Treasure Up in Smoke

by David Williams

  ‘Hm. I should have thought Peregrine could have handled that on his own. What shall we do for encores – buy back Long Island?’ She broke into the opening bars of ‘Rule, Britannia’ that make the introduction to ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen got out in the midday sun’ – a not entirely inappropriate overture for events soon to follow.

  CHAPTER II

  It would be no more than fairly accurate to say that Columbus discovered what later came to be called King Charles Island on 16 May 1503. He was beating up from Panama towards Hispaniola at the time, and during his fourth visit to the New World. He was behind schedule, well west of where he intended to be, and distinctly blast about the superabundance of hitherto unidentified and boring-looking landfalls attending the voyage. A rough translation of his son’s journal runs: ‘We did sight a treacherous-seeming island well populated by sea birds and thickly vegetated, the whole at ransom to a towering, vast volcano at the north. We did not tarry.’ This somewhat discouraging first review appears to have summed up the attitude of traders and potential setders alike for well over a century.

  Los Pajaros, as the island was called by the Spanish, lies some 150 miles due east of the Caymans, and ninety miles north-west of Jamaica. Shaped a little like a miniature Ireland, it is small – only seven miles north to south, and five miles wide. Strategically it was not considered commanding, its shores were uninviting, it offered little that anyone might want to take away – except fresh water – and for a reason lost in antiquity it acquired the reputation of being the haunt of evil spirits. For all these reasons the Carib Indians who had made the island their home were left to live there undisturbed for quite a long time – in sharp contrast to the fate their race suffered at the hands of European infiltrators practically everywhere else in the Caribbean.

  The Caribs acquired their warlike and savage reputation chiefly on account of their excusably warlike and savage attitude to the white usurpers, who found their presence inconvenient and slaughtered them in large numbers. In the ordinary way the Caribs lived sensible, ordered and contented lives. The womenfolk – of legendary beauty – were model wives. It is recorded that they spent most of their time massaging their husbands’ bodies, and knitting them hammocks. The men, handsome and fearless, were expert hunters, well versed in the art of camouflage. Independent by nature, they found obedience to superiors intolerable and slavery more so. Clearly, they had to go.

  The Caribs who had fetched up on Los Pajaros maintained a perfectly adequate existence from its natural resources – fish, birds and fruit – plus the progeny of some wild boar which had been put ashore by the Spaniards at the time when those compulsive colonists thought it prudent, as it were, in passing, to drop livestock on every island that looked capable of sustaining life. The evil spirits that discouraged proper European settlement were taken in their stride by the Caribs. A logical race, they had never seen the point of worshipping the provider of all things bright and beautiful. Instead they made sacrifices to Manitou, the source of all things dark and nasty, beseeching him not to be horrid to them. In this they were some way ahead of European scepticism which, two centuries later, questioned the credibility of a deity that created evil as well as good. True to form, the Caribs gave the name Manitou to the volcano that dominated their home – and so it is still known today.

  When a certain Michael O’Hara and party landed on the south-east corner of Los Pajaros in the January of 1652 they were met by hails of arrows and a well-practised display of fearsome mumbo-jumbo intended to strike terror in their hearts and send them packing. This strategy had worked often enough with less determined groups, who had gone paddling back to their ships long before the performance was over. O’Hara was a different class of caller.

  He had been chased out of Ireland for debt, forced out of England for being a Catholic, and successively hounded from Barbados and Jamaica for being a Royalist. O’Hara and the like-minded band he was leading were too desperate to be discouraged by a few missiles and an overacted exhibition of black magic. They advanced upon the Caribs, who promptly withdrew in astonishment. Too much pork and massage had taken their toll. The natives had become soft. They mounted a fresh attack but their hearts simply were not in it, and they were so well camouflaged that O’Hara and party actually underestimated their strength; otherwise the Europeans might not have been quite so courageous. A parley was arranged and a truce declared, leading eventually to a lasting peace with everybody’s interests respected – well, almost.

  O’Hara was an able and energetic man, – a farmer by occupation. Father Ignatius Kennedy, spiritual adviser to the group, was an enterprising Jesuit with a genius for organization. They had come prepared with sugar, potato, tobacco, hemp and other seed crops. Not everything they planted proved suitable or as useful as they had hoped, but they quickly transformed the internal economy of the island. The Caribs were not natural farmers but their womenfolk were soon conditioned to adding field work to their other duties.

  The settlers renamed the island King Charles, in memory of their recently beheaded monarch, and as a snub to Oliver Cromwell. They made their first settlement where they had landed – at the bottom right-hand corner of the island – and called it Rupertstown to welcome the king’s nephew who led an anti-Cromwellian expedition to the West Indies in the same year. Unfortunately Rupert failed to locate Barbados – though in all conscience it was big enough – and his small fleet was dispersed by a hurricane before it reached King Charles. The compliment was not altogether wasted, however. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the island was formally recognized as a Crown Colony with Michael O’Hara as its Governor. Soon after, Prince Rupert became a person of great influence in the Board of Trade. It was thanks to his intervention that the Royalist inhabitants of KCI were excused all export taxes for ten years.

