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The History of the Book in the Caribbean and Bermuda
51 JEREMY B. DIBBELL
Printing was slow to arrive in the Caribbean islands and Bermuda: the passage of a century or more between settlement and the establishment of a press was not uncommon, and some of the smaller islands were without a printing press well into the 20th century. Among the factors responsible for this trend were the islands’ close connections with—and reliance on—the European colonial powers; their relatively small populations and physical areas; the shifting geopolitical status of the islands, which served to impede institutional development; and restrictive colonial or local policies and customs. This notwithstanding, the region remains one of the most understudied geographical areas in terms of book history, and much work remains to be done to expand our current understanding of print and book culture in the Caribbean.
Prior to the establishment of presses, material for printing, such as laws, proceedings of local legislatures, and other local productions, was sent abroad, to be printed at presses either in the European or North American cities, particularly New York. In later years, the presses located in the larger Caribbean population centres such as Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua supplied their smaller neighbours. Before the advent of print on some islands, including Bermuda, MS newsletters are known to have circulated in the early years of the 18th century.
The earliest confirmed printing operation in the Caribbean islands was Robert Baldwin’s firm, established at Kingston, Jamaica in the early part of 1718. There was a press in Cuba by the early 1720s, and in Barbados in about 1730. St Domingue (Haiti) may have had a press as early as 1725. There were presses in St Kitts around 1747, Antigua in 1748, and Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Grenada in 1765. A newspaper was started in St Vincent around 1767; at approximately the same time, printing was begun in Martinique. St Croix’s first press began operation in 1770, and Joseph Stockdale brought printing to Bermuda in 1784, the same year John Wells set up his press at Nassau in the Bahamas. Trinidad had a press by 1786; there was a newspaper in St Eustatius in 1789, and there may have been a small printing office in Curaçao in the late 1790s. There was a press on St Bartélemy from 1799 until 1819. What is now the Dominican Republic had a press by 1801, Puerto Rico by 1806, and St Thomas in 1809. It was not until 1845 that the Turks and Caicos Islands had their own newspaper. Aruba had no press until the late 19th century, and no press is known to have been in operation on St Martin, St John, Tortola, Anguilla, or the other small islands before the second half of the 20th century.
Presses were established for a variety of sometimes overlapping reasons. In several cases, the local residents and government sought a printer and supported the establishment of a press: Jamaica’s Robert Baldwin and Bermuda’s Joseph Stockdale appear to have immigrated at the urging of island governments. In contrast, the French colonial government issued several brevets d’imprimeur in the 1720s for printers in St Domingue and Martinique, but the local governments seem to have prevented the printers from setting up shop. The first presses in Antigua and Barbados were commercial ventures, as were the second and third presses in Jamaica and other locations. Several presses were established following changes in colonial control, or by loyalist refugees from the American mainland (John Wells’s press at Nassau, for example). In some cases, presses were subsequently set up to print rival newspapers or to provide an alternative to the existing, established press: these included the pro-government second press in Bermuda, pro-emancipation printing offices in Jamaica and Trinidad in the 1830s, Catholic presses on several islands, and the press set up by Samuel Nelmes on Grand Turk in 1845 to advocate separation from the Bahamas.
Even with the significant linguistic, legal-political, and economic variation between the islands in the region, once presses were in operation their early outputs tended to be quite similar, and the products likewise can be compared to those of provincial presses in Britain and North America. A weekly newspaper, usually printed on one sheet and sometimes with additional sheets as supplements, tended to be the norm for island presses; the papers were very likely to contain plaintive missives from the printer begging for payment of subscriptions or advertising fees. Subscriptions were costly, and with the already-small population base, many newspapers failed to thrive, or appeared briefly during times of political or economic strife, only to fade away quickly. Almanacs, at first broadsheets and then later in pamphlet or book form, were a common production in the Caribbean islands until the 19th century, when production generally shifted to Britain. More substantial periodicals generally did not last long, due to competition from imported publications, a limited local audience, and high production costs. Printers eagerly sought contracts from local governments to print proclamations, laws, records of legislative sessions, and votes; their dependence on this support often made printers more compliant to the demands of local officials than they might otherwise have been. As in other areas, jobbing printing of blank forms, official documents, handbills, and other ephemeral matter was a key element of the printer’s business; unfortunately, much of this material has not survived. Relatively few books were printed on the islands, and of those, medical, agricultural, and other practical books were more commonly produced than literary works (though there are several notable exceptions). There were relatively fewer sermons and religious tracts published in the region than elsewhere, and most of those produced were concerned with slavery.
