Nevis Pinneys Beach 2010

Nevis is a small 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 one country: the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. 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 a shallow channel known as "The Narrows". Nevis is roughly conical in shape, with a volcano known as 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'' ("Land of Beautiful Waters") by the Kalinago and ''Dulcina'' ("Sweet Island") by the early British settlers. The name ''Nevis'' is derived from the Spanish ''Nuestra Señora de las Nieves'' (which means Our Lady of the Snows); the name was given by its 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 (slave trade, Royal African Company, Queen of the Caribees), 86–102 (Caribs), 113–120 (d'Iberville, buccaneers), 138–139 (Great Britain's wealth 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 from sugar plantations.

Nevis is of particular historical significance to Americans because it was the birthplace and early childhood home of Alexander Hamilton. For the British, Nevis is the place where Horatio Nelson was stationed as a young sea captain, and is where he met and married a Nevisian, Frances Nisbet, the young widow of a plantation-owner.

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 the literacy rate, 98 percent, is one of the highest in the Western Hemisphere.

Etymology

In 1498, 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/Sint Maarten.

The current name ''Nevis'' was derived from a Spanish name ''Nuestra Señora de las Nieves'' by process of abbreviation and anglicisation. 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: 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 two thousand years by Amerindian people prior to having been sighted by Columbus in 1493. 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 the North American continent. Captain Bartholomew Gilbert of Plymouth visited the island in 1603, spending two weeks to cut twenty 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. This was the voyage that founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

On 30 August 1620 James VI and I of Scotland and England asserted sovereignty over Nevis by giving a Royal Patent for colonisation to the Earl of Carlisle. However, actual European settlement did not happen until 1628, when Anthony Hilton moved from nearby Saint Kitts following a murder plot against him. 80 other 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 (1670) between Spain and England, Nevis became the seat of the British colony and the Admiralty Court also sat in Nevis. Between 1675 and 1730, the island was the headquarters for the slave trade for 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.

Due to the profitable Slave Trade and the high quality of Nevisian sugar cane, Nevis soon became a dominant source of wealth for Great Britain and the slave-owning British plantocracy. 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 British 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 British Colonial Office 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.

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 percent of the British Empire's total sugar production in 1700 was derived from Nevisian plantations. 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 Revolution.

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 percent of the 10,000 people living on Nevis were Black. Some of the maroons joined with the few remaining Kalinago in Nevis to form a resistance force. 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 Spain, Britain, and France. 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 British 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 the English on Nevis hated and feared the Amerindians. 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.

Some planters burned the plantations, rather than letting the French have them, and hid in the mountains. It was the enslaved Africans who held the French at bay by taking up arms to defend their families and the island. The slave quarters had been looted and burned as well, as the main reward promised the men fighting on the French side in the attack was the right to capture as many slaves as possible and resell them in Martinique.

During the fighting, 3,400 enslaved Nevisians were captured and sent off to Martinique, but about 1,000 more, poorly armed and militarily untrained, held the French troops at bay, by "murderous fire" according to an eyewitness account by an English militiaman. He wrote that "the slaves' brave behaviour and defence there shamed what some of their masters did, and they do not shrink to tell us so." After 18 days of fighting, the French were driven off the island. Among the Nevisian men, women and children carried away on d'Iberville's ships, six ended up in Louisiana, the first persons of African descent to arrive there.

One consequence of the French attack was a collapsed sugar industry and during the ensuing hardship on Nevis, small plots of land on the plantations were made available to the enslaved families in order to control the loss of life due to starvation. With less profitability for the absentee plantation owners, the import of food supplies for the plantation workers dwindled. Between 1776 and 1783, when the food supplies failed to arrive altogether due to the rebellion in North America, 300–400 enslaved Nevisians starved to death. On 1 August 1834, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. In Nevis, 8,815 slaves were freed. The first Monday in August is celebrated as Emancipation Day and is part of the annual Nevis Culturama festival.

A four-year apprenticeship programme followed the abolishment of slavery on the plantations. In spite of the continued use of the labour force, the Nevisian slave owners were paid over £150,000 in compensation from the British Government for the loss of property, whereas the enslaved families received nothing for 200 years of labour. One of the wealthiest planter families in Nevis, the Pinneys of Mountravers Plantation, claimed £36,396 () in compensation for the slaves on the family-owned plantations around the Caribbean.Personal stories: Traders and Merchants – John Pinney
In ''Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery'', a project by City Museum and the University of the West of England's Faculty of Humanities. Retrieved 8 May 2007.

