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Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

St. Vincent 1797 — The Deportation of the Garífuna

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s Indigenous history research, standing on its own website. Indigenous cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: Documented Fact · Tradition — the people’s own account · Debated / Claim. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. A surviving people’s deportation, taught as such: the Garífuna — in their own language the Garínagu — are a living people, and this class is not an extermination account. The “Black Carib” / “Yellow Carib” division is a colonial construction with a legal purpose (Hulme & Whitehead) and must be taught as the record labels it — the perpetrators’ category language — never as description. Every figure is a range with its sources: teach no single number for the Balliceaux deportation or its dead. The class pairs with the Extermination Census’s §4.2 standing line — Garífuna, the Caribbean’s surviving people — and with the deportation’s own verdict in the community record: “This was exile. You cannot deport people from their own country.”

St. Vincent, 1795–1797 — the war, the internment, the exile

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record, resting on the British parliamentary and colonial record as carried in the modern scholarship — centrally *Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars (2012), the fullest researched history of the war and deportation — beside Hulme and Whitehead on the colonial construction of the "Black Carib" category, Gonzalez (1988), and the Garífuna community and institutional record (Garifuna Heritage Foundation; Belize NICH*). British official vocabulary — "Black Carib," "Yellow Carib," "the Carib problem" — is the perpetrators' category language, quoted and labelled as such. Where figures disagree, the disagreement is printed and never silently resolved.

This is not an extermination account. The people deported in 1797 survive: the Garífuna — in their own language, the Garínagu — are a living people, in coastal communities in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, in St. Vincent itself, and in a large diaspora. What this file documents is a war of dispossession, a mass deportation carried out through an internment on which roughly half the deported died, and the seizure of a people's homeland — Yurumein.

1. The people and the island

St. Vincent, Yurumein in the Garífuna language, was one of the last Caribbean islands to be colonised, because its people successfully resisted settlement into the eighteenth century. Its Indigenous people were the Kalinago (Island Carib), of Arawakan-speaking Caribbean stock. Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Africans — survivors of wrecked slave ships in the tradition the community itself carries, escaped captives, and others who reached the island — joined, married into, and were absorbed by Kalinago society, producing a distinct Afro-Indigenous people: in their own naming, the Garífuna; in British colonial naming, the "Black Caribs" (Taylor, 2012; Gonzalez, 1988).

That British naming is itself part of this record, labelled as what the scholarship shows it to have been: a colonial construction with a legal purpose. British administrators divided the island's Carib population into "Black Caribs" and "Yellow" or "Red Caribs," presenting the former as essentially African interlopers — usurpers who had displaced the "true" Indigenous Caribs — and the latter as the island's authentic natives. Hulme (2000) showed how this Africanisation served planter interests directly: it cast the majority of St. Vincent's Carib population as foreigners with no Indigenous title to the land, and answered the British liberal sympathy that had defended the Caribs in the war of the 1770s. The operational consequence came in 1796, when the British physically separated "Yellow" from "Black" Caribs — returning the former to St. Vincent and deporting the latter (Hulme, 2000; Hulme & Whitehead, eds., Wild Majesty, 1992; Taylor, 2012). The Garífuna answer stands in the community record: as a Garífuna woman put it to a historian in 2011, on the word "deportation" itself — "This was exile. You cannot deport people from their own country."

Under the Treaty of Paris (1763) Britain claimed St. Vincent; the First Carib War (1769–73) ended in a treaty (1773) that recognised Carib possession of the island's windward north — roughly a third of the island. France took the island in 1779; Britain retook it in 1783. Through the following decade British planters pressed steadily into the treaty lands, and the government of St. Vincent pressed the Caribs for further cessions. By 1795 the Garífuna, under their paramount chief, Joseph Chatoyer — Satuye in the community's rendering — faced the loss of the homeland the 1773 treaty had guaranteed them (Taylor, 2012).

2. The Second Carib War, 1795–96, and the death of Chatoyer

War opened in March 1795, in the wider frame of the French Revolutionary Wars: the Garífuna fought in alliance with French republican forces, supplied and encouraged from Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues, at the same moment as Fedon's rising in Grenada and the Brigands' War in St. Lucia. The Garífuna war aim, on the record, was the defence of their treaty territory, not a French conquest; the alliance was the instrument available (Taylor, 2012; Kim, 2013).

Chatoyer was killed on Dorsetshire Hill, above Kingstown, on 14 March 1795 — the date as the record and St. Vincent's own national commemoration carry it; some accounts place the night attack in the early hours of 15 March, and that variant is printed here rather than resolved. The tradition carried in both British and community accounts is that he fell in single combat with Major Alexander Leith of the St. Vincent militia. St. Vincent and the Grenadines made Chatoyer its first National Hero, and 14 March is National Heroes' Day (Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines; Garifuna Heritage Foundation).

His death did not end the war. The Garífuna fought on for more than a year — at points holding much of the island — against British regulars, militia, and the specially raised Black Rangers, whose destruction of Garífuna provision grounds was, on Taylor's account, strategically decisive: a people can be starved out of country they cannot be beaten out of (Taylor, 2012). In June 1796 the French allies surrendered; the Garífuna fought on alone into the autumn, until Abercromby's reinforcements, the lost provision grounds, and hunger brought the surrenders of October 1796. Those who surrendered expected, on the precedent of 1773, a negotiated peace. The British government had decided instead on removal — total and permanent. Sir William Young's formulation, preserved in the Vincentian official retelling, states the policy's logic in terms: "either remove the British planter or remove the Caribs" — and the government chose to remove the Caribs (Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, citing Young).

