The Island that Disappeared Read online

  The Providence Island Company now had political, as well as economic and religious, motives to build a settlement on the Miskito Coast. If they could build plantations there, the potential for expansion was unlimited. Perhaps God had always meant for Providence to serve as the foundation for a mighty English empire in Central America? If the shareholders interpreted His will correctly, the island was destined to flourish as an offshore fort, where crops grown on the mainland could be stored before shipment to England. In time, their new colony would dwarf their outposts in Virginia, Maine, and New England, and the settlers of North America would join their more enterprising brethren on the Miskito Coast.

  *But they were most excited by the flocks of parrots they saw. The company had offered ten shillings to any man who sent a live parrot back to London. William Jessop’s only stipulation was that they be caged ‘in such a way that the boats are not made dirty unnecessarily.’ In the years to come, Jessop would send several letters to Providence in which he regretfully acknowledged the arrival of dead parrots.

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  The Pride of the Righteous

  WITH THE ARRIVAL OF THE Charity’s one hundred fifty passengers, the population of Providence rose to around three hundred. All the principal characters in the drama that was to unfold on Providence were now onstage. The Puritan element was represented by Henry Halhead, Samuel Rishworth, Hope Sherrard, and Richard Lane; the privateers by Capt. Daniel Elfrith, Capt. Samuel Axe, and Lt. William Rous. Adjudicating was the island’s austere governor, Philip Bell.

  Bell apportioned new plots, and New Westminster gradually expanded across the flat ground at the foot of Cedar Valley. Henry Halhead and Samuel Rishworth were given land and buildings on the east side of the island, which had until recently been occupied by John Essex. He had been co-leader, with Lewis Morgan, of the incipient mutiny against the company, and had returned to London on the Seaflower in a bid to draw public attention to the settlers’ grievances. Fortunately, for the company at least, he was killed when the ship was attacked by Spanish pirates in the Straits of Florida.

  With Essex dead and Morgan dismissed, the shareholders hoped that their new tenants would supply the responsible leadership that the islanders needed. Halhead and Rishworth were assigned a few servants each and apportioned tools and seeds from the company’s magazine. To reach the windward side of the island, they had to follow the river upstream into Cedar Valley, over the watershed and down onto the ribbon of flat ground that overlooked the reef. It was an idyllic spot: the shallow waters around the reef ran through multiple shades of azure, and a gentle, near-constant breeze sent ripples through the lush grass that rolled down to the shore. The two friends spent their days in their fields, while their wives, Elizabeth and Frances, looked after the children at home, tended to their livestock, and did the washing and cooking. Close by was a small hut that served as a chapel, where Mr. Ditloff would tend to the spiritual needs of the handful of artificial ‘families’ that lived on the east side of the island. The company assured Ditloff that in time he too would have land and servants of his own. For the time being, however, he was in the care of Halhead and Rishworth.

  Hope Sherrard moved into Lewis Morgan’s rooms in the governor’s house, and set about making his presence felt as the island’s new minister. After preaching his first sermon in New Westminster’s little church, he introduced the congregation to his new adjunct, Rev. Arthur Rous. They expected to see the entire community for morning and evening prayers every day, as well as at the two services they would give on Sundays. They also gave the settlers the option of attending a Saturday evening service at the governor’s house, catechism on Sunday afternoons, and another sermon on Wednesday evenings.

  There is no record of Sherrard’s sermons, but if church services in Virginia are anything to go by, he is likely to have ended them with a prayer: ‘Lord, bless England, our sweet native country. Save it from Popery, this land from heathenism, and both from atheism.’1 God would protect them from the enemy, Sherrard assured the congregation, but they would do well not to tempt His wrath. Playing games on Sundays was prohibited, those who slandered His ministers would be whipped, and blasphemers could expect to be hanged.

  Halhead and Rishworth were pleased to find themselves in such a godly community, administered by such enlightened rulers. Following the evening service, they often visited the homes of the island’s other tenant farmers, who agreed that the presence of such diligent ministers, after so many months living without spiritual guidance, was a great comfort.

