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Tidbits of Island Life

The first known census which listed by name all the heads of households on Saba was that of 1699. This list proves that most of the families of European origin now on Saba can be traced back to 1699, and that these settlers came directly from the British Isles.
1901 - Tennis Club, Saba. Back row: Rich Winfield, Joanna Vanterpool (Mrs. Austin Simmons), Donald Vanterpool, Elaine Simmons, Wallace Simmons. Front row: Evan L. Simmons, Annie Simmons, Mike Simmons, Josie Simmons.
Particular note must be taken of the fact that between 1840 and 1915 the population of Saba was more than 1500, climbing to a peak of 2488 people in 1914.
Shortly after that date many men left the island during the First World War to work in the Shell refinery in Curacao, and later in the Esso refinery in Aruba.
1901 - Croquet Club, Saba. Left to right: Tansy (Gov. Willemsen's sister), William O. Simmons, Amy Heyliger, Hurbert Simmons, Consie Simmons, Florrie Simmons, Gov. Willemsen, Engle H. Simmons, Elaine Simmons-Hassell, Ada Heyliger.
Between 1920 and 1930 Saba became known as the Island of Women. A selection of comparative figures for that period illustrates why this is so:

This situation continued with very little change until 1950, after which the population gained a regular balance between men and women. Comparative figures on population distribution throughout the various villages and the total number of houses are given.

First for the year 1865:

These inhabitants were all born on Saba. Foreign born were 43; total: 1809 souls in 347 houses.
In 1977, however, there was a total of 572 buildings and a population of approximately 1050. Water storage capacity was about five million gallons.
These figures illustrate that there were fewer houses and many more persons living in each house in 1865. Many of the houses then belonging to both whites and blacks were thatch roofed.
The village of Mary's Point or Palmetto Point and Middle Island have ceased to exist. A new village The Level came into existence in 1976, after completion of a road to that once isolated area.
Seeing population figures for the 80 year period between 1840 and 1920, one wonders how so many people managed to survive on a mountainous five square mile island.

Most people farmed several plots of land on the mountain slopes all the way from the shores of the sea to the top of the mountain. The late John William Johnson, at age 87, remembered that when he was a boy, all of Spring Bay and Giles Quarter was planted with small corn, peas, pumpkin and sweet potatoes. Planting at different levels of the mountainsides, various crops could be harvested all year.
Evidence that there was much more activity on the island with regards to animal husbandry can be taken from figures for the years 1900, 1931 and 1977.

Others fished or sailed on Saban-owned vessels all over the Caribbean, and brought much needed cash into the local economy.

The problem of drinking water was a big one indeed. Relatively few people could afford to build a cistern. Most people from Windwardside and Hell's Gate had to walk about a mile and a half down treacherous mountain slopes to Spring Bay, and then walk back up again with tubs of water on their heads. This water was used for drinking purposes mostly. It was obtained from the fresh water spring at Spring Bay, which had been in use since the first settlers arrived. According to local tradition, the first settlers had to fight Indians to get at this water.
Around 1920 the Government built three cisterns nest to the Roman Catholic church Hell's Gate which were a great help to the people of that village.
Father J.C. Gast, who lived on Saba from 1854-1864, described life on the island as not idyllic. Salt fish and sweet potatoes were the only meal. Very seldom was either meat or bread available. Animals were raised on the island for export to St. Thomas to buy flour, clothes, rum and salt fish. In 1857 people on Hell's Gate burned lime to make a living. Straw hats were also made. Wages were 50 to 60 cents per day, sweet potatoes cost 15 cents for six pounds.

