The Making of the West Indies

It is fairly obvious that some of our dishes have a European, East Indian, African derivation or a combination. But where does the use of ground provision, chip chip, cinnamon, nutmeg spices come from? The technique of stewing? Stewing with Roucou? The fruits we enjoy like guava and pineapple? Why our dedication to peanuts?

Roucou

The early inhabitants

Trinidad is home to the descendants of settlers from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The island’s history is indelibly connected to two tribes of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean called the Arawaks and the Caribs (collectively known as the Amerindians) who were the earliest inhabitants of Trinidad and Tobago. They were indigenous to the West Indies but were part of a migration from central East Asia which had begun about 35,000 years ago. 

The Arawaks and Caribs were part of a larger population that inhabited North and South America.

The West Indies

In 1498, explorer Christopher Columbus arrived at the shores of Trinidad and met these indigenous people. The Amerindians called Trinidad “Ieri, land of the Humming Bird”, but Columbus benevolently renamed the island “Holy Trinity” when he spotted the three mountain ranges. 

The Trinity Hills

Tobago was so named for the tobacco cultivated by the original Carib people. The Spanish explorers came to the West Indies looking for gold but found none in Trinidad. Colombus made no attempts to claim Tobago for the Spanish but, warring on the island continued between the Caribs and the Arawaks. 

Gold was in fact found in Hispaniola and this started the demise of the Amerindian population. 

Gold in Haiti

The Amerindian enslavement was begun by Columbus himself and he carried a number of them back to Spain to work as servants. 

In Hispaniola he forced a system of tribute on the Indians who lived in the area where gold could be found. Every Indian over fourteen years of age was to bring a hawks-beel full of gold to him every three months. Indians in other areas had to pay tributes of cotton. Those who did not bring these tributes were punished by death. Some Indians killed themselves rather than work for the Spaniards. Others who escaped to the mountains were hunted once more; and some took to the sea in their canoes. Under the Spaniards, the Amerindian population rapidly decreased and according to many historians, one-third of the natives of Hispaniola were dead by 1497. 

There are accounts of the impression of the Europeans of these Amerindians “They were neither black nor white; They had very hard bodies, very good build; good faces, not handsome, but very well made; very man-like; They appeared to be skilled servants; No doubt they could easily be converted to Christianity, as they seemed to have no religion of their own”.

Trinidad remained a Spanish possession from the 15th Century and the Cedula of Population in 1783, allowed French planters and their slaves to emigrate from the French colonies to the island. The British would capture Trinidad in 1797 and negotiate an amicable treaty of rule with the Spanish. In the 17th century, English, French, Dutch and even Courlanders (Latvians) fought to control the strategic island and it changed hands more than 30 times.

Sugar cane field

Sugar became king in the West Indies and enslaved Africans were brought to Trinidad to work on sugar-cane plantations and in 1802, the island became a British colony. After slavery was abolished, thousands of indentured labourers from India, China and the Middle East were brought to work the plantations. During British rule in the late 1600s, sugar, cotton and indigo plantations were established and thousands of Africans were brought to Tobago as slave labour. Bloody slave revolts, bitter battles for control among the Europeans, attacks on European settlers by the native Amerindians, and pirates are all part of Tobago's rich history.

Defending the shores!

In 1889, due to economic downturn, Britain joined the island, Tobago, to Trinidad as an administrative ward. The islands achieved independence from England in 1962 and became the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in 1976.

Even on his deathbed Christopher Columbus still believed that the long chain of islands that he "discovered" - stretching from the top of Florida southward toward the South American coast of Venezuela - were the Indies. When Columbus' mistake was realised, Spain labelled this chain of islands that separates the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean, the' West' Indies to distinguish it from the Spice Islands of the Pacific, the 'East' Indies.

Cuisine of the islands - taken from http://harrysharma.com/tandt/amerindi.htm

Cassava was the primary staple of the Amerindians. The Arawaks developed the technique of changing the poisonous prussic acid of cassava juice into a kind of non-poisonous vinegar by cooking it. They called this ' cassareep'. The cassareep together with one of the known spices, the chilli pepper, made the pepper pot, the Carib ' tomali ', which stabilised the alimentation to a high degree and made easier the consumption of cassava cakes.

Cassava cakes

The Arawaks developed the ' grater ' for making cassava cakes. In their development of graters, juice squeezers, large flat ovens of coarse clay on which the cassava cakes were baked, as well as in the development of cassareep and the pepper pot, the Arawak culture represented essentially an annex to the Amerindian civilisation of Eastern Venezuela and Guiana.

The Arawaks grew just enough food for their families and for themselves, including maize, cassava, sweet potato, yautia and groudnuts. Molluscs or shell fish figured prominently in the Amerindian diet particularly the chip chip, turtle and manatee (seacow). 

Wooden sculpted canoe

Chip chip which is found typically in Mayaro

The Arawaks also hunted very small animals including ducks, doves, and parrots. Fruits were a large part of their diet and included pineapples, mammee apple, star apple, guavas and cashews.

Mammee apple

The Arawaks' food was carefully prepared and they knew about stewing, baking and roasting techniques which they used in their food preparation - they stewed iguana, baked cassava, and smoked fish.
They also knew the sweet potato and a variety of tropical fruits such as the guava, custard apple, mammy apple, pawpaw, alligator pear, star apple and pineapple. The Amerindians knew the spices native to the islands: cinnamon, nutmeg and wild pimento. They introduced peanuts to the Spaniards.

The Amerindians knew also of tobacco, which was exceedingly popular among them; possibly in its origin it was connected in some way with religious rites. The Arawaks used it both for snuff and for smoking, generally in the form of cigars, while in the form of chewing tobacco in rolls; it was used as currency by the Caribs.


To learn more about Trinidad's History please see the following books and webistes:-
History of Modern Trinidad: Seventeen Hundred and Eighty-Three thru Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Two by Dr Bridget Brereton
http://www.gotrinidadandtobago.com/trinidad-tobago-history/
http://trinidad.us/history
http://harrysharma.com/tandt/amerindi.htm
http://indigenousreview.blogspot.com/p/about.html