Antigua History

The first people that are known to have lived in Antigua are the Siboney or 'stone people' who were here in 1775 B.C.. They had stone and shell tools, and lived on whatever natural resources they could find. Traces of them are found at Jolly Beach, Deep Bay and North Sound.

The Arawaks date from the time of Christ, coming to these islands in paddled canoes from South America. They introduced agriculture into Antigua, bringing such crops as pineapples, corn, sweet potatoes, peppers, guava, tobacco and cotton. They mostly lived on the north and east sides of Antigua, where the reefs provided good fishing. Some of the places they lived are at Indian Creek, Marmora Bay, Half Moon Bay, Mill Reef, Green Island, Cloverleaf Bay, Long Bay, Coconut Hall, Galley Bay, Hawksbill and Curtain Bluff. They left Antigua about 1100 A.D., but some remained, who were then raided by the Caribs, another Indian people based in Dominica. The Caribs named Antigua "Waladli".

Christopher Columbus named this island "Antigua" in 1493, as he sailed past. It is named for the Cathedral in Seville, Spain, "Santa Maria La Antigua". He is said to have prayed in this church before the Voyage. From then on, several explorers came to Antigua, as well as Buccaneers, who exploited the island for its timbers, medicinal and dye plants, and the cattle which they had introduced as a source of meat.

In 1632, the English arrived from nearby St. Kitts and established a settlement, the first of its kind from Europe. The island remained British ruled until 1967 except for a brief French occupation.

In 1674, a dramatic change in the island’s economy took place when the first large scale sugar plantation was established by Sir Christopher Codrington who came up from Barbados. His success encouraged others to turn to sugar production. Over 150 sugar mills dotted the countryside, many of which are still standing today.   The early planters christened many of their large estates with names that are familiar in Antigua today: Byam, Duers, Gunthorpes, Lucas, Parry, Vernon, Cochran, Winthrop, and others.

Similar to other Caribbean lands, Antigua was turned into a sugar-producing island and sllaves were imported from African countries as laborers. In 1728, there was a minor slave uprising and in 1736, a major slave rebellion was alleged to have been uncovered.  The three ring leaders, Court, Tomboy, and Hercules were broken on the wheel and some eighty others brutally executed.

By 1736, so many slaves had been brought in from Africa that their conditions were crowded and open to unrest. A slave called "Prince Klaas" (whose real name was Count) planned an uprising in which the whites would be massacred, but the plot was discovered and put down.

The whites caught Prince Klaas and four other accomplices and "broke" them "on the wheel". According to www.torture-museum.com, "breaking on the wheel" was actually a common and popular form of punishement in Europe at the time. According the site:

The victim, naked, was stretched out supine on the ground or on the execution dock, with his or her limbs spread, and tied to stakes or iron rings. Stout wooden crosspieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The executioner then smashed limb after limb and joint after joint, including the shoulders and hips, with the iron-tyred edge of the wheel, but avoiding fatal blows.

The victim was transformed, according to the observations of a seventeenth-century German chronicler, "into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh . . . mixed up with splinters of smashed bones."

Thereafter the shattered limbs were "braided" into the spokes of the large wheel, and the victim hoisted up horizontally to the top of a pole, where the crows ripped away bits of flesh and pecked out [the] eyes.

Ironically, the location of this torture and execution is now the Antiguan Recreation Ground. As an aside, this type of European practice probably strongly influenced the clause in the American legal code protecting citizens from "cruel and unusual punishment".

The slave-holders caught six other slaves and put them "out to dry", another form of torture, which involves hanging the victims in chains and starving them to death. The slave-holders also burned fifty-eight other slaves at the stake.

The headquarters for the English fleet was located at the Dockyard in English Harbour during the 1700’s and 1800’s when the sugar producing islands were of enormous value to Europe. The Dockyard was started to provide a base for a squadron of ships patrolling the West Indies and maintaining England's sea power. The senior officer of the Dockyard station from the years of 1784 to 1787 was Lord Nelson. Consequently today, The Dockyard and English Harbour are known as Nelson’s Dockyard. Prince William Henry, the Duke of Clarence, who later became King William IV, was stationed as a captain under Lord Nelson. His residence was the Clarence House. The present docks were formed by blasting away a small hill and spreading it on the surrounding reefs, a remarkable piece of engineering. Ships were brought alongside to be careened, which means pulling the vessel on its side so the bottom can be scrubbed and painted. Nelson's Dockyard was shut down and abandoned by the Navy in 1889.

Although the British Parliament enacted legislation in 1834 abolishing slavery throughout the empire, it mandated that former slaves remain on their plantations for six years (see The PostEmancipation Societies, ch. 1). Choosing not to wait until 1840, the government on Antigua freed its slaves in August 1834. This was done more for economic than for humanitarian reasons, as the plantation owners realized that it cost less to pay emancipated laborers low wages than to provide slaves with food, shelter, and other essentials. The plantation owners continued to exploit their workers in this way into the twentieth century. The workers perceived little opportunity to change the situation, and sugar's dominance precluded other opportunities for employment on the island.

IThe Antigua sugar industry was severely jolted in the 1930s, as the dramatic decline in the price of sugar that resulted from the Great Depression coincided with a severe drought that badly damaged the island's sugar crop. Social conditions on Antigua, already bad, became even worse, and the lower and working classes began to protest to the point that law and order were threatened. The Moyne Commission was established in 1938 to investigate the causes of the social unrest in Antigua and elsewhere in the Caribbean (see Labor Organizations, ch. 1). In 1940, in response to the situation, the president of the British Trades Union Congress recommended that the workers on Antigua form a trade union. Two weeks later, the Antigua Trades and Labour Union (ATLU) was created. The union soon began to win a series of victories in the struggle for workers' rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Antigua_and_Barbuda

http://www.caribnationtv.com/antigua.html

http://www.antiguanet.net/history.htm

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jchris1/aghistory.php

http://www.antiguamuseums.org/Historical.htm#HistETH

http://countrystudies.us/caribbean-islands/92.htm