Because of the early distribution of plots and because many of the planters departed from the island when sugar cultivation became unprofitable, a relatively large percentage of Nevisians already owned or controlled land at emancipation.Baker Motley, Constance (1998). ''Equal Justice Under Law. An Autobiography.'' New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. . An excerpt from the autobiography, describing her search in Nevis church records for her family's history during the era of slavery, is available online a

Retrieved 8 August 2006. Others settled on crown land. This early development of a society with a majority of small, landowning farmers and entrepreneurs created a stronger middle class in Nevis than in Saint Kitts, where the sugar industry continued until 2006. Even though the 15 families in the wealthy planter elite no longer control the arable land, Saint Kitts still has a large, landless working class population.

1800 to the present day

The population had reached 7,470 by 1842. Nevis was united with Saint Kitts and Anguilla in 1882, and they became an associated state with full internal autonomy in 1967, though Anguilla seceded in 1971. Together, Saint Kitts and Nevis became independent on 19 September 1983. On 10 August 1998, a referendum on Nevis to separate from Saint Kitts had 2,427 votes in favour and 1,498 against, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed.

Before 1967, the local government of Saint Kitts was also the government of Nevis and Anguilla. Nevis had two seats and Anguilla one seat in the government. The economic and infrastructural development of the two smaller islands was not a priority to the colonial federal government.

When the hospital in Charlestown was destroyed in a hurricane in 1899, planting of trees in the squares of Saint Kitts and refurbishing of government buildings, also in Saint Kitts, took precedence over the rebuilding of the only hospital in Nevis. After five years without any proper medical facilities, the leaders in Nevis initiated a campaign, threatening to seek independence from Saint Kitts. The British Administrator in Saint Kitts, Charles Cox, was unmoved. He stated that Nevis did not need a hospital since there had been no significant rise in the number of deaths during the time Nevisians had been without a hospital. Therefore, no action was needed on behalf of the government, and besides, Cox continued, the Legislative Council regarded "Nevis and Anguilla as a drag on St. Kitts and would willingly see a separation".

A letter of complaint to the metropolitan British Foreign Office gave result and the federal government in Saint Kitts was ordered by their superiors in London to take speedy action. The Legislative Council took another five years to consider their options. The final decision by the federal government was to not rebuild the old hospital after all but to instead convert the old Government House in Nevis into a hospital, named Alexandra Hospital after Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII. A majority of the funds assigned for the hospital could thus be spent on the construction of a new official residence in Nevis.

After d'Iberville's invasion in 1704, records show Nevis' sugar industry in ruins and a decimated population begging the English Parliament and relatives for loans and monetary assistance to stave off island-wide starvation. The sugar industry on the island never fully recovered and during the general depression that followed the loss of the West Indian sugar monopoly, Nevis fell on hard times and the island became one of the poorest in the region. The island remained poorer than Saint Kitts until 1991, when the fiscal performance of Nevis edged ahead of the fiscal performance of Saint Kitts for the first time since the French invasion.

Electricity was introduced in Nevis in 1954 when two generators were shipped in to provide electricity to the area around Charlestown. In this regard, Nevis fared better than Anguilla, where there were no paved roads, no electricity and no telephones until 1967. However, electricity did not become available island-wide on Nevis until 1971.

An ambitious infrastructure development programme was introduced in the early 2000s which included a transformation of the Charlestown port, construction of a new deep-water harbour, resurfacing and widening the Island Main Road, a new airport terminal and control tower, and a major airport expansion, which required the relocation of an entire village in order to make room for the runway extension.

Modernised classrooms and better-equipped schools, as well as improvements in the educational system, have contributed to a leap in academic performance on the island. The pass rate among the Nevisian students sitting for the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) exams, the Cambridge General Certificate of Education Examination (GCE) and the Caribbean Advance Proficiency Examinations is now consistently among the highest in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Hurricanes

* September 1989: there was a considerable amount of damage from Hurricane Hugo.
* September 1998, there was a great deal of damage from Hurricane Georges.
* November 1999: Nevis was hit by Hurricane Lenny, which caused some heavy damage to the island's infrastructure on the western coast, because of the storm's unusual track from west to east.
* October 2008: Nevis was brushed with the edge of Hurricane Omar. Among other establishments, The Four Seasons Resort Nevis was forced to close to undergo repairs. Hurricane Omar thus caused the loss of 600 jobs for over 2 years; the resort reopened on 15 December 2010.
* August 2010: there was some damage on Nevis from Hurricane Earl.
* September 2010, there was some damage from Hurricane Igor.
* September 2017, there was damage from Hurricane Irma.

