Montserrat: History

Pre-20th-Century History

Amerindians called the island Alliouagana, meaning 'Land of the Prickly Bush'. When Columbus sighted the island in 1493, he named it Montserrat, as its craggy landscape reminded him of the serrated mountains above the Monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona, Spain.

The first settlers from Europe were Catholics, mainly Irish, who moved to Montserrat in 1632 to escape persecution from Protestant rule on neighbouring St Kitts. In the years that followed, Montserrat continued to attract Catholics from other New World colonies as well as new immigrants from Ireland. Many came as indentured servants who paid off their passage by toiling in the fields of the early plantations.

By the mid-17th century Montserrat was thick with sugarcane fields and the need for labour had outstripped the supply of Irish field hands. Over the next century thousands of African slaves were brought to Montserrat as the island developed the same slavery-based plantation economy found throughout the rest of the British West Indies.

For two centuries sugar production flourished and in its heyday in the 1760s more than 100 sugar plantations dotted the island. By the early 1800s the sugar market had deteriorated and with the abolition of slavery in 1834 many of the plantations slipped into decline. Some were divided among small farmers and planted with lime trees, a crop that attained a certain measure of success, but other estates were simply abandoned.

Montserrat has been under British control almost continuously since 1632. There were, of course, the usual skirmishes with the French, who held the island briefly in 1665 and 1712, thanks in part to assistance from Irish-born islanders who distrusted the English. The French moved in again in 1782, but the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, returned Montserrat permanently to the British.

Modern History

With the breakup of the Federation of the West Indies in 1962, Britain offered self-government to all its Caribbean dependencies. Montserrat, too small to stand alone, balked at being lumped into a coalition government with either Antigua or St Kitts and successfully petitioned the British to let it remain a Crown Colony.

Two-thirds of the population fled abroad because of the eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano that began on 18 July 1995, after 400 years of dormancy. From that moment, the island had to come to grips with living with an active volcano as a neighbour. Plymouth, the island's capital and only significant town, had the misfortune of being just a couple of miles from the volcano and was abandoned soon after the initial eruptions smothered it with ash.

Of the population of little more than 10,000, some 7000 were evacuated altogether and the rest relocated to the north.

Recent History

Because the volcano is still active, it periodically produce superheated fast-moving pyroclastic flows - a mixture of hot ash, boulders and gas - which burst skyward or travel from the crater toward the ocean, destroying everything in their paths. In another major eruption in July 2003, the Soufrière's cone collapsed, shaving two-thirds off the top of the mountain and dramatically reshaping the horizon. On 3 March 2004, the volcano belched forth more ash and lava.

Today, the volcano is relatively quiet, it continues to produce volcano-tectonic earthquakes and belch out pyroclastic flows Observers insist the danger of further eruptions remains. The Daytime Entry Zone is open for viewing and volcano-related tourism is on the rise. Instead of waiting around for the volcano to calm down, the government of Montserrat moved to reorganise the island's infrastructure. A new airport was completed in 2005, and the initiative to move the capital to Carr's Bay is well underway.

Back to top ^