On Tobago

The story of how Latvia, then the Duchy of Courland, had a colony in the Caribbean. The island of Tobago. We travel back to the 17th century and explore how Latvia (Courland) became the world's smallest nation to have a colony. We look for remnants of that empire in present-day Tobago and Latvia.

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Transcript

On Tobago

From Grey Skies to Turquoise Waters

I’m presently looking out of my window in Rīga. The sky is that familiar winter shade of ‘Baltic Grey’, the kind that feels like a woollen blanket pulled tight over the city. It’s the sort of day that makes you dream of escape. Nowadays, many Latvians do exactly that - jumping on Air Baltic, Ryanair, or another airline to a warm destination.

But what if I told you that 370 years ago, the people of this very land - or at least, their rulers - didn't just dream of escape? They actually went. And they didn't just go on holiday; they went to conquer.

Today, we will travel back to the 17th century, to a time when the Duchy of Courland, which is the modern-day Kurzeme region of Western Latvia, punched well above its weight. We are going to discuss the period when Latvia had a colony in the Caribbean. The smallest European country to do so. A time when Latvian peasants and German nobles attempted to transform a tropical island into 'New Courland'.

So, grab your tea - or perhaps a rum cocktail - as we set sail for Tobago.

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The Dream of Duke Jacob

To understand how a small duchy on the Baltic Sea ended up in the Caribbean, we need to talk about one man: Duke Jacob Kettler.

If you visit Kuldīga in Latvia today - that beautiful UNESCO-listed town with the brick bridge and the flying fish that I mentioned in a previous episode - you might see a statue of him. He was born there. He doesn't look like a pirate. He appears more of a pragmatist. Duke Jacob was obsessed with one thing: trade. He looked at the Dutch, the English, and the French, and thought, 'Why not us?'

In the 1640s and 1650s, Ventspils was not a quiet port; it was a hub of industry. Jacob built shipyards that produced vessels rivalling anything in Europe. His flagship was a formidable frigate: Das Wappen der Herzogin von Kurland (The Arms of the Duchess of Courland), a double-decker modern ship with 45 cannons.

Now, imagine the scene. It's the 20th of May 1654. This wasn’t the first attempt by Duke Jacob to colonise Tobago. The first in 1637 and the second in 1639 ended in failure, with the settlers succumbing to famine. This new massive ship, carrying 80 families of colonists and 124 soldiers, sails into a bay in Tobago. The captain of Das Wappen der Herzogin von Kurland, Willem Mollens, drops anchor. They come ashore, likely sweating in wool uniforms that were designed for Baltic winters, and they plant a flag with a black crayfish on a red background.

They named the bay Great Courland Bay. They built a fort and called it - with no points for originality - Fort Jacob. And just like that, the colony of Neu Kurland was established, and the island was renamed. In 1657, reinforcements arrived from Courland and 120 colonists were added. The Courlanders had established the first real settlement in Tobago.

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Life in New Courland

So, what was life really like for a 'Latvian' in the Caribbean?

Well, first, we must be honest about who these people really were. The officers and the Duke were German-speaking nobility. But the settlers? Many were local Courland peasants, possibly criminals or serfs who had been promised freedom. Some were mercenaries from Scandinavia. There’s a record from 1691 of a Latvian peasant and his wife being deported to Tobago as punishment for a crime. Imagine that, exiled from the grey Baltic to a tropical paradise as a ‘punishment’.

But it wasn't a paradise for them. The mortality rate was terrible. Tropical diseases that Baltic immune systems had never encountered before wiped out settlers faster than ships could bring them.

And they weren't alone. They soon had neighbours. The Dutch established themselves on the other side of the island. For some time, they maintained an uneasy truce. The Courlanders cultivated tobacco, sugar, and coffee to send back to Ventspils. They even attempted to trade with the indigenous Caribs, although relations were... let's say, 'volatile'.

There’s a remarkable, almost tragic irony to the end of the colony. It didn't fall because of a great battle in Tobago; it fell because of geopolitics back home. In 1658, Duke Jacob was captured by the Swedes during a war in Europe. When the news reached Tobago, the garrison - mostly mercenaries who hadn't been paid in months - mutinied. They essentially said, “The boss is in prison, we're out of rum, we surrender”. The Courlanders gave the colony to the much bigger Dutch settlement in exchange for free passage back to Europe in 1659. 

Duke Jacob eventually got his island back in a treaty with England, but the momentum was lost. By 1690, the Great Courland Experiment was effectively over. For Tobago, over that half of a century they saw the English, Dutch, Spanish and French raid and fight over their territory. Each time the colonists destroyed the country. In fact, over 300 years of its history, Tobago changed hands 30 times, more than any other Caribbean island.

