An Irishman’s Life on the Caribbean Island of St Vincent, 1787–90: The Letter Book of Attorney General Michael Keane

Abstract

“AN IRISH WEST INDIAN ATLANTIC” IS THE TITLE Mark S. Quintanilla gives to his introduction to Keane’s Letter Book. There has been a great deal of recent scholarly interest in, and research on, the Irish role in the Anglo-American Atlantic world of the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, and its legacies into the 1900s and the present, especially in culture and literature. He cites many of these studies – though not this journal’s 2018 special issue (vol. 64, nos. 3 & 4) devoted to “Irish-Caribbean Connections”. This book reproduces the Letter Book of Michael Keane, an Irishman who served as attorney general of St Vincent, and also worked as a private lawyer, as a “planting attorney” or manager for absentee owners, and as a planter and enslaver in his own right. The Letter Book summarises some of his correspondence and also contains full copies of many of his letters, some quite long. It covers three years (1787–90), a time when St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) was on the frontier of British colonialism. As Quintanilla writes in his interesting and scholarly introduction (13–49), “the eighteenth-century Irish Atlantic followed the contours of the British empire” (13), expanding with the acquisition of the “Ceded Islands” in 1763 and contracting with the loss of the American colonies in 1783. The Ceded Islands (SVG, Grenada, Dominica, Tobago) represented the ‘new’ colonies opening up for British plantation development after 1763, the second phase of British expansion in the region, after the initial settlement of the ‘old’ colonies (Barbados, the Leewards, Jamaica) in the 1600s. The Letter Book (49–183) is held by the Virginia Historical Society as part of a larger family collection. Quintanilla has painstakingly transcribed the manuscript and supplied numerous annotations, which reflect an immense effort of archival research, in the SVG Archives (wills, deeds and baptismal records), archives in the UK and the USA, Irish newspapers and magazines and contemporary publications. As a primary source, now accessible to students