I think most Trinis could relate to this...I know I could.  I burst out laughing when I read it, realizing that all the time I was reading, I  swear I could hear my mother's voice!

​Sunday morning at Fort Picton, Laventille
After long wanting to visit this historic site, I finally had the pleasure of heading up to the fort this morning.
Picton was a brutal man who governed Trinidad with an iron fist, including erecting gallows outside his house at the corner of Charlotte Street and Marine Square where he did not hesitate to hang those he deemed in transgression. Most infamously he was tried in London in 1806 for torturing Louisa Caulderon at the Royal Jail in Port of Spain.
I've collected some information about him below written by Geoffrey MacClean, Prof. Bridget Brereton and Freddie Kissoon to supplement these photographs.
"In 1797 governor Thomas Picton was left with a very small garrison to hold Trinidad against the Spaniards and Republican French who belatedly realized that they had lost a strategic prize in Trinidad. Picton's problem was how to effectively defend his capital without building a multitude of forts around it and to do this he looked at the Laventille Hills overlooking Port of Spain.
The Martello Tower was forty feet high, commanding not only the route along the Laventille Hills, but also the vital road, the town of Port of Spain, the flanks and rear of Fort San Andres and it could also command the inner harbour in support of the Mole Fort. On the upper level of what was effectively the roof, Picton mounted an 18 pounder and a 6 pounder cannon en barbette. The floor below the guns was the living quarters for the garrison as in conventional Martello Towers, while the lower ground floor was the storerooms, magazine and water supply.
In keeping with the idea that the major threat would come along the Laventille ridge where an enemy could bring up cannon fairly close to the position, the northwest facing wall was built of stone just over six feet thick, effectively making it cannon proof. On the southern side where attackers would be below the level of the fort and cannon could not get that close, the walls were only four feet three inches thick. The Tower was built with a diameter of over thirty feet of stone, with white lime mixed with molasses and the white of eggs to provide the cement. Inside old baked bricks completed the interior, making the whole structure extremely strong. The entrance was placed on the eastern side so that the fort could be reinforced while under attacked from the south, the west or even the north. It was completed with wooden floors and was operational on 18 November 1798."
Geoffrey MacClean at www.citizensforconservation.org
THOMAS PICTON AND LOUISA CALDERON
"Louisa Calderon was only 13 when her mother sold her to old Pedro Ruiz for 2,750 joes, making him promise to marry Louisa when she reached 16. Mrs Calderon with her two other daughters operated a Coffee Shop in Puerto de Espana in 1799.
Coffee Shops were all over the city but they were really brothels and Pedro was a frequent customer. Whether he had his coffee before or after what he went for, was not known but he bought Louisa because the old reprobate wanted a virgin.
Sir Thomas Picton, the absolute dictator, ruled the country with an iron hand. Once a soldier fell in love with a slave girl and they ran away together. When they were captured, Picton made sure the girl was hanged the next morning in Marine Square – now Brian Lara Promenade, and the soldier received 1,500 lashes.
