author
Thomas Atwood
d. 1793
A colonial judge whose writings became one of the earliest detailed English accounts of Dominica, he is remembered less for public office than for the vivid record he left behind. His work captures the island’s landscape, government, and society in the late eighteenth century.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Thomas Atwood, who died on 27 May 1793, served as chief judge in Dominica and later in the Bahamas. He is chiefly remembered as the reputed author of The History of the Island of Dominica (1791), an early account of the island’s geography, trade, laws, and people.
That book gave later readers a rare contemporary picture of Dominica in the late eighteenth century, and parts of Atwood’s description were reused by later historians of the British West Indies. He also published a 1790 pamphlet on slavery and the treatment of enslaved people, a work that reflects the politics and arguments of the colonial world he belonged to.
His final years were bleak: he died in the King’s Bench prison in England, reportedly at an advanced age and after serious misfortune. Even so, his name has lasted because his writing preserved details of Caribbean colonial life that might otherwise have been lost.