

































Kalinago-European Alliances in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean: 
Wavering Between Empire and Decolonization

Stephane Martin Demers 2T1
York University
Osgoode Hall Law School

Thomas ‘Indian’ Warner is described as a figure who brokered peace between the 
Kalinago and the Europeans. However, the influence of Warner’s actions when 
compared to retaliatory measures taken by Europeans against him and the Kalinagos, 
and the longevity of alliances suggests that the intermediary role often attributed to 
him is exaggerated. Examining Warner’s voluntary and involuntary association with 
his Kalinago roots, and his resistance and peace efforts with the Europeans improves 
our understanding of the nature of Warner’s personal alliance with the Kalinago as 
well as the Kalinago’s broader alliance with the Europeans. This research examines 
these complexities to highlight how his presence and absence in the turbulent seven-
teenth century of Caribbean history influenced his alliances and broader connections. 

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Kalinago, English, French, alliances, seventeenth-century
B I O

Stephane recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Music 
and a Minor in History. Stephane is currently pursuing his Juris Doctor at Osgoode Hall 
Law School at York University where he intends to combine his interests in music and 
law to create a more equitable and just law school environment and legal profession. 

© 2021 Stephane Martin Demers
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/

                       This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
                       To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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Thomas ‘Indian’ Warner’s alliances with 
the Kalinago, English, and French shifted 
frequently. In Hulme and Whitehead’s 
document reader, Wild Majesty: 
Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to 
the Present Day, William Dampier 
describes Warner as a figure who mediated 
conflict between the Kalinago and the 
Europeans.  However, the influence of 
Warner’s actions when compared to 
retaliatory measures taken by Europeans 
against him and the Kalinagos, and the 
longevity of alliances indicates that he 
was not as neutral an intermediary as 
Dampier’s description suggests. Warner’s 
alliance with the Kalinago, the Kalinago’s 
alliances with the Europeans, and the 
English Crown’s short-lived alliance with 
the Kalinago can be better understood 
through an analysis of the intricacies of 
Warner’s mixed-race heritage and his 
involvement in resistive and peaceful 
Kalinago-European relations. 

Born in the English island of Antigua to 
Sir Thomas Warner, the Governor of St. 
Kitts,  and a Kalinago woman,  Warner 
was considered an ‘Indian’. In Antigua, 
he endured inhumane treatment at the 
hands of Madame Warner, his English 
stepmother.  Desperate to escape these 
unfavorable conditions, he fled to St. 
Lucia and subsequently became one of 

the captains of the Kalinago in Dominica.  
Shortly thereafter, the English Crown 
appointed him Governor of Dominica. 
Though his principal task as Governor 
was to negotiate the Kalinago’s status as 
subjects of the English Crown, it may be 
argued that the resentment towards the 
English, which was likely held as a result 
of his previous experiences in Antigua, 
compelled him to ally with the Kalinago. 

But Warner’s decision to form an alliance 
with the Kalinago was not entirely 
voluntary. Due to European stereotypes 
about the Kalinago’s behavior, he was 
labeled an ‘Indian’ without concern for his 
ideal personal identifiers. Generally, the 
Europeans saw the Kalinago as their 
“common enemy.”  The English viewed 
the Kalinago as “potential traitors.”  The 
French described them as “careless” and 
“exceedingly vindictive people.”  By virtue 
of Warner’s close contact with the Kalinago, 
he too was considered an enemy of the 
Europeans regardless of his mixed heritage. 
Ostracized from European circles of power, 
Warner used the Kalinago to combat notions 
of inferiority and weakness. 

The threat that Warner’s race posed to the 
“neat bifurcations of colonial understanding” 
(Whitehead 2005, 228) also indirectly 

.  

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               1. Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead (eds.), Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present 
Day: an Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 92.  
               2. Hulme and Whitehead, 90. 
               3. Hulme and Whitehead, 89. 
               4. Hulme and Whitehead, 91.
               5. Hulme and Whitehead, 90. 
               6. Hulme and Whitehead, 89. 
               7. Hillary McD. Beckles, “Kalinago (Carib) Resistance to European Colonisation of the Caribbean,” Caribbean 
Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2008): 81, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654700.
               8. Beckles, 89. 
               

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consolidated his alliances with the 
Kalinago by provoking rivalries between 
the French and English.  The central 
dispute was whether Thomas Warner was 
the legitimate son of Sir Thomas Warner. 
The French General Antoine Lefèbvre de 
la Barre believed that Warner’s ‘Caribbee’ 
status, which he inherited from his mother, 
nullified any claim to Sir Thomas Warner’s 
legal parentage over him. On the other 
hand, the English Lord William Willoughby 
believed that Warner was in fact his 
legitimate son.”  Warner and his Kalinago 
troops capitalized on the Europeans’ time 
spent disputing this fact by attacking their 
settlements in the Leeward Islands and 
preventing them from seizing Kalinago 
land. Ironically, Warner’s exclusion from 
the Europeans’ acceptable categories of 
race allowed him to lead the Kalinago 
more effectively in their fight against 
European colonization.  

