Caribbean Compass Yachting Magazine - February 2021

Boats and History:
Bequia Heritage Museum Expands
FEBRUARY 2021 CARIBBEAN COMPASS PAGE 24
The Bequia Heritage Foundation’s Bequia Boat Museum, overlooking Friendship
Bay at St. Hillary, houses a 36-foot Amerindian canoe, two 26-foot Bequia–built
whaleboats and a 12-foot Bequia whaleboat tender. Backed up with signage,
photographs, ships’ models, artifacts and traditional woodworking tools, the display
provides a window into Bequia’s rich and unique seafaring heritage.
Expansion planned by the Bequia Heritage Foundation to cover the entire sweep
of Bequia’s history has now become a reality with the opening of the adjacent new
Annexe building on December 7th, 2020. The two buildings together now form the
Bequia Heritage Museum.
The Annexe houses a fine collection of Amerindian artifacts, almost all found on
Bequia, plus a selection of material from the colonial period including a collection of
bottles retrieved by divers from Admiralty Bay. The exhibits in the Annexe are
enhanced by two PowerPoint presentations. One gives an in-depth and contextual
overview of Bequia’s more than 1,700 years of history. The other shows rare
historical charts, maps and photos of the island. Allow a good hour to get the most
out of this wonderful new addition to Bequia.
Until now, the Boat Museum was run by a small handful of Trustee volunteers and
funded solely by donations. In the early days, the original unstaffed building, opened
in 2013, was designed so that people could come and view the exhibits through the
windows for free. Tours inside with a volunteer guide were available only by
appointment. Now, through the Trustees’ hard work and additional fundraising
efforts, the new Annexe has been opened with a trained museum representative in
each building during opening hours. Entry fees (EC$25, or $20 for groups of four or
more; kids under 12 free) merchandise sales and donations will now provide funding
for salaries, maintenance, etcetera.
A monthly “Open Saturday” with free admission for all is planned once Covidrelated
conditions and regulations permit. The Museum also actively encourages
school groups to visit with their teachers by prior arrangement, once schools reopen.
Currently, due to the Covid pandemic, opening hours have been temporary
reduced to Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9:00am till 1:00pm. Personal guided
tours outside these hours are welcomed, and available by prior arrangement.
For more information contact (784) 532 9554 or bequiaheritage@gmail.com
Looking Back and Looking Ahead
by Herman Belmar
The history of Bequia is largely oral, rooted in a mixture of cultures: Amerindian,
Garifuna, African, and European. The lack of resources in the pre-1990s to send our
students en masse to secondary schools and universities dampened the ability to put
into writing the things that made us who we are. Our history and cultural traditions
were passed on orally or lost forever. The purpose of the Bequia Heritage Museum is
to change that: to bring to the front as much as possible of that which is quickly
fading, and to preserve it for posterity.
The impetus for the founding of the Bequia Boat Museum was a backward glance at
life on Bequia during the mid 1980s, including a glimpse of two whaleboats owned by
an aging group of Ollivierre brothers: Athneal, Louis, Barton and Ocarol. Of the four,
Athneal was the only one still capable of displaying brawn, as immortalised in song:
“Athneal was the greatest whaler man, with nerves of steel and a powerful right arm.”
Existing photographs of the crew of the two boats showed a team of brave men who
had all passed their 60th birthday. Tom Johnson, a dear friend of Athneal, assessed
WILFRED DEDERER (ALL)
the situation, even as Athneal declared himself “The Last Harpooner.” With Tom as
a driving force, the founders of the Museum Working Group took a decision to do
something urgently to preserve the cultural traditions from which our island evolved.
While all our history was important and worth preserving, we all felt the urgency to
capture and preserve as much of the oral history of whaling and ship-building as
possible, as well as the existing artifacts.
Tom and I were assigned to be the liaisons between the whalers and the committee,
with Pat Mitchell doing much documentation through photographs. The Bequia
Heritage Foundation was born, and the first offshoot was the Bequia Whaling and
Sailing Museum.
A boat and equipment were acquired from Barton Ollivierre, and a second boat and
equipment, depicting the Barrouallie whaling industry, was purchased, since it was
built in Paget Farm. Land at St. Hillary was purchased from Government, and the
evolution of the museum began its long laborious journey.
The emphasis today is not just on whaling. It covers our boatbuilding tradition
from canoes to ships, with the whaleboat standing in the middle as the small craft
that adapted the style of the Yankees while changing the face of life and history
on Bequia. We have also expanded to cover the Amerindian and European periods
of settlement.
Since the formation of the Museum Committee in 1984-85, a working relationship
has been established with the Kendall Whaling Museum of Sharon, Massachusetts.
We hosted a curator from that museum in the summer of ’85, and contracted with a
film company to produce a documentary on Bequia whaling. In 1986 I received
training as a curator at the Kendall Whaling Museum, and land at St. Hillary was
purchased with funding through the Canadian International Development Agency.
That year we also opened relationships with the Barbados Museum, where I secured
advanced curatorial training. In 1988 whaleboats were purchased, and a display at
the Gingerbread Hotel was erected. The exhibits were moved to a shed in Port
Elizabeth in 2000. The foundation of the Boat Museum at St. Hillary was laid in 2006.
Left: The new Annexe houses a fine collection of Amerindian artifacts, PowerPoint
presentations and more.
Below: The original building houses a representative collection of indigenous
open boats and related materials.
A canoe built by the Amerindians of Martinique, Dominica and Guyana was
purchased in 2005. The Boat Museum was opened in 2013, and the Annexe in 2020.
The existing buildings were built mainly thanks to the gifts of our many patrons and
donors (see a list on the museum wall) and the sweat and toil of our Trustees. We now
have two paid adjunct curators/office attendants.
In a master plan for the overall development of the property, our first drive is
landscaping, to create easy access to the shore of Friendship Bay, to provide ease of
access to yachties, and also to create a tranquil garden space in which one can relax,
read or just enjoy the sounds of nature: The Morris Nicholson Memorial Garden. The
plan includes the construction of an amphitheater-like building, where local
traditional music, dance, and craft can be displayed: The Pat Mitchell Memorial
Cultural Center. We are also planning spaces for a traditional Bequia chattel house,
boatbuilding, and perhaps pottery and basket weaving, and work and display areas
for traditional activities such as a whaling tryworks and a miniature sugar works.
While this is an ambitious plan, the work of the Trustees, who also serve as
volunteers, is an ongoing labour of love. The task ahead is truly astronomical.