Nevis
Nevis is a small island in the Caribbean Sea that forms part of the inner arc of the Leeward Islands chain of the West Indies. Nevis and the neighbouring island of Saint Kitts constitute one country: the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Nevis is located near the northern end of the Lesser Antilles archipelago, about 350 kilometres (220 mi) east-southeast of Puerto Rico and 80 kilometres west of Antigua. Its area is 93 square kilometres and the capital is Charlestown.
History
Amerindians
Nevis had been settled for more than two thousand years by Amerindian people prior to having been sighted by Columbus in 1493. The indigenous people of Nevis during these periods belonged to the Leeward Island Amerindian groups popularly referred to as Arawaks and Caribs, a complex mosaic of ethnic groups with similar cultures and languages. Dominican anthropologist Lennox Honychurch traces the European use of the term "Carib" to refer to the Leeward Island aborigines to Columbus, who picked it up from the Taínos on Hispaniola. It was not a name the Caribs called themselves. "Carib Indians" was the generic name used for all groups believed involved in cannibalistic war rituals, more particularly, the consumption of parts of a killed enemy's body.
The Amerindian name for Nevis was Oualie, the land of beautiful waters. The structure of the Island Carib language has been linguistically identified as Arawakan.
Colonial era
In spite of the Spanish claim, Nevis continued to be a popular stop-over point for English and Dutch ships on their way to the North American continent. Captain Bartholomew Gilbert of Plymouth visited the island in 1603, spending two weeks to cut twenty tons of lignum vitae wood. Gilbert sailed on to Virginia to seek out survivors of the Roanoke settlement in what is now North Carolina. Captain John Smith visited Nevis also on his way to Virginia in 1607. This was the voyage that founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
On 30 August 1620, James VI and I of Scotland and England asserted sovereignty over Nevis by giving a Royal Patent for colonisation to the Earl of Carlisle. However, actual European settlement did not happen until 1628, when Anthony Hilton moved from nearby Saint Kitts following a murder plot against him. He was accompanied by 80 other settlers, soon to be boosted by a further 100 settlers from London who had originally hoped to settle in Barbuda. Hilton became the first Governor of Nevis. After the Treaty of Madrid (1670) between Spain and England, Nevis became the seat of the British colony and the Admiralty Court also sat in Nevis. Between 1675 and 1730, the island was the headquarters for the slave trade for the Leeward Islands, with approximately 6,000–7,000 enslaved West Africans passing through en route to other islands each year. The Royal African Company brought all its ships through Nevis. A 1678 census shows a community of Irish people – 22% of the population – existing as either indentured servants or freemen.
Due to the profitable Slave Trade and the high quality of Nevisian sugar cane, the island soon became a dominant source of wealth for Great Britain and the slave-owning British plantocracy. When the Leeward Islands were separated from Barbados in 1671, Nevis became the seat of the Leeward Islands colony and was given the nickname "Queen of the Caribees". It remained colonial capital for the Leeward Islands until the seat was transferred to Antigua for military reasons in 1698. During this period, Nevis was the richest of the British Leeward Islands. The island outranked larger islands like Jamaica in sugar production in the late 17th century. The wealth of the planters on the island is evident in the tax records preserved at the Calendar State Papers in the British Colonial Office Public Records, where the amount of tax collected on the Leeward Islands was recorded. The sums recorded for 1676 as "head tax on slaves", a tax payable in sugar, amounted to 384,600 pounds in Nevis, as opposed to 67,000 each in Antigua and Saint Kitts, 62,500 in Montserrat, and 5,500 total in the other five islands. The profits on sugar cultivation in Nevis was enhanced by the fact that the cane juice from Nevis yielded an unusually high amount of sugar. A gallon of cane juice from Nevis yielded 24 ounces of sugar, whereas a gallon from Saint Kitts yielded 16 ounces. Twenty per cent of the British Empire's total sugar production in 1700 was derived from Nevisian plantations. Exports from West Indian colonies like Nevis were worth more than all the exports from all the mainland Thirteen Colonies of North America combined at the time of the American Revolution.
The enslaved families formed the large labour force required to work the sugar plantations. After the 1650s the supply of white indentured servants began to dry up due to increased wages in England and less incentive to migrate to the colonies. By the end of the 17th century, the population of Nevis consisted of a small, rich planter elite in control, a marginal population of poor Whites, a great majority of African-descended slaves, and an unknown number of Maroons escaped slaves living in the mountains. In 1780, 90 per cent of the 10 000 people living on Nevis were Black. Some of the maroons joined with the few remaining Caribs in Nevis to form a resistance force. Memories of the Nevisian maroons' struggle under the plantation system are preserved in place names such as Maroon Hill, an early centre of resistance.
The great wealth generated by the colonies of the West Indies led to wars among Spain, Britain, and France. The formation of the United States can be said to be a partial by-product of these wars and the strategic trade aims that often ignored North America. Three privateers (William Kidd is one of them) were employed by the British Crown to help protect ships in Nevis' waters.
During the 17th century, the French, based on Saint Kitts, launched many attacks on Nevis, sometimes assisted by the Island Caribs, who in 1667 sent a large fleet of canoes along in support. In the same year, a Franco-Dutch invasion fleet was repelled off Nevis by an English fleet. Letters and other records from the era indicate that the English on Nevis hated and feared the Amerindians. In 1674 and 1683 they participated in attacks on Carib villages in Dominica and St. Vincent, in spite of a lack of official approval from the Crown for the attack.
On Nevis, the English built Fort Charles and a series of smaller fortifications to aid in defending the island. This included Saddle Hill Battery, built in 1740 to replace a deodand on Mount Nevis.