Geography

The formation of the island began in mid-Pliocene times, approximately 3.45 million years ago. Nine distinct eruptive centres from different geological ages, ranging from mid-Pliocene to Pleistocene, have contributed to the formation. No single model of the island's geological evolution can, therefore, be ascertained.

Nevis Peak ( high) is the dormant remnant of one of these ancient stratovolcanoes. The last activity took place about 100,000 years ago, but active fumaroles and hot springs are still found on the island, the most recent formed in 1953. The composite cone of Nevis volcano has two overlapping summit craters that are partially filled by a lava dome, created in recent, pre-Columbian time. Pyroclastic flows and mudflows were deposited on the lower slopes of the cone simultaneously.

Nevis Peak is located on the outer crater rim. Four other lava domes were constructed on the flanks of the volcano, one on the northeast flank (Madden's Mount), one on the eastern flank (Butlers Mountain), one on the northwest coast (Mount Lily) and one on the south coast (Saddle Hill, with a height of ). The southernmost point on the island is Dogwood Point which is also the southernmost point of the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.

During the last ice age, when the sea level was 60 m lower, the three islands of Saint Kitts, Nevis and Sint Eustatius (also known as Statia) were connected as one island. Saba, however, is separated from these three by a deeper channel.

There are visible wave-breaking reefs along the northern and eastern shorelines. To the south and west, the reefs are located in deeper water and are suitable for scuba diving. The most developed beach on Nevis is the Pinney's Beach, on the western or Caribbean coast. There are sheltered swimming beaches in Oualie Bay and Cades Bay. The eastern coast of the island faces into the Atlantic Ocean and can have strong surf in parts of the shore which are unprotected by fringing coral reefs.

The colour of the sand on the beaches of Nevis is variable: on a lot of the bigger beaches the sand is a yellow-grey in colour, but some beaches on the southern coast have darker, reddish, or even black sand. Under a microscope it becomes clear that Nevis sand is a mixture of tiny fragments of coral, many foraminifera, and small crystals of the various mineral constituents of the volcanic rock of which the island is made.

Geology

Seven volcanic centers make up Nevis. These include Round Hill (3.43 Ma), Cades Bay (3.22 Ma), Hurricane Hill (2.7 Ma), Saddle Hill (1.8 Ma), Butlers Mountain (1.1 Ma), Red Cliff and Nevis Peak (0.98 Ma). These are mainly andesite and dacite lava domes, with associated block and ash flows, plus lahars. Nevis Peak has the highest elevation, at 984 m. Cades Bay and Farm Estate Soufriere are noted areas of hydrothermal activity.

Water has been piped since 1911 from a spring called the "Source", located up the mountain, to storage tanks at Rawlins Village, and since 1912, to Butler's Village. Additional drinking water comes from Nelson's Spring near Cotton Ground and Bath Spring. Groundwater has been extracted since the 1990s, and mixed with the Source water.

Colonial deforestation

During the 17th and 18th centuries, massive deforestation was undertaken by the planters as the land was initially cleared for sugar cultivation. This intense land exploitation by the sugar and cotton industry lasted almost 300 years, and greatly changed the island's ecosystem.

In some places along the windswept southeast or "Windward" coast of the island, the landscape is radically altered compared with how it used to be in pre-colonial times. Due to extreme land erosion, the topsoil was swept away, and in some places at the coast, sheer cliffs as high as have developed.

Thick forest once covered the eastern coastal plain, where the Amerindians built their first settlements during the Aceramic period, complementing the ecosystem surrounding the coral reef just offshore. It was the easy access to fresh water on the island and the rich food source represented by the ocean life sheltered by the reef that made it feasible for the Amerindians to settle this area around 600 BC. With the loss of the natural vegetation, the balance in runoff nutrients to the reef was disturbed, eventually causing as much as 80 percent of the large eastern fringing reef to become inactive. As the reef broke apart, it, in turn, provided less protection for the coastline.

During times of maximum cultivation, sugar cane fields stretched from the coastline of Nevis up to an altitude at which the mountain slopes were too steep and rocky to farm. Nonetheless, once the sugar industry was finally abandoned, vegetation on the leeward side of the island regrew reasonably well, as scrub and secondary forest.

Water resources

Nevis has several natural freshwater springs (including Nelson's Spring). The island also has numerous non-potable volcanic hot springs, including most notably the Bath Spring near Bath village, just south of the capital Charlestown.

After heavy rains, powerful rivers of rainwater pour down the numerous ravine

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