I started this series of reflections on bittersweet anniversaries we share with the United States Virgin Islands with a Sept. 20 commentary on the beneficial results of the 1853 Cattle Tax Riots, titled, “Writer remembers bittersweet anniversaries.” That piece was followed by my proposals for commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 1867 hurricane and wreck of the Royal Mail Steamship Rhone next year (“Writer chronicles the hurricane of Oct. 1867” in the Oct. 27 edition).
Avid readers of the Beacon have asked me why I include references to previous contributions in my commentaries, as they couldn’t remember what I’d said then. That is just why I do it: To draw their attention to what I’ve written on the topic before, without having to repeat its contents. The Beacon archives many of my pieces on its website, although Google’s changes to its search engine may make finding specific items harder than it used to be.
Online archives of newspapers published overseas are an accessible but undervalued source of material for research into VI history. I shall take here the coverage of the 1853 riots and 1867 hurricane by United Kingdom newspapers archived in the British Newspaper Library as examples of the insight they can bring to situations on the ground. However, the archives of The New York Times provide another valuable resource of VI history.
Tortola ‘insurrection’
The London Times of Sept. 1, 1853 carried a long article on the “Insurrection at Tortola.” The report had been brought to Southampton, England on the RMS Magdalena on Aug. 31 among the “usual” West India Mails, but it included a far from usual report published in “The St. Thomas’s Times” not later than Aug. 13, and Captain Chapman, the Magdalena’s commanding officer, had been personally involved in the events it described.
The “St. Thomas’s Times” listed six properties in the country that had been destroyed in the riots and at least 32 in Road Town, mostly burnt down, including the courthouse and the president’s private secretary’s house with all its books and records. The superintendent of the Royal Mail Steampacket Company in St. Thomas responded to the refugees’ arrival in St. Thomas on the night of Aug. 2 by loading stores and water onto a small mail boat called the Lady M’gregor, and Royal Navy Lieutenant Tickell, the admiralty agent for the Magdalena, volunteered to go to the aid of Colonel Chads, the president of Tortola who had stayed on in Government House by himself. Captain Chapman provided him with a small band of heavily armed naval veterans.
Relief party
A party of Danish troops had left for Tortola on a schooner about an hour beforehand, but the Lady M’gregor reached Road Harbour at the same time, and Tickell and his men landed first. It took him some time to persuade Chads to let him in so late at night. However, he was very relieved to see a British officer standing outside and to be told about the arrival of the Danish troops, however late. He also wanted something to eat as his food had run out.
Having seen the troops landed and the governor well protected, Tickell returned to St. Thomas, with the first reliable accounts of the situation on Tortola and reassuring letters for Mrs. Chads from her husband.
However, Colonel Chads’s health had suffered so badly that an obituary in The Times for his brother dated April 9, 1869 observed that he had died on Tortola on Feb. 28, 1854, aged 60, while still in office as president of the “British Virgin Islands.” (The widespread belief here that this territory did not become known as the “British Virgin Islands” until after the US renamed the Danish West Indies “the Virgin Islands belonging to the USA” in 1917 is incorrect.)
Transatlantic telegraph
By 1867 the introduction of the transatlantic cable telegraph had transformed communications.
A newspaper with an office near the cable’s landfall station in Cornwall — Lake’s Falmouth Packet & Cornwall Advertiser — was able to report the wrecks on the day they happened, Oct. 29, 1867: “The Rhone, expected to call at Plymouth on or about Monday next with the fortnight’s homeward mails, lost at Peter Island, a small island near St. Thomas. The Why [Wye], lost at Brick [Buck] Island, another small island near St. Thomas. The Conway driven ashore at Tortola, another of the Virgin Islands.”
However, the respective allegiances of the smaller islands between St. Thomas and Tortola were not widely understood in Britain, even by the former colleagues of the victims of the wreck of the Rhone employed by the Royal Mail Steampacket Company. Their memorial in Southampton is dedicated to the officers and crew “lost during the hurricane at St. Thomas, West Indies” despite the wreck having occurred off Salt Island.
It was, though, the hurricane’s effects on land that at first caught the attention of most London and UK provincial papers with sensational headlines, some appearing somewhat tardily, like the Liverpool Daily Post’s story on Nov. 16, 1867 titled, “The submersion of Tortola, … the most important of the British Virgin Islands.”
I also saw a descriptive formula similar to the one that the US would use on Transfer Day: “Latest and telegraphic news of the Virgin Islands in the West Indies, belonging to Great Britain, situated between Virgin Gorda and St. Johns, … Tortola had a governor, council and legislative assembly. It became a British possession in 1666” (Liverpool Mercury, Nov. 16, 1867).
Other online sources
Council minutes and other official publications dating back to the late 1700s held by the Archives and Records Management Unit of the Deputy Governor’s Office are now only available from The National Archives digitally. However, there are still relevant papers to be discovered.
While the territory’s Memory of the World Committee was preparing an application for the addition of St. Philip’s in Kingstown (known as the Church of the Africans) to UNESCO’s MoW Register, a vast undocumented file of official papers on St. Philip’s alone was found in TNA’s online catalogue! Digitised copies of them are now available at the ARMU.
Volunteers are busy translating into English over 200,000 digitised documents that the Danish National Archives is releasing next year for the centenary of the USVI’s Transfer Day. These will include information about our shared histories and family migrations between the two colonies.
Oral history
Traditional ways of preserving memories of local communities include oral interviews like the Beacon’s regular “In their words” feature, but online variants are now being created every day by posts on online groups like Facebook’s BVI History and Heritage Group, to which former residents living abroad upload their old photographs of VI people and places for identification by members here.
This commentary is based on an unpublished paper on “Online archives of overseas newspapers as sources of BVI history” prepared for the fourth Caribbean Symposium on Genealogy & History from Nov. 20-24, 2014 on St. Croix.
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