  Watching their so-called children tend the kitchen fire in the yard and cook their so-called fathers’ dinners, Halhead was struck by these curious facsimiles of English domestic life. The company’s tenants clearly drew some comfort from their artificial families, and were bound to them all the more tightly by the hardships they had endured.

  For almost three years, they had been planting and tending mechoacan potatoes, sarsaparilla, and pomegranate, plants that even the company’s ‘special agents’ seemed to know little about. Watching them wither in the dry season, only to be washed away by the autumn rains, they often wondered what sin they had committed to warrant such misfortune. The only crop that brought them any profit was tobacco, and they were obliged to give a third of whatever it raised at market to the company.

  When they weren’t tending their lordships’ latest whimsy, they were cutting and dressing stone for the walls of Fort Warwick. Lieutenant Rous’s demands on their precious time kept them from their fields. Why hadn’t their lordships sent more servants to work on the fortifications? they wanted to know. Like them, Henry also grew to resent the military service they were obliged to perform, for he found Captain Axe’s manner all too reminiscent of the overweening army officers that had been billeted in Banbury. He appreciated that in a new colony, everything had to be done ‘as in the beginning of the world,’ in the words of John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts.2 But that meant clearing land, building houses, and planting crops, not marching up and down the little square in front of the governor’s house.

  Captain Axe and the other soldiers on the island council found the settlers’ resistance infuriating. Didn’t they see that they had thrown themselves into the very mouth of the Spanish Empire? If Lucifer was the first rebel, the Puritan yeoman was clearly the second. Philip Bell was equally dismayed, for the arrival of the second contingent of settlers had only exacerbated the acrimony that prevailed in meetings of the island council. He had hoped to spin a comfortable web of mutual obligations that led all concerned to lead productive and virtuous lives. The island’s new ministers were supposed to be the oil in the machinery of island government, easing friction and aiding the smooth running of the colony, but they seemed no better suited to colonial life than Lewis Morgan. Bell was shocked by the brutality with which Rev. Arthur Rous treated his servants; such a man would never have been allowed to join a New England congregation. Fortunately for Rous’s servants, he died of fever within a year of his arrival.

  Mr. Ditloff was also quick to create problems. One Sunday, he refused to perform the sacrament—the ritual whereby consecrated bread and wine are offered to the faithful—for Henry Halhead, on the grounds that he was a hypocrite. On the outbound voyage, Henry had told him that the ship’s mate, John Wells, was ‘a carnal man, who would sometimes swear.’ Yet only the previous week, Ditloff had heard him call Wells, ‘a good and honest Christian,’ in front of his friends.

  When Hope Sherrard intervened in the dispute, Ditloff told him to mind his own business, and demanded ‘parochial independence’ for his little congregation. Notwithstanding the fact that his ‘church’ was no more than a hut on the beach, it was only what the company had promised him, he told Sherrard. The company disagreed: when word got back to London of his declaration of independence, they called him to account for ‘the pride and insolency of his carriage.’3 Mr. Ditloff sailed for London on the next ship, never to return.

  Since that left Hope Sherrard as t
he island’s only minister, the company was keen not to lose him as well. But Sherrard was a graduate of that bastion of Puritan nonconformity, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and was just as demanding as his predecessor. Not only did he expect the entire community to attend his sermons, he demanded that each man, woman, and child give him an account of their faith and, like Mr. Ditloff, was prepared to deny the sacrament to anyone he considered less than godly.

  The army officers of Fort Warwick had no interest in plumbing the depths of their consciences for signs of moral laxity and soon tired of their sanctimonious minister. Capt. Benjamin Hooke accused Hope Sherrard of ‘negligence in his function’ and ‘debility of memory, whereby he was made unfit for the ministry.’ In response, Sherrard told Captain Hooke that he was no longer welcome in his church. It was a rash act, but as he explained in a letter to Sir Thomas Barrington, he had discovered that the captain was ‘fomenting a faction against me in the church.’

