Anguilla's culture: a sailing tradition born of dry land

Why boat racing is Anguilla's national sport

Boat racing is Anguilla's national sport, and one of the island's own historians traces it to the failure of the land. In an essay for the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society, the boatbuilder and historian David Carty argued that the low rainfall brought a quick end to the sugar plantations in the early 19th century, and that Anguillian men were left to emigrate or to make a living on the sea, which in practice meant both. The island had little direct connection with any metropolitan power and built its own fleet of schooners and sloops, which became its lifeline in years of drought and famine.

Two kinds of boat made the tradition. The fishing boats were 17 to 20 feet long, usually without a deck, with a single mast of about 25 feet carrying a jib and a mainsail. The fishermen set their pots as far north as the Old England bank, and those who finished first waited for the rest so that the whole fleet could race home. The schooners, in Carty's account, did more to make racing part of the island's life. Early in the 20th century they carried men to the cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís in the Dominican Republic and to Aruba and Curaçao, up to 200 men on a trip, leaving Anguilla for the first part of each year a society of women and children. The voyage home, four to twenty days of beating to windward, was raced.

The boat the Society calls Anguilla's most famous ship is the Warspite, a wooden schooner 75 feet long built in 1902. Carty names the Esmile as her great rival; the Anguilla Tourist Board's account names the Ismay. The Tourist Board tells of a race in the 1930s in which the two schooners, carrying three to four hundred men between the fleet after five days at sea, were sighted west of Dog Island racing for Road Bay on a Sunday morning. The congregation of Bethel Methodist church on the hill above watched from the windows until the minister and everyone else left the service to cheer from the brow of the hill. Hundreds of women came to Sandy Ground or The Forest every June or July to meet the returning men, and so watched the finish of each race.

When the Santo Domingo trade ended and diesel engines came in, racing moved back to the fishing boats, and August Monday, then the biggest holiday of the year after Christmas, became race day. In the late 1930s Mac Owen of North Hill launched the Violet, built to be a racing boat first and a fishing boat second, and others followed with boats bought cheaply in St Kitts after customs had seized them from smugglers and rebuilt for speed. The racing boats went on fishing until around 1967, when outboard engines brought in faster fishing boats.

How an Anguillian racing boat is sailed

The boats are fitted and raced in a way Carty thought had no equal elsewhere. No boat may carry fixed ballast. For every race the crew loads large "bottom rocks", smaller "shingle rocks" and sometimes pieces of iron over the keel amidships, and small changes in that load can decide a race. There is no decking, so in heavy weather a crewman bails constantly. Boats are now built by hand using the WEST technique of wood saturated in epoxy, which Carty introduced, where they were once carved from white cedar. They race in three classes by size, and a Class A boat, the largest, carries 14 men and hundreds of pounds of ballast.

What each member of the crew does

In Carty's description the crew is five or six men. The forward man sits near the mast and reads the wind, calling a favouring or a baffling puff to the captain and helping to swing the hull through a tack. Behind him a man shifts the irons, heavy bars about two feet long on ropes, from side to side to keep the boat level. The next man tends the jib sheet and takes turns bailing, another trims both sails, and the captain steers with the mainsheet held under his foot against the planks.

Why both boats shout hard lee

A race has two legs. The boats run before the wind away from the shore, usually westward, round a stake boat some miles out, and beat back to a finishing stake a few yards off the beach. The second leg is where the rule the island is known for applies. In most sailing, a boat on the port tack gives way to one on the starboard tack. In Anguilla neither gives way: moments before a collision both crews cry "hard lee" and both boats tack away. Carty called the rule hair-raising and dangerous and noted that disputed calls lead to arguments close to fights, and that spectators ashore bet on every race, some of them heavily.

The season runs from around Easter week through the spring and summer to the Champion of Champions, a race round the island held in August at the end of Boat Racing Week. Spectators, called landracers, line the beaches, roads and hilltops.

What August Monday and Carnival celebrate

The summer festival grew out of emancipation. The anniversary of the abolition of slavery was marked on August Monday, once known as August Monday in the Park, and it is now celebrated as the Summer Festival, or Carnival. The festival begins on the first Friday after the first Monday in August and includes calypso competitions, j'ouvert, street dances, costumed parades, stilt walking, beach barbecues and the boat races.

The rest of the calendar mixes the island's own dates with British ones. Anguilla Day on 30 May marks the expulsion of the St Kitts police in 1967, the King's Birthday is kept, and the birthday of Ronald Webster, leader of the revolution, has been a public holiday since 2010.

