On 11 November 1770, Sandy, an enslaved worker at Courland Estate in Tobago, and six others attacked a military post in an attempt to seize weapons and win freedom. After failing to take the post, they attacked the estate and killed owner Samuel Hall. The resistance spread the following day to other estates as more enslaved people joined. A six-week rising followed. Sandy escaped capture, while colonial accounts framed the uprising as a threat to “order”; a decolonial history recognizes an organized struggle against enslavement and plantation violence. Tobago was then a separate British colony.
Indigenous residents of the Arena mission rose against the colonial mission and its forced-labour regime. The National Trust describes the system as encomienda; NALIS also records the uprising....
Four days after the uprising, acting officials in San José de Oruña ordered two captains and forty armed men to search Arena and nearby areas and capture Indigenous people they deemed responsible. The...
A colonial ordinance dated 15 December records that two Indigenous prisoners from Arena, identified as Pedro and Luis, had been brought under guard. The dossier frames the men as suspects and...
A treaty signed at Madrid on 27 August 1701 authorized the French Royal Company of Guinea to supply enslaved Africans to Spain’s colonies. NALIS identifies this arrangement in its account of...
The Treaty of Paris, signed on 10 February 1763, transferred Tobago from France to Britain. Tobago was then a separate colony from Spanish-ruled Trinidad, but it is part of present-day Trinidad and...
👉 Sandy leads an uprising at Courland Estate in Tobago
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11 November 1770
On 11 November 1770, Sandy, an enslaved worker at Courland Estate in Tobago, and six others attacked a military post in an attempt to seize weapons and win freedom. After failing to take the post,...
On 7 June 1771, 38 of the 42 enslaved people at Bloody Bay Estate in Tobago escaped and established a maroon settlement in the surrounding hills. Their flight was a collective refusal of plantation...
Royal instructions dated 3 September 1776 to Trinidad governor Manuel Fálquez set out measures to encourage population and trade. The instructions prefigured later Spanish efforts to attract foreign...
On 29 April 1780, Governor Martin de Salaverría authorized Philippe-Rose Roume de Saint-Laurent to travel to French Caribbean islands and invite French and Irish residents to settle in Trinidad. The...
On 5 June 1781, Tobago’s British lieutenant governor George Ferguson agreed to French terms of surrender after French forces invaded the island. Tobago was a British colony built around plantation...
On 24 November 1783, Spain issued the Cedula of Population, opening Trinidad to immigration by Roman Catholic settlers from Spain’s allied nations, particularly French Caribbean colonies. Land grants,...
