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I passed on in the direction of the sidelights of the car on the hillside, where the Pilot was presumably busy with the thermos flask, and in due course came upon the solitary occupant of the bench. He was still at his post; but this time he appeared in the darkness to be holding some flat object to his lips. Probably it was a flask. It is difficult to to imagine what else it could have been.

affair. A cow, invisible, settled down heavily in the lush pasture of an adjoining meadow with a complacent full - fed grunt. This was the hour when earth seems to have no place for mortals and their concerns. The stars, serenely aloof, with a hint of frost in their brilliance, provoked a distant cockerel to an abrupt call, like a clarion sounding the "Disperse!" As if in answer to it, I heard the murmured voices of the G.L. and his companion as they came softly along the brink of the lake, leaving it to the starlight and the mist and to the contemplation of the silent figure who had sat so still on a bench all day while

The night that had seemed so still out on the water was suddenly full of little sounds ashore. A love-sick frog, somewhere up one of the creeks, was pressing his suit tirelessly, although from his tone it sounded a hopeless enough hopeless enough fools fished.

THE TERCENTENARY OF BARBADOS.

BY JAMES A. WILLIAMSON.

BARBADOS, colonised three centuries ago, has features in its history which are uncommon and even peculiar. It was an empty island, devoid of any human habitation, when the English pioneers first entered it; and on this consideration in the lands beyond the line. its settlement is an achievement in which we all can take an honest pride, for it can offend not the tenderest of pacifist consciences. It has never, since that date of first possession, been for an instant under any foreign flag, a record of which no other of the smaller West Indian islands can boast, although it is shared by the Bermudas. Barbados, again, enjoys to this day a constitution not radically different from that which it evolved within a dozen years of its first plantation, the oldest type of constitution in the British Empire now existing overseas, and one which survives only in two other colonies. And finally, Barbados, although its foundation involved no eviction of foreign white men and no killing of a solitary dark-skinned Carib, was the scene of some highly unscrupulous transactions between fellow-subjects of the English state. Beyond the Tropic of Cancer, where the north-east trades blew hosts of adventurers to the golden Caribbean seas, might was right

in the seventeenth century as it had been in the sixteenth, and the early history of Barbados shows Englishmen oppressing Englishmen as harshly as if the imperial law had been as feeble as international law

The real founders of Barbados have never been recognised and honoured as have those of other British colonies, and this is because the story of their deeds has been overlaid by an erroneous tradition which has passed as true history until quite recent times. It was in 1605, according to this tale, that some Englishmen voyaging to Charles Leigh's colony in Guiana landed on Barbados, and set up the arms of James I. with an inscription claiming annexation to the English crown. The story rests upon two separate errors. Samuel Purchas, the heir to Richard Hakluyt's collection of manuscripts, first made mention of the landing (but not the inscription) in his wellknown 'Pilgrims,' wherein he reprinted a narrative by one of the 1605 voyagers. But an original copy of this narrative exists in in the British Museum, and contains no reference whatsoever to the Barbados incident. Purchas had interpolated the whole passage.

He was an unsafe editor, and frequently altered his material without avowing the fact. A century later the story was amplified. In 1741 an anonymous editor published at Barbados a book entitled 'Memoirs of the First Settlement of Barbados.' It consisted of abstracts of papers left by some of the seventeenth-century pioneers. These documents, now lost, were undoubtedly genuine, but the handwriting was crabbed that their editor made many mistakes in copying them for the press. He had read Purchas and believed him, and so he printed a statement that in 1605 an English vessel touched at Barbados and landed some men, who set up a cross at St James's Town and inscribed on a tree, James K: of E: and this Island." After this, the story continues, they explored the coast and left other marks of annexation, and then sailed on to St Christopher, where they found an English colony, which shortly after wards came into the possession of the Earl of Carlisle. the whole of this is true except the date, which is impossible; for there was no colony at St Christopher until 1624, and in 1605 there was no Earl of Carlisle. The actual date in the Barbados MS., we cannot doubt,

66

Now,

was 1625, but the editor, with Purchas running in his mind, misread it as 1605, and so falsified an important incident in the history of the British Empire.

Having eliminated the error, we can proceed to the true story, which is as follows. There was at that time in London a wealthy merchant named Sir William Courteen, of Flemish extraction, but a born subject of the English Crown. In 1624 he sent a ship to trade at Pernambuco, an ordinary voyage, since the English had already secured a share in the commerce of Brazil. The commander of this ship was John Powell, described in Chancery records as a gentleman of London, and he, on his homeward passage, sailed northwestwards across the track of the trades until he approached the edge of the Caribbean. There, on some unknown date in the first half of 1625, he sighted the virgin isle of Barbados, and went ashore to see what victual and water it might afford him. It is this John Powell, whose kinship and antecedents are quite unknown, who is the true pioneer of Barbados, and whose statue might worthily survey the waters of Carlisle Bay in this age when many less eminent celebrities are so honoured.1

1 The conclusive evidence on the point occurs in a Chancery pleading of 1629: "John Powell . . . had discovered the said island of Barbadoes, and was the ffirst person (as theis defendts were informed) that did discover the same Island, and did sett upp his maties standard there to the honor of this Nation and to the increasing of his Maiesties dominions." (Chancery Proceedings, Charles I., C. 60/38.2).

