The above photo of Saturday sailing is  from H. Hinderaker, whose beer is shown on the table with Chuck Hess’, Susan Young’s and Lew Handfield’s backs.

Key West Library

Last week we went on a working vacation to Key West. I got the start of a grant to publish the first maritime history book on the Turks Islands and Caicos Islands Sloop designs and their development. It will be basically a photo-essay with interviews and a lot of references, as well as a running commentary on the influences of the designs internationally.

Key West probably sounds like a vacation more than work, especially relating the Turks and Caicos to the Southernmost point of the United States, but, interestingly enough, like what you will find with most TCI history networking, there is a direct connection between the two.

Before Miami, there was Key West. This little outpost, isolated by water from the rest of the Florida territory, Key West, as a disorganized wild town, was the largest metropolitan area in the what is now the State of Florida. It was the trading capital for Caribbean products, especially Cuba. Actually until 1822 Key West or Cayo Oueso (Bon Cay) was owned by a Cuban who sold it to a hustler named John Simonton. It was a bawdy town with a tradition of pirating and wrecking ships. But, Simonton purchased the island to put in salt ponds and there you have one connection. He brought in people from the Bahamas to assist, and the Turks Islands were considered in the Bahamas at the time. So, through many references by Simonton of the Turks Islands it might be conjectured that there is a connection. There is also the connection of wrecking, sponging, spiny lobster fishing and turtling.  Key West was the land of opportunity and was and still is inhabited by Bahamians.

Next stop will be the Bahamas because the history of Bahamians in Key West was basically overlooked in regards to details, remember slavery in the United States made a lot of people unimportant.

While I was gone…

How Culture Works is finally being utilized by the public. Last Wednesday and the Wednesday before the hour-long show had other then me hosts. That is the point of the show: to get the community on air and let people know what they are doing for the community.

David Bowen hosted the newly formed Haitian Heritage Foundation and JJ Parker brought on TCI sailors to taunt Bahamian sailors about the upcoming TCI Challenge.

If you have an activity that your community group or an activity that you wish to expose to the public, as long as it is not negative nor political, you have your place to do it with How Culture Works. You can host it yourself or I will do the honours. Call Ross at 243 2093 if you want to discuss it.

Bahama Woes
We will not be going to the Bahamas as we had hoped. We thought through sheer force of will a group of us would be able to get on a plane and get to the George Town Regatta, the biggest of the 12 to 14 Regattas the Commonwealth of the Bahamas holds each year. We were invited to sail aboard their vessels and I was to video the event from a pace boat especially awarded for me to do just that.

We did not count on an early call for elections on 2 May, making this weekend an election weekend, nor all planes being full as a result and again sit at home tinkering with our Sloops in readiness for June.

Importance of Mariners’ Week
It seems there are a lot of people out there on our small Island of Providenciales who haven’t quite gotten it about what this week long event can mean to the Turks and Caicos. I am going on about this because of a couple of conversations I have had since our return last week.

Commemoration
The reason we started to do this was not to race against the Bahamians in Sloops but to honour over 327 years of recorded seafaring traditions amongst a group of Islands to be called the Turks and Caicos. Before you roll your eyes, it gives each and every one of us a new title for this culture, calling it a maritime nation. What does that do? Sit back and feel for a second. A maritime nation… you will not conjure up an image of frightened little people scurrying from raindrops, will you?

Maritime nations, such as Great Britain, the United States, Norway have pulled ahead of the more landlocked places on earth through a magnetic pull toward horizons off coasts. When you combine imagination with practicality in the right measures you get a seafarer. So, there are your entrepreneurial models, feet lightly planted on a moving deck.

But that entails sacrifices and a passing on of knowledge to lessen those learned sacrifices to those you love. That passing on of knowledge is continuing and in order to bring attention to it before it dies completely we are creating a week of focus on the sailors, boat and ship builders, captains, fishermen, traders, sail makers and riggers, blacksmiths and agents, as well as those who used the products of the sea or passed over the sea.

