The Island that Disappeared Read online

  Reverend Roote’s proposal had the backing of the civilian members of the island council. In a letter to Sir Thomas Barrington, Samuel Rishworth called Roote ‘my ancient acquaintance and worthy friend,’ and asserted, ‘for that short time he has been here, he has begun a Reformation of many things which were amiss.’ He urged Sir Thomas to do all he could to accommodate Roote’s proposals, ‘otherwise I fear we shall be much discouraged, for our hearts are set upon him.’9

  For a time, the company thought Roote’s scheme feasible. Now that the military faction was expending its energies in the trade with the Miskitos, perhaps the Puritan wing could be allowed to hold sway over the island council? Perhaps the company could accommodate both parties, with the pragmatists focusing on the construction of a new colony on the Miskito Coast, and the idealists on the construction of a model community on Providence?

  But the Puritan grandees could never commit to such a radical redesign of their colony and considered Massachusetts a poor example to follow. By the mid-1630s, the other Puritan colony had passed a law whereby only members of the congregation could hold public office. Since church membership was only offered to ‘visible saints’—those in whom the congregation clearly saw the ‘work of God’s grace’—this amounted to rule by a spiritual elite. Lord Saye, who was the Providence Island Company’s principal political thinker, was appalled by the democratic implications of this law, saying, ‘No wise man should be so foolish as to live where every man is a master, and masters must not correct their servants; where wise men propound and fools determine, as it was said of the cities of Greece.’ The godly settlers of Massachusetts might accuse his lordship of running scared of the popular will, but Lord Saye insisted that in placing the decision-making power of the congregation above that of its natural, aristocratic rulers, they had overturned the basis of good order and true liberty.

  The Providence Island Company’s shareholders had always intended to run their colony from London, and were determined to restrict both property rights and political participation. But it was theocracy, not democracy, that Lord Saye most objected to. Church and state should always be kept separate. Ministers should be absolutely free of governmental interference, for no one had the right to chastise them for what they did as religious leaders. But they should play no part in government or lawmaking. Lord Saye respected Hope Sherrard and was happy to be chastised by him for his personal failings. But his spiritual function ‘separated [Sherrard] unto a special work,’ which would only be corrupted if he were granted a say in government.

  Wasn’t Archbishop Laud living proof that the clergy ‘always had an itching humour for a coercive power’? Witness too the ‘fury approaching outright sadism’ that the nonconformists of Boston had provoked, how they had been driven from their churches and deprived of both civil rights and property. Given the chance, a firebrand like Hope Sherrard would doubtless mete out the same treatment to Captain Axe, Captain Elfrith, and Lieutenant Rous.

  Lord Saye was horrified by events in Massachusetts Bay not because they were democratic, but because they were tyrannical. Congregational control of political life offered no guarantee of security of property, protection under the law, or the other ancient rights of free Englishmen. These could only be guaranteed by good government, checked by the people’s representatives in Parliament. Any power not so checked, regardless of the saintliness of the hands that held it, was always liable to become despotic.

  Besides, who was to say that Puritans made better farmers than privateers? For as long as the shareholders needed to turn a profit, they were at the mercy of the very men being upbraided for their ungodly conduct. If that meant putting the Puritan ideal on hold, and giving the likes of Samuel Axe, Daniel Elfrith, and William Rous control of the island council, so be it. Henry Roote had his answer; he never returned to Providence.

  * * *

  In July 1634, the shareholders held a series of meetings at Brooke House to discuss how best to respond to the economic crisis facing their colony. Their excitement at the prospects for silk grass had proven short-lived: English spinners found that separating the silky fiber from the stiffer part of the grass was fiddly and time-consuming. Since it had ‘not yet come to sale or price,’ the company had to accept that their hopes for Camock’s flax had ‘disappeared and come to nothing.’10

  William Jessop also informed the shareholders that the mechoacan potatoes the settlers had planted were ‘not of any value,’ and that they had allowed their cattle to eat the dette saplings they had planted. Aside from tobacco, the only crop likely to flourish on Providence was cotton; the shareholders urged their tenants to put the cottonseeds they had procured for them to good use.

