Luxury Locations issue 26

FEATURE

Nelson’s Dockyard: Charting three centuries of history and heritage The world’s only working Georgian dockyard marks its 300th anniversary

T hankfully for Antigua, travel review websites didn’t exist in the 18th century when Horatio Nelson declared English Harbour to be an “infernal hole” and lamented being “most woefully pinched” by mosquitoes. The visitors of today are infinitely more benign and the historic district buttressed by Nelson’s Dockyard – named after its most famous erstwhile resident – is ranked by TripAdvisor as one of the island’s top three attractions. The dockyard’s significance in the chronicles of Antigua’s BELOW: The joiners loft as seen in the 1950s - credit Museum of Antigua and Barbuda

history – from a strategic British naval base to a cornerstone of tourism, its economic mainstay – cannot be overestimated. Last autumn, the well-preserved site marked its milestone 300th anniversary. September 25 was the tercentenary of the dockyard’s official establishment, when the Antigua Legislature passed an act granting land for use by the Royal Navy. The dockyard’s function was to maintain warships protecting Britain’s valuable sugar-producing islands. In those days, Antigua was a key supplier of sugar, the product that helped build the British Empire. The island’s first large-scale plantation had been established in the mid-17th century by Christopher Codrington. At the trade’s peak, there were more than 150 sugar mills in operation across the island. It’s a tortured history of course: the industry depended on the labour of enslaved people forcibly shipped to the islands from West Africa. Another reason Lord Nelson so despised the place had little to do with ethics, however. His stationing there from 1784 to 1787 was to enforce the Navigation Act which prohibited foreign ships from trading with British colonies. It made him deeply unpopular with local merchants who depended on trade with the fledgling United States. After the region’s sugar industry waned in the mid-19th century, following the abolition of slavery, Britain turned its attention elsewhere and the dockyard was closed in 1889.

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