3. Balliceaux: the internment and the mortality

From the surrenders of October 1796 — round-ups had begun in July 1796 — the captured Garífuna were shipped to Balliceaux (also spelled Baliceaux), a small, waterless island in the Grenadines, and held there through the winter while London and Kingstown decided a destination for permanent exile. Africa, the Bahamas, and Samaná were considered; Roatán, in the Bay Islands off Honduras, was chosen (Taylor, 2012; Gonzalez, 1988). Balliceaux had no fresh water and could grow nothing; the internees depended entirely on water and provisions brought by their captors, and epidemic disease — the scholarship names typhus and yellow fever as the candidates, without settling between them — moved through a crowded, malnourished population (Taylor, 2012).

The figures, printed as the record carries them — a range, with its sources:

In June 1804 the British colonial legislature passed an act extinguishing the deported Caribs' legal rights to their lands, and the Yurumein lands were granted and sold to British planters and veterans (Alston, 2021; Taylor, 2012). The deportation was therefore not a wartime measure later regretted in law; it was completed in law, as a transfer of a people's country to the people who had removed them.

4. Roatán and the making of the mainland Garífuna world

Roatán in April 1797 was Spanish-garrisoned; the British convoy took the island without a fight and left the exiles there. Spain moved the Garífuna to Trujillo on the Honduran mainland within the year. From Trujillo the Garífuna founded the mainland world that exists today: along the Caribbean coast of Honduras; into Belize — Garífuna Settlement Day, 19 November, a national holiday, commemorates the community's arrival on Belize's coast (the tradition carries 1802 and the larger 1823 arrival; Belize NICH); into Guatemala (Livingston, founded by the Garífuna leader Marcos Sánchez Díaz) and Nicaragua's Caribbean coast (Gonzalez, 1988; Palacio, ed., The Garifuna: A Nation Across Borders, 2005/2013).

The scale of the survival is part of the record. Taylor closes on the arithmetic the British policy produced: of a Black Carib population he puts at perhaps five times the number, a little over 2,000 landed in 1797 — "it was a cataclysm" — and their descendants today number in the hundreds of thousands (Taylor, 2012; community and institutional estimates commonly run to ~600,000 worldwide, printed here as an estimate, not a census). Twentieth-century labour migration carried Garífuna communities to the United States — New York (the Bronx above all), Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago — making the diaspora a second homeland that remits, organises, and returns.

5. Those who remained, and Yurumein today

The deportation did not empty St. Vincent, and this file does not print it as if it had. The 83 Yellow Caribs separated on Balliceaux were returned; others had hidden in the island's north and never surrendered; a last group around Morne Ronde surrendered only in 1805 — 16 men, 9 women, and 20 children (Gullick, 1983). The 1844 census counted 273 Caribs on St. Vincent (178 windward, 95 leeward). Their descendants are the Garífuna and Kalinago community of St. Vincent today, concentrated in the windward communities — Sandy Bay, Owia, Fancy — in the territory the 1773 treaty had recognised. On St. Vincent the language was driven nearly to silence; in exile it survived entire. The homeland claim is carried in both directions: by the Vincentian community that never left, and by a diaspora for whom Yurumein names a specific ancestral country to which return — physical, cultural, and legal — remains an open claim, pressed through ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Garifuna Heritage Foundation; community legal submissions).

6. Commemoration and recognition

The community's own commemorations are institutional facts of the record, not colour:

Historian Hilary Beckles has characterised the deportation as ethnic cleansing; Garífuna institutional language names it genocide and exile (Beckles, as carried in the scholarly summaries; Garifuna Heritage Foundation). Both characterisations are printed as their authors', labelled — the documented facts in §§2–3 are what this file itself asserts.

7. What cannot be held to standard

Sources for this file

Taylor, The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) • Gonzalez, Sojourners of the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 1988) — figure 4,195 • Bullen & Bullen (1972), as carried in the subsequent literature — figure 5,080 • Hulme, "Travel, Ethnography, Transculturation: St Vincent in the 1790s" (2000); Hulme & Whitehead, eds., Wild Majesty (1992) • Kim, Early American Studies 11(1) (2013) and The Eighteenth Century 55 (2014) • Alston, Slaves and Highlanders (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) — the 1804 act • Anderson, account of St. Vincent (c. 1798) [near-contemporary witness] • "Mourning Balliceaux," Island Studies Journal 15(2) (2020) — collation of the figures • Palacio, ed., The Garifuna: A Nation Across Borders (Cubola, 2005; 2013) • Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Garifuna exile account and Diaspora Affairs pilgrimage releases • Garifuna Heritage Foundation, programmes incl. March 2025 • Belize NICH, Settlement Day materials • UNESCO, Proclamation of Masterpieces (2001): "Language, dance and music of the Garifuna" • Gullick (1983), as carried in the anthropological literature — 1805 surrender, 1844 census.

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