Nevis Hotels
The island of Nevis is often a place that tourists like to visit to see the culture history and tourist locations of the island. Some may want to see good views of the island. Some may to see the sports, culture and entertainment of the island. Numerous tourists and other visitors like to take vacations on the island of Nevis. Some may want to stay a hotel in the island. They may want to stay at a large hotel or a small hotel. They may want to stay at a luxury hotel or a cheap hotel. Some may want to stay hotel that offers good facilities and has access to parking and to transport.
Nevis is an island in the Caribbean, located near the northern end of the Lesser Antilles archipelago, about 220 miles southeast of Puerto Rico and 50 miles west of Antigua. The 36 square mile island is part of the inner arc of the Leeward Islands chain of the West Indies. The capital of Nevis is Charlestown.
The five parishes of Nevis are ;Saint George Gingerland, Saint James Windward, Saint John Figtree, Saint Paul Charlestown, Saint Thomas Lowland
The formation of the island began in mid-Pliocene times, approximately 3.45 million years ago. Nine distinct eruptive centres from different geological ages, ranging from mid Pliocene to Pleistocene, have contributed to the formation. No single model of the island's geological evolution can therefore be ascertained.
Nevis Peak (985 m /3,232 ft) is the dormant remnant of one of these ancient stratovolcanoes. The last activity took place in 1692, but active fumaroles and hot springs are still found on the island, the most recent formed in 1953. The composite cone of Nevis volcano has two overlapping summit craters that are partially filled by a lava dome, created in recent, pre Columbian time. Pyroclastic flows and mudflows were deposited on the lower slopes of the cone simultaneously. Nevis Peak is located on the outer crater rim. Four other lava domes were constructed on the flanks of the volcano, one on the northeast flank (Madden's Mount), one on the eastern flank (Butlers Mountain), one on the northwest coast (Mount Lily) and one on the south coast (Saddle Hill).
During the last Ice age when the sea level was 200 feet lower, the three islands of Saint Kitts, Nevis and Saint Eustatius (also known as Statia) were connected as one island. Saba however is separated from these three by a deeper channel.
The
most popular and most developed beach on Nevis is the 4 mile long Pinney's Beach,
on the western or Caribbean coast. The eastern coast of the island faces into
the Atlantic Ocean, and can have strong surf in parts of the shore which are unprotected
by fringing coral reefs. The colour of the sand on the beaches of Nevis is variable:
on a lot of the bigger beaches the sand is a yellowish grey, but some beaches
on the southern coast have darker, reddish, or even black sand. Under a microscope
it becomes clear that Nevis sand is a mixture of tiny fragments of coral, many
foraminifera, and small crystals of the various mineral constituents of the volcanic
rock of which the island is made
Nevis, along with Saint Kitts, forms the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. The two islands are separated by a shallow 2 mile channel, known as The Narrows. Nevis is conical in shape, with a volcanic peak, Nevis Peak, at the centre. The island is fringed on three sides by long sand beaches, and has a coastline intermittently protected by coral reefs. The most popular beach is the 4 mile long Pinney's Beach, on the western or Caribbean coast. The gently sloping coastal plain (0.6 miles/1 km wide) has natural fresh water springs, as well as non-potable volcanic hot springs, especially along the west coast.
The island was named Oualie (Land of Beautiful Waters) by the Caribs and Dulcina ("Sweet Island") by the early British settlers. The name Nevis is derived from the Spanish Nuestra Señora de las Nieves or Our Lady of the Snows, and first appears on maps in the 16th century.
Nevis is of particular historical significance to Americans because it was the birthplace and early childhood home of Alexander Hamilton. Of import to the British, Nevis is the place where Horatio Nelson as a young sea captain, was stationed, and where he met and married Frances Nisbet, a young plantation widow.
When Nevis was sighted by Columbus in 1493, the island had already been settled for more than 2,000 years by Caribbean Amerindian populations. Since the 1990s, artifacts from three major prehistoric periods have been discovered at excavation sites in Nevis.
The indigenous people of Nevis during these periods belonged to the Leeward Island Amerindian groups popularly referred to as Arawaks and Caribs, a complex mosaic of ethnic groups with similar culture and language. Dr. Lennox Honychurch from Dominica (D. Phil. in Anthropology and a leading scholar in the history and culture of Island Caribs) traces the European use of the term "Carib" for the Leeward Island aborigines to Columbus, who picked it up from the Tainos on Hispaniola. It was not a name the Island Caribs called themselves. The Spanish used the term to clarify which native groups were officially available for enslavement. "Carib Indians" was the generic name used for all groups allegedly involved in war rituals of a cannibalistic nature, namely the consumption of parts of a killed enemy's body. The Spanish law permitted and encouraged the enslavement of all such "cannibals" or "Caribs".