  Not content with alienating the military wing of the island council, Hope Sherrard also criticized the governor. Philip Bell, he alleged,

  maintains this rotten principle that whatsoever he commands, be it either lawful or unlawful, yet we must yield an absolute and active obedience to the same without any questioning power…If this principle may stand good, what are we in this island, but his absolute slaves and vassals?4

  When he tired of arguing with Captain Hooke and Philip Bell, Sherrard followed Mr. Ditloff’s example and created a separate congregation, an act symbolic of withdrawal from the Church of England. Like all Puritans, he believed that he was on the cusp of a new understanding of the universe and his place in it. As Lord Brooke put it, ‘The light still will, must, cannot but increase.’ Religion was no longer a matter of mere adherence to outward forms; indeed, the outward signs of devotion were all too often used as a cloak for sin.

  The ability to make compromises for the sake of unity had been a capital virtue of the Pilgrim fathers who sailed to New England in 1621. But their minister had tended a small flock, which defined itself by its opposition to the Church of England. By contrast, Hope Sherrard was minister to saints, sinners, and the damned alike, and when he wasn’t pontificating about the nature of God, he was meddling in other people’s interpretations of Him. Power was an unfamiliar and intoxicating brew, and Sherrard was not the only Puritan minister to let it go to his head once set loose in the colonies.

  Sherrard’s self-righteousness might have exasperated the other members of the island council, but it appealed to the powerless, and like Lewis Morgan, he quickly became the pole around which all manner of discontented settlers gathered. Most came to him with prosaic grievances: they resented the company’s monopoly on the sale of their crops, and considered the distribution of tools and seeds to those with powerful sponsors unfair. But several of them, including Henry Halhead and Samuel Rishworth, wanted more fundamental changes, starting with the devolution of power from the military officers to the ‘visible saints’ in Sherrard’s congregation.

  Ranged against the ‘small body of zealots’ on the island council was a larger group of army officers, merchant sailors, and experienced colonists from the Somers Isles, who were more inclined to look windward than skyward for guidance. They expected Philip Bell, as the former governor of the Somers Isles, to take their side in island council meetings. But Bell was a man of strong religious conviction, who shared the company’s patrician high-mindedness. The Somers islanders didn’t thank the governor for his magnanimity.

  The governor had other headstrong individuals to contend with too. Barred from setting out to sea for fear he would attack Spanish shipping, Daniel Elfrith had become ‘a nuisance to everybody.’ The island’s admiral interfered with Samuel Axe’s authority at Fort Warwick, and the two men quarreled again when the tobacco harvest was brought in, this time over the portions they had been allotted. In exasperation, Bell expelled his father-in-law from the island council. He took the same tough line with Hope Sherrard and eventually imprisoned him for ‘persistently fronting the authority of the governor and council.’ In response, Sherrard’s friends on the Puritan wing of the council denounced the governor for his ‘impiety and despotism.’ Caught between his employers’ high hopes and the colonists’ low regard for his authority, Bell wrote to the company in despair at the ‘disunion of hearts and ends on the island.’5

  * * *

  Puritanism was proving no less divisive at home than it was on Providence. The Arminian wing of the Church of England argued for a strong-arm approach to the dissenters. Arminians were determined to unify England’s countless nonconformist sects in a single Church of England. They did not believe that heaven was reserved for the Puritan ‘elect,’ and were convinced that God’s grace was available to all who took part in the sacrament. Their greatest champion was William Laud, the bishop of London. Laud seemed almost embarrassed by the Reformation, which had created a cult of the Bible, without granting the Church any authority to insist that its interpretation of the word of God was better than anyone else’s. If Protestant orthodoxy were to be preserved, the Puritans would have to be brought to book.

  The Puritan preacher Thomas Shepherd recalled being summoned to appear before Bishop Laud in 1630.

  He asked who maintained me, charging me to deal plainly with him, adding withal that he had been more cheated and equivocated by some of my malignant faction than ever man was by Jesuit, at the speaking of which words, he looked as though blood would have gushed out of his face, and did shake as if he had been haunted of an ague fit.

