In 2025, a significant historical discovery was revealed at the St Augustine Campus. Evidence was disclosed that the Catalan Capuchin Missions extended protection and spiritual care to the Nepoyo indigenes in Spanish Trinidad, indicating a relationship defined by pastoral concern rather than the oppressive violence historically associated with the Catholic Church.
Melanie Pouchet’s PhD research, for which she received high commendation, “The Catalan Capuchin Missions in Spanish Trinidad, 1687 to 1735: A Frontier within a Frontier,” challenged established narratives and called for a reinterpretation of this aspect of Caribbean history.
Melanie’s ground-breaking study of the Catalan Capuchin Missions was the culmination of her formative experiences and scholarly pursuits.
Her affiliation with history originated in the family home. Her father was a history teacher who provided his children with access to a wide selection of history books and engaged them in intellectually stimulating conversations. The family was devoutly Catholic and so, historical events were often viewed through the lens of the Church.
From an early age, Melanie was privy to documents which showed that from the 1300s the Popes had not only denounced slavery, but they also warned of excommunication for any Catholic who participated in this exercise.
But the Spanish Crown, which represented the Catholic Church in exercising authority over ecclesiastical appointments and missionary activity in its colonies, operated in the Indies independently of the Roman Church. It was this dissonance between the doctrine of the Church and enslavement which often perplexed Melanie.
She studied History and Literature at the St Augustine campus and later, Philosophy and Theology in Venezuela, and then Rome. The courses abroad were all in Spanish: lectures, preparation of assignments, examinations and academic discourse. By the time that Melanie accessed the letters which were housed in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville addressed to the Spanish Crown by the Capuchin monks, she was able to interpret them herself. But this was not without painstaking effort.
The letters in the repository were written in “flowery” 17th century and early 18th century Spanish and so the task of understanding the history of the Spanish Empire in Trinidad through this medium was much like reading Shakespeare. This was not her only challenge.
The documents were centuries old, and their authors had used both sides of each page. As a result, the ink from each side had bled into the writing on the reverse side, which added more difficulty to the decoding process. With practice, Melanie became increasingly proficient in extracting meaning.
As a result of her research, Melanie knew that the Capuchin monks of the Franciscan Order were characterised by poverty, humility and fraternity. During the bubonic plague in Europe, they had exposed themselves to risk and death through their commitment to be of assistance to others. A frontier within the frontier, which framed her research, described the mission society that the Capuchins created to protect the indigenous inhabitants.
The primary frontier colony of Trinidad was characterised by hostility between the Spanish colonial authorities and external forces such as the French and English, who wanted to control the island. But within this frontier colony there was a frontier situation, where the Capuchin missionaries, sanctioned by the colonial authorities and by Royal policy, fought to preserve their own mission society against Spanish planters who ran the encomienda system in the wider Trinidad society on forced labour, and use the indigenes for this purpose.
The system of introducing missionaries to “control” the native population, to convert and acculturise them, was a different approach from the one used in previous centuries by the Spanish Crown, whereby soldiers with the intent to convert, dominate, pacify and exploit the population, had employed brutal methods and lethal violence.
The Catalan missionaries who came to Trinidad in the late 17th century, on the other hand, approached the project from a purely religious standpoint.
Unlike the soldiers, the Capuchins used no weapons. Instead, they learned the language of the Nepoyo and lived among them, in a way that acknowledged their dignity as human beings. They established a thriving agrarian economy which was dependent on a six-day work week. Cocoa, their staple crop, which the mission cultivated along with cassava, maize and bananas, was often envied by the Spanish planters. While it was mandatory for children to be baptised as Catholics, adults were not required to convert to Catholicism, although religious instruction was provided on Sundays for everyone.
The indigenes themselves realised that they were offered protection in these mission societies. Some who “escaped” to work in the encomienda system, returned to the missions, naked and starving. Melanie’s thesis, in fact, disproves historical accounts which describe the well-known Arena massacre of 1699 as fundamentally an attack on the missionaries by the indigenous population who revolted.
The evidence she unearthed reveals that the massacre took place because the indigenes of the mission at Arena (present-day San Rafael), were convinced by others from the encomienda system in Tacarigua and Arauca that the new Spanish Governor who was coming to visit their mission would do with them what he had done to another group of indigenes, and that was to kill their shaman, and to punish them.
The indigenes from the Arena mission agreed to band together with those from the encomienda system. They ambushed and killed the Governor, those in his party and the missionaries. They then desecrated the Church with its statues, vestments and vessels.
Melanie’s research goes on to describe the trial which would later take place and the fact that the rebellious indigenes had been hunted down and captured for trial by the mission indigenes of the Naparima missions run by the Catalan Capuchins, who did so against the instructions of the missionaries.
For these corrections to be made in historical accounts, they would first need to appear in a published book which Melanie is keen to write, once funding becomes available. This will allow her discovery to enter the public domain, and eventually appear in our history books, providing for future generations a more nuanced understanding of the history of the Catholic Church in Trinidad.
