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 thosedays, 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:
Anguilla presents a very singular appearance for a West Indian island. A little wall of cliff of some forty feet in height generally rises from the beach, and when you have mounted this, the whole country lies before you, gently sloping inwards in a concave form, and sliding away, as it were, to the south where the land is only just above the level of the sea.… Seven-tenths of the country are entirely uncultivated; in some parts a few coppices, but more commonly a pretty species of myrtle called by the negros maiden-berry, seems to cover the whole soil: the roads are level grassy tracks over which it is most delightful to ride, and the houses and huts of the inhabitants are scattered about in so picturesque a manner that I was put in mind of many similar scenes in Kent and Devonshire. Indeed there were scarcely any of the usual features of West Indian landscape visible; neither of those prominent ones, the lively windmill or the columnar palm, was to be seen, and there was a rusticity, a pastoral character on the face of the land, its roads and its vegetation, which is the exact antipode of large plantations of sugar.
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
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 thosedays, 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:
Anguilla presents a very singular appearance for a West Indian island. A little wall of cliff of some forty feet in height generally rises from the beach, and when you have mounted this, the whole country lies before you, gently sloping inwards in a concave form, and sliding away, as it were, to the south where the land is only just above the level of the sea.… Seven-tenths of the country are entirely uncultivated; in some parts a few coppices, but more commonly a pretty species of myrtle called by the negros maiden-berry, seems to cover the whole soil: the roads are level grassy tracks over which it is most delightful to ride, and the houses and huts of the inhabitants are scattered about in so picturesque a manner that I was put in mind of many similar scenes in Kent and Devonshire. Indeed there were scarcely any of the usual features of West Indian landscape visible; neither of those prominent ones, the lively windmill or the columnar palm, was to be seen, and there was a rusticity, a pastoral character on the face of the land, its roads and its vegetation, which is the exact antipode of large plantations of sugar.
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
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