A report counts six thousand Africans on St Vincent

In 1722 the second Duke of Montagu tried to plant British colonists on St Vincent. John Brathwaite, the captain who handled the talks with the Caribs, reported seeing at least five hundred Africans on the island. A report of 1735 put the population at six thousand Africans and four thousand Amerindians. A third figure, from the elder William Young in 1767, counted only two thousand Caribs. Every one of these numbers should be handled carefully. The Caribs kept Europeans off the windward half of the island, so nobody surveying could walk where they wanted, and the population itself moved with the fighting. The figures do not establish quantity. What they establish between them is direction. Over roughly seventy years an island that European powers had agreed to leave alone filled up with people escaping the plantations of the islands around it, and by the time British settlers arrived after 1763 they faced several thousand inhabitants organised against exactly what they had come to build.