Anguilla's history: a revolution fought to stay British

Who lived on Anguilla before the settlers came

The first people on Anguilla came from South America, travelling by raft and dugout canoe, and the oldest artefacts found on the island have been dated to around 1300 BC. Remains of settlements date from AD 600. Excavations have found forty villages, the largest at Island Harbour, Sandy Ground, Sandy Hill, Rendezvous Bay and Shoal Bay East. The island's Arawakan name was Malliouhana. Its European name is the Italian word for an eel, given for the island's long thin shape.

Two sites hold most of what is known about belief. The Fountain Cavern near Shoal Bay has a single entrance in its ceiling and a floor 30 feet below, reached in early times by climbing down tree roots, with pools of fresh water at the bottom. According to the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society, radiocarbon dates and pottery styles put the first use of the cave around or before AD 400, continuing until at least AD 1200. As many as 33 petroglyphs survive there, carved into the natural contours of stalagmites, and one of them is argued to represent Jocahu, a deity recorded among the peoples of the Greater Antilles in the late 1400s. Thousands of sherds from large open serving bowls were found above the first pool, which suggests ritual use and not only the drawing of water.

The Big Spring at Island Harbour is a collapsed sinkhole about 40 metres across and 5 metres deep, with a spring under a rock overhang on its eastern edge. Its ledges carry more than 100 petroglyphs dated to between AD 600 and 1200, most of them three indentations that form a face. On an island with no rivers, both sites are places where fresh water comes out of the rock. Later Anguillians collected water at the Fountain too, and the Big Spring stayed in use for 300 years or more after the Amerindians had gone.

How the settlers ran the island without a charter

When Europeans first saw Anguilla is uncertain. Some accounts credit Columbus in 1493, others the French Huguenot René Goulaine de Laudonnière in 1564. The Dutch West India Company built a fort in 1631 and withdrew after Spanish forces destroyed it in 1633.

English settlement began in 1650. The House of Assembly's own history describes the first settlers as runaway indentured servants from Barbados and small farmers from St Kitts leaving heavy tobacco taxes behind them. By 1666 the leading men had formed themselves into an Executive Council and elected their own deputy governor, Abraham Howell. No royal patent ever authorised it. Other Leeward Islands received patents appointing deputy governors, councils and assemblies; Anguilla's council acted as executive, legislature and court at once, tolerated from Antigua and never sanctioned there. The historian John Oldmixon wrote in 1708 that the settlers lived "without government or religion, having no minister nor governor, no magistrates, no law".

The French took the island in 1666 and returned it under the Treaty of Breda in 1667. They attacked again in 1688, 1745 and 1796. In 1745 two frigates landed 700 or 1,000 men at Crocus Bay, the sources give both figures, and 150 militiamen drove them off. In November 1796 some 400 men under Victor Hugues landed at Rendezvous Bay and burned the villages at South Hill and The Valley before the frigate HMS Lapwing defeated the French ships.

Why the plantations never took hold on Anguilla

Enslaved Africans were on the island early; archival evidence puts at least 100 there by 1683, apparently from Central as well as West Africa. Sugar replaced tobacco as the main crop, and by 1724 the population stood at 360 Europeans and 900 Africans. In 1819 the count was 360 Europeans, 320 free Africans and 2,451 enslaved people.

The soil and the rainfall defeated the planters. Rainfall averages about 900 millimetres a year and falls erratically, the soil is thin, and the plantations were largely unsuccessful; David Carty dates the collapse of sugar to the early 19th century. The collapse did not make slavery gentler: punishment, forced labour and sale off the island continued, and some owners removed enslaved Anguillians to islands where slavery was still legal in the years before emancipation. Droughts and famines in the 1830s and 1840s deepened the poverty. The slave trade ended in the British Empire in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834, and many planters then sold up or left. At one point the British government attempted to send the whole population to Demerara in British Guiana; most people stayed.

What followed was a society of smallholders, fishermen and salt workers. In the 19th century the island's salt ponds produced around 3,000,000 bushels a year for export to the United States, and by the First World War charcoal burning had cleared almost all of the forest.

How Anguilla came to be ruled from Basseterre

Drought, hurricanes and the effects of the Napoleonic Wars ended the council's long autonomy in 1825. London wanted a legal framework through which to apply the laws ameliorating slavery and, later, the Abolition Act, and Anguilla had none. The council dissolved itself, and the St Kitts Legislative Assembly passed an Anguilla Act extending its laws to the island and giving it one representative in Basseterre, about seventy miles away.

The Anguillians protested at once. Their protest asked whether laws for the island could be made "with much regard to its interests, when they are to be passed by a body of men living in a distinct and remote island possessing no property of any kind here". The Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society records that this and every later protest was ignored. Nevis joined the arrangement in the early 1880s, and the colony's name included Anguilla only from 1951.

Elected politics reached the island slowly and through St Kitts. A limited franchise based on income or property came in 1936, with Anguilla returning one member of a Legislative Council in which St Kitts had three, and the first elections were held on 24 June 1937. Full adult suffrage followed in 1952, with the first such elections on 6 October 1952. A petition of 1958 asked for the association with St Kitts to be dissolved, complained of "the dead hand of St Kitts" and warned that "a people cannot live without hope for long without erupting socially". Between 1958 and 1962 the three islands sat together inside the West Indies Federation.

