First-person accounts of the Caribbean from the 1820s to the 1890s — captains' logs, colonial administrators' diaries, and naturalists' observations, with extensive firsthand documentation of Anguilla.
European travelers to the Caribbean left behind an enormous body of firsthand writing -- part natural history, part memoir, part colonial propaganda -- describing landscapes, peoples, and plantation economies to audiences back home who had never seen any of it. These accounts are invaluable and deeply compromised at the same time: often the only surviving written record of a place or moment, filtered entirely through the assumptions of the person holding the pen.