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Remnants of an Empire

If you visit Tobago today, the legacy is quite visible, although you need to know where to look.

The most obvious one is the map. On the northern coast, you will still find Great Courland Bay. It hasn't been renamed. It’s still there, a nod to the Baltics on a map of the Caribbean.

In the town of Plymouth, near the site of the old settlement, is the Courland Monument. It’s a modern white geometric structure, designed by the Latvian-American sculptor Jānis Mintiks and erected in the 1970s. It stands as a strange, silent testament to this forgotten chapter. The inscription commemorates the “bold, enterprising and industrious Courlanders from faraway Latvia on the Baltic shores who had lived in this area named after them from 1639 to 1693”.

There are also legends. Some locals in Tobago still bear family names that sound eerily Baltic, or at least German or Courlander, though tracing their origins is difficult. In Plymouth, tourists are attracted to the 'Mystery Tombstone' of Betty Stiven. While she probably lived later, in the 18th century, her grave is located in the heart of what was once the Courlanders’ settlement, heightening the ghostly atmosphere of the place where 'Jacob's Town' once stood. A local grocery store still bears the name “Courland”, and Latvian diaspora groups from the US organise occasional midsummer festivals in the former Jacobs Town, bringing Latvian folk dresses and customs. The Courland colonisers left their traces.

Now, back in Latvia, if you visit Kuldīga, look for the environmental installation called 'Teleport'. It’s not a dusty old bronze man on a horse. It’s Duke Jacob, but he’s represented in a futuristic, metallic style, emerging from a kind of time portal. It symbolises his forward-thinking vision. He was a man out of time, trying to turn a small agrarian duchy into a global superpower.

And in Ventspils, the Livonian Order Castle features a digital exhibition about this period. You can view models of the ships that carried those poor, bewildered Courlanders across half the world. Plus, in Ventspils dock, a red neon sign on a storehouse reads “Tobago”.

During Latvia’s first independence between the World Wars, the authoritarian regime used the story of Courland’s Tobago as both an intriguing part of history and also a feature of Latvia’s national mythology. A glorious patriotic past when powerful nations possessed colonies. Oh, Duke Jacob’s ethnic background as a Baltic German was subdued! During the Soviet period, the mythology of Latvian Tobago was discontinued. After independence was regained in 1991, Latvian President Vaira Viķe-Freiberga, whose inauguration I attended on behalf of the British government, visited Trinidad and Tobago, and soon after, diplomatic relations were established between the two countries in 2003.

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Personal reflections

I’m not a supporter of colonisation. I know some people, especially in Britain, talk about the education and infrastructure developments that were brought to colonies many years ago. I see the subjugation of the local people, the slavery that made a few privileged Brits and other Europeans incredibly rich and did immense harm to the majority population and enslaved workers.

I have visited the Caribbean several times, both as a tourist and while working as a British diplomat. I’m even known to bore my PR apprentices with a story of running a crisis communications simulation in the Caribbean about hurricanes. Yes, it really did take place!

My last personal visit was just before the Covid pandemic struck - to St. Lucia. Such a beautiful island and such lovely people. When we disembarked from the Virgin Atlantic plane, it was heading onwards to Tobago - an island hop. And believe it or not, the supermarket in St. Lucia had Waitrose products in it! In return, my local Waitrose in Sudbury, England, stocks Chairman’s Reserve spiced rum. In my humble opinion, the best rum in the Caribbean.

Tobago was ceded to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, and was administratively united, annexed in fact, with Trinidad in 1889, remaining a British crown colony until its declaration of independence in 1962.

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The "What If?"

It’s fascinating to play the 'what if' game. If Sweden hadn't invaded... if the Duke hadn't been captured... would I instead be recording this podcast from Rīga, the capital of a global empire? Would there be a dialect of Latvian spoken in the Caribbean today, blending Baltic grammar with island slang? Latvia, well, Courland, was the smallest and fastest-growing state in the world during the time we have examined.

We may never know. But the next time you walk through the cobbled streets of Kuldīga or stand on the windy pier in Ventspils, look out towards the horizon. Those waves don't just reach Sweden. In a sense, they connect directly to a small, warm bay in the Caribbean, where for a fleeting, radiant moment, the Duke of Courland dreamt of empire. Priekā!

[Map of Tobago by Thomas Bowen, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Music by Christoph Scholl from Pixabay.]