What the sea and emigration made of Anguilla

With the plantations gone, men went to sea or went abroad, and very often both. Anguilla had almost no direct link with any metropolitan power and built its own fleet of schooners and sloops, which in drought years were the island's lifeline. Early in the 20th century those boats carried men to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic and to Aruba and Curaçao. According to the boatbuilder and historian David Carty, a schooner could take up to 200 men a trip from Marigot on Saint Martin, and for the first part of each year Anguilla was left a society of women and children. Economic stagnation, the droughts of the 1890s and the Depression of the 1930s pushed emigration further.

By 1960 the island still had no electricity, no telephones and no paved roads. Ronald Webster, who returned that year after more than two decades working on a dairy farm on Saint Martin, blamed decisions taken in Basseterre, and found wide support for saying so. That grievance is the background to everything that happened in 1967.

Why Anguilla refused to join the associated state

After the West Indies Federation broke up in 1962, Britain offered its remaining Leeward and Windward colonies associated statehood: full internal self-government, with London keeping only defence and external affairs. For Anguilla that meant being governed by St Kitts with nobody above St Kitts to appeal to. On 6 August 1966 Atlin Harrigan wrote in the St Kitts newspaper The Democrat that Anguilla should stay a colony like Tortola and Montserrat. Requests in June and October 1966 for a senior British official to come and discuss direct rule went unmet; a local government adviser was sent instead.

The associated state of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla came into being on 27 February 1967. A Statehood Queen Show at The Valley on 4 February had already been broken up; the St Kitts police fired on the crowd and Vincent Webster was wounded in the leg. A mock funeral for the stillborn statehood followed. On 8 March Government House was burned.

How the St Kitts police were expelled

On 30 May 1967, after a public meeting in Burroughs Park, the island's elected representative Peter Adams told the officer in charge of the St Kitts police that his men had to leave, and they did. That night a Peace-keeping Committee was appointed, the rebel island's first government. The date is kept as Anguilla Day. On 9 June an 18-man party set out by boat to overthrow the government in St Kitts; 12 landed and five were captured.

What the two referendums decided

A referendum on 11 July 1967 returned 1,813 votes for secession and five against. At a conference in Barbados later that month Adams accepted a settlement that kept Anguilla inside the state with a local council; the island rejected it, Adams lost the leadership and Ronald Webster took it. Under a constitution drafted with the help of the Harvard law professor Roger Fisher, an Anguilla Council was elected in October 1967, with five of Webster's candidates returned unopposed. An interim arrangement put the British official Tony Lee on the island from January 1968 to January 1969, and when it lapsed a second referendum in February 1969 returned 1,739 votes to 4. One account records the question as a return to St Kitts, another as cutting every tie with Britain. Anguilla declared itself a republic. Its constitution, drafted by the American businessman Jack Holcomb, provided for a president, a vice-president and an assembly, of nine members by the House of Assembly's account and eleven by another.

How the British landing ended the republic

The British junior minister William Whitlock arrived on 11 March 1969 to propose a new interim administration and left within hours; according to the Society, a warning shot fired from Office Hill told him to go. Eight days later, on the night of 19 March, soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment and Royal Marines came ashore at Road Bay and Crocus Bay by boat, dinghy and helicopter from the frigates HMS Minerva and HMS Rothesay, with officers of the London Metropolitan Police. The numbers vary by source: around 300 soldiers and 22 police officers in one account, 315 paratroopers in another, and an initial wave of 150 men in Matthew Lord's study of the operation.

Nobody resisted. The troops were met by islanders and by journalists who had arrived before them, the expected weapons had been hidden, and the press named the operation the Bay of Piglets. Lord's study finds the island's reception friendlier than the one the force had met at its staging base in Antigua. Much of the population saw the soldiers as a way to get what it had asked for since 1825, a direct tie to Britain. The Society's page on the women of the revolution carries the line "When the Island was invaded the men did not face the guns. The Women did." A second company of paratroopers stayed until 14 September 1969, and Army engineers followed to improve the public works.

How Anguilla became a separate territory again

The Anguilla Act 1971 came into force on 27 July 1971 and gave British rule its first legal footing, with a commissioner acting in consultation with an elected Anguilla Council. Elections under it were held on 24 July 1972 in seven districts, with the voting age set at 18. A constitution in February 1976 created the first legislature to make laws "with the advice and consent of the Assembly", and Ronald Webster became the first Chief Minister. The first law it passed was enacted on 13 May 1976.

The legal separation came last. On 19 December 1980 Anguilla was formally detached from St Kitts and Nevis and became a separate British dependency, and the Anguilla Constitution Order of 1982 set out the framework still in force, amended since. St Kitts and Nevis went on to independence in 1983; Anguilla did not follow. The politics article, how Anguilla is governed, takes up what that constitution reserves to the governor.

What Anguilla keeps of its revolution

The revolution is commemorated in the calendar. Anguilla Day on 30 May marks the expulsion of the police, and Ronald Webster's birthday, 2 March, has been a public holiday since its proclamation in 2010. Webster died on 9 December 2016, lay in the House of Assembly before his state funeral on 13 January 2017, and is recognised as the island's only National Hero. Burroughs Park, where the meeting of May 1967 was held, is now Ronald Webster Park.

Hurricanes mark the modern record as sharply as politics. Hurricane Luis damaged the island in 1995, Lenny flooded it in 1999, and Irma passed its northern eyewall over Anguilla on 6 September 2017 with maximum sustained winds of 185 miles an hour. One person died. The economy article, what Anguilla earns, covers what the storm cost and how the island paid for the repairs.