Montserrat

• 1. Introduction

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  Montserrat is a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, roughly 16 km long and 11 km wide, and islanders call it The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean. The name works twice. The green coast recalls Ireland, and many residents trace their ancestry there.

  From the top of Garibaldi Hill in Isles Bay, a visitor can look down on Plymouth, the former capital. It is now a ghost town, and it is the only volcanic-buried town in the Americas.

  How did a small island with Irish ancestry end up under the British flag? Who lived here before Europeans arrived, and did the Irish language really survive on its slopes? Why did a famous music producer build a recording studio here, and what became of it? And what does a community of a few thousand people do when half its land is closed off?

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• 2. First Peoples and Settlers

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  In 2016, local residents hiking in a wooded area near Soldier Ghaut found nine petroglyphs. Another carving turned up in the same area in 2018. The carvings are believed to be between 1,000 and 1,500 years old.

  They are among the oldest traces of human life on the island. Fieldwork in the Centre Hills in 2012 pointed to an Archaic, pre-Arawak occupation between 2000 and 500 BC. Coastal sites later showed the Saladoid culture, which lasted until 550 AD. The Amerindians travelled up the Lesser Antilles from the vicinity of Venezuela. The Caribs are believed to have called the island Alliouagana, meaning Land of the Prickly Bush.

  In November 1493, Christopher Columbus sailed past on his second voyage. He had been told the island was empty because of Carib raids. He named it Santa María de Montserrate, after the Virgin of Montserrat at a monastery near Barcelona in Catalonia. In Catalan, the name means serrated mountain.

  In 1632, a group of Irishmen settled on the island, most of them from nearby Saint Kitts. Sir Thomas Warner, the colony's founder and governor, urged them to go. More settlers followed from Virginia. The first arrivals appear to have been cultivators, each working his own little farm.

  The Irish had long been allies of the French, and in 1666 they invited France to claim the island. No French troops were sent to hold it. The French did attack and briefly occupy Montserrat in the late 1660s, but the English soon captured it. The Treaty of Breda confirmed English control the following year.

  Out of this settlement grew a neo-feudal colony. Protestant Anglo-Irish colonists known as redlegs brought in Sub-Saharan African slaves and Catholic Irish indentured servants to do the labour. Whether that Irish presence also left a language behind is a question that writers kept returning to for centuries.

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• 3. Echoes of Irish

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  In 1780, the geographer Thomas Jeffrey published The West India Atlas. He claimed that most people on Montserrat were Irish or of Irish descent. He added that the Irish language survived there, even among the enslaved.

  Irish merchants were prominent in Caribbean commerce, importing goods such as beef, pork, butter and herring. Irish servants and African slaves of every class lived in constant contact, and a population of mixed descent grew from it.

  Later witnesses seemed to agree with Jeffrey. In 1831, the County Kilkenny diarist and Irish scholar Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin noted a report that Irish was still spoken on Montserrat by both black and white inhabitants. In 1852, Henry H. Breen wrote in Notes and Queries that the claim that Irish was almost vernacular in the West Indies was true of the little island of Montserrat, and of no other colony.

  A sailor's story added colour. In a letter printed in The Atheneum on the 15th of July 1905, W. F. Butler quoted a Cork civil servant, C. Cremen. Cremen had heard it from a retired sailor named John O'Donovan, a fluent Irish speaker. O'Donovan said that in 1852, as mate of the brig Kaloolah, he went ashore and heard the people speaking Irish among themselves. He joined their conversation.

  In 1902, The Irish Times repeated a similar tale from the Montreal Family Herald. A man from Connaught was said to have been hailed in Irish by the island's black residents the moment he arrived.

  The British phonetician John C. Wells tested these stories in 1977-78. He studied speech on the island, including Montserratians living in London. He found that media claims of Irish influence were largely exaggerated. He found little in sound, word forms or grammar that could be traced to Irish. He recorded only a small number of Irish words, one example being minseach, which he suggests means goat.

  Irish Gaelic has since disappeared from use, and English is now the sole official language. A few thousand people speak Montserrat Creole, a dialect of Antiguan and Barbudan Creole. The Irish connection did survive somewhere else, though, on the calendar.

