Sons of the Soil: The Maingots and French Creoles in Trinidad History

In 1776 Joseph Étienne Maingot, a young bourgeois boy from Bordeaux, traveled to the French island of Martinique to join his father. In 1786 he left for Trinidad, a Spanish island (barely) governed from Caracas. What brought him to this “isla inutil” (useless island) ignored for over 200 years while other European powers battled continuously to possess even the smallest island in the Caribbean?A Royal Cédula in 1783 had signaled a change in Spain’s colonization policy offering generous land grants to White and Free Colored Catholics. Led by Roume de St. Laurent, a visionary Grenadian creole, Joseph Étienne Maingot and many other French settlers with their slaves began to develop the formerly abandoned island. They were enormously successful. In 1797 the English conquered and struggled to deal with a polyglot population, originally growing sugar and then cocoa, and a French culture tinged with West African influences. The many clashes over language, religion and education, gave rise to a French Creole identity known for its congenial life style, its music, cuisine and piquant sense of humor. So was Carnival and Calypso born. The permanence and love of the Island by the many male and female descendants of Joseph Etienne Maingot, through the best and worst of times, has earned them the honorific: “sons of the soil.”