The Island that Disappeared Read online

  The Island That Disappeared

  Copyright © 2017 by Tom Feiling

  First published by Explore Books in the United Kingdom in 2017

  First Melville House Printing: March 2018

  Maps by Simonetta Giori

  Melville House Publishing

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  Brooklyn, NY 11201

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  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Richard Oriolo

  Ebook ISBN 9781612194103

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Feiling, Tom, author.

  Title: The island that disappeared : the lost history of the Mayflower's sister ship and its rival Puritan colony / Tom Feiling.

  Other titles: Lost history of the Mayflower's sister ship and its rival Puritan colony

  Description: First American hardcover edition. | Brooklyn : Melville House, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017055039| ISBN 9781612197081 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781612194103 (reflowable ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Providence Island (Colombia)--History. | Puritans--Colombia--Providence Island--History. | British--Colombia--Providence Island--History--17th century. | West Indies--History--17th century.

  Classification: LCC F2281.S15 F45 2017b | DDC 972.9/03--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055039

  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  MAPS OF THE WESTERN CARIBBEAN AND PROVIDENCE ISLAND

  [ PART ONE ]

  1. Building New Westminster

  2. Educating Essex

  3. The Seaflower

  4. Cake, Ale, and Painful Preaching: A Banbury Tale

  5. The First Voyage to the Miskito Coast

  6. The Pride of the Righteous

  7. The Africans, ‘During Their Strangeness From Christianity’

  8. ‘A Nest of Thieves and Pirates’

  9. ‘Raw Potatoes and Turtle Meat’

  10. The Last Days of Their Lordships’ Isle

  [ PART TWO ]

  11. ‘Little More Than the Summit of a Hill’

  12. The Western Design

  13. The Rise of Port Royal and the Recapture of Providence

  14. Henry Morgan, Admiral of the Brethren

  [ PART THREE ]

  15. Mariners, Castaways, and Renegades

  16. The Last Englishman

  17. ‘A Sort of Lying That Makes a Great Hole in the Heart’

  18. How the Light Came In

  [ PART FOUR ]

  19. Modern Times

  20. ‘Maybe They Don’t Know What Is an Island’

  21. ‘Still a Little Behind Time’

  EPILOGUE

  REFERENCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Introduction

  What should we do but sing his praise

  That led us through the watery maze

  Unto an isle so long unknown,

  And yet far kinder than our own?

  —BERMUDAS, ANDREW MARVELL, 1654

  Now that bird…is maybe two hundred years old, Hawkins—they lives for ever mostly; and if anybody’s seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself. She’s sailed with England, the great Cap’n England, the pirate. She’s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, the Surinam, and Providence and Portobello.

  —‘LONG’ JOHN SILVER, TALKING OF HIS PARROT, CAPTAIN FLINT, IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S TREASURE ISLAND, 1883

  I LIKE TO THINK OF The Island That Disappeared as akin to one of those self-contained wintery worlds encased in thick glass that you find in secondhand shops; a world in miniature; a world familiar, yet made strange by its diminutive size. This book tells the story of Old Providence, a five-mile-long island one hundred fifty miles off the coast of Nicaragua, of which few people in Britain or the United States have ever heard. Though tiny, the island offers a precious view of the Atlantic world in microcosm. The island’s history is a rambling trek through four hundred years of Caribbean history. Though the path through time gradually grows narrower and more overgrown as it comes into the modern era, it offers the same broad vistas over the New World in 2017 as it did in 1629, when the first English settlers stumbled onto the island’s pristine white sands in search of a refuge from the violence of the Old World.

  This book began with a conversation I had with my editor at Penguin a few weeks after the publication of my last book, Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the New Colombia. In the course of my research, I had traveled the length and breadth of Colombia, and spoken to a lot of Colombians about their country’s history, politics, and culture. ‘How about writing something similar about the U.K.?’ she suggested. She received a lot of pitches from British writers proposing to write books about far-flung parts of the world, but few of them seemed interested in reporting on the state of their own country.

  This suited me fine; after spending several years in far-flung places, I was keen to know more about my own country. So in the spring of 2012, I bought a camper van and spent the next six months traveling around the country, navigating by a self-imposed rule that I would avoid all towns and cities, and stick to the back roads, guided only by a compass. I wanted to stop thinking about Britain in terms of A to B and instead attune myself to the natural boundaries of cliffs, rivers, and hills. When I wasn’t driving, I was sightseeing, and when I wasn’t sightseeing, I was reading about British history.

  The problem with writing books—as well as sightseeing—is that everyone wants to visit the best bits. The English—like the Americans—think they have their history sewn up. There are thousands of newspaper columnists and TV producers who take it upon themselves to distill the essence of the national character, as revealed in a series of cherry-picked favorite episodes. They seem content to pore over a tide of books, films, and documentaries that largely rehash what we already know. In order of immediacy, Britain’s cherries are deemed to be the Second World War (reduced to a simple struggle of good over evil), the First World War (patriotic sacrifice), the Victorians (enterprise, industry, and sexual repression), Elizabeth I (a secular Virgin Mother), and Henry VIII (the original macho brute). The same selective focus is apparent in the United States, where hordes of media producers home in on what they consider the best bits of their history, be it the landing of the Mayflower, the triumph of the Union in the Civil War, or landmark successes in space travel.

