The Caribbean’s southernmost state runs on oil not hotels
Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean’s southernmost archipelagic country, sits about eleven kilometres off Venezuela, 130 from Grenada, and 287 from Barbados. Unlike most Caribbean economies built on tourism, industry from oil and gas dominates, and its southern latitude means fewer hurricanes.
Banwari Trace in southwestern Trinidad, occupied around 5000 BCE, is the oldest pre-Columbian site in the Caribbean and yielded Banwari Man, the region's oldest skeleton. When Europeans came, Arawakan-speaking Nepoya and Shebaya and Cariban Yao lived on Trinidad, and Kalina held Tobago. Columbus named Trinidad for the Holy Trinity in 1498 to keep a vow, and glimpsed Tobago without landing; its Spanish name may refer to tobacco or the island's cigar-like outline.
Spanish conquest was slow and bloody. Antonio de Sedeño fought local people through the 1530s, San José de Oruña was founded in 1592, and Walter Raleigh raided it in 1595 while hunting El Dorado. In 1699 Indigenous people at the San Rafael mission rose up and killed priests and the Spanish governor. The capital moved to Port of Spain in 1757 after pirate attacks, yet only 1,400 people lived on Trinidad in 1777.
A 1783 royal decree offered free land and ten tax-free years to Catholic settlers loyal to Spain, drawing French planters and free people of colour from nearby islands to grow sugar and cocoa. By 1797 the population had topped 17,700, most of them enslaved. Tobago, meanwhile, changed hands about 31 times before 1814 as Dutch, Courlanders, French and British fought over it.
Outnumbered, Governor Chacón surrendered to Sir Ralph Abercromby's fleet in 1797 without a fight, and the first British governor, Thomas Picton, was recalled over torture and arbitrary arrests. Merikins, Black soldiers rewarded with southern land after serving the British side against the United States in 1812, settled there too. Today the country is famed for Carnival, Hosay and Diwali and gave the world the steelpan, limbo, calypso and soca.
Source: Trinidad and Tobago
