Visiting all countries in the world.. Welcome to ZoubeirsWorld.
On this episode, I am going to show you the road on a small island in the Caribbean which was made with bare hands.
This is the road which could not be built, they said.
I would like to give a mainly history on the building of the road on Saba. For generations Sabans climbed the slopes of the mountain to get up to the main village. As more and more Sabans visited the United States on boats from Saba, they experienced the transition from the horse and buggy era into the motorized world of the rising power during their visit in the United States. There were a number of prominent people among the Simmons’ family and others at the start of the twentieth century who felt that better could be done. They questioned if it was not possible to build a decent harbour and others wanted to know why Saba could not have a dream one day of having roads on which motor vehicles could be driven.
Mr. Errol Hassell who was a local councillor in the ninteen thirties, is the man who made it possible to get funding to start this road. He had lived and worked in New York like so many other Sabans at the time. He had seen the changes in New York when motor vehicles took over from the horse and the buggy period.
The other group who deserve a lot of credit for the road, were the men from the village of Hell’s Gate. For them it was a mission to get the road to their village which was at the end of the line. They received extremely small wages and worked hard and without any mechanized help to build most of the main road.
While it is said that there was no help, the first part of the road from the Fort Bay to The Bottom was engineered by the Department of Public Works on Curacao.
Mr. Josephus Lambert Hassell was living on Aruba at the time and came to his native Saba after that portion of the road had been built. He engineered the road from The Bottom to Flat Point and a number of side roads leading off the main road, like the ones to Booby Hill. He deserves a great deal of credit. But it was not so that any Dutchman told Sabans that a road was impossible to build. It is true though that Island Administrators, at least those who were Dutch and the Governors on Curacao tried their utmost to spend as little as possible on the islands outside of Curacao. From 1816 when the Dutch took over Saba from the English, the island was left to its own resources for the most part. More than a hundred years after that event, Saba had a very minimal budget most of which was brought up locally from a limited number of taxes imposed on the population.
Started in 1938. First steps broken up by Thomas Hassell, Norman Hassell and James Horton Simmons, all three were laborers from Hell’s Gate and were paid 65 cents per day.
Road stopped for some years and restarted in December 1941. The S was designed by the Department of Public Works on Curacao.
October 16th, 1943 Road from Fort Bay to The Bottom was finished. 1150 meters long, 4 meters wide and with a height differential of 99 meters.
Cost of this part of the road from Fort Bay to The Bottom was 33.600 Guilders.
In 1951 the road reached St. John’s. At that time there were three motor vehicles on the island.
In 1952 there were 9 motor vehicles on the island.
In 1961 there were 30 motor vehicles on the island.
In 1964 there were 46 motor vehicles on the island.
Now there are almost 2000 people living on the island
➤ Licence:
Song: Tobjan - Golden Days
Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music.
Creative Commons - Attribution 3.0 Unported
Video Link: https://youtu.be/qG3DWQj-f_s
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