A week ? It’s just a week since I posted ? Mindboggling. Right now I’m sitting on an excellent couch in a coffee shop (Rituals – the Caribbean Starbuck’s clone complete with chai latte and chocolate croissants, um…and Jamaican meat patties) on the in-transit floor of Piarco Airport in Trinidad but for the past seven days I’ve been living Lucian and having a wonderful time.
(note: a few hours later I traded the excellent couch for airport terminal bucket seats in the hopes of promised internet access that was sadly nowhere to be found. This post was sent via the lickety split connection at my hotel in Paramaribo – more on that very soon!)
I left off last week after the trip to Mamiku Estate to collect clay – this site was once the extensive 18th century plantation of the French Baron de Micoud and his wife Marie Anne Devaux de Micoud who later kept the estate going and was referred to as ‘Ma Micoud’ hence the name ‘Mamiku’ which has been used to name the site for some time. In 1778, the 460 acre sugar estate was described as including “all the buildings for the manufacture of sugar and the dwelling houses of the whites and the blacks, the plantations of provisions and canes, the canal, the lime kiln, the canoes, the pottery, the carts, all the machinery for the manufacture of sugar, 30 oxen, 27 mules, all the goats and sheep on the Pointe Riviere lands, 100 slaves of all ages and generally all the appurtenances of the said estate” (primary documentation cited in a 1937 history by Thomas Ferguson compiled for the Shingleton-Smith family, the current owners, and copied for me just this week by Veronica S-S – thank you so much !). So there you have it, a specific citation of an 18th c plantation pottery in St. Lucia rumors of which last year led me to one particular corner of Mamiku bush and to the subsequent excavation of what may or may not be an 18th c kiln.
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