I found such a wealth of information about the six nations split by the conjunction “AND” that I had to divide them into two articles. The first article covered Antigua and Barbuda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. This one will finish the remaining nations, continuing in alphabetical order. Once again I want to focus extra attention on the junior partner, the unfortunate geographic unit at the trailing end of each arrangement.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Another Caribbean nation, another conjoined arrangement, this one found far down the chain of the Windward Islands. The native Caribs protected Saint Vincent fiercely and blocked colonization until the Eighteenth Century. Meanwhile they accepted escaped African slaves who sought refuge from nearby islands such as Barbados, Saint Lucia and Grenada.
Their intermingled descendants, the Black Caribs, bedeviled European colonists for decades. French, British and Black Caribs all fought for control. Revolts by Black Caribs remained common and frequent even after Britain finally gained the upper hand. It was a mess. The French shifted their focus to Martinique instead.
Grenadines
Speaking of messes, the Grenadines didn’t fall entirely within Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The Grenadines needed to be tagged onto a larger entity because they couldn’t thrive as a nation on their own. They were too small and spread across a long string of ocean. It might have made sense to collect all of the Grenadines together — and the British made attempts over the years — but it just never happened.
Thus, when independence came in 1979, the upper two-thirds of the Grenadines became an integral part of the new Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the remaining portion joined Grenada to the south. Someone living on the island of Carriacou in the Grenadines, for example, lived in Grenada, not Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Fortunately Grenada didn’t call itself “Grenada and the Grenadines” because that would have created even more confusion.
The Grenadines portion of the nation retained a smaller population with only about ten thousands residents, or ten percent of the overall national population. About half of those people live on the island of Bequia (map). The remainder were spread amongst four other populated islands and two privately-owned resort islands.
São Tomé and Príncipe
Nobody lived on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe when Portuguese navigators stumbled upon them in the Gulf of Guinea off the western coast of Africa. Portugal thought those unclaimed, uninhabited islands would make an ideal offshore base for commercial relationships with the continent. So they colonized both islands during the Sixteenth Century and it became a cornerstone of their slave trade. The nation has remained a relatively stable democracy much of the time since gaining independence in 1975. It also formed one of the smallest African nations with only a couple of hundred thousand citizens.
Príncipe
Príncipe (map) was much smaller than São Tomé and it had only about five thousand residents. The name came from the Portuguese word for Prince, specifically Prince Afonso, son of King John II, named for his grandfather King Afonso V. He was the heir apparent to the Portuguese throne although he didn’t live long enough to become its king. Prince Afonso died in a horse riding accident in 1491, still in his teens.
Trinidad and Tobago
It seemed odd that FOUR of the nations included on the list once served as Caribbean colonies of the British Empire: Antigua and Barbuda; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; and finally Trinidad and Tobago rounding out the cast. Clearly the British found it convenient to cluster island possessions into groups to govern them more efficiently.
Trinidad and Tobago took a different twist than the others. Both islands had been well established with their own distinctive histories, just off the northern coast Venezuela. Trinidad had roots as a Spanish colony before Britain seized the island in the late Eighteenth Century.
Tobago
Tobago, on the other hand, seemingly traded hands regularly. Colonies on Tobago were established, captured, destroyed, rebuilt, and recaptured with alarming frequency, by several different European powers including Spain, England, France and the Netherlands. There was also another player involved — one I never knew about — the Courlanders. Often it was the Dutch and the Courlanders who tussled over Tobago.
The Courlanders came from the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, an area now found in Latvia (map). They seemed like an unlikely power, and yet the Courlanders maintained a great merchant fleet that sailed around the world. The Duchy traded extensively in the New World too. Tobago was their attempt to establish a formal colony in the Caribbean. They tried numerous times and ultimately failed along a section of the island that bears its name, Great Courland Bay (map).
Tobago eventually grafted onto Trinidad but only because of economic reasons. The British Empire site explained:
“The 1880s was to confirm that the old plantocracy was indeed in trouble. The price of sugar had continued to drop… 1884 shocked the economy of the island when its largest employer and landowner ceased trading… The British sought to ameliorate the situation by administratively joining Tobago to the larger island of Trinidad to its south. This southwards move was intended to ensure that Britain avoided taking on debt and expensive provisions for Tobago and transferring the liability to the colony of Trinidad.”
That arrangement remained in place when independence was granted in 1962, and it remains Trinidad and Tobago today.
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