Life was never idyllic. Cash money was always hard to come by, although for those who worked hard there was enough to eat. Most children in each household did their share of the planting, fishing and stock raising in order to make ends meet. The barter system, which was already in effect when Father Jean Baptiste Labat, a French Dominican Priest, who visited Saba on Sunday April 27th, 1701 and described how this system worked, was still used in the nineteen-fifties.
Since there was no refrigeration on the island, animals were slaughtered around 2 a.m., so that by 8 a.m. deliveries of meat (wrapped in a large leafed plant called elephant ear) were made, and by midday the entire animal had been cooked and eaten in households all over the island.
Fish were salted and put out to dry on the roofs of the houses, so that fish was still available even when the weather made it impossible to put out to sea.
Cassava bread was made in the old Indian fashion. The bread is made from the roots of the bitter cassava. The roots were grated into a pulp, which was then put into a bag, and the poisonous juice squeezed into a tub. When enough pulp had been obtained, it was put into a large sack which was laid on the ground beside a boulder; over this a short plank was laid, one end being shoved under the boulder and rocks piled on the other to furnish pressure. A night in this press eliminated the remainder of the juice. The dried cassava pulp was then spread thinly on an iron slab over a wood fire and baked. The bread, when finished, looked like an oversize pancake. It was then put on the roof to dry.
Even the squeezed-out juice was used, for the thick substance left on the bottom of the tub, after it had been drained off, was starch. Two days drying in the sun and this was ready for the wash.
It is remarkable that this age-old and cumbersome way of utilizing the bitter cassava has been retained here from its Arawak inventors after so many centuries.
Most houses had a firehearth equipped with a brick chimney, and wealthier people also had a brick oven. All cooking was done on wood fires. Kerosene stoves and refrigerators were only introduced to Saba on a large scale in the late nineteen-fifties, when people were relatively better off financially and could afford them.
Clothing was scarce and often patched and handed down from older child to younger, so that a pair of pants could remain many years in the same family. For those who could afford the luxury of owning a pair of shoes, the use of them was restricted to Sundays for attending church services.

Toys were unknown, yet the youth of former years found numerous ways to amuse themselves and even to make their own toys.
Public festivals were limited to the Queen's Birthday and Christmas. At Christmas it was the local custom for large groups of people to decorate themselves with masks, make music, and go from house to house and dance. Around that time of year there were usually torch parades through the various villages.
Dances were rotated from house to house, and invitation lists were sent out in order to get an idea of the number of people one could expect. These lists often gave an insight into the social register of the island, and sometimes when names were intentionally or unintentionally omitted, it could result in entire families refusing to speak to each other for years. The music at those parties consisted of an old Edison phonograph and one or two old ladies pounding away on a partition of the house for the rhythm.
Picnics and outings were organized by families and groups to Tent Bay, Spring Bay or Cove Bay from time to time. Much honest fun took place when 'a pot' was cooked. The idea was that the contents of the pot were sometimes stolen and the injured party was always invited to share the pot, and was told either that night or the following day that the contents of the pot had been the fruits of his labour. Most people took it gracefully.
Among the local customs which have now disappeared was that of making up poems and songs about people who had done something bad or stupid. Some of these poems and songs were so to the point that this too caused enmity between families for years.
Crime was limited to petty theft and cursing out one another. In our long history of the colonization of Saba, murder and other serious crimes have been very rare. Sometimes, if one wanted to tell a person off without too much ado, an anonymous letter was written and dropped in a spot where any member of the public could find it, read it, and pass it on. This system of drop-letters has now completely disappeared. An anonymous letter to the Editor can serve the same purpose!
Contact between villages was infrequent. One of my grandmothers, who was born and lived in the village of Hell's Gate, never visited The Bottom until she was fifty years old. Incidentally her husband's parents came from that village. Although this could have been a case of not liking her inlaws, as a boy I often heard old people saying that they had never had the time, inclination or desire to visit any other village. There are still a number of people both young and old, even with all the means of transportation today, who have never been off Saba.
Medical care was limited to certain ladies in each village who used bush medicine. Famous among them were Miss Shishi (Elizabeth Johnson who died in 1931 at the age of 93), and Peter Elenor Hassell. Local folklore has it that a certain Abram Hassell, also known as Bata, from the village of Booby Hill, knew how to cure skin cancer. He became so well known that people from the surrounding islands came to him for help and were cured. He is rumored to have taken the secret with him to the grave. However, his wife Tanna remembered part of the ingredients which went into making the poultice, viz., gray powder from under the 'houses' in Spring Bay, called arsenic powder, and white Vaseline.
Large groups of ladies would get together in the afternoons between meals for a social chat while working on their famous Saba lacework, which was introduced to Saba by Gertrude Johnson who had learned it while studying in a convent in Venezuela. This lacework was mailed abroad, mostly to pen pals in the United States.
In the evenings the men folk would gather at the breadlines. The breadlines are described in more detail in another chapter of this book.
There were no comforts in the old rum shops. One would walk inside and up to the counter of a local grocery-rum shop et alia, order a glass of rum or gin, then return outside and sit on a stone wall. The town drunk of those days must have eventually acquired a very calloused derriere.
Poor people could earn some money by gathering firewood and selling it or by fetching tubs of water and bringing it on their heads up the mountainsides from the springs located close to the sea.