Examining Warner’s role in helping the 
Kalinago resist European colonization is 
essential in understanding the nature of 
his alliance with the Kalinago. Warner 
and Kalinago leaders allied with 
interisland Kalinago and African 
runaway slaves to ‘delimit’ European 
land expansion and halt European 
colonization.  However, some  point to 

Warner’s short dialogue with Monsieur de 
Malassis, a French officer, while 
imprisoned to suggest that he was not allied 
with the Kalinago and was instead more 
sympathetic to the Europeans. While 
imprisoned, Warner states: “These people 
are beasts, a rabble, & wretches unworthy 
of me; & I am not involved with them.”  
These comments must be understood in the 
context of his arrest, and it is unlikely that 
he was genuinely disdainful of the 
Kalinago. Instead, to avoid being 
persecuted by the French, it was in 
Warner’s best interest to show them that 
he was not allied with the Kalinago.

Although Kalinago-European relations 
were mostly adversarial, with Warner at 
their side, the Kalinago negotiated treaties 
and exchanged goods with the Europeans. 
A treaty signed on 31 March 1660 by the 
Kalinago and Europeans stipulated that in 
exchange for granting the Kalinago 
dominion over Dominica and St. Vincent, 
the Europeans would acquire Guadeloupe, 
Martinique, and the Leeward Islands.  
Furthermore, at Prince Rupert’s Bay in 
Dominica, the Kalinago traded tobacco 
and cassava bread for European knives, 
hatchets,  and other iron tools which were 
used for canoe construction.  Thus, the 
notion of the Kalinago’s total resistance 

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               9. Neil L. Whitehead, “Black Read as Red: Ethnic Transgression and Hybridity in Northeastern South America and 
the Caribbean,” in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 228.  
             10. Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 98. 
              11. Tessa Murphy, “Kalinago Colonizers: Indigenous People and the Settlement of the Lesser Antilles,” in The Torrid 
Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century, ed. L. H. Roper (Columbia, South 
Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 28, doi:10.2307/j.ctv6sj7vv.5.
              12. Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 94. 
              13. Tessa Murphy, “Kalinago Colonizers,” 24.
              14. Lennox Honychurch, “Crossroads in the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and Exchange on Dominica,” World 
Archaeology 28, no. 3 (1997): 296, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1997.9980349. 
              15. Honychurch, 297. 

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against the Europeans is mistaken. The 
Kalinago struck a fine balance between 
fighting for their independence and 
brokering peace with the Europeans. 

However, the Europeans sometimes 
outright broke the peace with the 
Kalinago. In June 1675, Philip Warner, 
Thomas’ half-brother, murdered Thomas.   
Knowing that the Kalinago would rebel 
against the English without Thomas to 
control them, the English Crown pledged to 
punish the person who committed this act.  
In presenting this façade of peace, the 
English were provided with an opening 
to invade the Kalinago when they were 
least expecting it. Though the King’s 
public declaration to punish the offender 
was seemingly noble, this was merely a 
tactic to disguise his insatiable desire to 
acquire land through the destruction of 
the Kalinago. The English Crown 
capitalized on the murder of Thomas 
Warner by feigning peaceful relations 
with the Kalinago and in turn furthering 
imperial goals.

Alliances between Thomas ‘Indian’ 
Warner, the Kalinago, the English, and 
the French were complex. Examining 
Warner’s voluntary and involuntary 
association with his Kalinago roots, 
and his resistance and peace efforts with 
the Europeans can improve our 
understanding of the nature of Warner’s 
alliance with the Kalinago and the 
Kalinago’s alliance with the Europeans. 
Furthermore, Thomas’ murder provides a 
window into the English Crown’s 

disingenuous motivations to forge alliances 
with the Kalinago. With more information 
on Thomas Warner’s life and the period in 
which he lived, historians may be better 
able understand how his presence and 
absence in the turbulent seventeenth 
century of Caribbean history influenced the 
broader dynamics of the early colonial 
Caribbean.   

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               Hulme and Whitehead, Wild Majesty, 102-103. 
               Hulme and Whitehead, 102. 

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Works Cited

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Beckles, Hillary McD. 2008. “Kalinago (Carib) Resistance to European 
                    Colonisation of the Caribbean.” Caribbean Quarterly 54, no. 4: 77-94. 
                    http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654700.

Honychurch, Lennox. 1997. “Crossroads in the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and 
                    Exchange on Dominica.” World Archaeology 28, no. 3: 291–304. 
                    https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1997.9980349.
 
Hulme, Peter, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. 1992. Wild Majesty: Encounters with 
                    Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day: an Anthology. 
                    Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Murphy, Tessa. 2018. “Kalinago Colonizers: Indigenous People and the Settlement of 
                    the Lesser Antilles.” In The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and 
                    Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century. 
                    Edited by L. H. Roper, 17-30. Columbia, South Carolina: University of 
                    South Carolina Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv6sj7vv.5.

Whitehead, Neil L. 2005. “Black Read as Red: Ethnic Transgression and Hybridity in 
                    Northeastern South America and the Caribbean.” In Beyond Black and 
                    Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America. Edited by 
                    Matthew Restall, 223-243. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 

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