I BELIEVE THE FIRST ENGLISH SETTLERS OF BARBADOS LIED, part 1.
In 1627 the English settlers landed on the west coasts of Barbados and claimed that the entire island was ‘uninhabited (just as the first English settlers claimed when they arrived in Australia - which we all know to be a blatant lie, so why do you think they did not lie about Barbados also?) even though it would be decades later before they ever reached the Scotland district area to begin deforesting it.
2 weeks after English Captain Powell first landed in Barbados in February 1627 - he set sail for Guyana to secure tropical crops to bring back to Barbados to plant. Powell claimed that these 40 Arawaks from Guyana (we actually call ourselves Lokono in our own language, which simply means ‘the people’ of our tribe) - ‘volunteered to accompany him’, which we know to be a lie.
Because, once again, a simple fact of our culture that non-indigenous academics would not and do not know, is that our chiefs facilitated the agreement with the Dutch governor as we and the Dutch (who depended on their military alliance with us and the Kalina (mainland ‘Carib’) in Guyana - expected Powell to keep his word as per the agreement- to have our people go to Barbados for 2 years to teach the planters about growing Tobacco and cassava, pineapples etc, then materially compensate them with trade goods and return them to Guyana, so when the English settlers in Barbados broke the agreement and enslaved our people - refusing to let them return to Guyana, our Chiefs threatened to attack the Dutch forts and kill any Dutchman we could unless the governor got our people back.
Anyone who knows anything first hand about the traditional hereditary chieftain style of rule in our tribe would know that no 40 person family could just pick up and leave the tribe without the hereditary chiefs agreeing to it, hence why they felt the outrage and responsibility to get our people back. So we know Powell lied when he said this entire family of 40 of our people independently decided to just leave Guyana and accompany him, he even threw in a dubious claim he says the Guyana Arawaks made - telling him 'their ancestors once lived on Barbados but now it was uninhabited' (how convenient to further support his story!). Conversely, as another historical rebuttal to established non-indigenous academic BELIEF...IF this is true - then it also proves that it was LOKONO who inhabited Barbados, not Taino or Kalinago.
If they were a wandering family band of Arawak nomads in Guyana - our chiefs would have no care or interest in what they decided to do on their own, as why would our chiefs risk the good relations with the Dutch they were enjoying and receiving the annual tribute bribes the Dutch gave to have us help them wage war on other European rivals and their other indigenous allies. It was only because our chief's honor was on the line when the English broke the agreement that caused them to react in rage, as they would be viewed as weak and useless leaders if they let such an insult to their authority go unchallenged. In our tribe as in most others, a man's word is his bond, and the very act of you breaking your word - could turn your best Amerindian friend - into your worst Amerindian enemy! WE know this to be our way, but you do not.
Furthermore, another English contemporary of the mid 1600s (Major Scott) also said Powell lied about the 40 Arawaks independently volunteering to come - and stated as we state that it was a Dutch-Arawak officially brokered deal instead.
So Powell has been proven to be a liar. He could not even give a straight story about how many black Africans were on the one small ship he landed in Barbados with, in February 1627, with ten, seven, or 5 Africans being variously and contradictory stated, and neither could he give a straight story about how many Arawaks were brought, was it 40, 32, 30, 26 or 25? Even THAT story they could not keep straight either. …and yet we choose to believe he was honest in ‘knowing ‘ for a fact in February 1627 - that on the entire 166 square miles of then heavily forest-covered island of Barbados, there were no other human beings, even though it was literally decades later before the first European ships docked anywhere on the east coast. I think it is the height of academic prejudice to dismiss out of hand the possibility that even a few dozen remnant Amerindian survivors could have been extant on the island - especially on the well-watered and still abundant food source area of the Scotland district - when Powell landed on the other side of the island. That was a time of a handful of settlers on this island, with no intensive road networks we have today, only Bushy footpaths with thousands of places to hide, and I need not remind everyone that in the modern high tech era with over 250,000 inhabitants and 95% of the original forest cover gone, Barbados most wanted escaped criminal Winston Hall - was STILL able to hide and evade the entire Barbados Police Force and Army in the little forest area left in the Scotland district today. As for the bridge, the stated historical facts - it was discovered before the 40 Arawaks we know about - were imported from Guyana. I don’t understand why the great hostility by academics to admit that neither the established history nor my revisionist history can honestly be conclusively proven or disproved, for the English do not have a record of honesty in their colonial-era declarations or are we forgetting that the first English to settle Australia ALSO swore to almighty God and the Sovereign that ‘it was uninhabited’ as well. A claim everyone on earth knows to have been a complete and absolute lie.
