Title: St Kitts
Author: Brian Dyde
Publisher: Macmillan Caribbean
Reviewer: Barbara Nelson

Brian Dyde, a former hydrographic surveyor in the Royal Navy has had an association with the Caribbean island of St Kitts and the other Leeward Islands since 1973. This book, Dyde's third in the Macmillan Caribbean Guides series, is a comprehensive guide to St Kitts (or Saint Christopher) a beautiful Caribbean island with a most intriguing history.

The island, the most northerly of the Caribbean leeward islands, was called Liamuiga by the first people, Arawaks and Carib Indians, who lived there. They gave it the name because of its rich soil and abundant water. The island was renamed by explorer Christopher Columbus on November 12, 1493. But while it remained a Spanish possession for some 100 years after it was discovered, the island's name was changed many times.

Massacred

In 1624 an Englishman, Thomas Warner, saw the lovely island and set about establishing a settlement there. Eventually, English and French settlers lived peacefully together on the island for a while. But early in 1626 the Europeans, on discovering hostile moves by the native Carib Indians, massacred them in cold blood.

"This cold-blooded massacre was to be only the first in a long series of disasters brought upon the people of St Kitts. For a beautiful island offering so much to enhance life, its inhabitants were to suffer grievously from both man-made and natural calamities during the next three centuries," Dyde writes.

After the Carib 'threat' was eliminated, the island was divided between the English and French and colonising activity ensued rapidly. The number of settlers increased and they produced cash crops of tobacco and cotton.

Social upheaval

When the cultivation of sugar cane was introduced "it not only killed off the tobacco crop and changed the whole appearance of the island, but also brought about a complete social upheaval."

At first, indentured servants, many of them from Ireland were employed to clear the large tracts of forest to make way for sugar cane and cotton fields. Soon, however, slaves were brought from Africa to work on the land.

Dyde notes that there were "amicable relations" between the French and English on the little island until hostilities broke out in the Second Dutch War. In fact, there were alternating periods of peace and fighting between the two European powers for sometime.

Disputes

St Kitts was used as a base from which to settle other islands round about. "Surplus people and energy were directed outwards and not across the internal borders. By the time the English and French got around to disputing with each other for its possession the island had sent people off in all directions and early Kittitians were to be found in all parts of the Caribbean. St Kitts well deserved the title given it by later historians - 'the mother colony of the West Indies'.

"After the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the French gave up claim to the island. This left much valuable agricultural land for use by the British. "In the early part of the 18th century, St Kitts was called 'the Garden of the West Indies' and for its size was judged Great Britain's richest overseas possession'.

The 112-page book has 13 chapters. The material used has been meticulously researched.