By Peter Swann

When the first humans migrated across the Bering Straits into North America about 15,000 years ago they were starting a journey that would take many of their descendants through South America, across the Andes and north into the Caribbean. These nomadic people called Amerindians (or Arawaks) reached Antigua around 3000 BC.

They soon discovered the small 300 acre island just 2 miles off the North East coast of Antigua which we now call Jumby Bay Island. This island was important to them because it contained the only source of tool quality flint in the Caribbean. Flinty Bay on Jumby Bay Island’s North coast soon became a primitive, Stone Age, industrial center from which flint nodules were exported all over the Caribbean region. Today, archeologists from around the world visit Flinty Bay to sift through the flint tools discarded by the Amerindians to learn more about their way of life.

When the Amerindians first arrived they knew no agriculture and lived mostly off the sea but by 900 AD they knew how to farm the nutritious cassava root and make pottery. Their broken plates and pots can still be found on Jumby Bay Island today. They called our little island Yennecot and they called Antigua Waladli (similar in spelling to our local beer Wadadli). The name Antigua was given by Christopher Columbus in November 1493 and came from “Santa Maria de la Antigua”, a cathedral in Seville, Spain.(1)

Europeans did not reach Antigua until 1632. They brought with them their domesticated plants and animals, their manufacturing skills and their religions. They tried to impose their way of life on the Arawaks but many resisted and fled to the mountainous Caribbean islands where they could hide and launch attacks on the new settlers. Because these Arawaks often ate their captives they were known by the Spanish word Calibales (from which the English word cannibal is derived). Later, the pronunciation changed to Caribs and eventually the whole chain of islands from Trinidad to Hispaniola was named after them. The friendly Arawaks who lived in peace with the settlers were rewarded with sickness and death because they had no resistance to European diseases.

Early records show that by 1636 “English gentlemen” were coming to Jumby Bay Island to shoot rabbits and collect resin from the valuable Lignum Vitae (wood of life) tree which grew in abundance here. There were no coconut or date palms anywhere in the Caribbean at that time. The settlers boiled the twigs from the Lignum Vitae to make a medicine for treating venereal disease. There are no rabbits on Jumby Bay Island today and only one Lignum Vitae. The settlers did not like the Arawak name Yennecot and replaced it with the more English sounding name Southold.
This name also did not stick, and was later changed to Long Island which may seem strange because topographically, our island is not long.

However, the name accurately described the island’s appearance when viewed from the mainland, where Maiden Island and Southold appear as one “long” island. The name Long Island was chosen before the days of tourism by people unaware of the more famous island of the same name in USA. Today, the maps of Antigua, the Post Office and the Antiguan people still use the name Long Island but tourist brochures prefer Jumby Bay Island which derives from the name of our largest bay. The first European to have title to Jumby Bay Island was King Charles I of England. However, in 1627, he gave it to the Earl of Carlisle, “as a personal favour”. The Earl had no heirs and in 1650 his land reverted to the throne.

This was a time of great conflict in England and Oliver Cromwell was deporting English gentlemen to Antigua as a punishment for being loyal to the King. When the tables turned and the King regained power he showed his gratitude to these Royalists by giving them land. He gave Jumby Bay Island and some nearby islands to Major William Byam who later became Governor of Guiana. When William Byam died his youngest son Edward inherited the islands but he had very little interest in them and in the year 1700 he sold them to the Honourable Bertie Entwistle Jarvis with whose family they remained for the next 215 years.

Bertie wanted to farm his islands and introduced a curious breed of short coated, black and white sheep the descendants of which still roam Jumby Bay Island today.(2) Bertie could not make a living from his sheep but he was struck by the success of a nearby sugar mill called Betty’s Hope. He decided to build his own sugar mill on the island but because of the poor soil(3) and low rainfall his crop yield was poor and he lost money on the venture. In desperation, he turned to smuggling. Under cover of darkness he brought in large quantities of cheap French sugar and pretended it had been produced on Jumby Bay Island. This was illegal but the pretense enabled him to obtain a certificate of Antiguan origin signed by his local magistrate. It was only then that a sea captain could legally accept his sugar for export to Great Britain.

