Caribbean

Amid jungles and mountains the negro hunters of the wild pig, or “mareno,” long put up a ferocious resistance to the British Governors of the island. By Simon Harcourt Smith.

J.H. Bennett introduces William Dampier, the circumnavigator of the globe, and the first Englishman to land in Australia, who spent part of his youth as a planter in Jamaica and a Caribbean buccaneer.

John Terraine observes how the British and French fleets crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic three months before Trafalgar.

John Terraine describes how, in the months before Trafalgar, the French Fleet from Toulon was ordered to the West Indies, but Nelson was convinced that their real aim was Egypt.

S. Pollard discusses one of history's most controversial financial reformers.

For much of the British Civil Wars the colony of Barbados remained neutral, allowing both Parliamentarian and Royalist exiles to run their plantations and trade side by side. But with the collapse of the king’s cause in the late 1640s matters took a violent turn, as Matthew Parker relates.

Devastating earthquakes have been chronicled on the island of Hispaniola for the past 500 years, writes Jean-François Mouhot.

The West Indies is home to a large and vibrant South Asian population descended from indentured labourers who worked the plantations after the abolition of slavery. The arrival of the first, from Bengal in 1838, is recorded in the journal of a young doctor who accompanied them, as Brigid Wells describes.

David Abulafia considers Columbus’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, and shows how they challenged European preconceptions about what it meant to be human.

As Fidel Castro finally hands over the reins of power after forty-nine years, Michael Simmons finds his country poised between past and future.