International Influence of TCI
An aspect of our invisible history and another reason you should be proud of living here is the influence that this place has had upon other nations, especially the Northeast coast of North America (which includes Canada). A lot of the oldtimers who came here from the continent to the North might have interpreted a simpleness in the people and kept that opinion without going into much depth about who they really were or what their past meant to their present…

Without going into a history sermon about the mixing of a Loyalist slave culture and a Bermudian seafaring culture to produce a lot of the traditional mores of this place, suffice it to be that the Turks and Caicos Islands were developed by international trade.

With this mindset, forget anything else and go along with a blank page on where you are living, think of when the Bermudians came seven hundred miles from their archipelago to this place, set up shacks and put together salt ponds. They came to live on desert islands for commercial reasons, not just the sun, sea and sand.

The commercial reasons were trade with the aspiring colonies of Great Britain in the ‘New World’. Salt was needed to preserve food for survival in those future seaports but most importantly it was a preservative for the foodstuffs that were cargo aboard vessels bound for other ports along the coast and Europe. This was a major basis for confidence in seaborne trade with the colonies and a reason for the colonies to flourish and progress. Bermuda, which included the Turks Islands, made remarkable economic progress, and became the silent expeditor of settlements becoming cities along the East Coast from Key West to Halifax.

This is the background of the people of the Turks and Caicos Islands. The Bermudians were not just the white Bermudians. There were the other Bermudians here as well and it was not originally an extremely divided society according to Bermudian historical and legal documentation.

The Bermudians were here for almost one hundred years before the Carolinians came with their strict divisive policies. The salt industry was well established and the transfer of cultures was ongoing. The slave culture of the Bermudians was a lenient one that allowed the enslaved the freedom to move about the world aboard vessels, sometimes under the command of enslaved captains. That spirit was a main ingredient in the mix that occurred amongst the enslaved of the Turks Islands and the enslaved of the Caicos Islands. Freedom was what all people worship and when the Loyalists departed their ex-enslaved had already intermixed with the Bermudian ex-enslaved to produce a people who were almost completely dependant upon the sea for almost everything except children.

Those ‘simple’ people, that the new ‘old timers’ met, knew of their family histories, but not being asked, they did not say. There were dramatic tales sometimes put out there but there has not been a book of Turks and Caicos tales circulated in any important way that I have seen yet.

Pan-Caribbean maritime history
Caribbean Basin stories and histories as told by the islanders is just starting out, give or take fifty years or so, and it gives more depth to the development and disasters of these places of lumped together cultures searching to create a national identity but controlled by outside cultures.

As for the maritime aspect there is no one place to go and search out a maritime history of the Caribbean Sea. There are an overload of pirate books and some regional stories that include maritime details but the area is not usually taken seriously as a developmental ingredient in international vessel design or maritime cultures. Yet, the fore and aft rig was refined because of Caribbean commerce and the first triangular Bermudian sail was developed to come to the Turks and Caicos?

With an invitational regatta that showcases Caribbean maritime history in the form of traditional workboats sailing on our turquoise waters it would be an easy next step to put into this convergence seminars and eventually a centre for Caribbean maritime studies.

Self-esteem here for youth and the rest of us
The most important point that we have established the Federation for is to instill a sense of pride in what the Turks and Caicos means to ourselves. We focus on the youth of the nation but do not leave out the rest of us in our general concept.

As I have said before, over and over, this is a history gold mine here. Nothing has really been  published that starts to scratch the surface of the complications of the development of this place. Bertie Sadler is the exception to that but he was not given the assistance and/or aids to assist that great task he undertook. He was proud of being a Turks and Caicos Islander though he was from Jamaica to the extent that he invested his own monies in researching that history and really even with the excellent editing job done by his daughter, Marjorie, there is just too much for one mind to handle.

There are reasons to be proud of being here on these Islands without bringing in needs to compare them with any other place on earth and the sea is the key to unlocking most of those reasons, most of the history of the Turks and Caicos Islands deals with the sea.

For that reason alone we should have had a Mariners’ Week a long time ago.

End of sermon.