  With the increase in piracy masquerading as privateering against the King’s enemies, Rupertstown with its natural harbour came to enjoy great popularity as a supply post during the last part of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Henry Morgan and later Edward Teach – better known as Blackbeard – were only the most famous of a long line of valued customers.

  Parts of the island coastline on the north were also ideally suited for the arrangement of wreckings – employment that the Irish settlers supervised with pretended diffidence but which the Caribs took to like professionals. The salvaged cargoes consisted mainly of slaves. O’Hara had wisely decreed that the slave population should never be allowed to exceed the combined number of settlers and Caribs. Although his ruling stemmed from political and economic rather than from moral motives, its observation was to have profound and far-reaching effects, while making him immensely rich in the short term. The rescued slaves were sold on to Virginia. Ten per cent of the price fetched was paid as a levy to the Governor, while from around 1666 the slaves were carried in O’Hara ships.

  It should not be construed from all this that Michael O’Hara was primarily a selfish and greedy man, for above all else he was a cunning one. From the very beginning, King Charles was organized on apparently enlightened principles. The first island constitution awarded each settler family one hundred acres, and every mature Carib male ten acres. The land allocated to the Europeans tended to be on the flatter areas of the island – to the west, the south and the east. Carib territory happened to fall in the hilly north, around Mount Manitou.

  There remained some 10,000 unallocated acres – about half the island – which the Governor kept in trust for the King at a peppercorn rent. Since very few of the Europeans actually wanted to farm – they were mostly seafaring people – and almost all the Caribs at first despised agrarian pursuits as unexciting – it had been left to O’Hara and Father Kennedy to manage the plantations, renting back a good deal of the land, working it with a small but cared-for slave force mostly owned by the Governor and the Church. O’Hara’s and everybody else’s sugar, tobacco and other crops were processed through efficient, big refineries and
factories on a ‘co-operative’ basis. These were also owned by O’Hara.

  Prince James River – there was no end to the sycophantic nomenclature – naturally became Crown property. Its sources lay in the wooded hills around Mount Manitou, and while its course was plagued by frequent rapids and in one place a gigantic waterfall, it did provide a rudimentary method of transporting produce by raft through the long centre of the island down to the estuary in Rupertstown. Logs for building ships and houses came that way – felled from the wide strip of land that flanked the river banks and which formed part of the Governor’s title.

  It is questionable that O’Hara would have succeeded in creating what amounted to a personal kingdom had it not been for the blessing and complicity of the One True Church. The original settlers were all devout Catholics mindful of past persecution – grateful for deliverance and freedom. As for the Caribs, they quickly recognized the doctrine of transubstantiation as entirely consistent with refined voodoo and came joyfully to Mass.

  Michael O’Hara died in 1713 at the age of ninety-one. He had long since been succeeded as Governor by his son John (1661-1742), the progeny of his formal union with a Carib girl following the death of his first wife in 1659. While the marriage cemented relations between the whites and the Caribs, it was also the reason why Michael had not retired to Ireland or England. Thus, in several ways, he set a pattern for succeeding generations of O’Haras, all of whom regarded KCI as ‘home’, none of whom married pure white women, few of whom failed to live to great ages, and all of whom – with the exception of the present generation – succeeded in producing legitimate male heirs, including Matthew O’Hara (1788-1869), who accomplished that ambition at the age of 72.

  Nine generations of O’Haras have prospered on King Charles. Seven produced Governors – Matthew, the last of these, resigned the office on his seventy-fifth birthday in 1863 having first built himself an elaborate Gothic palace on the hill behind Government House: it completely dominates the other building. Both houses look down on the harbour nearby, and to the west.

  For more than three hundred years the economic, ethnic, and religious order that Michael O’Hara set up on the island has underpinned a relative prosperity for the inhabitants – this in sharp contrast to the misfortunes suffered by communities in other parts of the Caribbean. The decline of the sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco industries in the area did not bring disaster; KCI was not reliant on any of these except for its own needs. The failure of other island governments to produce sufficientb fresh vegetables, dairy produce and meat only demonstrated their indifference to good example. The potato was only the first root crop brought to King Charles. Successive O’Haras introduced others, plus tomatoes, cabbages, and a variety of green vegetables, all farmed on an adequate scale. It was Matthew’s son, Terence (1860-1935), who at the turn of the present century developed a cross breed of cattle ideally suited to the climate and feedstuffs available: these beasts tended to resemble undersized Indian Zebu but they milked like Jerseys and tasted like tough Aberdeen Angus.

  The end of slavery in 1834 had caused few problems on King Charles. The newly emancipated actually made up a minority of the population, and virtually all were at least third or fourth generation Carleons – as the inhabitants of the island liked to be called; a title derived from the Spanish ‘Carlos’ was deemed preferable to being known as Charlies even all those years ago. Matthew O’Hara, schooled in England, had long been convinced of the inevitability of abolition. The education he afforded his slaves and the fairly generous land grants he made to them – mortgaged by their labour – ensured they were quickly assimilated into the free population.

