It is a very rare sight these days to see a live donkey (the four-footed kind). Motorised transportation has almost totally eclipsed an animal which though deemed stubborn and recalcitrant, provided an important element in the landscape of Trinidad’s yesteryear.
The first donkeys in Trinidad were small, grey resilient types imported from the Catalan regions of Spain in the 17th century. They almost exclusively were the beasts of burden in and around the first Spanish capital of San Jose de Oruna (St Joseph) which was founded in 1592.
They also worked on the missions established by Capuchin monks across the island beginning in 1687. We know this because in 1699 the Tamanaque tribe at the nascent mission of San Francisco de Los Arenales (near present-day San Rafael) revolted and killed three priests and a layman carpenter. In a frenzy of rage against their oppressors, the Indians also shot and mutilated a donkey which was being used in the erection of the mission church.
Since the 17th century, cocoa had been an important crop. Massive land reforms introduced by Governor Gordon in the late 1860s saw a boom which lasted until prices plunged in 1920 and saw the Montserrat Hills of the Central Range becoming a major cocoa center. As a result, the little sure-footed burro was of immense value to the cocoa planter. During the cocoa boom they were imported from Venezuela to meet the demand and a good healthy animal cost as much as $40 which was a very substantial sum in those days.
Far from being the pig-headed beast of lore, the donkeys turned out to be patient and durable if somewhat hard to compel. Whether hauling pods from the slopes to be opened or sacks of cured beans to the cocoa agent’s shop in the village, the donkeys did so by a process called ‘crooking’. This involved the crafting of a wooden saddle of sorts for the back of the donkey with two crooked brackets on either side which were often equipped with panniers made of woven canes or reeds. In these panniers, the burros could carry as much as 300lbs of burden on the steepest slopes.
Santa Cruz and Maracas Valleys as well as the now vanished Caura village were all places where donkeys could be seen in large numbers carrying the fruits of the cocoa harvest. Superintendent of Prisons, Daniel Hart also noted the importance of the burro to cocoa cultivation in 1865:
“It is worthy of remark that a Cocoa Estate by the planting of provisions and the raising of stock ought to considerably tend to decrease the expenses above given, because the labourers are only required to pick—twice in the year—June and December. Each estate of the size herein given should also be provided with 8 pr 10 good donkeys for crooking, and 25 good steady labourers would be sufficient to carry on the working of an estate of 40,000 trees.”
To peasant gardeners too the tough donkey was a boon. On their cultivated patches of produce, the donkey was a necessary beast of burden. Until the 1940s, marketwomen came into major towns such as POS, San Fernando, Arima, Princes Town and Sangre Grande with the crooks of their donkeys’ backs laden with vegetables. Often, a small boy would be hired to handle the sometimes unruly beasts. Donkeys were also raced believe it or not, since in most communities there were races for Easter and Discovery Day. In Cedros and Icacos from the 1880s it was an organized affair. In Siparia which had races at Irwin Park, there was a Donkey and Mule Stake from 1912.
With the collapse of the cocoa economy in 1920, donkeys were surplus on the market. Hardy mules from the USA were still in demand for the sugar industry for the era of the tractor and truck had not yet come. Still, in the countryside and the cocoa growing districts, a donkey still was a common sight right up to the 1970s. In the 1980s I remember in Carapal (a cocoa growing district near Erin on the south coast), many donkeys as the old folk there who were mainly Venezuelan panyols still used them regularly to get out their crops to the main road where trucks could take them away. In Gran Couva too, in the heart of the largest cocoa district, one could still see donkeys as recently as two decades ago, but like those who once tilled the soil, the faithful burro has now all but disappeared.