  One evening in midsummer, I parked up outside a small, isolated church near Stokesay in Shropshire. I was too cut off from everything to know it, but that night, Danny Boyle would present his take on the meaning of Britain’s history at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. While he was transmogrifying England’s dark Satanic Mills to become the postwar light that is the National Health Service, I was reading about the English Civil War in the van.

  Why did I know so little about England’s last and greatest domestic conflagration? I wondered. Somewhere along the way, I had picked up the bare bones of the plot: how the Roundheads fought the Cavaliers, and Charles I ended up losing his head. But the hours I had spent watching history documentaries on BBC2 had given me next to no understanding of the causes of a war that raged for over ten years and killed two hundred fifty thousand Britons.

  As I read more about the English Civil War, I was struck by mention of the Providence Island Company. It was not often mentioned, but among its members were most of the Purita
n nobles who had led Parliament into war against the king. Providence…I recognized the name from my time in Colombia. The congressman who represents the department of San Andrés and Providencia is the only native English speaker in the chamber. Since the islands are five hundred miles north of the mainland, most Colombians don’t pay them much attention. While living in Colombia, I had, like them, occasionally wondered about tiny Providence, cut adrift one hundred and fifty miles off the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, but not enough to visit.

  Guided by an inkling that the island had something new and original to tell me about England, I began trawling the Internet for leads. I discovered that the Providence Island Company’s records had been lost for two hundred fifty years. Only in 1876 did the archivists at the U.K.’s Public Record Office realize that the records had been mistakenly filed under New Providence, the first English settlement on the Bahamas. In fact, Old Providence predates both New Providence and Providence, Rhode Island. I ordered the only three books to have been written about the place, and began reading.

  Though long forgotten, Old Providence had once been hugely important to England, for the island was the site of one of its first and most ambitious colonies. The first settlers arrived on the Seaflower in 1631, ten years after its sister ship, the Mayflower, landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Like their brethren in New England, most of them were Puritans, desperate to escape persecution at home and start over in the New World. Unlike New England, the colony on Providence had a short life, for it was wiped out by the Spanish in 1641. Yet a remarkable story emerges from those ten years, of how the colony’s idealistic Puritans were fatally undermined by the unscrupulous pirates and slave owners in their midst. It seemed to me a neat précis of how and why the English first settled the Americas, and the legacy they left for generations to come.

  No one I spoke to in London had even heard of Old Providence. But then I met a Colombian artist at a gallery opening who had spent several summers on the island when he was growing up. What was it like? I asked him. Well, the islanders were nothing like the archetypal villagers that Gabriel García Márquez described in One Hundred Years of Solitude, he told me. Most of them were Baptists for a start, and although they understood Spanish, many refused to speak it. They had been hospitable enough, at least to begin with, and the older islanders were noticeably pious and well educated. Crime was practically unheard of, and usually involved nothing more serious than the theft of coconuts. But his memories of the island had been tainted by an acrimonious dispute that flared up between his parents and the island’s mayor, which had only ended when they sold up and returned to the mainland. In spite of their outward show of piety, there were still a lot of pirates on Providence, he concluded.

  I wanted to see what had happened to Old Providence since it sailed off the edge of the world stage; as well as to listen for echoes of the dramatic confrontation between Puritans and pirates that took place there three hundred eighty years ago. I had reasons of my own for going there too: a desire for a refuge from the world. I certainly wasn’t being driven into exile, as the Puritan settlers were, but the desire for ‘purification’ from the ‘contaminants’ of the modern world has not gone away, and neither has the instinct that told me I would find it on a faraway tropical island.

  I spent four wonderful months on Providence, an earthly paradise that may well be the last vestige of the Caribbean as it was before the drug trade, corruption, and mass tourism became facts of life. It was not easy to piece together the story of what happened following the resettlement of the island in 1789. There is no Public Record Office on Providence, and what passes for truth is often closer to myth. To piece together the story of the colony, and the completely overlooked community that emerged from its shadow one hundred fifty years after it collapsed, I had to become a very local historian. This meant ditching the history books for the Dictaphone, and listening to the stories told by the five thousand people who live on the island today.

  I found the diminutive story of the island enchanting, for the very act of looking at a microcosm reminds us that there are epic dramas being played out on stages large and small. I found that there are indeed still pirates—and Puritans—on Providence. Through them, I learned a great deal about the legacy of the early colonial period, not just for the Caribbean, but for England, the United States, and the Atlantic World their peoples forged. So while the story you’re about to read might be set on a tiny stage, its principal concern is nothing less than how the western world came into being, and the impact that its founders continue to have to this day.

