... St Vincent, [is] not a Caribbean island that people pay much attention to these days. In the 1790s it was the centre of the world or so I will try to convince you ... . ...

Alexandre Moreau de Jonnes, at the age of 80, ... published a memoir of his first career as a soldier, in which he revealed that he'd acted in the Caribbean during the wars of the 1790s as a agent of Revolutionary France, including making two secret visits to St Vincent where he'd been appointed by Victor Hugues to train Caribs in the use of fire-arms.

In late 1795 Moreau spent several months in a Carib village near the east coast of St Vincent, fascinated in equal degree by the social life of the savages, the tropical vegetation and crops around him, and the beauty of the chief's daughter, Eliama, aged eighteen, the same age as Moreau. He calls the village a paradise and says that it has always stayed in his memory as the place where he spent the happiest moments of his life. "This was truly Eden," he writes, "with its perpetual spring, its shady forests, its magnificent views, its flowering groves, [and] its singing birds. Nothing was missing, since a second Eve lived in this pleasant retreat."

Remember that this was in the middle of the most fearsome guerrilla war in Caribbean history.

Then, after a failed attack on British positions in December 1795, Moreau was recalled to Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues and only returned to St Vincent for his second visit after British reinforcements had turned the tide of the insurrection. This time, landing on the eastern coast in the spring of 1796, close to the village where he'd spent those idyllic months the previous year, the first thing Moreau finds is a massacred village men, women, children, old people, all hacked to death and their houses burned. Then he learns that both the chief and his daughter Eliama the Eve of his Carib paradise -- have been killed in the recent fighting. In fact, Moreau arrived just in time for the final defeat in June 1796, after which the French soldiers including Moreau -- were returned to France, while the Caribs were shipped to a small island off the coast and subsequently transported to Honduras. ...

None of this should, of course, be taken to imply that the French source is simply authoritative... However, Moreau's friendship with the Caribs did undoubtedly lead to greater intimacy and arguably to greater knowledge: during these four months Moreau lived in much closer daily contact with the Vincentian Caribs than any other outsider at this time, possibly during the whole course of the eighteenth century.,,,

We also get some sense from Moreau of the extent of Carib integration into the larger Caribbean world of the 1790s. After a storm in September 1795 destroys Carib crops, Moreau accompanies a group of Caribs on an overnight canoe trip to Trinidad with a supply of Spanish gold coins salted away after a shipwreck and which the Caribs use to buy food supplies and to charter three schooners to carry the supplies back to St Vincent. They operate perfectly happily within the money economy of the Caribbean. In addition, Moreau says, Carib pirogues were constantly on the move between the mouth of the Orinoco and the islands of the Bahamas, which meant they were well-informed about everything that was happening in the Caribbean. They were, Moreau says, Victor Hugues' eyes and ears, the intelligence force for revolutionary insurgence. All this is very far from the picture of primitive savages that Young propounds. (Moreau also has much to say about the prominent r™le that women played both in the Carib councils and in the actual fighting; of which there is no hint in the British sources.)

But the most striking and puzzling aspect of Moreau's evidence is that he lived and fought with a group he regarded as Yellow Caribs: he meets Black Caribs and even describes a kind of national council at which all indigenous leaders are present, but the picture that emerges from his account is of Yellow Carib dominance, both ideologically and numerically. The British, remember,were at this time estimating around 3000 Black Caribs and a very small number of Yellow Caribs: Moreau's numbers are 1500 Black Caribs and in excess of 6000 Yellow Caribs. This is an enormous discrepancy, even taking into account the difficulty of estimating population numbers at this time and in this terrain. So Moreau's evidence, never considered by historians or anthropologists, dramatically changes not just the picture of Carib lifeways but even the very constitution of racial and ethnic identity in St Vincent in the late eighteenth century; and therefore throws into question notions such as ethnogenesis by which anthropology has tended to approach the complexities of transculturation.

Moreau needs understanding against the background of the differential relationships with the Caribs established by the British and French during the second half of the eighteenth century. On St Vincent the French had small plantations where they grew coffee, tobacco, indigo,and cocoa, none of which had a deleterious effect on the environment, from a Carib point of view, while the British drive in the islands they gained at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 was to develop sugar plantations, which involved the large-scale destruction of the islands' forest, which the planters tended to see as especially malign. As a result, British contact with Caribs was infrequent, limited to the political leadership, and often antagonistic. The French also had a long commercial tradition of the coureurs des ”les, traders who would often dress as Carib, have Carib wives, and speak Carib Đand presumably at least on occasion simply become Carib. So on a number of counts the French were regarded more sympathetically by the Caribs and had closer socialand commercial relationships with them.

In addition, of course, the British had been actively involved since the 1770s in trying to remove the Caribs from St Vincent, andthe French as enemies of the British were Carib allies.

The comparison between William Young and Moreau de Jonnes is certainly instructive. Young compiled hishistory largely from his father's papers. His own personal knowledge of the Caribs was limited to the chiefs who visited him on his estate. He wrote as the Caribs' political opponent and with a view to getting the British government to remove the entire Carib community from the island. He keeps the Caribs as savages, yellow as good, black as dangerous: transculturation is recognised only in the form of the ethnogenesis which has brought two savage races together to form a "doubly-savage"race.

By contrast Moreau wrote as a Carib ally. He provides evidence of transculturation not just between Caribs and Africans, but also between Caribs and French, for which the most intriguing witness is the chief's daughter, Eliama,educated at a convent in Martinique, presumably able to pass as French, and yet dying as a Carib soldier by her father's side.

Certainly, if we map these two accounts onto contemporary anthropological models, then Young emphasises the purity and savagery of the Caribs, their absolute separateness both from the lifeways of the British and from the viewpoint of the observer, while Moreau emphasises transculturation, shared ideals in practice, and romance: a form of participation which might from ascientific point of view be thought to undermine objectivity, but which from an ethnographic point of view achieves what looks like an ideal temporary integration into the culture he's describing.

One of the conference questions asks "What underwrites colonial historiography?" I'd suggest that at least in this instance colonial historiography has been underwritten by a failure to look beyond the sources offered as authoritative by those who won the military victories that determined the course of Caribbean history. William Young's work is the most compromised and least informed of the three writers I've discussed; yet his book provides the version usually accepted as true; nobody writing Vincentian history reads Moreau de Jonnes,apparently because he wrote in French; and nobody reads Alexander Andersonbecause most of his manuscripts lie unpublished in the Linnean Society library inLondon.

Oneof the reasons why Moreau has not been visible for so long is perhaps that his kind of ethnographic imagination quickly disappeared as a scientific ideal, to be replaced formost of the nineteenth century by the physical anthropology to which Alexander Anderson had contributed and which Blumenbach and others were in the process of formulating in European laboratories. For that form of anthropology, identity was written in bone, in the form of your skull, and was clearly susceptible of no negotiation whatsoever: race was destiny. A study of cultural process formulated outside the blinkers of racial thinking would need to wait almost a century, for the equally revolutionary decade of the 1890s, and for the work of Jose Mart’.

Karl Eklund's Note: I have obtained a translation of Moreau's book that includes the Caribbean material. (I also have a translation that includes everything except the caribbean material!). I will try to get the text into electronic form and make it available in the near future.

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