In 1623, the English captain Sir Thomas Warner landed on St Kitts and established the first permanent English settlement in the West Indies. The little colony at Old Road on the island’s western coast became the launching point for English colonisation across the Eastern Caribbean — earning St Kitts its enduring title, the “Mother Colony of the West Indies”.
Thomas Warner and the founding of the colony
Warner had served in an earlier, failed English venture in Guiana on the South American mainland. Convinced the smaller islands offered better prospects, he chose St Kitts for its fertile volcanic soil, fresh water and sheltered anchorage. Arriving with a small party of settlers, he established the settlement at Old Road Town, where the colonists planted tobacco — then Europe’s most profitable cash crop. With backing from London merchants, the colony shipped its first tobacco crop home and proved that English settlement in the Caribbean could pay.
St Kitts at this time was home to the Kalinago, the Indigenous people who knew the island as Liamuiga — “fertile island”. The first years of the settlement depended on an uneasy coexistence with the Kalinago under their leader Tegremante, who permitted the newcomers to plant on the island.
The French arrive
In 1625, the French privateer Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc reached St Kitts after an encounter with Spanish forces. Rather than fight one another, the English and French agreed to share the island — the English holding the centre, the French the two ends. St Kitts thus became one of the first Caribbean islands jointly settled by two European powers, an arrangement formalised by treaty in 1627 that shaped a century of cooperation and conflict.
Catastrophe for the Kalinago
European expansion came at a devastating price for the island’s first people. In 1626, fearing a Kalinago attack, the English and French launched a pre-emptive massacre of the Kalinago at the place still known as Bloody Point, killing much of the island’s Indigenous population and ending organised Kalinago resistance on St Kitts. Any honest account of the founding of the colony must hold both truths: the establishment of English America’s Caribbean foothold, and the destruction of the people who had lived on Liamuiga for centuries.
The Mother Colony
From St Kitts, English settlement spread rapidly through the region — to Nevis in 1628, and on to Antigua and Montserrat in the 1630s, while Barbados was settled separately in the same era. The French likewise used their portion of St Kitts as the base from which they colonised Martinique and Guadeloupe. Within a generation, the experiment at Old Road had reshaped the entire Eastern Caribbean. As tobacco gave way to sugar in the 1650s, St Kitts and its neighbours became some of the most valuable — and most brutal — colonial possessions in the world, their wealth built on the labour of enslaved Africans.
Why 1623 matters
The settlement of 1623 set in motion everything that followed: three and a half centuries of colonial rule, the plantation economy, the transatlantic slave trade’s arrival in the Leewards, the long struggle for emancipation and self-government, and ultimately the independent federation of 1983. The story that began at Old Road runs in an unbroken line to the modern nation of St Kitts and Nevis.
Continue the story
- 1493: Columbus’s Second Voyage — the first recorded European sighting of the islands.
- Significant Historical Events — the full series, era by era.
- Timeline of Key Events — the whole history at a glance.