Picked-Up Pieces (12 page)

The lack of external encouragement sounds a constant note in Anguilla’s history. In 1707, Captain Thomas Bolton and nine other survivors of a sunken ship, after thirty-one days adrift in a small boat, were cast up at Long Bay. His journal acknowledges that “the People were very kind to us”—“The Islanders very much bewail’d our Condition, and were ready to fight among themselves, in shewing their Eagerness to welcome us to their Houses”—but complains of their stay that “the worst was, we could not have any News from other Islands; this being an Island of little Trade, and no Shipping.” J. Oldmixon’s
The British Empire in America
(second edition, 1741) states that in Anguilla people lived “without Government or Religion, having no Minister nor Governor, no Magistrates, no Law, and no Property worth keeping,” and adds that they “live poorly, and we might say miserably, if they were not contented.” In 1825, when Henry Nelson Coleridge visited Anguilla, the people seemed “a good sort of folks, though they have been living for a long time in a curious state of suspended civilization. They acknowledge the English laws, but the climate is said to induce fits of drowsiness on them, during which Justice sleepeth, and Execution tarrieth.” In 1920, Mrs. Katharine Janet Burdon, in
A Handbook of St. Kitts-Nevis
, wrote, “Strangers are so rarely seen that the last one who visited Anguilla, in 1917, an enterprising and eminent official from a neighbouring British Colony, was taken for a German spy, and greatly to his amusement was followed by the whole police force of the Island until he had presented his credentials to the Magistrate.” And in 1960, when my wife, three children, and I lived for five weeks in Sandy Ground, we had the pleasure of being, for intervals, the entire tourist population of the island. I will not forget an evening spent with Mr. Vincent Lake—one of Anguilla’s leading citizens, the scion of a family whose holdings in island land and cargo-carrying sloops amounted to a fortune—in which I found myself describing to him, as if to a latter-day Miranda, such commonplace wonders of the Western world as four-lane highways and skyscrapers and neon lights. He had never seen them even in a movie. In those
days, when Anguilla was a British colony, a lonely generator supplied power to a telephone line serving fourteen users, most of them island officials. There was also a Social Center at the East End, with electric lights and a jukebox. Later that year, in September, the eye of Hurricane Donna passed directly over Anguilla. Miss Selma Buchanan wrote my wife, “Mrs you can only imagin what a time we had that night.… The Carty’s house half is gone and the Cocial Centre at the east end is gone there are only two school standing on island church to flew off every boat sink in the harbour so many big trees fell what a sight to see little Anguilla.” In 1968, returning, we find that the homes destroyed by Donna have been replaced, but the telephone line has not been reactivated.

Henry Nelson Coleridge’s 1825 description still serves:

The roads, at least to the driver of a rented jeep, are now quite undelightful puddings of potholes and coral protrusions, and the scanty crops of cotton and yams and sisal seem to occupy rather less than three-tenths of the soil, and a certain pastel Los Angeles look is creeping into Kent and Devonshire, but the dominant impression, of scattered homes and no windmills, remains to tell the tale: Anguilla was but lightly involved
in the sugar economy. Captain Bolton in 1707, over sixty years after cultivation of sugarcane had been introduced into Barbados and the shift from tobacco to sugar had swept the Leeward Islands, found on Anguilla “2 or 300 English” engaged in the planting of tobacco, “which is highly esteem’d.” Anguilla was too rocky and dry for the great mechanized plantations the sugar industry required, and hence was exempted from the full force of the social transformation whereby communities of white planter-proprietors gave way to feudal estates supporting vast slave populations. Anguilla has no equivalent of the slums of St. John’s on Antigua or Basseterre on St. Kitts. As drought, piratical raids, and the abolition of slavery (in 1834) thinned the ranks of the white settlers, the ungrateful land fell by default to the Negro inhabitants. By 1847, of about twenty sugar estates once under cultivation, only three or four survived. Mrs. Burdon states that as of 1911 the population consisted “almost exclusively of peasant proprietors.” She goes on, “Anguillans are a particularly sturdy, independent, intelligent type, their high character being developed by the hard school of nature in which they live, and by the system of proprietorship which has existed for generations.” The island, she notes, is free of tropical diseases to a unique degree, in part because “the people of Anguilla, differing from the usual habits of the West Indian negro, build their houses some distance apart.”

