History of Canouan

class="apple-converted-space"> slaves who had escaped repression on Barbados by following the current of trade winds westward to St. Vincent, as well as those who had survived shipwrecks near St. Vincent and Bequia.

The mixed descendants of the island warriors and the freed Africans (who became known as the Black Caribs), with their common distrust and disgust for the Europeans, proved to be a fearsome foe.

The Caribs feared complete domination so they allowed the French to construct a settlement on the island in 1719. The French brought slaves to work their plantations. By 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle officially declared St. Vincent and its surrounding islands to be a neutral island, controlled by neither Britain nor France. The two countries continued to contest control of the islands, however, until they were definitively ceded to the British in 1814.

In the early 1990s the Canouan Resorts Development Ltd (CRD)company was formed and secured lease for areas of the island to build 2 hotels - the current Raffles Resort site and Tamarind Hotel site. At