The Amerindian name for Nevis was Oualie, land of beautiful waters. The structure of the Island Carib language has been linguistically identified as Arawakan. This is used as an argument to support the Arawakan Continuity Model for the Leeward Islands. According to the continuity model, the many ethnic groups of the Leeward Islands lived side by side through the centuries before the Europeans arrived, becoming multilingual because of intense inter-island trade. The suggestion that a natural merging of languages and cultures occurred over the centuries is in sharp contrast with the invasion and displacement model which has previously been the dominant model in Caribbean scholarship. The displacement model suggests that the Cariban speaking groups killed off the Arawakan groups, but that the Arawakan language survived because the Carib warriors spared the Arawak women and the women then passed Arawakan on to their children. Many scholars now subscribe to moderated continuity models, considering the Caribbean to have been a site of encounter and exchange throughout history.
In 1498, Christopher Columbus gave the island the name San Martin (Saint Martin). However, the confusion of numerous poorly-charted small islands in the Leeward Island chain meant that this name ended up being accidentally transferred to another island, which is still known as Saint-Martin/Sint Maarten.
The current name Nevis was derived from a Spanish name Nuestra Señora de las Nieves by a process of abbreviation and anglicization. The Spanish name means Our Lady of the Snows. It is not known who chose this name for the island, but it is a reference to the story of a 4th century Catholic miracle: a snowfall on a mountain near Rome [8]. Presumably the white clouds that usually cover the top of Nevis Peak reminded someone of this story of a miraculous snowfall in a hot climate.
Nevis was part of the Spanish claim to the Caribbean islands, a claim pursued until 1671, even though there were no Spanish settlements on the island. According to Vincent Hubbard, author of Swords, Ships & Sugar: History of Nevis, the Spanish ruling caused many of the Arawak groups who were not ethnically Caribs to "be redefined as Caribs overnight". Records indicate that the Spanish enslaved large numbers of the native inhabitants on the more accessible of the Leeward Islands and sent them to Cubagua, Venezuela to dive for pearls. Hubbard suggests that the reason the first European settlers found so few "Caribs" on Nevis is that they had already been rounded up by the Spanish and shipped off to be used as slaves.
In spite of the Spanish claim, Nevis continued to be a popular stop-over point for English and Dutch ships on their way to the North American continent. Captain Bartholomew Gilbert of Plymouth visited the island in 1603, spending two weeks to cut twenty tons of lignum vitae wood. Gilbert sailed on to Virginia to seek out survivors of the Roanoke settlement in what is now North Carolina. Captain John Smith visited Nevis also on his way to Virginia in 1607. This was the voyage which founded the Jamestown Settlement, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
On August 30, 1620, James I of England asserted sovereignty over Nevis by giving a Royal Patent for colonisation to the Earl of Carlisle. However, actual European settlement did not happen until 1628 when Anthony Hilton moved from nearby Saint Kitts following a murder plot against him. He was accompanied by 80 other settlers, soon to be boosted by a further 100 settlers from London who had originally hoped to settle Barbuda. Hilton became the first Governor of Nevis. After the 1671 peace treaty between Spain and England, Nevis became the seat of the British colony and the Admiralty Court also sat in Nevis. Between 1675 and 1730, the island was the headquarter for the slave trade for the Leeward Islands, with approximately 6,000-7,000 enslaved West Africans passing through on route to other islands each year. The Royal African Company brought all its ships through Nevis.