The Hon. Bertie Jarvis still had a problem, however. He needed to ship at least ten times as much sugar from Jumby Bay Island as even the most gullible magistrate would consider possible. His solution to the problem was both elegant and treacherous. He set the export quantity of sugar on his application form at, for example, “seven” hogsheads and then after the certificate of origin was signed by the magistrate, he would secretly add “ty” to the word seven in the small space he had allocated for this purpose. This ruse enabled him to export all the French sugar he could obtain.
Sugar smuggling soon became the way of life in other small islands around Antigua. It seemed everyone knew what was happening but no one tried to stop it because everyone gained from it. The local economy was boosted, the British received a good supply of sugar and the French had a market for their excess production. Surprisingly, the British government was so taken in by the “ty” deception (as it was later described) that in 1725 they insured the Hon. Bertie Jarvis against any loss of his crop resulting from a French attack!

In 1835, one year after slavery was abolished, Thomas Jarvis, great grandson of Bertie, rented small plots on Long Island to emancipated slaves to grow vegetables for sale at the market on the mainland. Of course this did not provide the Jarvis family with much income and in 1875 they almost lost everything when the British government put their islands up for sale by auction to recover unpaid taxes. At the last moment, the family managed to find enough money to keep their land. For a while, they tried to grow cotton on the island but in 1915, during the first world war, Bertie Hill Jarvis, second son of Thomas Jarvis could hold out no longer and once again the island went on the auction block. By this time Bertie’s old sugar mill next to the Estate House was in ruin and it remained that way for the next 45 years.

Lena Henzell bought Long Island at auction in 1915 and paid £250(4). Lena was a very attractive lady and unusually forthright for a women in the early 1900’s. She smoked a pipe and 80 cigarettes a day and developed throat cancer but nevertheless lived until she was over 83. She brought in a caretaker called Sam Payne who managed the island as a family weekend retreat until his death in 1932. Sam must have been a fearsome fellow during his lifetime because when he was laid out in his coffin the people of Parham stuck pins in the soles of his feet to make sure he did not walk from his grave.

Lena’s fifth child, Frank Henzell, was her favorite. He was a handsome, thin, weather beaten man with dark, piercing eyes. Unfortunately, he was addicted to both alcohol and women, and his behaviour embarrassed the family so much that Lena gave him title to Jumby Bay Island in her will on the promise that he would live on the island during her lifetime. Frank kept his promise and in 1952 moved his residence to the old Estate House. He raised turkeys, guinea fowl, peacocks and built up a flock of over 300 sheep after crossbreeding the remnants of Bertie’s stock with some new Persian sheep he imported. Most of the island was then covered by brush which concealed donkeys that would bray eerily at night. Frank cleared away the brush in the more fertile watershed areas of the island in order to help his sheep graze more easily. This was how Pasture Bay on the north side of the island got its name. Frank also resumed Bertie Jarvis’ nocturnal business deals with the French. This time they were Guadeloupe fisherman who would come once a month to swap three sheep for one duty-free case of French cognac. Frank used to brag that he caught all his fish by shooting them with his 303 caliber rifle. On one memorable weekend in 1954 he demonstrated this remarkable skill to his friend Jimmy Watson (then the manager of the sugar factory) and Jimmy’s daughter Agnes. They went to the beach at Pond Bay, where Pond Bay House stands today and Frank promptly located and shot a barracuda swimming near the shore. Agnes dashed into the water to retrieve the fish and proudly handed it to her father. Unfortunately, the barracuda was merely stunned by the shot and when Jimmy took it into his arms it revived and clamped its formidable jaws onto Jimmy’s rather large nose.

Jimmy was soon screaming in agony and almost lost his nose while everyone around him tried to remove the writhing creature. It was only after one of them scooped out the barracuda’s eyes that it finally let go. From that time on, Jimmy (who later became the manager at Mill Reef), would point to his scarred face and brag that he was the only man alive to have been caught by a fish on land!

Sixty years ago wild life was so abundant on and around Jumby Bay Island that Frank had no difficulty obtaining all the food he needed. Almost every weekend he had a party for his drinking friends or his family. They would feast on crabs, lobster, cockles, turtles and of course lamb. He caught the land crabs at night when they left their holes in the sandy soil next to Jumby Bay. He purged them for a week in a barrel of cornmeal before boiling them in a cast iron pot over an open fire. He flavored the crabs with spicy West Indian curry and onions and served them with Fungie, a delicious West Indian dish made with cornmeal, butter and okra.
Frank Henzell’s nephew, Len Moody-Stuart(5), recalls that in the 1940’s the Henzell and Moody-Stuart families would go out at night onto Jumby Bay reef to hunt lobsters. They walked in a small procession out along the sand spit to the reef, each carrying a gunny sack and a lighted torch called a flambeau. The lobsters were attracted by the light and all the party had to do was to bend down and pluck the lobsters from the water and place them in their gunny sacks. In those days, it seemed the supply of lobsters was infinite but today one would be lucky indeed to catch even a single lobster using this technique. They also “grained” for cockles using a barbed iron rod (called a grain) to probe through the sand.

