On this site:
- Homepage:
Introduction
Aim of our research
The importance of Mountravers - Archival research:
The enslaved people, and three brief biographies - Fieldwork:
Developments - Other work on Nevis
- Developments in Bristol
- Publications
- Acknowledgments
- Contact details and links to other sites
On this site:
- Homepage:
Introduction
Aim of our research
The importance of Mountravers - Archival research:
The enslaved people, and three brief biographies - Fieldwork:
Developments - Other work on Nevis
- Developments in Bristol
- Publications
- Acknowledgments
- Contact details and links to other sites
Mountravers Plantation
Nevis, West Indies
Nevis, West Indies
Christine Eickelmann and David Small
Introduction
Mountravers, also known as 'Pinney's Estate', was a medium-sized sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Nevis. It was made up of several estates and tracts of land; their ownership, as well as many of the enslaved people who worked this plantation, can be traced back to the latter part of the seventeenth century. Until slavery was abolished in 1834, more than 750 individual enslaved people lived on Mountravers about whom very little was known. Successive members of the Pinney family owned the plantation, among them John Pinney, who settled in Bristol, England, in 1784 and whose family home in Bristol is now the city's Georgian House Museum.
Mountravers, on the slope of Mount Nevis, in the parish of St Thomas
Nevis was the premier landing point for slaves in the Leeward Islands between 1675 and 1730, and Bristol was the most important British slaving port in the 1730s. Links between Bristol and Nevis have been re-established through our involvement with both the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society and Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery.
Our interest in the plantation was initially triggered by Professor Richard Pares's book A West India Fortune and by the absence in Bristol's Georgian House of any information about slavery as the major source of John Pinney's wealth.
The aims of our research
- to reconstruct the biographies of the enslaved people on Mountravers, as well as those of the managers and overseers
- to locate, identify and record the plantation structures
- to assist local organisations in recording and preserving the history of the island.
The importance of Mountravers Plantation
This research aims to enable people in Nevis and in Bristol to develop an understanding of their shared past by looking at an example which links them both. The plantation is of particular importance because- the treatment of some of its slaves became a cause celebre in 1810 after a notorious flogging which fuelled the debate about the abolition of slavery
- the plantation is one of only a few in the British Leeward Islands where archaeological work has taken place at a slave village site
- Professor Richard Pares's economic history of Pinney's sugar business A West India Fortune (London, 1950) is still regarded by academics in the field as a landmark publication
- Channel 4's Time Team two-part archaeology programme (1998/9) about the plantation has focussed public attention on Mountravers
- in 2005 Newfound Property International, a Canadian company specialising in leisure resorts, bought around 600 acres of the wider 'Pinney's Estate'. Encouragingly, they indicated their willingness to preserve the historic sites on the estate. Since then the company has changed hands. It is now Newfound NV.