Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 1
Barbados: Gateway to America
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Few travelers head for the Caribbean island to plumb its history, much less its American history. Escaping from winter’s blasts through sun, sea, and sand is the lure. Yet for some of us that’s not quite enough, and so the islands with the richest assortment of historical treasures catch our attention. Up there at the top is Barbados, the easternmost island of the Windward chain, lying sixteen hundred miles southeast of Miami, and on its eastern shore buffeted by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
A unique feature of Barbados’s history is Britain’s tenure as its sole colonizer, from the time the first English adventurers landed in 1620. Not here the talk of how many flags have flown in succession over disputed island territory, or stories of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century European warfare fetching up on these shores.
More recently, with new attention cast on the African background of the island’s dominant population, the mingling of cultures is seen to characterize and enrich Barbados. The island’s wonderful history museum, housed in an eighteenth-century military garrison, devotes a gallery to the vestiges of mostly West African culture—the languages, art, music, and crafts that “are living testimony to the strength of customs which have survived centuries of misunderstanding.”
And then there is the American connection. The island’s earliest ties to the North American colonies were those made by a royal grant from Charles II to eight aristocrats. These Lords Proprietors—wealthy Barbadian planters —were given title to about a thousand miles of the region then called simply Carolina. By the mid-1600s immigrants from Barbados began settling there; they named the first major port city Charlestowne.
In Barbados the plantocracy soon abandoned tobacco and cotton for sugar, the crop that would shape its history, and during much of the seventeenth century the island flourished as England’s richest colony, far surpassing the North American settlements. As younger sons and less fortunate Barbadians made their way north, Barbados became what one historian calls “the gateway to America.” The Proprietors and their agents, known as the Barbados Adventurers, forged family ties with the colonists of North America that survive to this day. By the end of the eighteenth century, emigrants from Barbados had set their stamp not only on the planter culture of the Carolinas but on Virginia and other tidewater regions. And when the nineteen-year-old George Washington accompanied his tuberculosis-stricken elder half-brother, Lawrence, in search of a healthful climate, they chose Barbados, where Lawrence’s wife had relatives. This was the only time the future President traveled outside the country.
For more than a century legend had it that the Washington brothers had occupied a house on Bay Street on the outskirts of Bridgetown, and cabdrivers would direct American tourists to the spot. Recent research has proved that the Washingtons stayed in another Bay Street structure, known as Bush Hill House. Until recently this belonged to the Barbados Light and Power Company, which gave it to the National Trust. Now a $1.3 million funding