  Laud forbade Shepherd to ‘preach, read, marry, bury or exercise any ministerial function’ in London, and sent him away.6

  Bishop Laud and his supporters set about capturing the king’s mind, and succeeded in convincing him that all nonconformists were Puritan zealots at heart and, as such, politically subversive. In 1633, Charles appointed Laud archbishop of Canterbury. Once in office, he embarked on a campaign of religious persecution more severe than anything seen since Elizabeth was on the throne. ‘Painful’ preachers who disagreed with the new ceremonies, the position of the altar, or the King’s Book of Sports were charged with heresy and hounded out of church.*

  The appointment of Archbishop Laud sent shock waves through Puritan ranks. The MP and Providence Island Company shareholder Oliver St. John saw Arminianism as another step on the road back to rule from Rome, and called it ‘the little thief put into the window of the church to unlock the door.’7 Laud’s attempts to increase the wealth of the Church, and his love of the mystical garb donned by church ministers, convinced many Puritans that he wanted to turn the clock back further, to a time when Englishmen were still in thrall to magic.

  Far from listening to the Puritans’ concerns, King Charles conspicuously chose Catholics as his friends and advisers, and even befriended George Con, the first papal representative to come to England for over one hundred years. To make matters worse, Archbishop Laud became a prominent figure in both the Privy Council and Star Chamber, where he gave his wholehearted support to Charles’s drive to raise taxes without the authorization of Parliament.

  Laud was pushing the nonconformist element of the Church of England into an unprecedented radicalism. The Puritans had always seen Catholicism and arbitrary government as two sides of the same coin, but they were powerless to stop the fusion of church and state that the king seemed intent upon. The world seemed on the verge of the millennium, the thousand-year rule of the saints prophesized in the Book of Revelation. With both the Church of England and the Palace of Whitehall in the hands of despots, growing numbers of Puritans felt driven to build a new church and a new state in the Americas. One of the most aggressive promoters of migration to New England was Edward Johnson, who remembered 1634 as the year in which the ‘yoke of Episcopal persecution in England became so heavy on the necks of the most godly [that] many thousands of them did flee away to join themselves to these American churches.’ By then, all of England’s colonies had become refuges for nonco
nformists: not just those established by Puritans, like Providence and Massachusetts, but also commercial ventures like Virginia, Maryland, and Connecticut. Had they not left for America, there is every chance that the Earl of Warwick, as lord lieutenant of Essex, would have been called upon to put down an insurrection.

  Over the course of the 1630s, sixty thousand English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish men and women made the crossing to the New World. Two-thirds of them headed not for North America, but for the Somers Isles, St. Kitts, and Barbados.8 This should have been good news for the Providence Island Company, but most Puritans chose the colony at Massachusetts Bay over Providence, for it offered a degree of freedom unknown on their lordships’ Isle. The founders of Massachusetts had taken the company’s charter with them, effectively cutting themselves off from England’s rule. On arrival, virtually all heads of families were offered the chance to become freeholders of the land they tilled, and the company’s meetings in Boston became the basis of the first representative government in the Americas.

  As Archbishop Laud turned the screws on his opponents, Puritan emigration increasingly took the form of vociferous, unbending ministers leading their congregations into exile. Among them was Rev. Henry Roote; so keen were the shareholders to recruit the reverend and his congregation that they even covered the cost of shipping him and his family to Providence to make a preliminary survey of the island’s spiritual life.

  Reverend Roote spent a few weeks on Providence, at the end of which time Philip Bell proclaimed him a man of ‘ability, gravity and deserts.’ Unfortunately, Roote was unable to return the compliment. Bell and the military men around him had strayed a long way from the Puritan ideal, he told them, for Providence was utterly lacking the machinery for popular participation in government. He returned to London in May 1634, armed with a list of proposals for the shareholders. He was prepared to return to Providence with one hundred devout settlers, but they ‘would not undertake the voyage, but upon a promise to have the government in their own hand.’ If the company agreed to dismiss the soldiers and sailors from the island council, the community could enjoy the leadership of its ‘saints,’ and thereby ensure the protection of God. No amount of forts could protect their colony from a wrathful God, he reminded them.