My mother once told me that what my father considered a rest from his labours was a walk down to the well by the sea at Cove Bay to bring up a tub of water, after which he would eat and get back to work. In planting season he would work when it was full moon, until late in the night, then get three hours sleep and be up and about to put in a breakneck twenty-one hour schedule. Sturdy men they were in those days!
To fish twenty miles out on the Saba Bank, or all the way some one-hundred miles out on Bird Island, one would have to row a long boat there and back, then labour up in the mountains to the village where one lived. And this not always with a catch worth-while.
Many are the times that wives and children watched and waited in vain for husbands and fathers who never returned from the sea. Sometimes entire families were lost while out fishing, as was the case with a father and three sons (Steven Wilson and sons Gustus, Jeremiah and Charles) from the village of St. John's, who went fishing on the Saba Bank and never returned. Also quite a number of men lost their lives while fishing around the cliffs on Saba.
Around the year 1900 there were twenty-one fishing boats on Saba, each approximately seventeen feet long. During the fishing season between October and January, around a hundred men took part in the fishing. The rest of the year about thirty men fished on a daily basis.
Before 1900 Saban fishermen spent time living and fishing on Gran Roques island off the Venezuela coast, during the hurricane months. They would travel first to Margarita where they would obtain a license and purchase their salt. After some months on Gran Roques they would return to Saba with salted fish, turtles and dried iguana. When a man named Hercules Johnson was attacked and carved up with a machete by some Venezuelan fishermen, our people discontinued fishing there.

In 1905 the Demerara Ice Company had two schooners, each manned with ten Sabans. These schooners fished off the coast of Demerara, and the catch of an average of 500 lbs per trip (3 trips per month) was sold in Georgetown. The twenty Sabans earned a total of three hundred dollars per month.
In former times oil for lamps was obtained through frying the livers of the triggerfish or old wives, locally called moonfish, which were caught on the Saba bank.

Since there were no radios or weather forecasts, people had to read signs of a hurricane coming through the behavior of animals. Hurricanes took their toll both at home and at sea. Families waited sometimes weeks before they could hear news that relatives who had been on sailing ships during a hurricane were either alive and well or forever gone.
In the hurricane of 1871, a house which had just been built, and about which the owner bragged that he would like to see the hurricane that would blow that house away, was completely blown away from the Brest Place on Booby Hill, and was never seen again.
Another house with its residents inside was blown from the village of St. John's and came to rest in The Bottom. Legend has it that the doors of the Roman Catholic Church in St. Eustatius were found on The Level, Saba, after the hurricane of 1772.
When Mt. Pelee erupted on Martinique in 1902, a Johnny Hassell lost his life while on board a schooner anchored there in the harbour of St. Pierre. My grandmother told me that the eruption could be heard on Saba, and people here thought it was a Dutch man-of-war in St. Eustatius.
Traces from the old days still linger among the old folks, and even among people now in their forties, for whom the 'old days' are still not that far away.
Our island only started to make its entry into the twentieth century in the nineteen sixties, but today most Sabans can enjoy quite a number of the conveniences enjoyed elsewhere.
As the pace of economic growth accelerates people are becoming increasingly concerned about our identity and culture being swallowed up and lost. Thanks in part to a number of studies having been conducted and some of these published in book-form the 'Saba of old' is now well documented. An Oral History Project has also been conducted since this book was last published.

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Content © Will Johnson 1979, 1983 and 1989 - Third Edition - Copyright © CaribSeek 2003 - All Rights Reserved.