Abstract
Empires meant very little to St Hillaire Begorrat. He was the natural product of a world in which imperial loyalties were fluid and shifting. His sense of nationalism, like those of his fellow planters, vacillated throughout his life. Along with British merchant adventurers and émigré Europeans, creole planters like Begorrat played a fundamental role in shaping the politics of the Southern Caribbean, but nowhere more so than in Trinidad. They were, on the whole, a self-serving group of transient migrants with very little loyalty to anyone but themselves. Moving between nations, they had pursued their fortunes with scant regard for whichever colony they happened to be in. At the expense of the existing population and with few controls, they held all the major offices and controlled the government. Along with spies and agents, Thomas Picton was quickly dominated by men such as these. Not only would he emulate their style and habits, he would, to his detriment, add to their power. Subtly and slowly he would be drawn into their capricious world.
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Notes
For an excellent appraisal of the various campaigns fought by Britain and her allies in the Caribbean, see Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against Revolutionary France (Clarendon, Oxford, 1987). For details on Sir John Vaughan’s brief tenure as commander-in-chief, see in particular pp. 115–59.
Picton would die a wealthy man, however. He received several bequests during his later life as well as a small fortune won in the Peninsular War (1807–14) as prize money. His estates on Trinidad and his private estate in Wales were also of considerable value. Robinson also writes that ‘he was not entirely dependent upon his own exertions for future fortune, on the contrary, young Picton was entitled upon the death of his mother to considerable property; and this event which happened in his lifetime rendered him afterwards independent of any profession’: Robinson, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 2. Picton also received £5,000 upon the death of the Duke of Queensbury in 1810: see John William Cole, Memoirs of British Generals Distinguished During the Peninsular War 1807–1814 (Richard Bentley, London, 1856), p. 18.
Robinson, Memoirs; see also Frederick Myatt, Peninsular General (David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1980);
and Robert Havard, Wellington’s Welsh General: A Life of Sir Thomas Picton (Aurum, London, 1996), Chapter 1.
The Duke of Wellington began his career in a similar way and in a similar atmosphere of cynicism. There are many books on Wellington, but for this area, see Richard Holmes, Wellington: The Iron Duke (HarperCollins, London, 2003), in particular Chapter 1, ‘A Solitary Life’, pp. 1–35.
Iris Butler, The Eldest Brother: The Marquess Wellesley 1760–1842 (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1973) is an excellent (and alternative) view of Wellington’s early life and the beginnings of his military career — sent to military school in Brussels because the family could not afford a high enough commission.
V.S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (Picador, London, 2001, from the original published by Andre Deutsch, 1969), p. 176.
For the structure and the influence of Port of Spain Cabildo, see P.C. Borde, Histoire de L’Isle de la Trinidad Sous le Gouvernement Espagnol, 2 vols (Maisonneuve, Paris, 1882), vol. 1, p. 239.
The best overview of the Cabildo is James Millette, The Genesis of Crown Colony Government: Trinidad 1783–1810 (Moko Enterprises, Curepe, 1970).
Anthony de Verteuil, A History of Diego Martin 1784–1884 (Paria Publishing, Port of Spain, 1987), Chapter 2, pp. 41–67 and Plate 2.6, ‘Begorrat, the King’. De Verteuil is a direct descendant of Begorrat. Much of his analysis comes principally from three unpublished diaries/accounts. The first is The Diary of Edouard Le Cadre, which, as de Verteuil states, was ‘written by the nephew of St Hillaire Begorrat’s son-in-law, François Le Cadre. In 1813, as a precocious 14 year old he visited his relations in Diego Martin for two months … he again returned there from Martinique in 1827’: see de Verteuil, A History of Diego Martin, pp. 1–50. The second is the ‘Recit’ of Ferdinand Le Cadre. Ferdinand was the grandson of Begorrat. He wrote this short, unpublished autobiography in 1827 shortly before his early death aged 22. The third is the Diary of Francois D’Abadie, a cousin by marriage and a personal friend of Begorrat. The will of Pierre Begorrat, in 21 pages, gives evidence of the family background as well as of their extensive business operations: N.A.T.T, Book of Spanish Protocols, 1836, no. 24, ‘Last Will and Testament of Pierre Begorrat’. See also ‘The Last Will and Testament of St Hillaire Begorrat’, quoted in de Verteuil, A History of Diego Martin, pp. 5–10, from records kept at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago.
De Verteuil, A History of Diego Martin, pp. 5–10, a fact remarked upon by Lavaysse in his travelogue: see Jean Dauxion Lavaysse, A Statistical, Commercial and Political Description of Venezuela, Trinidad, Margarita and Tobago (Negro Universities Press, Westport, 1969; original edition Paris, 1820).
C.W. Day, Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies (J. Budd, London, 1852), pp. 46–8.
Jesse Noel, ‘Spanish Colonial Administration and the Socio-Economic Foundations of Trinidad 1777–1797’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1966; de Verteuil, A History of Diego Martin, p. 14.
H. Garcia (ed.), Documentos Relativos a la Revolution de Gaul y Espana (Checos, Caracas, 1949). See also the analysis of Noel, ‘Spanish Colonial Administration’; and Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado, pp. 163–4. In addition, see Vincente Emparin, Governor of Cumana to Pedro Carbonelli, Governor-General of Caracas, Massachusetts Historical Society, The Francis Russell Hart Collection 1573–1830, report no. 36. Box 1, Folder 33 (31 March 1797), which discusses in detail the problem of agents and of the dangerous subterfuge to be found on the now British Trinidad.
James Walvin, Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd edn (Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), pp. 70–2 and 144–5.
The origin of this argument is from Brown; for its compelling detail, see Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2006).
Abercromby’s successor Alex Cochrane was also an enthusiastic supporter of this kind of recruitment, firmly convinced that these African-American soldiers were to be ‘infinitely more dreaded by the Americans than the British troops’: see John Weiss, Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad 1815–16 (McNish and Weiss, London, 1995).
Don Cristoval de Robles, Recommendations: ‘… and a great proportion of the slaves who have been sent here from other islands for crimes dangerous to their safety.’ For example, in New York in the late eighteenth century it was not uncommon for transfers of difficult slaves to occur: see Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris (eds), Slavery in New York (New Press, New York, 2005), Chapter 2, ‘The Tightening Vice: Slavery and Freedom in British New York’, p. 85.
Patrick Lipscomb, ‘Party Politics, 1801–1802: George Canning and the Trinidad Question’, Historical Journal, 12(3) (1969), pp. 442–66.
L.M. Fraser, History of Trinidad in Two Volumes (Charles Reiss, Port of Spain, 1891), vol. 2, pp. 251–9.
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© 2012 Kit Candlin
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Candlin, K. (2012). The Planter and the Governor. In: The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030818_4
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