  The shareholders had no time for the settlers’ complaints. There would be no further changes to the profit-sharing scheme, nor would any further investment be made until they started producing marketable commodities. Instead, they castigated them for their indolence. ‘The sluggard that will not labour, let him not eat and be clothed in rags,’ they told Philip Bell.11 Those who refused to contribute to the building of Fort Warwick were clearly under the sway of ‘a love to ease and liberty, against which humanity and care of their own reputation should have prevailed.’12 Such troublemakers would receive no more servants at the company’s expense, and those who continued to sow discord in the island council would be expelled.

  Philip Bell was told to prepare for the arrival of more settlers on the Long Robert. Once they had cleared enough land to build themselves some huts and plant their crops, they were to pitch in with the construction of the new fort that Captain Axe planned to build in the south of the island. As for the news that the servants laboring in the fields wore only linen, the shareholders admitted their ‘wonder at the scantiness of clothing,’ and ordered Bell to put a stop to such a scandalous practice.13 Their prudishness speaks volumes about the distance between rulers and ruled. The shareholders were not short on skittish enthusiasm, but they had none of the patience needed to work out which crops would prosper and which would not. They might have been ready to question Aristotle, but they were slow to learn from their tenants’ experience of farming in the tropics and did nothing to tap the Miskitos’ knowledge of the environment.

  In their first years on the island, the settlers had averred to what they assumed to be their patrons’ better judgment, carefully planting and raising the seedlings they received from London. But it was becoming clear that the company knew nothing about the island or its climate. Beset by crop failures and commanded by men oblivious to their suffering, the settlers’ despair turned to defiance. When experienced colonists like Daniel Elfrith urged them to plant more tobacco, they followed their advice, and by late 1634, their fields were full of ripening tobacco plants. Early the following year, they bartered seven thousand pounds of the ‘noxious weed’—their entire crop—with a passing Dutch ship.14 The company’s ship was in the harbor at the time, waiting to be loaded with the tobacco crop, but the farmers opted to trade it for the Dutchmen’s cargo of wine.

  The shareholders were outraged by their audacity. By 1635, they had accumulated debts of £4,599. Unless drastic measures were taken, their colony was heading toward collapse. The causes of the crisis weren’t hard to find: the settlers’ failure to hit on a valuable crop; the extreme touchiness of the Puritans among them; and the rigid hierarchy through which their grievances were filtered. But at root, the problem came down to a shortage of labor. The more the settlers asserted themselves, the less inclined the company felt to send out more servants. Even when they tried to recruit more servants, they found that most apprentices preferred to try their luck in New England, where there was some prospect of buying land at the end of their indentures, and popular participation in local government was well established.

  England’s growing population had fed the colonies a steady supply of young men, which kept the price of labor low. But the company was now in competition with employers in New England, Virginia, and the other Caribbean is
lands. The wealthy merchants and nobles that ran Barbados and the Somers Isles could offer migrants few of the incentives that lured them to New England, and often resorted to violence to raise a workforce. So common did the practice of kidnapping servants for the colonies become that a new term—to be ‘barbadosed’—was coined to describe it.15

  What was to be done? Enslaving the Indians of Central America was out of the question. The Miskitos’ hatred of the Spanish, and their knowledge of the local flora and fauna, made them valuable allies. The company also had ideological reasons for respecting their freedom. The Miskitos were the tabula rasa on which the Christian Gospel would be written in chalk, as if in a classroom. With the English colonist cast as teacher, and the native as willing pupil, there was no room for a relationship as base as that between master and slave.

  Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish priest who was first to draw attention to his country’s cruel enslavement of the native peoples of the Americas, thought that the only alternative was to import African slaves. Unlike the Indians, the Africans had nothing to offer apart from their labor, for nobody proposed taking the Gospel to Africa. Besides, slavery was known to be well established in Africa, and there was no need to negotiate a contract with an African slave as there was with a freeborn Englishman, who only agreed to submit to servitude for a limited period of time. As the company put it, ‘Negroes, being procured at cheap rates, [can be] more easily kept, and [are] perpetually servants.’16

  Following a recommendation from Philip Bell, the company instructed Capt. Sussex Camock to buy forty Africans and then sell them to its tenants. But buying slaves was easier said than done. Slavery had yet to become common practice in the other English colonies of the Caribbean. There were enslaved Africans laboring in the plantations of Virginia, but the Chesapeake Bay was a long way from Providence. The Spanish had literally millions of slaves working in their colonial mines and plantations, but their slaving networks were strictly off-limits. Captain Camock would have to find another way.

  *The Arminians were essentially traditionalists; they wanted to see the more ceremonial aspects of church services restored, and the altar kept apart from the congregation. The Book of Sports was designed to protect the traditional games and physical activities that people played after church on Sundays from the Puritans, who wanted to ban them.

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  The Africans, ‘During Their Strangeness From Christianity’

  ONE DAY IN APRIL 1635, Francisco Fernández Fragoso was walking near the settlement at San Juan del Norte on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua when he came across a white man stumbling along the shoreline. When the stranger saw the Spaniard, he fell to his knees and put his hands behind his head. ‘Negro, negro!’ he kept saying, gesturing toward the mouth of the River San Juan two miles down the coast. ‘He looks hungry,’ Fragoso said to himself, and took the stranger to have something to eat. Over lunch, the stranger babbled away between mouthfuls of fish soup, but the only words Fragoso could understand were ‘negro’ and ‘Catalina.’ Presumably, the stranger was an Englishman.

  The following morning, Fragoso set out in a chalupa (canoe) to the mouth of the river. With him went the stranger, two of Fragoso’s friends, both armed with harquebuses, and five local Indians, who carried longbows. When they reached the mouth of the San Juan, they found another young Englishman, who had a noticeably pockmarked face, and four exhausted Africans. When they saw Fragoso, the Africans jumped to their feet and put their hands up. ‘¡Señor, venimos en paz! [we come in peace],’ one of them exclaimed. ‘We are slaves owned by Doña Mariana de Armas Clavijo, widow of the late Capt. Amador Pérez, a citizen of Cartagena!’

  Fragoso took the four Africans and two Englishmen to the hospital of San Sebastián in Portobello, which lay several days’ sailing down the coast. When they arrived, Fragoso had them eat and bathe while he sent for the alcalde mayor (the Spanish equivalent of a justice of the peace). Capt. Juan de Ribas arrived promptly, accompanied by the public scribe. He began by asking Francisco Biafara to confirm his name, nation, and owner. Then he questioned him about the island from which he claimed to have escaped.

  He was twenty-eight, Francisco Biafara told the alcalde mayor. He came from the Bight of Biafara (in contemporary Nigeria), and was one of eleven slaves who worked on Doña Mariana’s cargo boat, ferrying goods between Cartagena and Santa Marta. One day, eight or nine months before, they had been carrying a cargo of wine toward the mouth of the River Magdalena when they were attacked by Dutch pirates, who forced their way aboard and took them captive. The pirates towed Doña Mariana’s boat back to Santa Marta, where they dumped its captain on the shore, and headed out to sea with the eleven slaves. There were about fourteen pirates on board the Dutch ship, led by a short man who Francisco called ‘Juan Flamenco’ (John Fleming), who he guessed to be about fifty. After seven days at sea, they reached a small, mountainous island that the pirates called ‘Catalina.’ There, Juan Flamenco sold the eleven Africans to an Englishman called Capt. Félix Beles, who gave the pirate a pig and twenty-six pounds of tobacco for each of them.