  * * *

  Part One covers the rise and fall of the original Puritan colony on Providence. Part Two covers Henry Morgan and the Brethren of the Coast who took the Puritans’ place. This takes us up to the interval: the century after 1680 when the island was abandoned. Part Three opens with my arrival on the island and goes on to explore how Britain grew rich on the back of a very different kind of colony—Jamaica—and how the Puritans and pirates of the Caribbean were mythologized by the empire builders of the Victorian era. This is where I look into the fascinating story of what happened after Francis Archbold resettled the island in 1789. Finally, Part Four looks at the legacy of Puritanism and piracy, and the challenges the islanders face today, as their isolation comes to an end.

  A few words on the text: In colonial times, the English called the island ‘Providence’, while the Spanish called it ‘Santa Catalina.’ After gaining independence from Spain, the Colombians called it ‘Providencia de Santa Catalina,’ but these days, they just call it ‘Providencia,’ while English speakers call it ‘Old Providence.’ I have chosen to use all these names, depending on the period, and whose point of view I am trying to convey.

  The neighboring island of San Andrés, which lies forty miles south of Providence, has also been through several monikers: The first English settlers called it ‘Henrietta,’ after King Charles’s French wife, but the island was largely ignored until 1785, when the Spanish crown reasserted its claim to what it called ‘San Andrés.’ The islanders preferred to call it ‘St. Andrew’s,’ but these days, most of them use the Spanish name, and I have done the same.

  The Mosquito Coast, as the Caribbean coast of present day Nicaragua is known, is not what it was either. The name has nothing to do with flying insects, and everything to do with the tribe the English settlers encountered when they first ventured from Providence to the coast of Central America. In modern times, it became known as the Misquito Coast, then the Miskito Coast, and now there is talk of it becoming the Miskitu Coast. I have opted to use the second, most common name.

  I have amended citations from the original sources to conform to modern English spelling, but left them otherwise unchanged. In most instances, I have converted seventeenth-century prices into their modern-day equivalent with the help of several handy online currency converters.*

  *The National Archive’s currency converter can be accessed at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/​currency/​results.asp. Francis Turner’s article, Money and Exchange Rates in 1632, can be found at: http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/​RDavies/​arian/​current/​howmuch.html. Pirate Money can be found at: http://pirates.hegewisch.net/​money.html. To calculate the present day purchasing power of Dutch guilders, I used: http://www.iisg.nl/​hpw/​calculate2.php.

  [1]

  Building New Westminster

  THE YEAR 1629: EMERGING FROM a sea that shimmered near silver in the light of midmorning, the island looked like a black peaked hat. As the Robert drew closer, its flanks turned dark green, suggestive of rich, fertile soils, and the seabed rose steeply from the depths, turning the water a brilliant turquoise. Capt. Daniel Elfrith dropped anchor at the edge of the coral reef that runs down the eastern side of the island, and had his men row him ashore in a longboat. He stepped onto a beach of fine, white sand that rose steeply into deep forest. Ahead of them, the sunlight was playing on the fronds of tall palm trees that marked the watershed of a lush valley. They made
their way to the fast-running stream, which gave them their first taste of fresh water since leaving the Somers Isles, eighteen hundred miles to the northeast.*1

  Captain Elfrith resolved to explore his discovery. The undergrowth was dense, and they had to clamber over the roots of huge cotton trees, so they stuck to the course of the stream. As they climbed higher, the trees thinned out. Emerging onto flatter ground, they found wild orange and lemon trees growing in abundance. They also found trees bearing fruit that none of them had seen before: papaya, guava, and soursop.

  It took them several hours to reach the summit of the island’s highest peak, but once there, the lie of the island became clear to them. Freshwater streams coursed through steep-sided valleys that branched out in every direction, leveling out as they approached the shore, one thousand feet below, where they could see the Robert riding at anchor. They could see shades of brilliant aquamarine around the coral reef, which stretched out of sight to the north.

  There were also masses of birds, which chattered over their heads as they passed under the boughs of the cotton trees. Through his spyglass, Captain Elfrith watched a pelican scoop plump fish from the glittering sea, a solitary heron standing sentinel in the mangroves, man-of-war birds (or frigate birds) nesting on the rocky offshore cays. He didn’t know it, but many of the birds he saw had come to the island to escape the winters of New England, where another band of English pioneers was struggling to keep from freezing to death.

  The island was full of promise: It was well watered, its soils were rich, and there was plenty of flat land close to the shore where a community of settlers could raise all manner of crops. The natural harbor in the northwest was to leeward, and the hills surrounding it would protect it from the storms that swept across the western Caribbean in the autumn. Captain Elfrith was coming to the end of a fruitless cruise in the far west of the Caribbean Sea. The day before, he had landed at another island, forty miles due south. It too had been small—just twelve miles long—and while its sandy soils were fertile and it appeared to be uninhabited, he had searched in vain for a supply of fresh water. It was also low-lying, and he had been concerned that the lack of a vantage point would make it hard to defend from attack.