Category Archives: history

Native Pine and more on Middle and North

I recently had the opportunity to pay a brief visit to North and Middle Caicos on a scout for Turks and Caicos Productions. The always efficient big blue unlimited coordinated my adventure. I arrived at Heaving Down Rock (color coded great map found here) shortly after 6am to check in with the ferry. This was my first experience using TCI Ferry Service/Caribbean Cruisin’ and by the end of the day I was thoroughly impressed; timely departures and arrivals, courteous and professional staff, and a swift and steady boat ride despite fairly large and in charge swells. As soon as we arrived at the Sandy Point Marina in North Caicos, Cardinal Arthur and his taxi greeted me and we immediately got to chatting. I quickly discovered Cardinal Arthur is a 5th generation Turks and Caicos Islander, his legacy pre-dated by his father, Clementine Arthur, and his father’s father, Cain Arthur. The original Arthur was an African slave who labored in Bermuda before his assignment on John Lorimer’s Haulover Plantation in Middle Caicos. To read more about Haulover, please click here. Cardinal’s mother, Ida Forbes (another long standing Turks and Caicos namesake) passed away when he was only twelve years old. Cardinal shared many stories of his boyhood and I learned a great deal of Turks and Caicos history in a few hours. He pointed out many “fire gardens” (slash and burn farming techniques) full of pumpkin, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, bananas, papayas, tomatoes, and stalk after stalk of corn. He pointed out native sopadilla and wild cherry trees, reminiscing how as children they would pick and eat the fruit as they stumbled upon it. When I asked Cardinal about a giant agave on the side of the road, he proclaimed that’s “sisal!” and then explained how it was prepared. First you would strip the leaves, then soak them under water for 15 days. Once the fibers became soft then they would be woven into rope.

Our first stop was to Whitby beach, and the old Whitby Hotel, which Cardinal confirmed was the hot and happening place to be in the 1980’s.

The Whitby hotel used to be accessed by a small inlet channel they made into a mini marina complete with dive boat operation. A storm filled in the access and perhaps that was the start of the decline. When I inquired about the giant Causarina pines in the area, he told me they were relatively new, he wasn’t certain if they were even around as early as the seventies.

A fire garden dotted with white cranes

After stops at Horsestable Beach, several grown over ruins, and farms in Bottle Creek, we passed the Ready Money Farm just before arriving at the causeway.

Curalena Higgs-Phillips, a cultural crusader whose forefathers settled in Ready Money Garden, keeps up a charming little village there with local crafts and foods. I have yet to meet Curalena, but I look forward to the day I do, hopefully at one of the many cultural events she organizes there. To see this vibrant woman in full color and hear more of the Christmas traditions of Turks and Caicos past please see below:

After crossing the causeway we were soon after at Mudjin Harbor, hands down my favorite beach in all of Turks and Caicos. Cardinal explained that “Mudjin” came from “Bermudian,” a somewhat obvious deviation that was unknown to me before.

Cardinal said in his youth they would often catch and eat ducks such as these.

Not far away there was an entire flock of flamingos, a rare sight on Providenciales but an apparently common one in Middle.

Next we headed to Bambarra Beach

Near the thatched huts we came across this conch shell that Cardinal explained was most likely very old as it was knocked using the old method; the pointed end of another conch shell.

Our final stop was to a little port and dock looking over Pelican Cay. We found huge lobster shells from a recent catch. Cardinal could name when most of these sloops were built and by whom.

As we turned around the loop in front of the old (and now unused) airport to make our way back to Sandy Point, Cardinal stopped and let me have a lingering look at this Native Pine that he had planted some years ago. This was the first time in my memory that I had seen a living Native Pine. Being a member of the Environmental Club I had read about the Caicos-Pine-Recovery-Project and over the years had seen many photos of the dead and dying forests. This was the first time I could clearly see the shape of the tree and the needle structure of the branches; what a beauty even when sick. Since 2005, an estimated 90% of the Caicos Pine population has died. Please contact the DECR to find out what you can do to help. Let’s keep the Caicos Pine a part of the Turks and Caicos. I’d like to start a Christmas tradition of cutting a Causarina, and planting a Caicos Pine in it’s place in the fuure. Thanks to Brian Naqqi and his seedlings, we may just have the opportunity to do so.

All images by pepperkeystacie

My thanks to everyone who made my day island hopping so pleasant, and especially Cardinal Arthur for making it educational.

National Heroes Day

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National Hereos Day takes place in the Turks and Caicos Islands on the last Monday of May. This day was created to honor James Alexander George Smith McCartney, better known as J.A.G.S., the country’s first chief minister who served these islands from August 1976 until his untimely death in a plane crash over New Jersey in May of 1980. Jags McCartney was born on June 30, 1945 on Grand Turk to an accomplished Jamaican barrister, Harvey O.B. Fernandez McCartney, and Sally (Taylor), a Sunday school pianist from TCI. The couple named their son after a successful Jamaican barrister and legislator, James Alexander George Smith who died in 1942.

