Nevis ( ) is an island in the Caribbean Sea that forms part of the inner arc of the Leeward Islands chain of the West Indies. Nevis and the neighbouring island of Saint Kitts constitute the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a sovereign state. Nevis is located near the northern end of the Lesser Antilles archipelago about east-southeast of Puerto Rico and west of Antigua. Its area is and the capital is Charlestown.
Saint Kitts and Nevis are separated by the Narrows, a shallow channel. Nevis is roughly conical in shape with a volcano, Nevis Peak, at its centre. The island is fringed on its western and northern coastlines by sandy beaches composed of a mixture of white coral sand with brown and black sand eroded and washed down from the volcanic rocks that make up the island. The gently-sloping coastal plain ( wide) has natural freshwater springs as well as non-potable volcanic hot springs, especially along the western coast.
The island was named Oualie, translated as "land of beautiful waters", by the Kalinago and Dulcina ("Sweet Island") by the early British settlers. The name Nevis is derived from the Spanish phrase , which translates as Our Lady of the Snows; the name was given by the island's Spanish discoverers and first appeared on maps in the 16th century.Hubbard, Vincent K. (2002). Swords, Ships & Sugar: History of Nevis. Corvallis, Oregon: Premiere, , pp. 20–23 (Captain Gilbert, Captain Smith), 25 (pearl diving), 41–44 (name Dulcina, treaty with Spain, first settlement), 69–70 (privateers, Captain Francis), 79–85 (Atlantic slave trade, Royal African Company, Queen of the Caribees), 86–102 (Caribs), 113–120 (d'Iberville, buccaneers), 138–139 (profits derived from West Indian sugar and slave trade, 1776 starvation), 194–195 (Alexandra Hospital), 211–223 (electricity, Anguilla in 1967, OECD blacklist). Nevis is also known by the sobriquet "Queen of the Caribees", which it earned in the 18th century because of its many sugar plantations.
Nevis is both geographically smaller and less populous than Saint Kitts. It maintains significant autonomy within the federation, including a separate government headed by the premier of Nevis and a separate legislature. Nevis has twice voted – in 1977, in an unofficial referendum, and in 1998, in an official one – to secede from the federation, but neither attempt succeeded.
The majority of the approximately 12,000 Nevisians are of primarily African descent, with notable British, Portuguese, and Lebanese minority communities. English is the official language, and its literacy rate of 98 per cent is one of the highest in the Western Hemisphere.
Etymology
In 1493, Christopher Columbus gave the island the name San Martín (Saint Martin). However, the confusion of numerous poorly charted small islands in the Leeward Island chain meant that this name ended up being accidentally transferred to another island, which is still known as Saint-Martin.
The current name Nevis might be derived from the Spanish name via process of abbreviation and anglicisation or named after the highest mountain in Scotland, namely Ben Nevis. The Spanish name means Our Lady of the Snows. It is not known who chose this name for the island, but it is a reference to the story of a 4th-century Catholic miracle related to a snowfall on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Presumably the white clouds that usually cover the top of Nevis Peak reminded someone of this story of a miraculous snowfall in a hot climate.
Nevis was part of the Spanish claim to the Caribbean islands, a claim pursued until the 1670 Treaty of Madrid, even though there were no Spanish settlements on the island. According to Vincent Hubbard, author of Swords, Ships & Sugar: History of Nevis, the Spanish ruling caused many of the Arawak groups who were not ethnically Caribs to "be redefined as Kalinago overnight". Records indicate that the Spanish enslaved large numbers of the native inhabitants on the more accessible of the Leeward Islands and sent them to Cubagua, Venezuela, to dive for pearls. Hubbard suggests that the reason the first European settlers found so few Kalinago on Nevis is that they had already been rounded up by the Spanish and shipped off to be used as slaves.
History
Amerindians
Nevis had been settled for more than 2,000 years by Amerindian peoples prior to having been sighted by Columbus in 1493.See for example Nevis Heritage excavation reports, 2000–2002 , Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton. Retrieved 8 August 2006. The indigenous people of Nevis during these periods belonged to the Leeward Island Amerindian groups popularly referred to as Arawaks and Kalinago, a complex mosaic of ethnic groups with similar culture and language.Wilson, Samuel (1990). "The Prehistoric Settlement Pattern of Nevis, West Indies". Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 1989), p. 427-450. Dominican anthropologist Lennox Honychurch traces the European use of the term "Carib" to refer to the Leeward Island aborigines to Columbus, who picked it up from the Taínos on Hispaniola. It was not a name the Kalinago called themselves.Honychurch, Lennox (1997). "Crossroads in the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and Exchange on Dominica". World Archaeology Vol. 28(3): 291–304. "Carib Indians" was the generic name used for all groups believed involved in cannibalistic war rituals, more particularly, the consumption of parts of a killed enemy's body.
The Amerindian name for Nevis was Oualie, land of beautiful waters. The structure of the Kalinago language has been linguistically identified as Arawakan.