Emancipation
In 1706, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the French Canadian founder of Louisiana in North America, decided to drive the English out of Nevis and thus also stop pirate attacks on French ships; he considered Nevis the region's headquarters for piracy against French trade. During d'Iberville's invasion of Nevis, French buccaneers were used in the front line, infamous for being ruthless killers after the pillaging during the wars with Spain where they gained a reputation for torturing and murdering non-combatants. In the face of the invading force, the English militiamen of Nevis fled. Some planters burned the plantations, rather than letting the French have them, and hid in the mountains. It was the enslaved Africans who held the French at bay by taking up arms to defend their families and the island. The slave quarters had been looted and burned as well, as the main reward promised the men fighting on the French side in the attack was the right to capture as many slaves as possible and resell them in Martinique.
During the fighting, 3,400 enslaved Nevisians were captured and sent off to Martinique, but about 1,000 more, poorly armed and militarily untrained, held the French troops at bay, by "murderous fire" according to an eyewitness account by an English militiaman. He wrote that "the slaves' brave behaviour and defence there shamed what some of their masters did, and they do not shrink to tell us so." After 18 days of fighting, the French were driven off the island. Among the Nevisian men, women and children carried away on d'Iberville's ships, six ended up in Louisiana, the first persons of African descent to arrive there.
One consequence of the French attack was a collapsed sugar industry and during the ensuing hardship on Nevis, small plots of land on the plantations were made available to the enslaved families in order to control the loss of life due to starvation. With less profitability for the absentee plantation owners, the import of food supplies for the plantation workers dwindled. Between 1776 and 1783, when the food supplies failed to arrive altogether due to the rebellion in North America, 300–400 enslaved Nevisians starved to death. On 1 August 1834, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. In Nevis, 8,815 slaves were freed. The first Monday in August is celebrated as Emancipation Day and is part of the annual Nevis Culturama Festival.
A four-year apprenticeship programme followed the abolishment of slavery on the plantations. In spite of the continued use of the labour force, the Nevisian slave owners were paid over £150,000 in compensation from the British Government for the loss of property, whereas the enslaved families received nothing for 200 years of labour. One of the wealthiest planter families in Nevis, the Pinneys of Mountravers Plantation, claimed £36,396 (worth close to £1,800,000 today) in compensation for the slaves on the family-owned plantations around the Caribbean.
Because of the early distribution of plots and because many of the planters departed from the island when sugar cultivation became unprofitable, a relatively large percentage of Nevisians already owned or controlled land at emancipation. Others settled on crown land. This early development of a society with a majority of small, landowning farmers and entrepreneurs created a stronger middle class in Nevis than in Saint Kitts, where the sugar industry continued until 2006. Even though the 15 families in the wealthy planter elite no longer control the arable land, Saint Kitts still has a large, landless working-class population.
1800 to the present day
Nevis was united with Saint Kitts and Anguilla in 1882, and they became an associated state with full internal autonomy in 1967, though Anguilla seceded in 1971. Together, Saint Kitts and Nevis became independent on 19 September 1983. On 10 August 1998, a referendum on Nevis to separate from Saint Kitts had 2,427 votes in favour and 1,498 against, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed.
Before 1967, the local government of Saint Kitts was also the government of Nevis and Anguilla. Nevis had two seats and Anguilla had one seat in the government. The economic and infrastructural development of the two smaller islands was not a priority to the colonial federal government.
When the hospital in Charlestown was destroyed in a hurricane in 1899, planting of trees in the squares of Saint Kitts and refurbishing of government buildings, also in Saint Kitts, took precedence over the rebuilding of the only hospital in Nevis. After five years without any proper medical facilities, the leaders in Nevis initiated a campaign, threatening to seek independence from Saint Kitts. The British Administrator in Saint Kitts, Charles Cox, was unmoved. He stated that Nevis did not need a hospital since there had been no significant rise in the number of deaths during the time Nevisians had been without a hospital. Therefore, no action was needed on behalf of the government, and besides, Cox continued, the Legislative Council regarded "Nevis and Anguilla as a drag on St. Kitts and would willingly see a separation". Finally, a letter of complaint to the metropolitan British Foreign Office gave a result and the federal government in Saint Kitts was ordered by their superiors in London to take speedy action. The Legislative Council took another five years to consider their options. The final decision by the federal government was to not rebuild the old hospital after all but to instead convert the old Government House in Nevis into a hospital, named Alexandra Hospital after Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII. A majority of the funds assigned for the hospital could thus be spent on the construction of a new official residence in Nevis.
After d'Iberville's invasion in 1704, records show Nevis' sugar industry in ruins and a decimated population begging the English Parliament and relatives for loans and monetary assistance to stave off island-wide starvation. The sugar industry on the island never fully recovered and during the general depression that followed the loss of the West Indian sugar monopoly, Nevis fell on hard times and the island became one of the poorest in the region. The island remained poorer than Saint Kitts until 1991 when the fiscal performance of Nevis edged ahead of the fiscal performance of Saint Kitts for the first time since the French invasion.
Electricity was introduced in Nevis in 1954 when two generators were shipped in to provide electricity to the area around Charlestown. In this regard, Nevis fared better than Anguilla, where there were no paved roads, no electricity and no telephones until 1967. However, electricity did not become available island-wide on Nevis until 1971.
An ambitious infrastructure development programme was introduced in the early 2000s which included a transformation of the Charlestown port, construction of a new deep-water harbour, resurfacing and widening the Island Main Road, a new airport terminal and control tower, and a major airport expansion, which required the relocation of an entire village in order to make room for the runway extension.
Modernised classrooms and better-equipped schools, as well as improvements in the educational system, have contributed to a leap in academic performance on the island. The pass rate among the Nevisian students sitting for the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) exams, the Cambridge General Certificate of Education Examination (GCE) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations is now consistently among the highest in the English-speaking Caribbean.