A Short History

People lived in the Grenadines long before Europeans sailed through. Farming and pottery-making peoples from the South American mainland settled the chain from about the last centuries BC, and by the 1490s the islands were Kalinago country. On Canouan's windward side a carved boulder, a petroglyph, survives from those centuries. The island's name is thought to come from caouane, a Carib-origin word for a large sea turtle.

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 ceded Grenada and the Grenadines to Britain. The French held St Vincent from 1779 to 1783. A later partition, dated 1784 or 1791 in different sources, placed Canouan, Mustique and Bequia with St Vincent and the islands south of Union with Grenada.

The earliest dated record is a 1785 lease of a cotton plantation of 245 acres. By 1817 William Snagg owned Carenage Estate, on the north-west of the island, with 177 enslaved people. Slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1834 and apprenticeship ended on 1 August 1838. The Snagg heirs were awarded £6,083 in compensation for about 242 people at Carenage; the people they had enslaved received nothing.

In the 19th century the Snagg family brought an English shipwright, Benjamin George Compton, to Canouan to teach boatbuilding. William Alexander Mitchell of Bequia learned the trade from him and married his daughter, and the line of Grenadine shipwrights that followed ran between the two islands. Canouan also had two shore-whaling stations; both had closed by 1925. Sir John Compton, later the first Prime Minister of St Lucia, was born on Canouan in 1925.

In 1921 the people of the village in the north of the island resettled on the west coast, where the village still stands.

In 1946 the Snagg estate was sold to the colonial government. Universal adult suffrage came in 1951, associated statehood on 27 October 1969, and independence for St Vincent and the Grenadines on 27 October 1979.

Resort building in the north of the island began in the 1990s. The extended jet runway opened in May 2008. Sandy Lane Yacht Club's marina opened in 2017, Mandarin Oriental took over the hotel on the Estate in 2017, and Soho Beach House Canouan opened in 2022.