So nature, in neglecting Anguilla, has not been entirely unkind; nor has the neglect been total. There is good fishing. There are pockets of fertile soil, and ample pasturage for goats and sheep. Ancient wells supposedly dug by the Caribs provide fresh water for those who do not have private cisterns. The harvest of salt from the large, diked saltponds behind Sandy Ground, a peculiar industry established in the early 1800’s, still goes on, generating an annual burst of employment, mostly for women. The export of Sea Island cotton, a silky, long-fiber variety used in underwear, produced for a time thousands of pounds in annual revenue and financed the construction of the island’s own ginnery—now defunct. And there exists a native tradition of shipbuilding; elegant all-wood hulls, the keel timbers shaped from branched tree trunks, dot the beaches, though work on them proceeds imperceptibly, at about the speed of coral formation. Fundamentally the economy runs by remittance. Anguillan men emigrate to work in the cane fields of Jamaica, or the oil refineries of Curaçao and Aruba, or the hotels and construction crews of St. Thomas. Though the men are gone for years, money returns
regularly, and across the island pleasant and sturdy houses of imported cement block slowly rise. There are few tarpaper shacks; there is no begging. Literacy is a relatively high 70 per cent. A young American resident on Anguilla in recent months analyzes last summer’s upheaval as a middle-class revolution—Anguilla’s refusal to join the Socialist revolution being perpetrated in Basseterre by the Labor government of Robert Bradshaw. Bradshaw is the walrus-mustachioed, dictatorial premier of the St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla state to which Britain granted local self-government on February 27, 1967. St. Kitts and Nevis have long been one-crop sugar islands, and the sugar depression has created problems unknown in perennially depressed Anguilla, including a drastic split between the white proprietorial class and the black laborers, and the start of political terrorism. Last August, an unnamed Anguillan was quoted in the
Times
as saying, “St. Kitts is a millstone around our necks.”

Anguilla’s association with St. Kitts (St. Christopher) has always been tenuous. St. Kitts is the nearest British island, but lies seventy miles to the south, beyond St. Martin/Sint Maarten (French and Dutch), St. Bart’s (French), and Saba and Sint Eustatius (both Dutch). When, in 1796, a French force invaded Anguilla under orders to exterminate the English inhabitants (legend says the fishermen of Anguilla loaded their cannon with lead seine weights), help arrived not from St. Kitts but from more distant Antigua, in the form of the man-of-war
Lapwing;
the St. Kittians, to be fair, did address to the
Lapwing
commander a letter of thanks for his rescue of a “sister colony.” In Anguilla, the laws lay dormant for want of a magistrate, and not until after 1800 did the Anguillans send a representative to the St. Kitts legislature. In lieu of anarchy, the Anglican vestry ruled the island, headed by the parson and the warden; until very recently, the manager of the island’s rather minimal affairs has borne the proud title of Warden. The West Indian archives contain more than one instance of a colonial official’s shirking and bemoaning his assignment to Anguilla. “Indeed such an assignment,” one penned in 1842, “is but poor reward for a life devoted to the Service of the Crown.” In 1871, when the Federal Colony of the Leeward Islands, with its capital in Antigua, was created by Parliament, Anguilla expressed a desire not to be lumped with St. Kitts, but Governor Benjamin Pine, already sufficiently harassed by a plethora of presidencies under his government, ignored the request. During the Second World War, when St. Martin was a Vichy fuelling station for German submarines, American
soldiers built an airstrip on Anguilla and impressed the Anguillans so favorably that as late as 1960 wistful hopes of an American takeover were still alive. One rumor claimed that the United States had offered to forgive Great Britain her entire lend-lease debt in exchange for Anguilla, and had been refused. Anguilla’s poor-sister status within the Leewards worsened after the St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla state was granted home rule. Anecdotes of the short shrift that Anguilla thereafter received from the Bradshaw government have the orotund ring of legend. For instance, when Great Britain requisitioned money for a much-needed pier on Anguilla, where anything bigger than a sack of wheat must be tediously rafted in, the St. Kitts government took the money and built the pier on its own island, christening it, deadpan, Anguilla Pier. School supplies and salaries for Anguillans were held up. Anguillan public-works projects—such as the planting of hundreds of unwired telephone poles along the roads—were carried forward with labor brought from St. Kitts. “Anguilla men go all over the islands looking for work,” our taxi-driver said, gesturing toward these poles. “Anguilla men know enough to build big boats and plant a sixty-foot mast when the boats sit in the water, but Anguilla men don’t know enough to dig a hole.” The St. Kittian policemen on Anguilla were not beloved. In March of 1967, their precipitate use of tear gas turned into a riot an intended demonstration at a potentially benign gathering—the contest to choose a Miss Anguilla to compete for the title of Miss Statehood. It is a parable of the slenderness of St. Kitts-Anguilla ties that when the revolution came, on May 30th last year, it consisted simply of rounding up the seventeen St. Kitts policemen, putting them into a boat, and pushing them out to sea.