  By the end of the nineteenth century the population of KCI had become as close knit and isolationist as it is today. Nor had it been necessary to import Chinese and Asians to add to the ethnic mix when the need for cheap labour produced this recourse in other parts of the Caribbean. Sugar was the only – and seasonally – labourintensive industry, and it was a relatively small one. The O’Haras as paymasters to the island balanced the agricultural output as well as the books. There was never any stigma attached to cutting cane because no one needed to rely on that temporary occupation alone for a living. Even in modern times the KCI sugar crop on the O’Hara estates is largely managed by hand and not machine, with no shortage of hands for the task.

  Just as the founders of modern King Charles had been seafarers, so has the tradition been carried on. Under sail and steam Carleons established a reputation as seamen and any excess of population has always been easily accommodated at sea. Over a third of the male population at any time in the last hundred years has been gainfully employed afloat – serving under the flags of many nations and remitting valuable foreign currency back to the island.

  It is only fair to add that for the first half of the twentieth century KCI’s healthy economy was in very large measure supported by an export the population had done nothing to develop and, albeit inadvertently, a good deal to hinder before its potential was realized. The younger Columbus had noted the incidence of bird life. Without question he was recording his observations of Gull Rock – a two-mile long and (once elevated) narrow island lying a short distance from the mainland, beginning half-way up the west coast of King Charles and skirting it northwards. The property of the O’Haras, the bird sanctuary contained one of the richest and most conveniently exploitable deposits of guano in the world. It took fifty years to use up this fortune – the single greatest source of wealth the O’Haras ever enjoyed.

  The exhaustion of KCI guano available for export to the fertilizer manufacturers of the USA, and thus the reduction of Gull Rock from a towering outcrop to a small plateau a few feet above sea level, might have been expected to alter the island’s economy as much as its western landscape. Happily there was no discernible drop in standards, nor in the ability or willingness of the O’Haras to ensure popular contentment through the taxes the family paid and the gifts it made.

  The Michael O’Hara Primary Schools – there were five – the Ignatius Kennedy Memorial Grammar School, and the King Charles Agricultural College provided an adequate educational facility for the young of KCI. There were also numerous O’Hara Bursaries to enable promising pupils to continue their studies in Britain and elsewhere.

  Various O’Hara Trusts had been formed over the years to fund the provision and future survival of a small hospital and libraries, as well as pensions for that very large percentage of the island’s 7800 inhabitants directly employed by O’Hara companies.

  The Roman Catholic Church continued as a major beneficiary of the family largesse – and the second biggest influence in the community. Other denominations were tolerated, but while there were Anglican and Baptist churches on the island, they numbered between them scarcely five hundred adherents, mostly lapsed.

  There were no political parties on KCI. The Governor, appointed from the UK, chaired an Executive Council of three – the other two members were drawn from an elected Legislative Assembly of seven. This arrangement had obtained since 1882. Significantly, no O’Hara had been formally involved as a member of the Assembly or the Council since old Matthew had resigned the Governorship in 1863 and retired to his imperious new abode. Since that time successive Governors had been obliged to climb the hill to seek O’Hara approval or direction on any and every issue affecting the island’s economy and organization. The Gothic pile had not been named Buckingham House without reason.

  It was Patrick O’Hara (1890-1962) who had exploited the guano deposits and who, when these were exhausted, had thrown a good deal of energy into the production of King Charles Cigars. It was no surprise that after a fairly modest start this activity – in relative terms – grew to be immensely successful. After the Cuban revolution in 1959 the consumption of Havana cigars was declared an un-American activity, and it was natural that this created a marketing opportunity in the USA for cigars produced less than eighty miles from the Cuban shore. All this lent even greater credence to o
ld Patrick’s reputation for perspicacity. The fact remained that KCI cigars were in no way superior to Jamaican, and the output was small. Still, they fetched an endrmous price on the American market as was demonstrated by the audited accounts of the O’Hara Tobacco Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of O’Hara Industries Ltd.

  King Charles Island had not joined the ill-fated Caribbean Federation, so that it was hardly affected when that alliance disintegrated in 1962 – as Patrick O’Hara had prophesied it would. However, the last event was used to justify the holding of a referendum to give the people of KCI the opportunity of voting whether they wished to remain a Crown Colony or to become independent. Ninety-three per cent of the enfranchised population exercised their rights in the polling booths, and all but five elected to remain under the British yoke. The number should have been seven, but two of those instructed to vote this way – to offer proof of the absence of duress – lost heart at the last minute.

  A visit four years later from the United Nations Decolonization Committee served only to confirm the astonishing fact that the islanders carried their colonial status with pride, and considered the whole enquiry to be at best facetious and at worst an affront to their individual and national liberties. The Committee members flew away bewildered – most of them back to homes in newly emerged countries torn by civil strife, political corruption and general famine. The inhabitants of King Charles, they ruminated, were a backward people quite undeserving of the contentment they enjoyed.

  Joseph Michael O’Hara, the 63-year-old bachelor head of KCI’s First Family, sat silent and thoughtful at his desk in the dark-oak panelled library of Buckingham House. He had always found the interior of his home conducive to contemplation. Being a man of some sensitivity he tried to avoid contemplating – or even gazing at – its hideous exterior.