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• 4. Rebellion and Limes

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  On the 17th of March 1768, enslaved people on Montserrat rose in a rebellion. It failed, but their effort was remembered. In 1985, the islanders turned St Patrick's Day into a ten-day public holiday to commemorate it. The festivities celebrate the island's culture and history in song, dance, food and traditional costumes.

  The island passed between powers more than once in that era. The French made a brief attack in 1712. In 1782, during the American Revolutionary War, France captured Montserrat as America's first ally. The French had no plan to colonise it, and they agreed to hand it back to Great Britain under the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

  Britain abolished slavery in Montserrat in 1834. Falling sugar prices then hurt the economy through the nineteenth century, because Brazil and other nations competed in the trade.

  A planter named Mr Burke planted the island's first lime tree orchards in 1852. Five years later, the British philanthropist Joseph Sturge bought a sugar estate to prove that paid labour could be economically viable. Numerous members of the Sturge family bought more land.

  In 1869, the family founded the Montserrat Company Limited and planted Key lime trees. They began commercial production of lime juice, and by 1895 the island was producing more than 100,000 gallons a year. They also set up a school. Casks of pure juice were shipped to England, where Evans, Sons & Co of Liverpool clarified and bottled it. Each bottle carried a trade mark meant to guarantee quality.

  The company also sold parcels of land to the inhabitants. As a result, much of Montserrat came to be owned by smallholders.

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• 5. Studio in the Tropics

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  In July 1979, AIR Montserrat opened in Salem. The Beatles' producer, George Martin, had built it near his own residence through Associated Independent Recording. It was a residential studio, with several villas for clients to stay in during sessions.

  The equipment was serious. The studio had a 46-channel Neve mixing console, two MCI 24-track recorders and three Ampex ATR-102 2-track tape recorders. It also had an MCI synchronizer for 46-track work, and JBL and Tannoy monitors.

  The Climax Blues Band was the first group to record there, working on their album Real to Reel. Dire Straits, Elton John, Earth, Wind & Fire, Jimmy Buffett, Michael Jackson, the Police, the Rolling Stones and Rush followed. Dire Straits made Brothers in Arms there. Duran Duran recorded Seven and the Ragged Tiger, and Rush recorded Power Windows. The Police made Synchronicity and Ghost in the Machine on the island. Jimmy Buffett's album Volcano took its name from the Soufrière Hills.

  The Police also used the island as a backdrop in the 1980s. Their music videos for Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic and Spirits in the Material World were filmed there.

  In the early hours of the 17th of September 1989, Hurricane Hugo passed the island as a Category 4 storm. It damaged more than 90% of the structures. AIR Montserrat, which had operated for over a decade, was severely damaged and closed. The tourist economy was virtually wiped out.

  The next blow would come not from the sea but from a mountain.

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• 6. The Mountain Wakes

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  Plymouth lay under more than 12 m of mud by the time the worst of the first eruptions had passed. The Soufrière Hills volcano, at the island's southern end, had been dormant for centuries. On the 18th of July 1995, it became active. Its eruptions destroyed the Georgian-era capital on the west coast, along with the airport and docking facilities.

  The southern part of the island became an exclusion zone, unsafe to live in or to travel through. It also includes two sea areas next to the land where volcanic activity is greatest. More eruptions followed in the late 1990s.

  On the 25th of June 1997, a pyroclastic flow raced down Mosquito Ghaut, a steep ravine leading to the sea. The surge spilled out of the ravine into the Streatham village area, which had been officially evacuated. Nineteen people there were killed, and several others suffered severe burns.

  The mountain itself changed shape. Before 1995, the Soufrière Hills stood 915 m high and was the island's highest point. A growing lava dome has since raised it to an estimated 1050 m.

  A vulcanian explosion sent pyroclastic flows down several sides of the mountain in the period from November 2009 through February 2010. On the 11th of February 2010, flows buried the remnants of the W. H. Bramble Airport, on the eastern side of the island. Since early 2010 the volcano has been relatively quiet, and the Montserrat Volcano Observatory monitors it closely.

