Montserrat

Montserrat is a 40-square-mile island of the British West Indies in the Leewards, southwest of Antigua. Montserrat's history is one of conflict between the French and the British, and between the planter and slave classes.

Columbus discovered the island in 1493, but it was not until 1625 that Charles I of England issued letters patent for its settlement. Irish colonists arrived in 1632 and immediately suffered raids by the Caribs of Dominica. In 1666 hostilities between the British and the French broke out in the Leeward Islands, and after the French captured Montserrat in 1667, the Irish defenders swore loyalty to the Catholic French sovereign. In 1737 the English governor William Mathew began removing the disabilities of Roman Catholics in the Leewards. Further conflicts led to the Treaty of Versailles (September 1783), which returned Montserrat to the British crown. In 1805 French troops ransomed the island for £7500.

A British decree in 1816 divided the Leeward Islands into two governorships, and in 1834 the colony of Antigua (including Montserrat and Barbados) became the first West Indian colony to declare all slaves free. The Leeward Islands Act of 1956 dissolved the colonies in the Leeward Isles, although Montserrat elected to remain a British crown colony. Although Montserrat's population was once estimated at twelve thousand, as of the early years of the twenty-first century it was roughly one-third of what it had been. This was due to a number of natural disasters in the late twentieth century. In September 1989 Hurricane Hugo damaged over 90 percent of the structures on the island. These were rebuilt, but in July 1995 the island's Soufrière Hills volcano erupted, burying the capital city of Plymouth in over forty feet of mud, destroying the island's airport, and rendering the entire southern half of the island unfit for human habitation. A new airport opened in 2005.

See alsoLeeward Islands .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. B. Labat, The Memoirs of Père Labat, translated by John Eaden (1931).

Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (1954).

Howard A. Fergus, History of Alliouagana: A Short History of Montserrat (1985).

Additional Bibliography

Britnor, L. E., and Charles Freeland. Montserrat to 1965. Hail Weston, U.K.: British West Indies Study Circle, 1998.

Farnsworth, Paul, ed. Island Lives: Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.

O'Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

                                   Christopher T. Bowen