From wikipedia

“J.A.G.S. McCartney was the leader and founder of the People’s Democratic Movement (PDM), a grassroots organization established to address the many social and economic ills that had been pervasive throughout the Turks and Caicos Islands. A central goal of his was the attainment of self-determination for the people of the Turks and Caicos Islands. McCartney had particularly sought to mobilize the youth in the political process. A charismatic, dynamic and visionary figure, McCartney was determined to usher in a new Constitution that would foster and safeguard the rights of all Turks and Caicos Islanders, create new opportunities for citizens and advance the Country. Assuming office at age 31, McCartney remains one of the world’s youngest democratically elected leaders in history.”

To read more on the history of this great man, please visit 107fm

Blue Hills

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The island I call home is Providenciales, the most populated and developed in the Turks and Caicos chain of approximately 40 islands and cays. Providenciales was formerly known as Blue Hills, and luckily this charming name is still in use for one of the most quaint and colorful areas on the island. A drive down Blue Hills road one will see traditional and contemporary architecture, large bustling churches, seaside cemeteries, and brightly painted boats and native sloops. All along the road, just feet away, lies the arching palm tree lined beach, one of the few outside the national park where you may go shelling. The people dotting the streets are just as noteworthy as the environment; schoolchildren in uniform, fisherman at work, teenagers playing hoops, men slapping down dominoes, and women walking to mass in big beautiful hats and tailored suits. Not only is it a fantastic place to take a slow drive and soak in the sights, it’s highly recommended you stop into one of the restaurants and soak in some native fare and beverage. Here you may just be able to watch your conch being caught, knocked, and prepared before it sits on your plate. The photo above is one of my first portraits of Blue Hills, taken in 2004.

Name origin of the Turks and Caicos

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Terrestrial globe made by Vincenzo Coronelli for Louis XIV, currently displayed in the Bibliothèque nationale François Mitterrand in Paris.

How the Turks and Caicos came to be named as such is still partially shrouded in mystery. Voyages in search of salt set sail in 1585 for “Island Caycos,” a derivative of “caya hico,” the Lucayan term for “string of islands”. The “Turks” is where it gets more interesting. The rare color map “Archipelague du Mexique” pictured in the last posting is the first time the term was recorded, in 1688 by the leading cartographer of his time, Vincenzo Coronelli. Vincenzo had produced his first work at 16 and his industrious career of 140 separate works ended with his death in Venice at the age of 68. The partnership of Coronelli and Jean-Baptiste Nolin Sr. is said to have resulted in many of the best regional maps of the Americas of the period. On the said map, next to Grand Turk is written “I. de Viejo, Conciua ou Turks”. Some historians have deciphered this as a comment, erroneously written, which should have read “Concina ou Turks,” or “where the Turks gather”. In these days, Turks was a reference to pirates. Ottoman ships, manned by Turkish sailors, had the reputation of dealing in piracy, as did some Bermudians, who were beginning to settle in the TCI. Another popular theory, as told on the National Trust tour of the Cheshire Hall Plantation on Providenciales, relays that Europeans first sighting the islands witnessed hundreds of red Persian turbans on the horizon. What they misinterpreted as Turkish inhabitants was actually the plentiful native red capped cactus, thus named the “Turk’s Head Cactus”.

Information in this post was gathered from various sources including Nigel Sadler’s article “The Bermudians and the Start of the Salt Industry, ” Chapter 10 in A History of the Turks and Caicos Islands Ed. Dr. Carlton Mills. Image from mooonriver.blogspot.com

Lukka Kaya – People of the Islands

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Two near neighbors of the Turks and Caicos, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba, have been inhabited since AD 1 by Amerindian “Guanahacibibes”, hunters and gatherers who most likely traveled by way of the Yucatan channel. By Ad 500 descendants of the Guiana’s and Venezuela were moving south to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. They brought new practices; swidden agriculture, canoe building, and pottery making, specifically a bright red Saladoid pottery making style that made their settlements easily identifiable for archeologists. Unlike their predecessors who had to migrate when their diet resources were scarce, villages were occupied for years thanks to cultivation of staple foods such as manioc (yucca or cassava), beans, peppers, and sweet potatoes. Over time these groups of South American descendants eventually grew to become knows as a single people who referred to themselves as Taino, meaning “noble” in their native language. The earliest Taino habitation to be found to date in the entire Bahamian archipelago, lies on Grand Turk. It has been concluded that around AD 750 Taino’s from the northern coast of Hispaniola arrived by canoe on Turks and Caicos shores. Centuries of evolution in farming, fishing, boat building, salt collecting, wood carving, language, ritual, and religion later, these Taino’s of the Bahamian archipelago had culturally evolved into the Lukka Kaya, “People of the Islands”.
This post is a summary of “Our First Colonists: The Pre–Columbian People of the Turks and Caicos Islands” by Josiah Marvel, Chapter 7 in A History of the Turks and Caicos Islands Ed. Dr. Carlton Mills