For ANY intelligent Barbados to doubt for a second that a small remnant surviving group of perhaps even less than 2 dozen remnant survivors), indigenous Lokono-Arawaks could successfully hide their presence at a time in our history almost 400 years ago - when Barbados had so few settlers and no modern technology and the entire Scotland District was totally covered in a forest which the Lokono-Arawaks here had 400 years ago...and they were jungle experts - born and bred in it for millennia, unlike Winston.
So how the hell would they have known in 1627 if anyone was on the eastern side of Barbados when they landed on the west? In this 1657 Map of Barbados it shows an Amerindian man with a bow called Salymingo in the area of St Phillip near to the ancient sacred Amerindian site now called Mapps Cave, the old map also mentions he owned a 35-foot long canoe, was he local or a visiting Kalinago from St Vincent?
No one can conclusively prove either argument, except that I can say for a fact - that no Kalinago ever traveled alone in an ocean-going canoe between the inner arc of islands and Barbados, always in a group of their kin (so where are the rest of them if he is supposed to be a Kalinago traveler) when crossing such distances on the open ocean, easier and safer than one man trying to propel and steer a whole 35-foot long dugout canoe by himself with one paddle, he would need to be Superman as the minute he fell asleep it would drift, and do you honestly think one man could paddle a dugout tree trunk canoe 100 miles against the Atlantic current and the wind pushing him west to reach Barbados to the East of his home island, then go around the calmest west and south coasts of Barbados - to paddle into an East Coast Bay? A paddling fest he would have to have done non-stop with no sleep for over 24 hours?
I say he more likely paddled just down the East coast of Barbados for 2/3 miles only from his nearby Scotland District refuge to visit his sacred cave (a feat a mere one-man actually COULD do) and I would further say he left his canoe at what is now Consett Bay (as it’s the closest bay in the direction his canoe is pointed it - which might be a clue) and walked to the cave on well used native tracks which would have crisscrossed Barbados, and which later became used and widened by the settlers to become our first roads, as this had historically been the colonial path of least resistance (just use the existing native tracks and widen them to carriageways wherever possible, after first using them to penetrate inland for logging and deforesting operations soon after initial settlement.
But who am I (a mere actual tribal descendant and member who has been involved with my tribe's mainland communities spiritual and cultural affairs on every local, regional & international level for 29 years) to dare question non-Indigenous academics - who literally never set foot in an Arawak village in most cases nor ever paddled a dugout canoe in their lives unlike me - right? LOL
TAKE THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT OF AUSTRALIA AS A PRIME EXAMPLE:
In 1770 Captain James Cook landed in Botany Bay, home of the Eora people, and claimed possession of the East Coast of Australia for Britain under the doctrine of ‘terra nullius’ (meaning 'Empty land').
According to the international law of Europe, there were only three ways that Britain could take possession of another country:
If the country was uninhabited, Britain could claim and settle that country. In this case, it could claim ownership of the land.
If the country was already inhabited, Britain could ask for permission from the indigenous people to use some of their land. In this case, Britain could purchase land for its own use but it could not steal the land of the indigenous people.
If the country was inhabited, Britain could take over the country by invasion and conquest- in other words, defeat that country in war. However, even after winning a war, Britain would have to respect the rights of indigenous people.
Strangely Britain did not follow any of these rules in Australia. Since there were already people living in Australia, Britain could not take possession by “settling” this country. However, from the time of Captain Cook’s arrival, the British Government acted as if Australia were uninhabited. So, instead of admitting that it was invading land that belonged to Aboriginal people, Britain acted as it was settling an empty land. This is what is meant by the myth of terra nullius.
Source: The myth of terra nullius NSW Board of Studies, 1995 Reproduced in the Sydney Morning Herald, 26 October 1996 Racism. no way. CESCEO
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