St. Vincent & The Grenadines

After St. Lucia, he stirred up the Black Caribs of St. Vincent. These Black Caribs were a mixture of African and Carib. You will find them in St. Vincent to this day. Bryan Edwards wrote in his book of 1793, that origin of the Black Caribs of St. Vincent lies in the fact that a ship was wrecked in 1675 on Bequin, carrying slaves from the tribe of Mocoes in Benin. Together with runaway slaves from Barbados, the "Red Caribs" produced offspring with the Africans, who were subsequently called "Black Caribs."

The 1960 census showed that there were 1,200 Caribs in St. Vincent, most of these are in fact Black Caribs. Urged on by Hugues, the ancestors of these same people rose in rebellion and there was desperate fighting, so desperate that it looked at one time as if the French and their Carib allies would succeed in throwing the English off the island, as they had done in St. Lucia.

In the end, the rebellion was put down, and large quantities of Black Caribs were carried away from St. Vincent and settled in the Bay islands, in Ruatan and Bonacca off the Mosquito coast of South America.

Years later, some of these Black Caribs were allowed to leave Ruatan and settle in the southern part of British Honduras, and today you will find them among the most progressive and hardworking of the inhabitants of Belize. Some make a living cutting timber in the forests, others fishing, others are farmers. They number about 7,000. It is because of this transportation that the number of Black Caribs in St. Vincent is so small.

After a period of turbulence, St. Vincent settled down to become a sugar island. England often exported criminals. Many "poor whites" came to the Caribbean and made a home for themselves at Dorsetshire Hill, northeast of Kingstown. Many Portuguese were settled there in the same way that many also came to Trinidad.

West Indian immigration to Trinidad and Tobago over the last 150 years has contributed to an aspect of our cosmopolitanism in that tens of thousands of people, mostly of African descent, have come here, their origins at first very diverse, but in the melting pot of Trinidad and Tobago we all have become one people.

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Source of this information can be found here St. Vincent