  The exclusion zone is no longer a single block. Since 2014 it has been divided into subzones with different entry rules, based on volcanic activity. In 2020, some areas were open around the clock and even inhabited. The most dangerous zone, which includes Plymouth, is open only to visitors accompanied by a government-authorised guide.

  The volcano has also made the island bigger. Montserrat now covers 104 km2, and that figure is slowly rising as volcanic deposits build up on the southeast coast.

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• 7. Starting Over

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  In 1994, about 13,000 people lived on Montserrat. After the volcano resumed activity in July 1995, an estimated 8,000 refugees left, mostly for the United Kingdom. By 1997, fewer than 1,200 people remained on the island.

  Criticism of the government's response to the disaster led Chief Minister Bertrand Osborne to resign in 1997, after only a year in office. David Brandt replaced him and stayed until 2001.

  In 1998, Britain gave the people of Montserrat full residency rights, so they could migrate if they chose. In 2002, British citizenship was granted to British Overseas Territories citizens in Montserrat and all but one other territory. The 2011 census counted 4,922 residents. By early 2016 the estimate had reached nearly 5,000, mainly because of immigration from other islands. The government's 2024 census found 4,386 people, a 10.9% drop from 2011.

  Only the Parish of Saint Peter in the northwest is inhabited now. The other two parishes, Saint Georges and Saint Anthony, are still too dangerous.

  The island governs itself internally, but it remains a British Overseas Territory. King Charles III is head of state, represented by an appointed Governor. The Premier is head of government and is appointed from among the nine elected members of the Legislative Assembly. The United Nations lists Montserrat among its non-self-governing territories. The British government supplies most of the operating budget, at approximately £25 million per year.

  Getting to the island has changed too. In February 2005, Princess Anne officially opened what is now called the John A. Osborne Airport in the north. Since 2011, FlyMontserrat Airways has operated several flights daily. A ferry once ran about an hour and a half from Heritage Quay in St. John's, Antigua to Little Bay. It stopped in 2020 because it was financially unsustainable, so the only access now is by air.

  In 2015, planners announced a new town and port at Little Bay on the northwest coast. Government and business moved temporarily to Brades. The 2017 hurricane season and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the work. The Little Bay Port Development Project, a £28 million effort funded by the UK and the Caribbean Development Bank, began in June 2022.

  Power is the next test. The island runs on five diesel generators that supply 2.5 MW. Two exploratory geothermal wells have found good resources, and together they are expected to produce more power than the island needs.

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• 8. Wild Island

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  The giant ditch frog, known locally as the mountain chicken, is found only on Montserrat and Dominica. It is critically endangered. Its numbers have collapsed because of the amphibian disease Chytridiomycosis and the volcanic eruption of 1997.

  Experts from Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust work with the Montserrat Department of Environment on a project called Saving the Mountain Chicken. A captive breeding population has been set up with the Zoological Society of London, Chester Zoo and Parken Zoo, along with the governments of Montserrat and Dominica. Releases from the programme have already taken place.

  The national bird is the Montserrat oriole, which is found nowhere else. The IUCN Red List now classes it as vulnerable, having previously listed it as critically endangered. Captive populations are held at Chester Zoo, London Zoo, Jersey Zoo and Edinburgh Zoo. The Montserrat galliwasp, a lizard found only on the island, is critically endangered, and a species action plan has been developed for it.

  Plants have had their own rescues. The pribby, a shrub of the Centre Hills, was known until 2006 only from one book about the island's vegetation. The Montserrat National Trust and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have worked to conserve it. In 2006, conservationists also rescued several plants of the endangered Montserrat orchid from dead trees and moved them into the island's botanic garden.

  In 2005, an international team surveyed the Centre Hills for a biodiversity assessment. Partners included Durrell, Kew, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Montana State University. The report counted 1241 known invertebrate species, including 718 species of beetle from 63 families. About 120 invertebrates are estimated to be endemic. The shoreline caves shelter ten species of bats, and efforts are under way to protect them.

  The Montserrat tarantula is the only tarantula native to the island. It was first bred in captivity at Chester Zoo in August 2016.

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