres

The first Spanish governor
was poisoned by a slave girl
Earthquakes, smalipox epi-
demics, hurricanes and
battles that echoed the tur-
mou in Europe, mght down
to Robespierre sending an

Beaty

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pet delomusly free
Chocolate Chip oC oOk IES
with every field you Onder

ROYAL RESERVE

agent to str up trouble bet-
ween French royalists and
republicans when they had
become the dominant group
near the end of Spain’s rule,
were Trinidad’s legacy

But mostly the country was

shaped by the slave trade
Originally, there were seven
tribes tiving on the

2,000-square-mile istand, an
unusual mix, since most of
the islands in the Lesser An-
ulles archipelago had only
two tribes at the most. Un-
doubtably it had something
to do with the fact that the
South American coast 1s only
seven miles away at its closest
point

The orginal inhabitant
didn't get along all that well
Raiding parties launched by
the warlike Caribs, who had
migrated from the Amazon,
would carry off women and
children from other tribes,
usually after eating the men
It is romic that, except for a
handful of invididuals with
Canb blood in their veins,
the only trace of the once:
fierce cannibals is a local beer
called Carib and T-shirts that
advertise the beer with the

slogan: Carib 1s you
into slavery in the

Taken

We deliver on
Sundays from 1pm

985-0636

pearl fisheries or the sugar
cane fields, first by the
Spaniards, then the French,
the Indians died off. By 1892,
there were only 800 left on
the entire island. As their
numbers fell, the conquerors
looked around desperately
for somebody to replace
them. And so began the flow
of African slaves to Trinidad.

When the slave trade
routes were finally cut off by
the British, slavers began
grabbing peasants from their
homes in the Azores,
although two-thirds of these
dyed from the heat and over-
work just as the Indians and
Africans had before them.

After the island fell to the
British, a wave of Scots, Ger-
mans, French, Swiss and
trish began arriving. Entirely
unaccustomed to the climate
and unfitted for the rough
work in the fields, many of
these, too, died. According-
ty, the West Indies turned to
the East Indies in search of a
labour pool. Where the mis-

named ‘‘Indians’’ of the
Caribbean had toiled and
died, real Indians began to

arrive

Indentured tor a period of
five years, at the end otf
which time they were given
tree return passage to India
or parcels of land, they took
up farming for the most part
and their temples and mos
ques sprang up everywhere in
the jungle Matched against
Gserman renaissance architec
ture and the gingerbread
houses of the British, the
Hindu touch gave the island
the beginnings of an ex-
quisitely cosmopolitan look

After the War of 1812, a
group of black veterans,
mostly escaped American

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... AND GET A
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slaves from the state of
Georgia who had fought in
the Corps of Colonial
Marines against their
masters, were rewarded by
the British with land grants in
the lush interior region of the
Aripo Savannah.

For a couple of years star-
ting in 1865, Chinese im-
migrants from Hong Kong
were brought in on indenture
contracts, but no sooner had
they arrived than the Chinese

INCLUDES:

Sunday -

VALIO

January 6) February 1

BY DAY

A deluxe wall unit

Nec astaprrentrise areal bed

eo lect titrvers thie cospabeoed

edd at ve Spree ee satis tered

etary bay a ket atid sae

Complimentary Spanish ~
Coffee at our Keg restaurant.

Stay a minimum of 2 nights,
Thursday & receive FREE
lift passes to be used Monday - Friday.

government forbade any fur-
ther such exodus. The
Chinese left stranded in
Trinidad quickly bought their
freedom and_= started up
shops, nearly driving the In-
dian and Portuguese retailers
out of business.

There were further in-
fluxes: Venezuelans fleeing
revolutions on the mainland,
Syrians, Corsicans,
Lebanese, and from 1931 on-
ward, Jews escaping from

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when you Stay at

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CHARACTER AND QUALITY

A tradition that’s passed on
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ppeenonoueo nance erase tte

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A

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A PROUD CANADIAN

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Extra person $25,

Nazi Germany. By the time
the Americans departed at
the end of the Second World

War, leaving tens of
thousands of steel drums
behind — which were to

become the core of a cultural
New Age — Trinidad had
evolved into a polyglot socie-
ty quite different from. its
Caribbean cousins, as multi-
layered as an onion skin.

Next: The surprise of
modern Trinidad.

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