Some time prior to 200 B.C. a cultivated tribe called the
Arawaks reached the island using dug-out canoes. These new residents brought plants, animals, and basic farming and fishing skills with them. They lived there for 1,500 years until the
Caribs invaded the island. More than 200 years after
Columbus laid eyes on St. Vincent, the Europeans established a kind of permanent settlement. Its mountainous and heavily forested geography allowed the Caribs to defend against
European settlement here longer than on almost any other island in the Caribbean. After the Caribs were defeated on other islands they joined
slaves who had escaped repression on
Barbados by following the current and 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, had a common distrust and disgust for the Europeans, and 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 1951 universal adult
suffrage was introduced in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and in 1979, it became an independent state within the
British Commonwealth with a democratic government based on the British system. ==Climate==