Carlos Gonzales, the Don Juan of the city, fell in love with Louisa and followed her home. He said, “When I saw you for the first time, your ravishing beauty captivated my very soul. I love you beyond reason, beyond measure, beyond love’s own power of loving.” Louisa did not fall for his flattery and ordered him to leave immediately.
Shortly after this, Pedro Ruiz came home and realised that the money he had to buy mules, was stolen. Picton had Carlos and Louisa arrested. In the Royal Jail, iron rings were placed on their wrists and ankles with chains linking the rings. The magistrate St Hilaire Begorrat supervised the “appliquez le question” to Louisa with six others in the torture chamber.
Her left wrist was tied to a rope which was slung over a pole. Her right wrist was tied to her left ankle. While she was suspended hanging by her left wrist, she was lowered slowly until the right heel was resting on the piquet – a piece of wood about four inches long by two inches wide and rounded at the top to about half an inch to meet the legal requirements.
The piquet was designed not to pierce the skin but to cause pain in every bone and muscle of the body. Louisa suffered for 53 minutes before screaming that Carlos had stolen the money. She was tortured again on Christmas Eve 1801. Petitions were sent to the King who placed Trinidad in commission and after enquiries Picton was ordered to stand trial in London.
Colonel Fullerton, a rival of Picton, Louisa Calderon and other witnesses also went to England.
After the trial, posters distributed to booksellers throughout Britain, reported the news. “The Trial of Governor T Picton for inflicting the torture on Louisa Calderon, a free mulatto, and one of his Britannic Majesty’s Subjects, in the Island of Trinidad. – Tried before Chief Justice Ellenborough and a special jury, and found guilty. Taken in Short-hand during the proceedings on the 24th of February 1806.”
In 1808, after his appeal, Picton was acquitted. Seven years later, he died as a hero at the Battle of Waterloo.  Freddie Kissoon www.newsday.co.tt/commentary/0,82831.html
MORE ON PICTON AND CAULDERON
"Picton's enemies, in Trinidad and Britain, saw that the charge of illegally authorising such an inhumane torture on a very young girl could ruin him. Drawings of Luisa being tortured in the Port of Spain jail were published and widely circulated.
She was taken up by Picton's main opponent, William Fullarton, and his wife. They brought Luisa to Britain in 1803, and supported her there for several years—the court case involving her took a long time and of course her testimony was needed.
People's love for scandal being as great 200 years ago as today, Picton's allies spread rumours that Luisa gave birth to Fullarton's child when she was in Scotland. (Fullarton sued, and the case was going on when he died; Mrs Fullarton continued to look after Luisa in Britain). More generally, the rumour was that she was a prostitute whom the Fullartons introduced into "polite society" in Britain.
Luisa did give evidence at Picton's trial in the Court of the King's Bench in 1806; he was found guilty. But a retrial was ordered, and he was eventually acquitted in 1808. Both trials were extensively reported in the British newspapers and the published reports of "celebrity trials". Luisa was famous even if the eventual verdict got Picton off. The picture of her torture was widely published.
As far as we know, Luisa returned to Trinidad after the final trial in 1808. And then she disappeared from the record; we don't know what became of her. But we do know that she survived her ordeal and became perhaps the first Trinidadian woman to be visible as an individual in the archive, the first to play a part (even if forced on her) in public affairs."
Source: Professor Bridget Brereton in Trinidad Express

