Angostura Bitters and the Siegerts

THE EDITOR: There was a letter in the Express of February 24 from Ferdie Ferreira concerning Angostura.

Management of Angostura recently said the company was nearly 200 years old. Ferreira is speaking of the product being 200 years old. Two different things.

Two hundred years ago Siegert was living with an Amerindian woman called Maria Pastora del Pilar Araujo y Flores with whom he had a son, Johan Theophilius Benjamin Siegert Araujo.

The formula for bitters was not developed by Siegert. He got it from Maria Pastora and it was a bush medicine of the Amerindians that he would have later improved upon. He married her the day before she died.

JGB Siegert later married Maria Bonifacia Gomes de Saa and had the following children: Benjamin Isidoro Siegert Gomez, Cecilia Siegert Gomez, Carlos Demasio Siegert Gomez and two others.

Cecilia married Rafael Machado Siegert and they had a daughter, Cecilia Machado Siegert, who married my wife’s grandfather.

Angosto is the Spanish word for narrow. The town of Angostura was located where the river was narrow. The Orinoco is a very big river. When it floods big clumps of land float down the river and some get to Manzanilla Beach in Trinidad. It is on those pieces of land that Trinidad gets flora and fauna from Venezuela. The capybara that we have come from Venezuela. I remember many years ago a boa constrictor on the bridge in San Rafael and it measured over 20 feet. That was not native to Trinidad. It came from Venezuela.

Because of my wife’s maternal family coming from Ciudad Bolivar I made a few trips there with her. I remember looking across the Orinoco where it was narrow and the other side of the river was almost out of sight. It is reported to be the fourth largest river in the world based on outflow of water and is 1,400 miles long.

Simon Bolivar liberated a few South American countries from Spain. To honour him the town of Angostura changed its name to Ciudad Bolivar in 1846.

The Siegert family, Carlos, Alfredo and Luis, moved to Trinidad in 1875 because of civil unrest in Venezuela. They bought and lived at the property that later became Bishop’s High School. That occupied the whole block other than the house at the north-eastern corner where the Hope Ross family lived.

Later other children were born into the Siegert family. Those would include Rosalino, Alberto, Gallus, Ana and Petra. All of them had streets in Woodbrook named after them

The formula or Angostura Bitters was in the possession of my wife’s grandfather who mixed his own batch of bitters from time to time, assisted by my wife’s oldest first cousin, who at that time was living with him. A copy of the formula and manufacturing process was found in his safe and given to me. It was on two pages, one in English and one in Spanish.

On the advice of my wife, a few years ago, I burnt the two pages to protect the integrity of the formula.

VINCENT E QUESNEL

Diego Martin