  Francisco and his companions found themselves in the company of about three hundred men, twenty women and a few boys. Some of them were Dutch, like Juan Flamenco, but most of them were English. Although none of the Africans spoke the strangers’ language, Félix Beles was clearly their leader. There were two regiments of soldiers on the island: one commanded by a smaller, older man called Captain Alfero, the other by a tough young man called Captain Rus.*1 On one occasion, Francisco heard Félix Beles reprimand Captain Alfero for inviting Diego el Mulatto, the famous Havana-born pirate who sailed under the Dutch flag, to join him on the island.

  This was all very interesting, said Juan de Ribas. Were the foreigners well armed? The soldiers carried neither swords nor daggers, but harquebuses, Francisco told him. They also had muskets, pikes, cannon, and war drums, all very poorly maintained, which they kept in a large building next to the governor’s house.

  And was the island well defended? Yes, there were nine small forts, several overlooking the harbor, and one outside the governor’s house. Each had between two and five cast-iron cannon, either mounted on carriages or laid on wooden frames on the ground.

  And what of the harbor? Juan de Ribas wanted to know. Did it offer good anchorage? Yes, said Francisco, although there were some rocky outcrops. The English had built small forts on either side of the entrance to the harbor, one of which was on a point and had a watchtower. There were no guards in the settlement, but the soldiers kept watch from the forts, and whenever a ship’s sails appeared on the horizon, they would fire a cannon. When the men working in the fields heard it, they would throw down their tools and rush to the nearest fort or gun emplacement to take up arms.

  How did they sustain themselves? Juan de Ribas inquired. The island had many freshwater streams, which were good to drink from. There were no wild pigs in the woods, but the foreigners kept chickens, pigs, a bull, and three cows for breeding. Although most of their fields were given over to tobacco, they also grew some maize and plantains. But their main food crop seemed to be potatoes, which they usually ate raw.

  The alcalde mayor grimaced and stroked his beard thoughtfully. Had Francisco ever heard the Englishmen talk about a fleet of ships coming to the island from England or Holland? No, Francisco said, although on their way to Catalina, he had heard Juan Flamenco say that he would be back the following year with two big, new ships to take revenge on Don Antonio de Oquendo, a Spanish sea captain who had captured a small Dutch boat and its crew off Havana. Juan Flamenco said that he would kill him and load his ships with tobacco for the journey back to Holland. Did the islanders have a ship of their own? No, only a few chalupas, although Francisco overheard Captain Alfero say that he had ordered a flat-bottomed boat built, so that he could go privateering along the coast.

  None of the Africans had enjoyed the experience of working under people of another language and religion, Francisco added. The Englishmen
had a little house where they gathered every day after work to hear sermons from a young priest, and he had seen men, women, and children go to the house, each with a book in his or her hand. They forced the Africans to listen to his sermons, but they couldn’t understand what he said. Nor did they want to, for the foreigners were clearly heretics: on the day of their arrival, they had watched aghast as the priest snatched their rosaries and crosses from their hands and stamped them into pieces on the ground.

  Realizing the dire predicament they were in, Francisco and five of his friends—Juan Biafara, Pedro Folupo, Gerónimo Angola, and Damián Carabali—waited for the next starless night and stole away to the beach. Once at the shoreline, they ran into a group of English servants who were about to make their escape in the governor’s chalupa. ‘This is no way to live,’ said one of them. ‘If you want to go back to your land, we’re going.’ Francisco and his friends joined the servants in the governor’s chalupa, and together, they rowed into the night.

  After two days sailing, they caught sight of the Miskito Coast. By then, their chalupa had been battered by the heavy seas and they were worried that it would sink before they made dry land. They clung to the shore until they came to the Spanish fort at the mouth of the River San Juan, and struggled ashore. One of the Englishmen went to look for help and came back not long afterward with Señor Fernández Fragoso, who took them to Portobello in his boat.