The Conqueror

In the eighteenth century Nevis was known as The Mother of the English Leeward Caribbees.  A Captain-General ruled the group in the name of the King, but if he died suddenly, his itinerant duties devolved upon the Governor of Nevis until the crown heard of its loss and made choice of another to fill that high and valued office.  She had a Council and a House of Assembly, modelled in miniature upon the Houses of Peers and Commons; and was further distinguished as possessing the only court in the English Antilles where pirates could be tried.  The Council was made up of ten members appointed by the Captain-General, but commanded by “its own particular and private Governor.”  The freeholders of the Island chose twenty-four of their number to represent them in the House of Assembly; and the few chronicles of that day agree in asserting that Nevis during her hundred proud years of supremacy was governed brilliantly and well.  But the careful administration of good laws contributed in part only to the celebrity of an Island which to-day, still British as she is, serves but as a pedestal for the greatest of American statesmen.  In these old days she was a queen as well as a mother.  Her planters were men of immense wealth and lived the life of grandees.  Their cane-fields covered the mountain on all its sides and subsidiary peaks, rising to the very fringe of the cold forest on the cone of a volcano long since extinct.  The “Great Houses,” built invariably upon an eminence that commanded a view of the neighbouring islands.—­St. Christopher, Antigua, Montserrat,—­were built of blocks of stone so square and solid and with a masonry so perfect that one views their ruins in amazement to-day.  They withstood hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tidal waves.  They were impregnable fortresses against rioting negroes and spasmodically aggressive Frenchmen.  They even survived the abolition of slavery, and the old gay life went on for many years.  English people, bored or in search of health, came for the brilliant winter, delighted with the hospitality of the planters, and to renew their vitality in the famous climate and sulphur baths, which, of all her possessions, Time has spared to Nevis.  And then, having weathered all the ills to which even a West Indian Island can be subject, she succumbed—­to the price of sugar.  Her great families drifted away one by one.  Her estates were given over to the agent for a time, finally to the mongoose.  The magnificent stone mansions, left without even a caretaker, yielded helplessly to the diseases of age, and the first hurricane entering unbarred windows carried their roofs to the sea.  In Charles Town, the capital since the submergence of James Town in 1680, are the remains of large town houses and fine old stone walls, which one can hardly see from the roadstead, so thick are the royal palms and the cocoanut trees among the ruins, wriggling their slender bodies through every crevice and flaunting their glittering luxuriance above every broken wall.

But in the days when the maternal grandparents of Alexander Hamilton looked down a trifle upon those who dwelt on other isles, Nevis recked of future insignificance as little as a beauty dreams of age.  In the previous century England, after the mortification of the Royalists by Cromwell, had sent to Nevis Hamiltons, Herberts, Russells, and many another refugee from her historic houses.  With what money they took with them they founded the great estates of the eighteenth century, and their sons sent their own children to Europe to become accomplished men and women.  Government House was a miniature court, as gay and splendid as its offices were busy with the commerce of the world.  The Governor and his lady drove about the Island in a carriage of state, with outriders and postilions in livery.  When the Captain-General came he outshone his proud second by the gorgeousness of his uniform only, and both dignitaries were little more imposing than the planters themselves.  It is true that the men, despite their fine clothes and powdered perukes, preferred a horse’s back to the motion of a lumbering coach, but during the winter season their wives and daughters, in the shining stuffs, the pointed bodices, the elaborate head-dress of Europe, visited Government House and their neighbours with all the formality of London or Bath.  After the first of March the planters wore white linen; the turbaned black women were busy among the stones of the rivers with voluminous wardrobes of cambric and lawn.

Several estates belonged to certain offshoots of the ducal house of Hamilton, and in the second decade of the eighteenth century Walter Hamilton was Captain-General of the English Leeward Caribbees and “Ordinary of the Same.”  After him came Archibald Hamilton, who was, perhaps, of all the Hamiltons the most royal in his hospitality.  Moreover, he was a person of energy and ambition, for it is on record that he paid a visit to Boston, fleeing from the great drought which visited Nevis in 1737.  Then there were William Leslie Hamilton, who practised at the bar in London for several years, but returned to hold official position on Nevis, and his brother Andrew, both sons of Dr. William Hamilton, who spent the greater part of his life on St. Christopher.  There were also Hugh Hamilton, Charles, Gustavus, and William Vaughn Hamilton, all planters, most of them Members of Council or of the Assembly.

And even in those remote and isolated days, Hamiltons and Washingtons were associated.  The most popular name in our annals appears frequently in the Common Records of Nevis, and there is no doubt that when our first President’s American ancestor fled before Cromwell to Virginia, a brother took ship for the English Caribbees.

From a distance Nevis looks like a solitary peak in mid-ocean, her base sweeping out on either side.  But behind the great central cone—­rising three thousand two hundred feet—­are five or six lesser peaks, between which are dense tropical gorges and mountain streams.  In the old days, where the slopes were not vivid with the light green of the cane-field, there were the cool and sombre groves of the cocoanut tree, mango, orange, and guava.

Even when Nevis is wholly visible there is always a white cloud above her head.  As night falls it becomes evident that this soft aggravation of her beauty is but a night robe hung on high.  It is at about seven in the evening that she begins to draw down her garment of mist, but she is long in perfecting that nocturnal toilette.  Lonely and neglected, she still is a beauty, exacting and fastidious.  The cloud is tortured into many shapes before it meets her taste.  She snatches it off, redisposes it, dons and takes it off again, wraps it about her with yet more enchanting folds, until by nine o’clock it sweeps the sea; and Nevis, the proudest island of the Caribbees, has secluded herself from those cynical old neighbours who no longer bend the knee.