How Anguillians speak at home

English is the official language, and most people speak a British-influenced standard English. Beside it runs the island's own English-based creole, which Anguillians call "dialect", "Anguilla Talk" or "Anguillian". Its roots are in early varieties of English and in West African languages, and in structure it resembles the English creoles of the other Eastern Caribbean islands; it is unrelated to the French-based creole of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Linguists tracing its origins point to three regions of Africa from which people arrived before 1710: the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast and the Windward Coast.

The archives suggest that Africans and Europeans first formed two distinct, perhaps overlapping, speech communities, and that Anguillian became the language of most people after slavery was abolished and islanders came to see themselves as belonging to one society. Spanish, Chinese and the languages of other immigrant groups are also spoken. In the 2001 census 90.08% of residents gave West African ancestry, and 72% were Anguillan and 28% non-Anguillan.

Which churches Anguillians belong to

Christian churches had no consistent presence in the first period of English settlement. Ministers began formal work among the enslaved as early as 1813, and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society of England built churches and schools from 1817. In the 2001 census 29% of the population was Anglican and 23.9% Methodist, with Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Church of God and Pentecostal congregations and a small community of Jehovah's Witnesses. Ronald Webster was a Seventh-day Adventist and went into politics although his church's regional leadership had explicitly forbidden it.

The island has a place in Rastafarian history as the birthplace of Robert Athlyi Rogers, author of The Holy Piby, a text with a strong influence on Rastafari and other Africa-centred belief systems. A Muslim cultural centre has opened more recently.

Where Anguilla's reggae and country music come from

Reggae has the deepest roots, and its best-known musicians come from the Banks family. Bankie Banx has released more than ten albums and played with Bob Dylan, Jimmy Cliff and Jimmy Buffett; he built the Dune Preserve music bar to save the dune at Rendezvous Bay, and the Moonsplash festival has been held there every year for more than three decades. His son Omari Banks is a musician and a former West Indies cricketer.

Country music is the less expected tradition. Island Harbour, a village on the east of the island settled by Irish families, is its centre, and Anguilla held its first country music festival in 2005. Soca and calypso are heard at every festival, and the soca group Xtreme Band became known across the region after the 2001 Carnival. In 2015 the producer Kedar Massenburg recorded Sounds of Anguilla (Volume 1), a compilation of island musicians across pop, reggae, hip-hop, soca and R&B.

What Anguillian cooking is built on

The cooking draws on native Caribbean, West African, Spanish, French and English cuisines, and the sea supplies most of it: spiny lobster, crab, conch, shrimp, mahi-mahi, red snapper, marlin and grouper. Salt cod is a staple, eaten on its own or in stews and soups. Land for livestock is short, so poultry, pork, goat and mutton are used alongside imported beef, and goat is the meat eaten most. The official national dish is pigeon peas and rice. Much of the produce is imported, because most of the soil is sandy and infertile; what is grown includes tomatoes, peppers, limes, onions, squash, pigeon peas and callaloo, with yams, sweet potatoes and breadfruit as starches.

Where Anguillian athletes have competed

Cricket is popular, as in most former British colonies in the region, but David Carty wrote that on Anguilla it takes second place to boat racing. Omari Banks played for the West Indies, and Chesney Hughes played county cricket for Derbyshire in England. Several of the island's best-known athletes have competed for Great Britain. Zharnel Hughes, born on Anguilla, has represented Great Britain since 2015, won the 100 metres at the European Championships in 2018 and set a British record of 9.83 seconds in 2023. The triple jumper Keith Connor won Commonwealth and European titles and an Olympic bronze for Great Britain, and the long jumper Shara Proctor competed for Anguilla until 2010 before switching.

Smaller games have their own followings. Dominoes is played in the street in the evening and competitively, with an Anguilla team in the World Council of Dominoes tournaments. The Anguilla Cycling Association holds the John T. Memorial race each July on roads that the Tourist Board notes are mostly flat, and a rugby club, the Anguilla Eels, was formed in April 2006.

Who keeps the island's heritage

The Anguilla National Trust was set up in 1989 to preserve the island's natural and cultural heritage and opened its office in 1991. In 2024 the collection of the Heritage Collection Museum was handed over to the Anguilla National Museum. The Trust also runs programmes for Anguillian writers, and the anthology Where I See The Sun, published in 2015, collected work by forty-three poets writing in Anguilla.

Some heritage is older than any institution. Generations of Anguillians visited the Fountain Cavern to draw water, often first as schoolchildren, and lovers wrote their names on the leaves of the pitch apple tree at its entrance to seal their relationships. The cave's Amerindian petroglyphs, as many as 33 of them, are part of the same site. The history article, how Anguilla left St Kitts, covers the revolution that the calendar commemorates.