Turtles were easy to find at their nesting ground on Pasture Beach. This was not a well kept secret because at night Frank would often encounter poachers from the mainland there. They collected eggs from new nests located by following the tracks left by the female turtles. Each nest would contain about 150 soft, leathery eggs similar in color, shape and size to ping pong balls and valued for their reputed aphrodisiac qualities. If a female was found on her way up to nest she would be immobilized by turning her onto her back and then killed. First, her flippers would be removed for their delicate meat and then she would be cut up further for turtle steaks and her unlaid eggs. The main prize was her shell for which there was a ready market.

Since Frank’s time our attitude to wildlife has changed. Now, most people want to live in harmony with our wildlife. The rare Hawksbill turtles on Pasture Bay have existed since the end of the Jurassic period over 150 million years ago and none of us wants our species to be responsible for their extinction. Today the turtles are protected on Pasture Bay under a University of Georgia research program sponsored by the island’s residents. Upon request, Island visitors may now join the researchers and observe the turtle’s nesting behavior.

When Lena Henzell died on 7th April 1960 Frank became the new owner of Jumby Bay Island. After his mother’s death, he drank even more heavily and his health deteriorated so much that he could no longer look after the Island. His drinking friend, Terry Tyrell found him a buyer and in April 1963 for the princely sum of EC$300,000 the Gordon brothers from Guadeloupe became the new owners of Jumby Bay Island. As part of the deal they built a house overlooking Cistern Point and gave Frank the right to use it for the rest of his life. By 1963 the sugar industry in Antigua was finished and tourism was just beginning. The Gordon brothers understood this and started to build a small resort hotel. They constructed four of the six existing Rondovals, renovated the estate house and partially restored the sugar mill. Unfortunately, the brothers ran out of money and the hotel never opened for guests.

On 12th December 1965, the wealthy, retired CEO of Tektronix Inc., Robert (Bob) Davis and his new bride, Johnne Davis, were sailing by Jumby Bay Island on their way to the fishing grounds when his boat captain (also the island’s realtor) told them the island was for sale. Within the hour they were having a delightful picnic on the lawn in front of the Estate House. Under the influence of the afternoon sun, a fine claret and the gentle, warm breeze scented with rosemary and thyme Bob knew he had to buy the island and start a new life. Four months later, in April 1966, he purchased Jumby Bay Island for EC $1.2million. Title was held in a company called Arawak Ltd.

Mr. Davis’ first step was to buy a 90 ft barge, Nina, and hire a captain and five crew to bring his family possessions and various construction equipment from the Port of Miami to Jumby Bay Island. The barge set out, uninsured, on a course that would bring it right into the path of the level 4 hurricane Inez. Unfortunately, the barge was not designed for work on the high seas and on 28 September 1966, just off the coast of Jamaica, she sank losing all but one of her crew. This was a crushing blow for Bob Davis but he was a resilient man and in January 1967 he decided not only to build a new 80 ft barge himself but to build a new dock, a water catchment and convert the fake sugar mill into a water tower.

One and a half years later the new barge was finished and ready to launch from where it was built on what is now Lot 2. To everyone’s embarrassment the barge was too heavy to slide down the launch ramp and its naming ceremony had to be postponed. It took six more months, using hundreds of hydraulic jacks to lift the barge and build a new steeper ramp. Finally, in November 1968 Johnne Davis was able to crack a bottle of champagne across the barge’s bow and declare, “I name this barge Sea Ranger. May God bless her and all who sail in her.” Regrettably, God did not bless this barge. As she slid down the ramp into the sea her planks twisted and groaned as she began to leak. Finally, she sank in what we now call Davis Bay.

While Sea Ranger was being built Bob Davis was working on his $168 million Master Plan. He built a scale model of the development at the estate house to show potential investors. The few Arawak staff permitted a brief glimpse of the model were astonished by its ambitious scope. What they saw was an 18 hole golf course surrounded by a narrow gauge railway track designed to transport up to 5,000 guests between three hotels placed at strategic sites around the island. In addition, there were 830 apartment units, a casino, an aquarium, a botanical garden, a shopping center, four restaurants, a church, a school, an exhibition hall and three large swimming pools. The main railway station was to be located near Henzell Point. A branch line was included to take all the island trash to the utility area for processing at night.

