History
“Pulling seine” - those who helped the fishermen pull in their fishing net or seine would get some fish.
remained long after these early times, and up to today, families like Hughes (changed from Hugues) and Frontin still flourish in the district. There is also Point Radix, the name of the original grant made to Radix, and Lagon Mahau, which is a district with a lagoon that passes through the original grant of Mahau. The period of the capture was also the aftermath of the French revolution, and a lot Republicans from Martinique and Guadeloupe had fled to Trinidad in the wake of bitter unrest in these islands. Chacón had apparently made a few grants to Republicans of color, for names like Hugues and Frontin strongly suggest this. However, the majority of the people granted land at Mayaro were royalists, for Chacón, to avoid the conflict and bitterness that existed between royalist and Republican in the French islands, tried to separate them in Trinidad. Incidentally, the settlement of the Mayaro coast was begun by the royalist Phillipe Alphonse Gantaume, who in 1793 had fled revolutionary troubles in Martinique, taking to sea in an open boat and being washed up on the Mayaro coast. Stranded there, he got in touch with Governor Chacón, and Chacón made a grant of land to him, which he called Beau Séjour (Beautiful Sojourn). In addition to
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The Ins & Outs of Trinidad and Tobago
Image courtesy Adrian Camps-Campins
this estate Gantaume opened another shortly afterwards – St. Joseph Estate. These two estates are the first to have been established in Mayaro. The great problem for the planters was shipping out their produce. Mayaro had become an extremely productive region, and it was because of this and because of the fact that the settler Gantaume had become a very important figure in the region that Governor Sir Ralph Woodford in 1818 started the first round-island steamer service in Trinidad. Mayaro continued to be a productive region, although cut off by land from the rest of Trinidad, owing to the forests, by the complete absence of roads, and by the bridgeless Ortoire River, which commanded its entrance from the south and west. So cut off in fact was Mayaro that after the abolition of slavery in 1838, while slaves walked off the estates in other parts, in Mayaro they appeared to remain. This was certainly due to the fact that the region was so isolated that slave and slave owner, thrown together as they had always been, had developed an unusual relationship. In good time many of the original grants had passed on to former slaves.