The Timeline of Jamaica

Fiwi Roots

FiwiRoots, your guide to the heart and soul of Jamaica. We go beyond the beaches to explore the rich history, vibrant culture, and unique geography of the island. Join us as we uncover untold stories, celebrate Jamaican traditions, and take a deep dive into what makes this nation so powerful

  1. Sep 26

    Jamaica's 300-Year-Old Mystery: Who Built Colbeck Castle—Clues History Missed & The Likely Builder

    Who Built Colbeck Castle—The Clues History Missed & The Likely Builder Two miles north of Old Harbour stands one of the strangest surviving buildings in Jamaica.Colbeck Castle is difficult to mistake for any other great house on the island. Four massive three-story towers rise from its corners. Between them run two levels of open arcades—three bays across the shorter elevations and five across the longer ones. Even as a roofless ruin, the building commands the landscape with the scale and presence of something designed to be noticed.For generations, its history seemed straightforward. Colonel John Colbeck, one of the officers who arrived during the 1655 English invasion of Jamaica, received vast land grants in the parish and purportedly constructed the castle around 1680. For centuries, its heavy masonry and fortress-like towers were explained away as defensive measures against a potential Spanish attempt to recapture the island. That remains the official version preserved by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust.That timeline, however, collapses under the geopolitical realities of the era. The case for a 1680 construction date rests almost entirely on the threat of a Spanish invasion, yet Spain had formally recognized English sovereignty over Jamaica a decade earlier in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. Committing astronomical resources to erect an inland stone fortress against a nonexistent Spanish naval threat makes little historical sense. Furthermore, when wealthy planters built fortified residences in late seventeenth-century Jamaica, their defenses were designed to withstand internal slave rebellions and coastal pirate raids—not hypothetical Spanish armadas.That historical contradiction shatters the traditional narrative. More crucially, the archival and architectural record indicates that Colonel John Colbeck never built the castle at all.Instead, a converging body of evidence points to the massive stone structure having been constructed roughly eighty years later—likely in the early 1760s—by a wealthy Scottish planter named John MacLeod. Unlike the received legend, this revised dating does not depend on folklore or stylistic guesswork. It is supported by a traceable trail of estate maps, deeds, probate inventories, contemporary colonial gazettes, and structural clues etched into the surviving masonry itself.The full visual archive for this episode is available at https://jamaicagreathouses.com/colbeckcastle/. Explore the historical maps, transcribed newspaper records, the Renaissance architectural treatises of Sebastiano Serlio that inspired the design, and detailed artist reconstructions showing what the great house and its surrounding grounds likely looked like in their prime. 📖 EXPLORE THE BOOKS**The Timeline of Jamaica** (Non-Fiction): A formal chronological history of Jamaica's development from Pre-1494 to 1962. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F484WYWB/**The Secret Pact** (Historical Fiction): A novel of mystery and intrigue set in 1740s Jamaica, the aftermath of the Second Maroon War. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D1PGRFBJ/**The Covenant of Glass** (Caribbean Gothic): A chilling story of Obeah, de Laurence, and bindings set in the heart of Jamaica. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQ94X4N7/🔗 CONNECT Support the preservation of Jamaican heritage and explore our full collection of resources: https://FiwiRoots.com

  2. Sep 14

    Black River, Jamaica: Echoes of a Former Glory

    There was a time when Black River was one of Jamaica’s most important towns—a place of ships, warehouses, merchants, government offices, and international trade. Its river carried logwood and other goods from the interior to the sea, while wealth flowed through a system built in large part on the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants.Then the advantages that made Black River prosper began to disappear. Exports declined. The working waterfront faded. Roads replaced the river as the main route of commerce, and business shifted inland. Historic buildings still line streets that once bustled with trade, leaving Black River living among the echoes of its former glory.That contrast between past wealth and present condition helped inspire the Fiwi Roots project. During a 2007 visit, the architecture of a beautifully restored guesthouse raised questions about the prosperity that had once built places like it—and about the town that remained around it. That curiosity widened into a deeper search for Black River’s story, and eventually for many of Jamaica’s overlooked, fragmented, and forgotten histories.More recently, Hurricane Melissa added another painful chapter, damaging parts of the town and sharpening the question of what can still be preserved. Black River is no longer only a story about how a town rose and declined. It is also a story about reinvention, survival, and what a community chooses to carry forward.Today, the river that once carried cargo to the sea draws visitors into one of Jamaica’s most important wetland landscapes. The Lower Black River Morass—with its mangroves, crocodiles, birdlife, and river tours—has given the area a new identity centered increasingly on ecology, conservation, and heritage. It is internationally recognized as a Ramsar site—a designation reserved for wetlands considered important not only to their own country, but to the wider world—giving Black River ecological significance far beyond St. Elizabeth.How did one of western Jamaica’s most important towns rise so high—and what caused it to lose its place? This is the story of Black River.

