The Kalinago Massacre of 1626 is one of the gravest events in the history of St Kitts and Nevis: a coordinated attack by English and French settlers that killed a large part of the island’s Indigenous Kalinago population and ended organised Kalinago resistance on St Kitts. This page records what happened plainly and respectfully — because the islands’ story does not begin with European settlement, and the people who lived here first deserve to be remembered accurately.
The Kalinago of Liamuiga
Long before Europeans sighted the islands in 1493, the Kalinago were the people of St Kitts, heirs to thousands of years of Indigenous settlement in the Eastern Caribbean. They knew the island as Liamuiga — “fertile island” — and Nevis as Oualie, “land of beautiful waters”. Skilled mariners, farmers and traders, they moved between the islands of the region in large seagoing canoes.
Settlement and rising pressure
When English settlers arrived in 1623, followed by the French in 1625, the newcomers depended at first on Kalinago tolerance — the Kalinago leader Tegremante permitted the small colony to plant at Old Road. But the settlements grew quickly, taking more land and resources, and the Kalinago saw their island and way of life under increasing threat. The settlers, for their part, feared a Kalinago attempt to expel them — and reportedly received word that one was being prepared.
The massacre
In 1626 — some sources say 1625 or 1627, and accounts differ in their details — the English and French acted together in a surprise night assault on the Kalinago settlements. Kalinago leaders, Tegremante among them, were killed, and the attack widened into a massacre of Kalinago men, women and children across the island; contemporary accounts speak of hundreds, possibly as many as two thousand, dead. The site of the worst killing, at the mouth of Stone Fort River on the west coast, has been known ever since as Bloody Point. Survivors fled the island; some were enslaved.
Aftermath
The massacre ended organised Kalinago resistance on St Kitts and removed the last obstacle to European control. The English and French formalised their partition of the island the following year, and from this secured base their colonisation spread through the Leeward Islands — to Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat. On the cleared land, the settlers built the tobacco and then sugar economies that would define the colonial centuries.
Remembering the Kalinago
The events of 1626 are part of a wider pattern of violence against the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean — and remembering them honestly matters. The Kalinago people were not erased: their descendants live today, most prominently in the Kalinago Territory on Dominica, and their presence endures across St Kitts and Nevis in place names and memory — Mount Liamuiga above the former cane lands, Oualie on the shores of Nevis, Bloody Point itself. Their history is the islands’ first history.
Continue exploring
- 1493: Columbus’s Second Voyage — and the Indigenous islands he passed.
- 1623: The First English Settlement
- Colonial History of St Kitts and Nevis
- Timeline of Key Events · History & Culture hub