T&T’s Asa Guevara sported two gold medals at the end of the Brutus Hamilton Challenge held in Berkley, California, on the weekend.
The Chaguanas-native mounted the top of the podium after clocking 47.23 seconds in the men’s 400 metres final. Guevara later teamed up with his UTEP squad to win the 4x100m in 40.42 at the two-day meet.
The weekend before the local quartermiler placed third in the 400m in a time of 46.81 at a meet hosted by his university in El Paso, Texas. The relay team also improved on its previous time of 40.70 in placing second.
Source:  Trinidad Guardian

​Nathalie Taghaboni is a Trinidad-born author who migrated to Canada at the age of 15, best known as her pen name Queen Macoomeh

Pointe Baleine in 1910. The silk-cotton tree seen here still stands and once marked the location of a whaling station established in the 1820s.To most of us, Gaspar Grande or Gasparee Island is a quiet place occupied seasonally by holiday homeowners or renters. This minute limestone rock just off the northwestern peninsula is far richer in history and heritage than we can imagine. 
Perhaps because of the lack of water, the Amerindian presence on the islet was non-existent or temporary. The place takes its name from Gaspar Percin de la Roque who was granted the entire island by Don Jose Maria Chacon, the last Spanish Governor, in 1783. The conditions were suitable for little other than cotton cultivation, but since this was then the dominant cash crop in the colony, almost the entire 330 acre extent was soon covered with sea-island cotton trees. 
Quiet cotton plantation though it was, Gasparee was of strategic military importance to the Spanish colonial authorities since Spain was at war with Britain in the end of the 18th century. Slaves bound to the cotton plantations on Gasparee were pressed into work terracing sites for forts and batteries, as well as cutting a roadway to the top of the hill and dragging up the heavy artillery needed to reinforce the position. 
A considerable number of cannon, mortars and shot were landed but the earthworks and walls were not completed in a timely fashion and lumber (mainly wooden barrels) formed a crude redoubt while the cannon lay in disarray while they were slowly put in place. 
A small flotilla of Spanish warships under the cowardly Commander Apodaca were anchored between the island and Chaguaramas bay. It remains to be told in another column how in February 1797, the British Admiral, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, swept into the Gulf of Paria at the command of an overwhelming force and wrested Trinidad from the Spaniards, and how Apodaca set his ships ablaze without the slightest resistance. 
Upon the assumption of British rule, Sir Thomas Hislop, governor, set about strengthening the colony’s fortifications which included the incomplete Spanish fort at the eastern end of Gasparee. My friend and fellow historian, Jalaludin Khan has exhaustively documented the remaining military relics of Gasparee, from the Spanish times straight up to World War II and is able to identify most of the earthworks which once made the island a stronghold. 
Bombshell Bay is so known for the cache of mortar shells discovered there, which are large metal cannon shot, hollow inside, and filled with powder and smaller balls. Hislop’s fortifications on the foundations of the Spanish emplacements can still be seen, but it requires a keen sense of history to find anything else. 
After the period of construction ended, it appears that cotton cultivation terminated at Gasparee and whaling became the main economic activity. From Gaspar Percin de la Roque, a Bermudan whaling captain, C A White, acquired in 1826, the piece of flat land later known as Pointe Baleine. Here he established a whaling station, complete with coppers for rendering the blubber into oil, and targeted the herds of migrating humpback whales which passed through the Bocas annually. 
Whale oil was then traded globally much like petroleum oil is today, bringing in great returns to investors. Unlike the whaling operations of New England (made famous by Herman Melville), whaling in Trinidad did not employ large ships but were “shore” stations where lookouts were posted on the hilltops of the Bocas Islands to signal the men below when a herd or single whale was sighted.
Sturdy longboats, each manned by a dozen rowers and a harpooner would be speedily launched and the slain whale then laboriously towed inshore for processing. It is also recorded that a small amount of springy whalebone was also exported from Trinidad, being much in demand for ladies’ corsets in particular. 
Being able to only snag eleven whales in his first year of operation, White was soon bankrupt, with his holdings being auctioned in 1828 to another whaler named Joell who had a station at Chacachacare. Joell carried on his trade here until 1833 when the operations at Pointe Baleine were taken over by the Tardieu clan of Monos Island, who for generations have been the intrepid fishermen and adventurers of the Bocas islands. 
Jean Baptiste Tardieu, the patriarch and clan head, was in partnership with a firm of German merchants in Port-of-Spain, Gerold and Urich, who made arrangements for the sale of the casks of whale oil produced at the whaling stations. In the shade of an ancient silk-cotton tree which still stands, the whaling station of Pointe Baleine carried on into the 1850s.
Source: Angelo Bissessarsingh
Published: Sunday, April 10, 2016

Check out this article - wonder if someone will bring this to Ottawa!
A DOUBLES factory operator in San Juan says the company has invented a doubles-making machine and a pholourie machine, which can cut production times of the local culinary delights by 40 per cent.
The doubles machine can produce up to 1,000 doubles an hour while the pholourie machine can make 12,000 pholouries in an eight-hour shift.
The machines are the brainchild of Toddy Ramsahai of Radha Swami Industries Ltd, the company which owns and operates supermarket-based doubles outlets branded as “Doubles King”.
For the past three years, the Boundary Road, San Juan factory has been using the machines to mass-produce barra and pholourie which are then sold to local vendors.
In an interview with Express Business at the factory last Friday, Ramsahai disclosed that a businessman in England has already put in an order for the machines.
“The England client has a roti business and he wants to diversify into doubles and pholourie now. He came to Trinidad and tested them out. We’re in the process of exporting,” he said. “The initial idea behind the machine was to simplify the doubles-making process and to make the barra more consistent, so when you go to buy doubles you will have a consistent type of product.”
Source:  Trinidad Express May 3, 2017.​
To find out about purchasing the machines, you should contact Toddy Ramsahai of Radha Swami Industries Ltd, Boundary Road, San Juan, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago..

I saw this very interesting post on the Mayaro Rio Claro Regional Cooperation site and thought I would share it.  It is self explanatory.