  3. Aug 27

    The Arithmetic of Empire: How Planters Invented Jamaica's Racial Math

    Every time we fill out a form or answer a census, we are asked to check a box. Black. White. Mixed. Today, our choices have been narrowed for us, forcing centuries of rich, complex heritage into broad, oversimplified categories. We have been conditioned to treat these few checkboxes as fixed truths about who we are.But the pendulum used to swing to a much darker extreme. Centuries ago, colonial officials didn't want broad strokes—they obsessed over the exact fractional extent of our ancestry.In this episode, we step beyond modern census data to uncover the unsettling history of how racial identities were constructed in Jamaica. We examine the social engineering of colonial writers like Edward Long, the arbitrary math of the 1733 Assembly act that legally redefined who could be "white," and the critical difference between a racial label and actual legal freedom. From the obsessive caste systems of the past to the narrowed checkboxes of the present, we are unpacking the myth of race to ask one fundamental question: if our categories have always been engineered by the state, who decided who we are?

  4. Jun 8

    Beyond Babylon: The Forgotten History of Rastafari

    History is often written by the victors, but the true story of Rastafari was forged by those the world chose to ignore. Beyond Babylon: The Forgotten History of Rastafari peels back the layers of colonial record-keeping to explore the birth, struggle, and evolution of a movement that redefined identity, faith, and resistance.In this deep-dive episode, we move past the stereotypes to uncover the radical roots of the Rastafari consciousness. From the isolated hills of 1930s Jamaica to the establishment of the revolutionary Pinnacle settlement, we navigate the convergence of biblical prophecy, the coronation of Haile Selassie I, and the visceral reclamation of self-worth against a backdrop of systemic oppression.This episode of the Forgotten Chapters bridges the gap between the official timeline and the lived experience—recovering the voices, the music, and the philosophy that turned a marginalized community into a global beacon of defiance.📖 EXPLORE THE BOOKS**The Timeline of Jamaica** (Non-Fiction): A formal chronological history of Jamaica's development from Pre-1494 to 1962. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F484WYWB/**The Secret Pact** (Historical Fiction): A novel of mystery and intrigue set in 1740s Jamaica, the aftermath of the Second Maroon War. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D1PGRFBJ/**The Covenant of Glass** (Caribbean Gothic): A chilling story of Obeah, de Laurence, and bindings set in the heart of Jamaica. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQ94X4N7/🔗 CONNECT Support the preservation of Jamaican heritage and explore our full collection of resources: https://FiwiRoots.com

    Beyond Babylon: The Forgotten History of Rastafari

  5. Jun 4

    The Cow Called Jamaica Hope: How a Jamaican Engineered a Better Cow for the Tropics

    Jamaica is known for reggae, sprint legends, Blue Mountain coffee, and a culture that seems too large for one small island. But there is something else Jamaica gave the tropics — something far less famous, but deeply important. A cow. Not just any cow. A cow designed for heat, hillsides, ticks, poor pasture, and the daily struggle of small farmers who needed milk, income, and a way out of poverty. At a time when European dairy cattle failed in the tropics, and local cattle could survive but barely produced enough milk, one Jamaican scientist looked at the problem and decided Jamaica would not simply import an answer. Jamaica would build one.This is the story of the cow called Jamaica Hope — and how Dr Thomas Lecky, a Jamaican, engineered a better cow for the tropics.