Latest prices for sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton from the colony; and of wine, flour, salted beef, butter, oil, and soap from France: the 24 May 1775 issue of Affiches Américaines, a French-language newspaper printed in Haiti from 1764 to 1791. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society
Given the wide range of colonial powers active in the Caribbean, a diversity of languages was at play from the very beginning. Printed matter in most colonies tended to appear in the language of their mother countries, but as the islands were occupied by, or transferred to the control of, different European colonizers, and as local Creole languages and dialects developed, the lingua franca was adjusted accordingly, and bilingual and sometimes even trilingual publications began to appear. In 18th-century Grenada, newspapers were printed in French and English; in the middle decades of the 19th century, Papiamento newspapers and pamphlets (sometimes in combination with Dutch, Spanish, and other languages) were printed in Curaçao and Aruba. The first books published in St Croix were a Creole ABC and grammar, sponsored by Moravian missionaries. Creole languages continue to be spoken and printed in certain islands at the present time.
Roderick Cave has compared the mobility of Caribbean printers to that seen in 15th-century Europe (Cave, 12). Juan Cassan printed on Grenada and Trinidad; Matthew Gallagher is known to have printed on Dominica, Grenada, and Trindad; William Smith printed on Dominica and St Vincent. The movement of printers extended beyond the region, as many of them trained in England, Scotland, France, or the American mainland. William Brown, who was apprenticed with William Bradford and William Dunlap in Philadelphia, printed on Barbados from 1760 until 1763, then went to Quebec; the first two printers on Barbados, David Harry and Samuel Keimer, had both previously worked in Philadelphia as well. Benjamin Franklin dispatched first Thomas Smith and later (after Smith’s death in 1752) his own nephew, Benjamin Mecom, from Philadelphia to Antigua. Thomas Howe, an early St Kitts printer, taught his son George to print; in 1800 George became the first trained printer in Australia. By the early years of the 19th century, local ownership of presses became more common.
There is evidence that both slaves and free blacks were occasionally employed as pressmen and even compositors, at least in Jamaica, Antigua, and St Vincent. The common practice of widows managing printing offices was in evidence in this region as well: in Jamaica, Robert Baldwin’s widow Mary managed the press from Robert’s death in 1722 until after 1734, and the widow of Jean Bénard printed the Gazette de la Guadeloupe in 1788. When Joseph Stockdale died in 1803, his three daughters managed the business and printed the newspaper until 1816. Printers on the islands frequently shared publications with each other as sources of news, and several opened separate reading rooms to provide access to newly arrived newspapers and other printed matter.
Printing equipment and paper were imported from Europe and, later, America; Caribbean printers were quick to adopt iron hand-presses when they became available, as the tropical climate wreaked havoc on wooden presses. There was a lithographic press at Bermuda by 1821, when the governor there attempted to circumvent the newspapers and began printing his own proclamations. Over the course of the 19th century, the quality of Caribbean publications tended to decline, as the islands’ economies faltered and the original equipment wore out.
Caribbean printers typically sold books and other general merchandise in their shops, while general grocers often stocked imported books and other printed matter. Cave describes a typical stock of books: ‘some standard schoolbooks, a range of medical and law books, history, biography, and political treatises for the man of affairs, charts and pilots for the mariner’ (Cave, 27). Books comprised a significant portion of imports to the region: Giles Barber calculated that for the period 1700–80 books exported to the Caribbean region represented roughly a quarter of total British book exports, with Jamaica alone importing nearly as many books as New York over the course of those decades. Literary publications formed no small part of the stock: newspaper advertisements reveal that plays, novels, and periodicals were commonly available alongside the more utilitarian titles. By the middle of the 19th century, American books were often imported into the region, a trend which continues into the 21st century.
