This is a wonderful song, but unfortunately Von Schmidt got the facts of Ebenezer Joshua's trip quite wrong. A few years ago I came across a webpage in which the author wrote that his father, who was an official with the U.S. State Dept. at the time, had personally arranged for Joshua to travel to a regional economic planning conference on Barbados. The trip was planned long before the strike, and the people on the island were in desperate need of some source of income other than sugar cane, so portraying Joshua's trip as a cowardly betrayal of the people is a gross mischaracterization. Unfortunately I can no longer find where I saved that post or the URL where I originally saw it.

Karl Eklund, who retired from the U.S. to the island of St. Vincent, knew the song and when he learned of Eric Von Schmidt's death in 2007 he wrote a blog posting entitled "Joshua Gone Barbados. Eric Gone, Too.(v2)". St. Vincent is small enough that Eklund knows people who had known the major people mentioned in the song, including Ebenezer Joshua and Sonny Child. From his own research it's pretty clear that Eric got the story wrong. Joshua wasn't the hated tyrant Von Schmidt makes him out to be. He was actually a rather poor man who was quite beloved by the people.