Taylor, Douglas Macrae (1901-1980)

Linguist and anthropologist considered to be the most respected and prolific academic to be associated with Dominica. Born in Yorkshire, U.K., he was a graduate of St. Peter's College, University of Cambridge, where he studied modern languages. He became the world authority on the Island-Carib culture and a distinguished pioneer of Caribbean linguistics. His major works were "The Caribs of Dominica" (1938), "Ethnobotany of the Island Caribs" with W.H. Hodge (1957) and "Languages of the West Indies"(1977), just three of some 70 publications on Dominica alone, that included monographs and articles. Douglas Taylor first came to Dominica in 1930, residing permanently from 1938. Shortly after his arrival here he was accused of fomenting trouble in the Carib Reserve by the British Administrator, E.C. Eliot, and of encouraging the "Carib War" of September 1930, charges that Taylor strongly denied. His first marriage, to an American, ended in divorce and he then married Martina Benjamin, a Carib woman of Bataca, with whom he had several children. He spent most of his time researching and writing at his home at Magua, Bellevue Chopin, between his occasional teaching assignments at the universities of Yale and Oxford. In 1979, a year before his death, he was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University of the West Indies, which he received at the Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. He left Dominica after the destruction of Hurricane David and died in England in 1980.

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