Sights
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mmerse yourself in wartime and peacetime history. To get the feel of a place, there is nothing quite like the local museum, and Tobago has an excellent one. The location itself makes it worth a visit, being high on a hill overlooking Scarborough. It’s in an old fort, the late-18thCentury Fort King George. The thing about coastal fortifications is that while, to the visitor, a site such as this merely offers a panoramic view, to the military mind it is a potential stronghold with intrinsic safety because of its elevated position and the advantages of offering a clear view of anyone approaching from the sea, plus the ability to bombard them. Now outdated (and this one was ravaged by a hurricane in 1847 anyway), forts around the world have been turned into museums, and this one is up there with the very best. The building that once served as officers’ accommodation has been refurbished and now plays host to displays of everything from fragments of ancient pottery and weapons to relatively modern items that give a glimpse of Tobago as it was in the 19th and 20th Centuries. What the visitor gets from a tour of the museum depends largely on his or her interpretation. Bits of broken plates and bowls are nothing more than rubble to some, but examples of functional and artistic development to others. The museum offers knowledgeable assistance for researchers, group tours, etc., and on the visits undertaken to gather material for this article, a museum assistant, an artist herself, brought the “rubble” to life with her insight into what was going on and how styles developed, even in distant periods when the pace of change was less frantic than it is today. A collection of maps from down the ages shows how things have changed here, with cartographers of different countries assigning place-names that their predecessors wouldn’t have recognized. Thus the Dutch, the Courlanders (from what is now Latvia), the French and the British called things what they wanted to. One map, notable mainly because it doesn’t follow the convention of having north at the top and south at the bottom, and therefore has Trinidad looking like the shape of a whisky tumbler, with Tobago falling off the end, features “Ian Flamingh’s Bay”, which is more than a Dutchman’s incorrect spelling, because it predates the island’s inhabitation by the James Bond author by several centuries. A museum wouldn’t be complete without some human bones, and here you’ll find the skeleton of a prehistoric Amerindian, discovered at Mount Irvine. Long, long before the Europeans were here and brought in the Africans as slaves, Amerindians settled here, and before Christopher Columbus had even heard of the Caribbean, the Caribs and Arawaks skirmished throughout the region in a long-running feud. The strong African heritage of Tobago is reflected by artefacts in the museum, not just things discovered here and donated by families, but works of art and practical items brought direct from Africa itself to reinforce the bond between that continent and this small island. Just below the fort is a sprawl of buildings that, until recently, housed the island’s main hospital, now replaced by Scarborough General, to the east of the capital. On a fine day Fort King George seems like it would have been a cushy, if sweaty, little tour of duty for the British soldiers stationed here to protect their country’s interests. Even when the rain pours down and it’s like looking at the view through a curtain of glass beads, there is a sense of nature’s magnificence and a feeling of being just a small part of a vast history.
Fort King George By Chris Morvan
Photo: Inken Janning
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