UK NEWS

CARIBBEAN ISLAND WHERE RED-HAIRED LOCALS SPEAK WITH SCOTTISH ACCENT

PARADISE: Treasure Beach

Monday May 19,2008

By Catherine Reid

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A HISTORIAN hopes to solve one of the Caribbean’s most enduring mysteries of how a small island community came to have red hair and speak with a Scots dialect.

Generations of those living around Treasure Beach, where there are many Jamaicans with blue eyes, fair hair and freckles, agree the place has a Scottish past. But how it came about, no one can say. Popular legend holds that sometime in the holiday island’s colonial past, a Scottish ship capsized on a treacherous reef.

The sailors swam ashore and they never left, becoming fishermen and farmers. The area’s isolation – swamps to the east and west, mountains to the north and sea to the south – cut them off from the wider world and they eventually married into local families.

Across the island their descendants are instantly recognised as “brownin’s” or “red men”, with a strange dialect littered with “aye” and “you know”.

Now Dr James Cant, a former history teacher turned policy analyst with the Ministry of Defence, plans to travel to the remote community and discover its origins once and for all. He said: “Treasure Beach is a really secluded part of the island – it’s a bit like the Highlands – remote, very religious and relies on fishing.

“What I want to pin down is how and when Scottish blood came to be there.”

The remote community boasts a roll call of Scottish names – MacIntyre, Moxam, Parchment and James.

Virtually every family has a streak of Celtic genes, appearing as red hair or green or blue eyes.

Until recently, few outsiders came to these villages. Tourist resorts are a long way off, and the old isolation that saved the villages from slavery still exists to some extent.

Despite local legend there is no documentary evidence of the shipwreck and Dr Cant also hopes to investigate claims that their forbears may have been colonists fleeing Scotland to the doomed Darien colony in Panama. Some 2,500 Scots settled in Darien in 1698-99. They called their territory New Caledonia but the vast majority died, not least because William III of England denied them vital support.

Two cast iron cannons made at Carron Ironworks in Falkirk were dredged from the sea off Treasure Beach and are believed to have come from a Scottish shipwreck.

Dr Cant, who will film a documentary of his trip, said: “I will check the archives at the National Library to establish which ship they belong to.”