Due to the profitable Triangular trade and the high quality of Nevisian sugar cane, the island soon became a dominant source of wealth for Great Britain and the slave-owning British plantocracy. When the Leeward Islands were separated from Barbados in 1671, Nevis became the seat of the Leeward Islands Colony and was given the nickname "Queen of the Caribees". It remained colonial capital for the Leeward Islands until the seat was transferred to Antigua for military reasons in 1698. During this period, Nevis was the richest of the British Leeward Islands. The island outranked even larger islands like Jamaica in sugar production in the late 17th century. The wealth of the planters on the island is evident in the tax records preserved at the Calendar State Papers in the British Colonial Office Public Records, where the amount of tax collected on the Leeward Islands was recorded. The sums recorded for 1676 as "head tax on slaves", a tax payable in sugar, amounted to 384,600 pounds in Nevis, as opposed to 67,000 each in Antigua and Saint Kitts, 62,500 in Montserrat, and 5,500 total in the other five islands. The profits on sugar cultivation in Nevis was enhanced by the fact that the cane juice from Nevis yielded an unusually high amount of sugar. A gallon (3.79 litres) of cane juice from Nevis yielded 24 ounces (0.71 litres) of sugar, whereas a gallon from Saint Kitts yielded 16 ounces. Twenty percent of the British Empire’s total sugar production in 1700 was derived from Nevisian plantations. Exports from West Indian colonies like Nevis were worth more than all the exports from all the mainland Thirteen colonies of North America combined at the time of the American Revolution.
The enslaved families formed the large labour force and were forced to perform the monotonous and dangerous work of the sugar plantations. After the 1650s the supply of white indentured servants began to dry up due to increased wages in England and less incentive to migrate to the colonies. Additionally, the plantation owners considered lifelong enslavement a better long-term investment for their owners than indentured servants who could leave after four to seven years. They also considered it easier to control persons in a workforce that had been removed from their homelands and separated from their kin by brute force and who were easily discerned by their skin colour should they try to escape. By the end of the 17th century, the population of Nevis consisted of a small, rich planter elite in control, a marginal population of poor whites, a great majority of enslaved families of African descent, and an unknown number of maroons, people who had freed themselves from the exploitation at the plantations and escaped into the mountains. In 1780, 90 percent of the 10,000 people living on Nevis were black. Some of the maroons joined with the few remaining Caribs in Nevis to form an ever present resistance force in the mountainous regions of the island. Memories of the Nevisian maroons' struggle against the injustices suffered by the Afro-Caribbean population under the plantation system are preserved in place names such as Maroon Hill, an early centre of resistance.
The great wealth generated by the colonies of the West Indies led to wars between Spain, Britain, and France. The formation of the United States can be said to be a partial by-product of these wars and the strategic trade aims that often ignored North America. Three privateers were employed by the British Crown to help protect ships in Nevis' waters. One of them, Captain Frances, was of African descent. He commanded 100 men and a 20-gun ship.
During the 17th century the French, based on Saint Kitts, launched many attacks on Nevis, sometimes assisted by the Island Caribs, who in 1667 sent a large fleet of canoes along in support. Letters and other records from the era indicate that the English on Nevis hated and feared the Amerindians. In 1674 and 1683 they participated in attacks on Carib villages in Dominica and St. Vincent, in spite of a lack of official approval from The Crown for the attack.
In 1706, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the French Canadian founder of Louisiana in North America, decided to drive the English out of Nevis and thus also stop pirate attacks on French ships; he considered Nevis the region's headquarter for piracy in the Caribbean against French trade. During d'Iberville's invasion of Nevis, French Buccaneers were used in the front line, infamous for being ruthless killers after the pillaging during the wars with Spain where they gained a reputation for torturing and murdering non-combatants. In the face of the invading force, the English militiamen of Nevis fled. Some planters burned the plantations, rather than letting the French have them, and hid in the mountains. It was the enslaved Africans who held the French at bay by taking up arms to defend their families and the island. The slave quarters had been looted and burned as well, as the main reward promised the men fighting on the French side in the attack was the right to capture as many slaves as possible and resell them in Martinique.
During the fighting, 3,400 enslaved Nevisians were captured and sent off to Martinique, but about 1,000 more, poorly armed and militarily untrained, held the French troops at bay, by "murderous fire" according to an eyewitness account by an English militiaman. He wrote that "the slaves' brave behaviour and defence there shamed what some of their masters did, and they do not shrink to tell us so." After 18 days of fighting, the French were driven off the island. Among the Nevisian men, women and children carried away on d'Iberville's ships, six ended up in Louisiana, the first persons of African descent to arrive there.
Nevis was united with Saint Kitts and Anguilla in 1882, and they became an associated state with full internal autonomy in 1967, though Anguilla seceded in 1971. Together, Saint Kitts and Nevis became independent on September 19, 1983. On August 10, 1998, a referendum on Nevis to separate from Saint Kitts had 2,427 votes in favour and 1,498 against, falling short of the two thirds majority needed.
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