Colonial era
Despite the Spanish claim, Nevis continued to be a popular stop over point for English and Dutch ships on their way to North America. Captain Bartholomew Gilbert of Plymouth visited the island in 1603, spending two weeks to cut 20 tons of lignum vitae wood. Gilbert sailed on to Virginia to seek out survivors of the Roanoke settlement in what is now North Carolina. Captain John Smith visited Nevis on his way to Virginia in 1607 on the voyage that founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
On 30 August 1620, James I of England asserted sovereignty over Nevis by giving a Royal Patent for colonisation to the Earl of Carlisle. However, actual English settlement did not happen until 1628, when Anthony Hilton moved from nearby Saint Kitts following a murder plot against him. 80 English settlers accompanied him, soon boosted by a further 100 settlers from London who had initially hoped to settle Barbuda. Hilton became the first Governor of Nevis.
After the Treaty of Madrid between Spain and England, Nevis became a major part of the English West Indies and an admiralty court also sat in Nevis. Between 1675 and 1730, the island was the headquarters for the slave trade to the Leeward Islands, with approximately 6,000–7,000 enslaved West Africans passing through en route to other islands each year. The Royal African Company brought all its ships through Nevis. A 1678 census shows a community of Irish people – 22% of the population – existing as either indentured servants or freemen."Irish indentured labour in the Caribbean". . Nationalarchives.gov.uk. 11 March 2013.
Due to the profitable slave trade and the high quality of Nevisian sugar cane, Nevis soon became a dominant source of wealth for the colonial slavocracy. When the Leeward Islands were separated from Barbados in 1671, Nevis became the seat of the Leeward Islands colony and was given the nickname "Queen of the Caribees". It remained the colonial capital for the Leeward Islands until the seat was transferred to Antigua for military reasons in 1698. During this period, Nevis was the richest of the English Leeward Islands.
Nevis outranked larger islands like Jamaica in sugar production in the late 17th century. The planters' wealth on the island is evident in the tax records preserved at the Calendar State Papers in the Colonial Office's Public Records, where the amount of tax collected on the Leeward Islands was recorded. The sums recorded for 1676 as "head tax on slaves", a tax payable in sugar, amounted to 384,600 pounds in Nevis, as opposed to 67,000 each in Antigua and Saint Kitts, 62,500 in Montserrat, and 5,500 total in the other five islands.Calendar State Papers (1676). Number 1152, 1676. The British Colonial Office Public Records. Qtd. in Hubbard, p. 85.
The profits on sugar cultivation in Nevis was enhanced by the fact that the cane juice from Nevis yielded an unusually high amount of sugar. A gallon (3.79 litres) of cane juice from Nevis yielded 24 ounces (0.71 litres) of sugar, whereas a gallon from Saint Kitts yielded 16 ounces (0.47 litres). Twenty per cent of the English colonial empire's total sugar production in 1700 was derived from Nevisian plantations.Watts, David (1987). The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492. Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 285. Exports from West Indian colonies like Nevis were worth more than all the exports from all the mainland Thirteen Colonies of North America combined at the time of the American Revolutionary War.
The enslaved families formed the large labour force required to work the sugar plantations. After the 1650s, the supply of white indentured servants began to dry up due to increased wages in England and less incentive to migrate to the colonies. By the end of the 17th century, the population of Nevis consisted of a small, wealthy planter elite in control, a marginal population of poor Whites, a great majority of African-descended slaves, and an unknown number of maroons, escaped slaves living in the mountains. In 1780, 90 per cent of the 10,000 people living on Nevis were Black. Some of the maroons joined with the few remaining Kalinago in Nevis. Memories of the Nevisian maroons' struggle under the plantation system are preserved in place names such as Maroon Hill, an early centre of resistance.
The great wealth generated by the colonies of the West Indies led to wars among the great powers of Europe. The formation of the United States can be said to be a partial by-product of these wars, and the strategic trade aims that often ignored North America. Three privateers (William Kidd being one of them) were employed by the Crown to help protect ships in Nevis' waters.
During the 17th century, the French, based on Saint Kitts, launched many attacks on Nevis, sometimes assisted by the Kalinago, who in 1667 sent a large fleet of canoes along in support. In the same year, a Franco-Dutch invasion fleet was repelled off Nevis by an English fleet. Letters and other records from the era indicate that colonists on Nevis hated and feared the Kalinago. In 1674 and 1683, they participated in attacks on Kalinago villages in Dominica and St. Vincent, despite a lack of official approval from the Crown for the attack. On Nevis, the English built Fort Charles and a series of smaller fortifications to aid in defending the island. This included Saddle Hill Battery, built in 1740 to replace a deodand on Mount Nevis.
Emancipation
In 1706, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the French-Canadian founder of Louisiana in North America, decided to drive the English out of Nevis and thus also stop pirate attacks on French ships; he considered Nevis the region's headquarters for piracy against French trade. During d'Iberville's invasion of Nevis, French buccaneers were used in the front line, infamous for being ruthless killers after the pillaging during the wars with Spain where they gained a reputation for torturing and murdering non-combatants. In the face of the invading force, the English militiamen of Nevis fled.