  6. May 14

    A Mother’s Legacy — A Haunting Prequel

    The Narrative Series: Voices from the Past In this episode we step into Glen Carty’s, A Mother’s Legacy, the haunting prequel to The Secret Pact. This is the story behind Silas — the man whose fate becomes the gravity around which The Secret Pact turns. He is the one others will risk everything to protect. He is the one his enemies are determined to crush. His existence defined the extremes: life and death.But before Silas became the man at the center of the storm, he was a nine-year-old boy sitting close to his mother, listening as she reached back into memory.Through her stories, A Mother’s Legacy takes us back to the source of the fire — to the visceral memories of the Middle Passage, the harsh reality of seasoning, and the quiet, subversive power of a woman who refused to be hollowed out by history.Her words are not simply tales from the past. They are gifts of identity, warnings about the world, and lessons in freedom, dignity, and survival.In this intimate beginning, memory becomes inheritance — and a mother’s story becomes the first spark of a son’s awakening.THE NARRATIVE SERIES: VOICES FROM THE PASTHistory is not only found in dates, documents, and official records. It also lives in the fears people carried, the choices they faced, the losses they endured, and the small acts of courage that helped them survive.While The Timeline of Jamaica traces the formal arc of the nation, and The Forgotten Chapters explores the stories history too often leaves behind, The Narrative Series: Voices from the Past steps into the human experience behind the record.Drawn from the growing collection of historical novels published by Fiwi Roots Publishing, this series sits beside the research, timelines, and archival work of Fiwi Roots. Its purpose is not to replace history, but to bring it closer — to give readers a way to step into the period and imagine what life may have felt like for the people who lived through it.Through historical fiction, these stories explore the weight of bondage, war, exile, survival, love, betrayal, and hope as they may have been experienced by ordinary people caught inside extraordinary times.Here, history is not distant. It has breath, memory, and consequence. *** THE NARRATIVE SERIES: VOICES FROM THE PASTHistory is not only found in dates, documents, and official records. It also lives in the fears people carried, the choices they faced, the losses they endured, and the small acts of courage that helped them survive.While The Timeline of Jamaica traces the formal arc of the nation, and The Forgotten Chapters explores the stories history too often leaves behind, The Narrative Series: Voices from the Past steps into the human experience behind the record.Drawn from the growing collection of historical novels published by Fiwi Roots Publishing, this series sits beside the research, timelines, and archival work of Fiwi Roots. Its purpose is not to replace history, but to bring it closer — to give readers a way to step into the period and imagine what life may have felt like for the people who lived through it.Through historical fiction, these stories explore the weight of bondage, war, exile, survival, love, betrayal, and hope as they may have been experienced by ordinary people caught inside extraordinary times.Here, history is not distant. It has breath, memory, and consequence.

  7. May 2

    Against All Odds: The Rise of Jamaica’s First Black Millionaire in the 1800s

    Born in 1820, just 18 years before the end of enslavement, George Stiebel entered a world designed to keep him at the bottom. He was the son of a German Jewish merchant and a Black Jamaican mother—a man born into the 'middle' of a rigid colonial caste system.His journey from a ship’s carpenter to Jamaica’s first Black millionaire was not a straight line, but a path carved through the 1800s by way of sea-faring risks, to the gold mines of Venezuela, surviving imprisonment in Cuba and Hispaniola and failure before finding his fortune.Within 35 years after emancipation was declared, Stiebel had achieved what was once legally and socially unthinkable. By 1873, while the island was still grappling with the deep scars of its plantation past, he returned to Jamaican shores not as a subject of the old order, but as its most successful entrepreneur.He didn't just amass a fortune; he shattered the glass ceiling of the Victorian Caribbean. By purchasing the land for Devon House on the corner of Hope and Trafalgar Road, he forced the colonial elite to witness a new reality: the wealthiest man in Jamaica was a man of color. In just four decades of the ink being dry on the Emancipation Proclamation, George Stiebel had moved from the margins of society to the very center of its most exclusive circle—proving that while the world was designed to keep him down, he had the grit to buy the ground they stood on.For more on the story: https://jamaicagreathouses.com/devonhouse/index.html

  8. Mar 24

    The $3.5 Billion Secret: How the Diaspora Sustains Jamaica

    History often records migration as a change of address, but for the Jamaican diaspora, leaving the island is a calculated strategy for survival and a powerful macroeconomic engine. In this episode, we explore the "Modern Era" (1990s–Present), where the movement of people has evolved into a fluid, multi-directional network of capital and culture.We dive deep into the "Circularity" of the Global Jamaican—from the $3.5 billion in annual remittances that anchor the nation’s GDP to the poignant phenomenon of the "Returning Resident."The Waves of Migration: Full Series Playlist🔗 Watch the complete series here: [INSERT YOUR PLAYLIST LINK HERE]Series Roadmap:Currently Playing: The $3.5 Billion Secret (Modern Era)Coming Soon: The Silver Men: Surviving the Deadliest Job (Panama 1850–1914)A Project of © Fiwi RootsThis series is based on the historical research found at https://jamaicatimeline.com. All research and narratives are curated by Glen Carty to preserve the long-view of Jamaican history.

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About

FiwiRoots, your guide to the heart and soul of Jamaica. We go beyond the beaches to explore the rich history, vibrant culture, and unique geography of the island. Join us as we uncover untold stories, celebrate Jamaican traditions, and take a deep dive into what makes this nation so powerful

Information

  • Creator
    Fiwi Roots
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Fiwi Roots
  • Show Website
    The Timeline of Jamaica