the midst of Economic Hardship and a Suspicious Caymanian Seafaring Morality
With an annual revenue of around £60 sterling by 1843, the economy of the Cayman Islands continued in decline to 1845 (and beyond), with an unverifiable number of Caymanians migrating to Ruatan off the Miskito Coast, as a better ‘livelihood [there was] more easily obtained due to richer soil’; besides moving to Ruatan as planters, Caymanian seamen by 1845 were catching most of their turtle along the Nicaraguan and Honduran coasts.155 Large-scale cotton cultivation had ceased by apprenticeship, and agriculture in Grand Cayman served a decidedly local purpose and thus would not have constituted a substantial portion of the island’s export economy.156
154 Williams, A History, pp.48-49.
Similarly, although turtle was an important export, Caymanian seaman had made it known to the Presbyterian Reverend Hope Masterton Waddell in 1845 that because of the convergence of dangerous currents in Cayman waters, ‘Seamen who don’t call there for turtle, give [the islands] a wide berth.’ Indeed, seamen often misjudged their distance from Grand Cayman, and ‘when they had reckoned themselves thirty miles off…[instead found] their ships crashing on its reefs.’ ‘The Grand Cayman is a trap for ships’, Waddell remarked, ‘and catches more [victims] 155 L. R. Fyfe, Grand Cayman: Report of Official Visit Preceded by Minute of Instructions by His Excellency Sir H.W. Norman…Governor of Jamaica (Kingston: Government Printing Establishment), p.9.
123 perhaps than any other spot of equal extent in the world.’157 Nonetheless, it is true that Caymanians took full financial advantage of wrecked ships, which by 1874 amounted to ‘…50% of the proceeds of sale.’158 Two wrecking incidents immediately come to mind here: the wreck of the Iphigenia in 1874 and the wreck of the Juga in 1888. The former occurred on the coral reefs off Bodden Town. Bodden Town Magistrates quickly made their way to the wrecked ship ‘and told the captain that its condition was hopeless’, despite the fact that the ship’s hull had not been compromised. Bedlam thereafter ensued, the Magistrates offering ‘only token remonstrations as unauthorized wreckers cut down and carried off all the rigging and sails, purloined the loose ship’s stores and threatened to invade the officers’ quarters and below decks.’159 The wreck of the Norwegian merchant ship the Juga occurred off Grand Cayman’s west coast in 1888. As with the Iphigenia, the crew members of the Juga experienced strong-arm tactics by Caymanian wreckers, who, at the backing of their Magistrates, were keen to secure their proceeds, although according to the ship’s captain, he did not acknowledge a receiver of wrecks. When the latter incident was later investigated by ‘Captain E. Rolfe of HMS Pylades’, the Caymanian wreckers were placed clearly in the wrong if simply on the omissive fact that Rolfe’s report did not mention an official receiver of wrecks;160
157 Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure1829-1858 (London: Routledge, 1977, second revised edition), pp.216- 217.
158 Craton, Founded, p.216.
159 Craton, Founded, pp. 215-216. See also PRO, CO 137/478, ff. 20-77. 160See Craton, Founded, p.217; see also PRO, CO 137/538, ff. 32-42.
124 theoretically, this meant that the Caymanians had committed an act of piracy according to the following nineteenth century statute:
Now piracy is only a term for sea-robbery…If any man shall be assaulted within that jurisdiction and his ship or goods violently taken away without legal authority, this is robbery and piracy. [If the inhabitants of a nearby island] shall…dispossess the master, and afterwards carry away the ship itself or any of the goods, or tackle, apparel or furniture, in any place where the Lord Admiral hath, or pretends to have jurisdiction, this is also robbery and piracy.161
Nonetheless, Captain Rolfe’s concluding words on the matter begin to situate the occupational and cultural importance of wrecking for Caymanians, and the British proclivity to overlook any potentially illegal Caymanian wrecking despite the passing of the Wrecking and Salvage Law thirteen years earlier, which was created not only to protect shipowners and their insurers, but also gave them legal redress to unsolicited wrecking:162 ‘Wrecking is one of the principal industries of the Cayman Islands’, Rolfe began, ‘and one which they thoroughly appear to understand and conduct in a straightforward and equitable manner.’163
Together with the more unassuming, honest occupation of turtle fishing, which by the 1840s had shifted to the Miskito Coast, wrecking represented an important economic mainstay in Cayman during this historical phase. Unfortunately, there is
161 Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Outcasts of the Sea (Hampshire: Paddington Press, 1978), p.8. 162 Craton, Founded, p.216.
125 no available catalogue of the actual amount of revenue these seafaring occupations brought in at this time. Nonetheless, given the serendipitous nature of ships being wrecked, together with the meager financial yields of turtle-fishing, such occupations could not, on their own, sustain the economy of the Cayman Islands, although it is important to note that the very idea of seamanship provides established Caymanians their sense of traditional and historical worth as we shall see in the following section.
**
In conclusion, major social and administrative improvements had taken place in the Cayman Islands by 1880. The islands formally came under the administrative control of Jamaica in 1865, ending their 130 years of relative isolation;164 Jamaican laws thus became more applicable in the Cayman Islands, despite the Jamaican Assembly’s vociferous assertion in 1834 that those islands were an altogether different jurisdiction and should take care of their own legislative affairs.165 Additionally, in 1865 the Land Registration Act was ratified, marking the end of a hitherto vague right to land ownership, clarifying any such ownership and widening the means of acquiring title to land.166
164 See An Act for the Government of the Cayman Islands, June 22, 1863, 27 Vict. Cap. XXXI, in Laws of the Cayman Islands up to No. 12 of 1889 (Jamaica: Government Printing Establishment, 1889), pp.1-4; see also Craton, Founded, pp. 150-151.
In addition to the return of the Methodist church in the 1860s, the Baptist and Presbyterian churches had been fully
165 See Report of the Governor’s proposal about Caymanas, September 20, 1835, PRO, CO 137/201, no.
958.
126 established in the islands by the 1880s, and Caymanians of all colours proved willing vessels for Christianity.167 Furthermore, the sister islands had been repopulated by 1833, and by productive families, among them the Fosters and Kirkonnells, who, by the 1880s, were engaged in that island’s coconut industry, boat building, and merchant shipping enterprises.168 Such developments lead us into the sixth phase of Cayman’s history and the ways in which its occupational and social circumstances especially underpin pervasive traditional Caymanian lines of thought in the present.
167 Williams, A History, p.48. 168 Craton, Founded, p.176-178.
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