Though everyone, including the Anguillans themselves, emphasizes the revolution’s comic-opera episodes, bloodshed was threatened, and there was no going back. On June 11th, gunmen attacked police headquarters in Basseterre; earlier that spring, fifty shots had been fired into the lodgings of a Warden sent from St. Kitts. On June 16th, Peter Adams, who had been Anguilla’s representative in the state legislature, proposed that the United States make Anguilla an American territory. His proposal was ignored in Washington. On July 11th, a popular referendum showed 1,813 to 5 for independence; Peter Adams was chosen president and asked for talks with President Johnson. Our President’s response, if any, did not make the newspapers. On August 1st, under the supervision of a Caribbean Commonwealth Conference in Barbados, a
reconciliation was worked out whereby Anguilla ended its secession and Bradshaw promised greatly increased financial aid. On August 4th, Anguilla deposed Peter Adams and installed as president Mr. Ronald Webster, a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, one of the wealthiest men on the island, and Adams’ Minister of Interior. Two days later, Jeremiah Gumbs went to the United Nations and told reporters, “The people are very aware about not losing control of their land.… We want to keep the island the way God made it.” By the middle of August, the frigate
Lynx
, with a contingent of British Marines, moored off Blowing Point but was warned by Webster that blood would flow if a landing was attempted. (One strange tale from this period of crisis is that some Marines did land, distributed candy to the children who had gathered, and were seen off by a band playing “God Save the Queen.”) By the end of August, Jamaica had refused to condone an expeditionary force from various islands that would put down the rebellion, and it became clear that Bradshaw lacked the military muscle to impose his will. On August 29th, the U.N. hearing ended, with no action advised, and a nebulous, nervous peace prevailed. Even now, an incoming tourist is sternly questioned as to what his “mission” might be, and one can see on the dirt runway of the airfield barrels and rolls of barbed wire to obstruct the landing of any planes other than the two-engine Aztecs that run daily shuttles to St. Martin and St. Thomas. Our first evening here, a British pleasure craft lowered a few female swimmers into Rendezvous Bay, and a carload of Anguillan militia rushed to investigate the invasion. Without doubt, Anguilla is under economic siege; the Bradshaw government has cut off even the island doctor’s salary, and the schools and public services are kept going by infusions of private money, including tens of thousands of dollars from the pocket of Ronald Webster himself. A young man held on suspicion of murder languishes in the island’s jail; not only is there no magistrate to hear his case but St. Kitts, which has the facilities to test the murder weapon for fingerprints, both refuses to do so and refuses to let the gun be examined on another island. The suspect’s story is typically bizarre for these bewitched times: he was walking with one hand on a girl and the other on his bicycle when suddenly she fell down dead, a bullet in her heart.