In its system of elementary éducation Barbados does not differ much from other West Indian colonies: in respect of higher education it stands far ahead of them. It is the only colony where a school may be found, viz. Harrison's College, of the type of the large English public schools; and in Codrington College, affiliated to Durham University, it has the one collegiate institution in this part of the world, endowed by a Barbadian, who had learnt at Oxford to value University teaching and college life1. Of the elementary schools, all of which are denominational and the majority connected with the Church of England, there are 167 in receipt of Government grants; there are also five second-grade schools, and a high school and two second-grade schools for girls, while four scholarships are granted by the colony, tenable at any University or College in Europe or Canada, or at any Agricultural or Technical College in Europe or America that may be approved by the Education Board. Barbados, as has been said, lies by itself beyond the ring of the Caribbean Islands. It is further to the east than the rest of the West Indies, and is therefore the natural point of call from the mother-country, from which it is separated by 4,000 miles of Atlantic ocean. It is about 100 miles due east of the island of St. Vincent, about 400 miles from British Guiana, 280 from Antigua, 1,000 from Jamaica, and 1,200 from the Bermudas. The nearest foreign neighbour is the French island of Martinique. In history, as in geography, it stands apart from the other 1 Barbados owes Codrington College to the bequest of Christopher Codrington, a member of the family of that name so well known in West Indian history. He was born in Barbados, and was an undergraduate of Christ Church and a Probationer Fellow of All Souls, to which latter college he left his books and a sum of money to build a library. He succeeded his father as Governor of the Leeward Islands in 1698, and died at Barbados in 1710. By his will he left two plantations in Barbados, called Conset's and Codrington's, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, then recently incorporated, for the maintenance of professors and scholars to study divinity and medicine. The building was begun in 1716, but was not finished for many years afterwards. West Indian islands. Of all the West Indies it is perhaps the purest specimen of a colony as opposed to a dependency, and of all the British possessions in the Caribbean Sea it has the most unbroken British traditions. The English found it an empty island, and they peopled it, bringing in after them African slaves. No native element was ousted by them, no foreign nation ever had Barbados in its keeping. Englishmen came there to live, not to trade merely or to rule. The rapidity of its growth is almost unparalleled in the history of colonization; and it is evidence at once of the prosperity which free trade brought in early colonizing days, and of the number of emigrants who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, were leaving England for the West. On the other hand, the story of the Civil War shows that there was quality as well as quantity in the emigration, that the men who went out were whole-hearted men, who meant to make the island their home, and meant that home to be a free, self-governed one. From its geographical position as an outpost in the Atlantic, Barbados in early days attracted English sailors and English settlers, and, lying so far out to sea, its climate was better suited to Englishmen than that of the other parts of the western tropics. In tropical lands Englishmen, as a rule, cannot settle, live, and thrive. In Barbados they could and did, and the history of the island, with its long generations of English inhabitants, is the most striking exception to the rule that the tropics must be peopled by others than the nations of northern Europe. Yet even in Barbados, once the black race was introduced, it soon outnumbered the white, and the terrible mortality of the white servants imported into the plantations showed that, even if Europeans can live in the tropics, they must at least find coloured races to do the manual work. Barbados is an island of which the utmost has been made; almost every available acre of its surface is, and always has been, under careful cultivation; and, if the question were to be asked, how far the capabilities of a land and its people are developed under British rule, it would be well to instance this densely peopled, richly-cultivated little island, which, from the days of the first settlers down to the present moment has, even in times of trouble and distress, been so pre-eminently full of life. BOOKS RELATING TO BARBADOS. LIGON'S True and exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657) is a contemporaneous account of the island by an eye-witness at its most interesting time. Of later books, SCHOMBURGK's History of Barbados (London, 1848) is full and exhaustive in every particular; and MR. DARNELL DAVIS'S Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados (Georgetown, British Guiana, 1887) gives a most minute and interesting account of the island to the end of the Civil War, with a number of curious details bearing on the. West Indies generally. CHAPTER VI THE WINDWARD ISLANDS THE Windward Islands colony consists of the islands of St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada, which lie almost due north of each other in the order given, and of the chain of islets between St. Vincent and Grenada, known as the Grenadines. They are not a single colony, but a confederation of three separate colonies, with a common Executive in the person of the Governor-in-Chief, who resides at Grenada. At the same time, they are near to each other, and in history and traditions they have much in common. Grenada was discovered by Columbus on his third voyage in 1498, and was named by him Concepcion, its present name, so familiar to Spanish ears, being given at some unknown subsequent date. On the same voyage he is said to have discovered St. Vincent, though the record is quite uncertain. The discovery of St. Lucia is popularly set down to his fourth voyage in 1502; but the new island, which he then sighted, and which was known to the natives as Mantinino, was not St. Lucia, but the neighbouring island of Martinique1. St. Vincent and St. Lucia were probably named after the days on which they were discovered, St. Vincent's day being the twenty-second of January, St. Lucy's the thirteenth of December. St. Lucia was also known in French guise as St. Alousie; and other forms of the name, as e. g. St. Alouziel, occur in early notices of the island. It may be assumed that the three islands were discovered by 1 See Washington Irving's Columbus, bk. xv. ch. i. |
