BLACK CARIB BASTION of FREEDOM.

• Author: Muilenburg, Peter T.

These indomitable people maintained a stronghold of liberty on St. Vincent, despite waves of colonial oppression

Like so much else, it was Columbus's fault; he dislodged the pebble that set off the avalanche of demographic upheaval that first flung three races together--and at each other's throats--in the West Indies.

The Indians were already there, by turns peacefully or bloodily minding their own business. Then the Europeans arrived to decimate them and usurp their land and with them came a trickle of kidnapped Africans that became a torrent as the century wore on. The elements assembled, Euro, Afro, and Indio, were smelted into uniquely American alloys in a Caribbean furnace stoked to the melting point by monumental injustice.

Yet out of this bitter history came transcendent stories of freedom--such as that of the Black Caribs of Saint Vincent. Their tiny nation, an amalgam of Afro-Carib half breeds with runaways from plantation slavery and castaways from wrecked slave ships, was a beacon of liberty in a sea of slavery for nearly three hundred years. Against mounting odds they played their hand out with finesse, to the last card. And the ultimate twist to their fate holds out hope that all may yet be well in human affairs if might and greed can, in the end, be so side stepped.

From the first, many Africans who found themselves enslaved on a New World plantation, looked long and hard at the surrounding wilderness from which it had been cut and simply walked off the job--into the jungle, free once again. Although survival in the wild was anything but simple, nonetheless wherever the slaves had sufficient mountains and forests to escape to, there were Maroons--runaways living in the bush. Brazil, with its vast forests, had the largest Maroon nation, the Republic of Palmares, which spanned almost a hundred years and counted a population of twenty thousand. The Bush Negroes of Suriname re-created West African villages deep in the limitless interior of the Guianas. And in Jamaica the "cockpit country" gave the Maroons ideal terrain for successful guerrilla warfare.

But in the limited areas of the Lesser Antilles, runaways existed in perpetual apprehension of recapture--and never was the hypocrisy of the "civilizing mission" of Christian Europe laid more bare than in the satanic punishments it meted out to a recaptured Maroon--the pious Spaniards tied him to a stake in the town plaza and castrated him before a crowd of his peers, the refined French slow roasted him, the liberal Dutch hung him from a shark hook through the ribs, the scrupulous Danes pinched him with red hot tongs and lopped off a leg for good measure, the legalistic English broke his bones on a wheel. Despite such measures, marronage occurred everywhere; but in the Lesser Antilles, only the Black Caribs of Saint Vincent succeeded in making good their freedom.

Little is certain about the origin of the Black Caribs, but the first Africans in the Windward Islands--that we know about--were captives taken by the Caribs in raids upon the early Spanish settlements.

The Spaniards and the Caribs deserved each other. The Spaniards had exterminated, almost inadvertently, the peaceful Arawaks of Hispaniola and the Bahamas within thirty years after their arrival. The Caribs, however, were the original "warlike cannibals." From their strongholds in Saint Vincent and Dominica, the Carib warriors issued forth in their giant war dugouts eager for battle, women, and loot-just like the conquistadors (though the Caribs had the grace not to preach religion to those they were raping and robbing).

For 150 years after Columbus, the Caribs raided Spanish towns and plantations in the eastern Caribbean, then terrorized the English, Dutch, and French settlements. Their homeward-bound dugouts included captured African slaves. How many it is hard to say, but the presence of three hundred blacks on Dominica was reported by the governor of Puerto Rico in 1588 who had it from an eyewitness. It can be presumed that Saint Vincent would have had at least as many or more.

The Carib men fathered children with their African captives and set the African men at liberty, giving them Indian women. Such was the origin of the Black Caribs. The Caribs' motives can only be guessed at, but perhaps it...