He was not, in the geographical sense, the first discoverer, for Barbados had appeared on the maps before the middle of the previous century. Various mariners had seen it and passed it by, and their observations had been so inaccurate that scarcely any two of their charts assigned it the same position. One voyager in times past had turned loose some swine to breed, and their descendants had multiplied into great herds, which roamed the silent woods. Of

other animals and of reptiles there seem to have been none. Not one of the earlier visitors had regarded Barbados as anything but a refreshing place on a tropical passage, to be entered with trepidation and quitted as soon as might be. Wooded islands without human tenants were uncanny, the natural haunt of devils and magicians. Madeira, according to an old tale enshrined in Hakluyt and known to reading Englishmen of Powell's time, had driven its first explorers so mad with terror that some had died "for thought," and the rest had fled in an open boat to end their lives in slavery among the Moors of the African coast. Bermuda had been somewhat of a strain upon the nerves of Sir George Somers and his shipwrecked crew, whose tales had stirred Shakespeare to write 'The Tempest.' Yelling canni

bals were on the whole more tolerable than the silence of groves where no human foot had trod since the making of the world.1 So it had been that during eighty years and more no man had sought to make his habitation in Barbados.

But by 1625 the times were changing. Renaissance and Reformation had bred a new type of man, who scoffed at the devil or felt strong enough in a simple faith to overcome him. To the pioneers of Stuart England a fertile island had also a new attraction, for Virginia had now for a dozen years been sending home tobacco with fair profit to planter and to merchant, and other tobacco colonies were coming into existence wherever soil and climate were favourable. Barbados awaited only a discoverer with the new mental background, and it found him in Captain John Powell. He, grasping the possibilities, did more than hunt hogs. He explored the leeward coast-line, noted doubtless that the forests contained dyewoods of commercial value, and set up the inscription on the tree : "James King of England and this Island." Poor King James was then dying or dead at home, and never heard of his new acquisition, but his son Charles I. was in due course to deal with it in remarkable fashion.

1 Archæological research has shown that there had once been some native inhabitants in Barbados, but they had all departed before the advent of the European pioneers, to whom their former presence was unknown.

John Powell sailed home- These five persons were all

wards by way of the Leeward Islands, where Thomas Warner had the year before begun a tobacco plantation at St Christopher. At that colony there were as yet only a handful of English, much in dread of the Caribs, and they entreated Powell to stay with them until reinforcements arrived. But Powell's mind was running on his own plans, and he was eager to reach home. After a brief sojourn he left St Christopher. It would have been better for him had he never seen the place.

In England, Powell reported his discovery to his employer, Sir William Courteen, who realised that Barbados would be an ideal site for a tobacco plantation. Apart from its good soil and valuable fustic wood, its chief recommendation was that which would have been a deterrent to men of an earlier age, the absence of inhabitants. Barbados owed this advantage to its position eighty miles to windward of the regular chain of the Lesser Antilles; for the Carib canoes, which frequently passed between the other islands, could not make this long passage in the teeth of the trade wind. Courteen therefore determined to colonise Barbados. He formed for the purpose a small private syndicate, consisting of himself, his brother Sir Peter Courteen, his brother-in-law John Mounsey, John Powell the originator of the scheme, and Captain Henry Powell, the brother of John.

investors, but it seems evident that the principal subscription came from Sir William himself, a great capitalist reputed to be worth more than £100,000. Associated with the project, but not a member of the syndicate, was John Powell the younger, son of John Powell the discoverer; and this junior Powell was destined to play a considerable part in the development of the colony.

In April 1626 the first expedition set sail under the command of John Powell the elder, but he failed to reach Barbados that year. Charles I. was then at war with Spain and Portugal, and Powell had provided himself with letters of marque empowering him to attack the King's enemies at sea. In July he was back at the Isle of Wight with a prize, which was evidently valuable enough to justify him in postponing the voyage to Barbados. At the close of the year a fresh start was made, this time under Henry Powell, who reached the island safely on 20th February 1627, with eighty colonists conveyed in the ship William and John. The date was given by Henry Powell himself at a legal inquiry thirty years later; and although the interval was a long one, we may fairly trust the veteran's memory, for the date of the founding of a prosperous British colony was just the kind of circumstance to stick in the principal actor's mind. Henry Powell's men were but an ad

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