<P> Many Indian immigrants who had completed their indentureship also established cocoa estates, most notable of them being Haji Gokool Meah, a Kashmiri - born immigrant who went on to the become one of the wealthiest men in Trinidad and Tobago . The Indian community has steadily prospered and grown until now it makes up about 35% of the population of the nation (the largest ethnic group by about 1%). </P> <P> The arrival of witches' broom and black pod diseases in the 1930s coupled with the Great Depression, destroyed the cacao industry in Trinidad and Tobago . Although prices for Trinidad and Tobago cocoa beans remains high on the world markets, cocoa is no more than a marginal crop . Relations between the Indian immigrants, and both the British, and the black population were generally strained, and occasionally erupted into violence such as the 1884 Hosay massacre . </P> <P> The American Merrimac Oil Company drilled an early oil well at La Brea at Trinidad and Tobago in 1857, where oil was struck at 280 feet (85 m). Also mentioned is the pioneering work of Capt . Darwent with his Paria Petroleum Company Limited, and Conrad F. Stollmeyer (who was great grandfather of Republic Bank's then Chairman, former West Indies cricket captain, Jeffrey Stollmeyer), an entrepreneur of that period who felt that a combustible fuel could not be distilled out of the asphalt from the pitch lake . The other point of view from Capt . Darwent was that a combustible fuel, refined from oil drilled from the earth would be the ideal fuel for the future ." </P> <P> In either 1865, 1866, or 1867, according to different accounts, the American civil engineer, Walter Darwent, discovered and produced oil at Aripero . Efforts in 1867 to begin production by the Trinidad and Tobago Petroleum Company at La Brea and the Pariah Petroleum Company at Aripero were poorly financed and abandoned after Walter Darwent died of yellow fever . </P>

When was oil discovered in trinidad and tobago