Boston Herald I’ve been obsessed with Barbados since I was a kid, when I read the Newbery Medal-winning book “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” by Elizabeth George Speare. For anyone who somehow managed to escape their summer reading, the book is about a fictional 17th century young woman who, orphaned, must leave her home in Barbados and travel to New England. Now in Puritan Connecticut, she often reminisces about her home and her childhood growing up in beautiful Barbados.
Today more than ever before, the ways of the Carib are to be laughed at and ridiculed; the dirty, heathen savages who are to be shunted away and have no rights but to die far away. The colonization of Barbados is one of the darkest events and evil stories of modern history. Four centuries ago Spanish and Portuguese slavers started to kidnap, kill and drive out the thousands of peaceful Indians found on the islands the Indians called Ichiroganaum. The exact location of the island was a carefully kept secret but Spanish and Portuguese sailors knew the island only as the barbarous island, “Los Barbados” where brutality and crime could be committed with immunity. The island lay just outside the Caribbean and far away from watchful eyes. Look out for this and other books by Gary and Angela Cole…
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