The first libraries in the region were those of ecclesiastical institutions in the early Spanish colonies, including one begun in 1523 at the Santo Domingo convent in Puerto Rico. Thomas Bray’s Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge dispatched small religious libraries throughout the English Caribbean in the early years of the 18th century, and the organization later funded and supplied schools for slave and free black children in several islands during the 1790s, Bermuda’s being the most successful. Social and subscription libraries were not uncommon, although these often failed after their original founders passed from the scene. Commercial, religious, and small local libraries were available in some islands by the middle of the 19th century, but it was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that more widespread local and national libraries were established across the region, including five funded by Carnegie grants (in Barbados, St Lucia, Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, and Trinidad).
Control over the press by local or colonial governments varied markedly. Throughout the region, a combination of rewards (in the form of government contracts) and threats was often used to keep printers and editors in line. An editor was deported from Trinidad in 1790 for printing articles about the French Revolution, and a later governor on that island made his views on press coverage clear by requesting the temporary loan of the handle of the printing press when the editor gave offence. Libel charges against editors were not infrequent. The English-controlled islands had what would be considered the most press freedom, but even there significant pressure was brought to bear when situations seemed to warrant it.
In the French islands, a royal brevet d’imprimeur was required for any printer, and, even following the Revolution, the government kept a firm control over the output of any press. Pre-publication censorship was enforced, and printers, booksellers, and editors all had to pay licence fees until 1827. An 1848 decree abolished censorship prior to publication, but that step was revoked in 1852 and censorship continued until 1863. Newspapers containing political content still had to obtain prior approval, however, and J. A. Lent notes that ‘administrative authorities had a right to warn the press, to suspend newspapers during certain times, to suspend papers with or without warning by proportion of general surety, and to hand press offenses over to correctional tribunals’ (Lent, 172). Censorship was generally the rule rather than the exception in Haiti as well, and a journalist was even executed there in 1820. Rules were similar in the Spanish and Dutch colonies. The Danish islands (now the US Virgin Islands) were governed by a 1779 law establishing censorship and the granting of subsidies to royal-approved publications, which continued until 1916–17.
In Cuba, by contrast, the government has owned and controlled the media, publishing, and bookselling industries since the time of the Revolution. Concerted literacy campaigns and the rapid establishment of a nationalized publishing system beginning in the early 1960s contributed to the development of a dynamic graphics industry, making possible the explosive growth of poster art, for decades a major component of Cuban print culture.
Literacy rates in the Caribbean grew sharply in the 20th century; while Haiti’s rate remains in the 50–60 per cent range, the other islands report literacy rates above 85 per cent. Yet, as has generally been the case throughout their history, the Caribbean islands suffer from a relative dearth of books. Bookshops must import the bulk of their stock from the US and Europe, which greatly increases the cost to consumers. Similarly, purchasing books from abroad means paying what are often exorbitantly high shipping rates. While there was a brief heyday of West Indian fiction publishing in the middle decades of the 20th century by such houses as Heinemann and Longman, for the most part it has remained a fact that authors must look abroad to find a wide reading audience. Small speciality or academic publishers for books of local or regional interest have been established on several islands; the Leeds-based publisher Peepal Tree Press specializes in works by Caribbean authors, and the multinational publisher Macmillan has a dedicated Caribbean imprint. Self-publishing, particularly for fiction and poetry titles, has been common in the region for decades, and many authors are now turning to electronic publishing as an outlet.
Public libraries have and continue to play an important role in the region, providing reading material and other resources to island residents. Regional cooperation among libraries and archival repositories is becoming increasingly common and widespread: in 2004, a large group of national and university libraries from around the area founded the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), an extensive repository for digitized materials of local and regional interest from partner institutions. Like their counterparts around the world, 21st-century librarians, booksellers, authors, and readers from the Caribbean region are navigating their way through the rapid changes taking place in the world of books and reading. Regardless of what the future holds, the region’s diverse and complex history offers much untilled, fruitful ground for scholars of print culture and history, the reading experience, and bibliography.
G. Barber, Studies in the Booktrade of the European Enlightenment (1994)
R. Cave, Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies (1987)
G. Frohnsdorff, Early Printing in Saint Vincent (2009)
J. A. Lent, Mass Communications in the Caribbean (1990)
B. F. Swan, The Spread of Printing: The Caribbean Area (1970)
