Fort King George, Scarborough, Tobago

The Island of Tobago in the West Indies - now the Caribbean - was sighted by Columbus who called it Bella Forma. The island lies - with the far larger Trinidad - off the coast of South America.

The original Carib population fought off European settlement of Tobago throughout the 1500s and early 1600s. The English claimed Tobago in the 1580s. The Dutch took over in 1632 and named the island Nieuw Vlissingen, but were destroyed by a Spanish expedition 5 years later.

Intriguingly, colonists from the Duchy of Courland in the Baltic (modern Latvia) arrived in 1637 to found a colony and made several attempts to settle over the next 30 years or so, until expelled by the Dutch, who were than defeated by the French in 1677.

Tobago is said to have changed hands 33 times between Spanish, Dutch and the English. In 1763, after the Seven Years War, Tobago was ceded to Britain, but captured again by the French in the War of American Independence in 1781. The French renamed the capital, Scarborough, as Port Louis. Tobago was then recaptured by the British in 1793 in the French Revolutionary War. Finally, the island was ceded to Britain through the Treaty of Paris in 1814.

The reason for all this fighting was the wealth of the island under the appallingly barbaric plantation slavery system, under which the island's 80 plantations - with 300 white inhabitants and 3,000 black slaves - had reputedly exported by 1777 160,000 gallons of rum, 1.5m pounds of cotton, 500 pounds of indigo and 24cwt of sugar.

The picture here is of the newly restored Fort King George and shows the quarters of the Royal Artillery and the Officers' Quarters.

Originally named Fort Castries - after the French Secretary of the Navy for Louis XVI, the Marquis de Castries - this fort was begun in 1781 to protect the newly renamed Port Louis. When the British recaptured the island the fort was completed and strengthened. There is a cistern for collecting water, an impressive barracks and a strongly-built powder magazine also to be seen, together with the usual collection of antique cannons.