A critical component of Bob Davis’s Master Plan was the concept of “environmental capacity” defined as the number of people the island could accommodate without damage to its character. A consulting firm concluded this number was about 6,000 guests plus eating, toilet, laundry and transportation facilities for 3,000 resort employees.

It is hard to believe now that anyone would conclude the character of a 300 acre island would not be damaged by the influx of 9,000 people. Nevertheless, that was what was planned and would have become a reality if other factors had not intervened.

After losing Sea Ranger Bob Davis decided he must have a boat to transport the heavy equipment needed to execute his Master Plan. He went to Miami and bought a 250 ft freighter, Star W with 17 crew and a Chinese Captain. The boat left Miami in March 1969 but barely made headway against the trade winds. When the boat finally arrived to re-fuel at the island of St. Thomas there was a mutiny and all the crew jumped ship. It took another two months to get Star W to Jumby Bay Island but when it arrived Bob discovered it’s draft was too great to be accommodated by the dock he had just built. For the next two years until Bob found a buyer, the Star W rested at anchor in the deep water of Parham Sound while every day its faithful Captain Chen could be seen washing, polishing and painting her.

Not surprisingly, Bob Davis failed to get permission to execute his Master Plan. His application was denied because his 600 room hotels, located where Bananaquit, Doniford House and Osprey are today, were considered a hazard to aircraft. However, Bob Davis was about to experience an even greater setback. He had financed all his activities with money borrowed using his Tektronix stock as collateral. When the OPEC crisis came in 1973 the value of his stock plummeted and his bank was forced to sell all his shares to recover the balance of his loan. Unfortunately, this created a large capital gains tax for Bob which he could not pay. It took the IRS about 3 years to realize this and when they did they seized Arawak’s remaining assets.

When Bob Davis married Johnne Davis he acquired a stepson, Homer Williams. By 1973, Homer was already an accomplished real estate developer. He knew Jumby Bay Island well and was convinced it was a sound property investment. When he discovered the island was going to be auctioned in Puerto Rico he wrote to the IRS asking for the auction site to be moved closer to his home in Portland, Oregon. The IRS did as Homer asked on the condition he gave them a certified check to cover what the IRS considered to be a minimum bid. On auction day, 11th October 1979, Homer met the IRS representative at the auction site in Portland and not surprisingly he was the only bidder. Three months later, on 31 January 1980, at a cost of US $150,000 Homer Williams obtained title to Jumby Bay Island.

In true developer fashion, Homer immediately borrowed a large sum of money which he used to clean up the island, restore the fake sugar mill, add two more Rondovals, build Pond Bay House, the bar and the dining area at the Beach Pavilion. His all-inclusive resort opened for guests in December 1983 and it was an immediate success. In January 1984 Hideaway Report gave Jumby Bay and its new manager, David Brewer and architect, Bob Moreland, high ratings.

The report attracted many new guests one of whom was John Mariani, Chairman of Banfi Vintners, a leading wine maker and wine distributor located in Long Island, New York. Banfi Vintners had just scored a huge marketing success selling an Italian white wine called Riunite. It seemed that everyone in America had heard their catchy slogan “Riunite on ice, that’s a nice.” John and Homer met on Jumby Bay beach and as they walked slowly along the shore Homer told him about his plans. They decided to continue their discussions later that evening at dinner. John had only been on the island two days but like so many others before him he was already in love with the place.

It was not long before John and Homer became business partners in Arawak Ltd. By 1989 Harpers Hideaway reported that Jumby Bay had become the world’s top resort and the future for the island looked very rosy. Unfortunately, the developer’s focus on profits and future expansion was inconsistent with the homeowner’s focus on privacy and exclusivity. What followed was legal wrangling and negotiations between Arawak and the homeowners which ultimately resulted in the homeowners buying all Arawak’s assets for cash. They formed a new company, Jumby Bay Island Company (JBIC), which has controlled the island since 6 August 1998.

The island has come a long way since the days of Major Byam and the Honorable Bertie Entwistle Jarvis. It owes much to the tenacity and creativity of the Henzells, Bob and Johnne Davis, Homer Williams, the Marianis, and the members of Jumby Bay Club. It is not surprising that visitors call Jumby Bay Island the hidden jewel of the Caribbean.

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