Eyre complained in 1865 that the young and strong were good for nothing and were filling the jails; but a simultaneous report by a missionary told the truth concerning the officials.  This aroused the colored people, and a mulatto, George William Gordon, called a meeting.  Other meetings were afterward held, and finally the Negro peasantry began a riot in 1861, in which eighteen people were killed, only a few of whom were white.

The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial 354 persons, and in addition to this killed without trial 85, a total of 439.  One thousand Negro homes were burned to the ground and thousands of Negroes flogged or mutilated.  Children had their brains dashed out, pregnant women were murdered, and Gordon was tried by court-martial and hanged.  In fact the punishment was, as the royal commissioners said, “reckless and positively barbarous."[89]

This high-handed act aroused England.  Eyre was not punished, but the island was made a crown colony in 1866, and given representation in the legislature in 1886.

In the island of St. Vincent, Indians first sought to enslave the fugitive Negroes wrecked there, but the Negroes took the Carib women and then drove the Indian men away.  These “black Caribs” fought with Indians, English, and others for three quarters of a century, until the Indians were exterminated.  The British took possession in 1763.  The black Caribs resisted, and after hard fighting signed a treaty in 1773, receiving one-third of the island as their property.  They afterward helped the French against the British, and were finally deported to the island of Ruatan, off Honduras.  In Trinidad and British Guiana there have been mutinies and rioting of slaves and a curious mingling of races.

Other parts of South America must be dismissed briefly, because of insufficient data.  Colombia and Venezuela, with perhaps eight million people, have at least one-third of their population of Negro and Indian descent.  Here Simon Bolivar with his Negro, mulatto, and Indian forces began the war that liberated South America.  Central America has a smaller proportion of Negroids, perhaps one hundred thousand in all.  Bolivia and Peru have small amounts of Negro blood, while Argentine and Uruguay have very little.  The Negro population in these lands is everywhere in process of rapid amalgamation with whites and Indians.

FOOTNOTES: 

[76] H.O.  Flipper’s translation of Castaneda de Nafera’s narrative.

[77] Johnston:  Negro in the New World, p. 109.

[78] Bryce:  South America, pp. 479-480.

[79] I.e., mulattoes.

[80] Inter-Racial Problems, p. 381.

[81] Smith:  General History of Virginia.

[82] La Croix:  Memoires sur la Revolution, I, 253, 408.

[83] Marquis d’Hermonas.  Cf.  Johnston:  Negro in the New World, p. 158.