Blanchisseuse

EXTRACT:

Towns and Villages of Trinidad & Tobago
by Michael Anthony

Blanchisseuse, situated about midway along the rocky north coast of Trinidad, is among the very earliest of our settlements. Coming into being shortly after the Cedula of Population of 1783. At this time Spanish Governor Jose' Maria Chacon was settling incoming French immigrants all over the country, and in the remotest areas.

The place was marked by a river, as was usual with these settlements, since rivers were the only reservoirs of fresh water in those times. When the officer charting and surveying the coast anchored his vessel off the settlement, he asked what the place was called. But no one knew. Noticing the women washing clothes in the river, he simply wrote on his survey chart: Ladies River. Later the ladies themselves and the rest of the settlers called the place after the washer-women who the surveyor, Frederick Mallet, had seen. They gave it the French name for "washer-woman", which is "Blanchisseuse."

Nothing much is heard of Blanchisseuse. Neither the Spaniards, nor the British who came later, mentioned it in their list of settlements for the purpose of production statistics. There were no estates because of the difficulty of the terrain and available space for expansion, which also led to the difficulty of cutting good roads. There were no roads at all leading out of Blanchisseuse, except that one great highway - the sea. The settlement was a clearing with towering mountains behind and pounding sea in front, thick forests, gorges, precipices, and generally inhospitable terrain both to the east and west. Also, the people were absolutely cut off, for there was not a neighbouring village for miles around.

In 1849 when Lord Harris divided up the island into counties and wards he sent a Warden to Blanchisseuse and gave him control of a wide, richly forested region, of which the village was a small part. Harris felt that while in most areas the focus was on the produce of estates, it would be folly to let the valuable natural estate of timber that was to be found in Blanchisseuse, go unnoticed.

In 1866, Governor Sir Arthur Gordon's close friend, Charles Kingsley, paid him a visit during the Christmas season of 1869, Gordon made sure that Kingsley did not leave without seeing Blanchisseuse. Instead of choosing to go by boat, Kingsley, a great lover of hiking and mountain-climbing, wanted to go to Blanchisseuse across the Northern Range from Caura.

They launched at the jungle forests, attempting to make what was undoubtedly going to be the first overland trip to Blanchisseuse. When they were on the outskirts of Blanchisseuse, Kingsley gives what is perhaps the only glimpse of Blanchisseuse. He writes: "And now we began to near the village, two scattered rows of clay and timber bowers right and left of the trace, each half-buried in fruit trees and vegetables, and fended in with hedges of scarlet hibiscus." The village was physically very small, having just two rows of tapia houses, and it was hardly a mile long from one end to the other, looking east to west. What they had done was lay out a new land route to Blanchisseuse.

When the team arrived in the village they were warmly greeted by the villagers having been alerted by mail they received via the coastal steamer which passed Blanchisseuse by on its way to Toco.

The population stood at 472 people after the census of 1871. At that time, nearly a century after the Cedula, the white inhabitants had largely disappeared, retaining their presence in the features of so many of the black people.

The Government erected a school there in 1872. The first schoolmaster, C. Farfan, had 47 children to start, but the number rose to 89 by 1880.

The year 1880 must have been the year the villagers completed their new church for that was the period in which the Parish of Blanchisseuse was created. As for health, although in 1870 Kingsley was told that the village stood out for its unhealthiness, this was not strictly true, for at that time its mortality rate of four percent was one of the lowest in Trinidad. At least such was the position in 1881.

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