The Island that Disappeared Read online

  Francisco testified that that was all he knew. The scribe handed him the transcript of his account, so that he could confirm that everything had been recorded correctly. But Francisco could neither read nor sign his name, so the scribe signed the transcript on his behalf. Aided by an interpreter, Juan de Ribas also questioned the two English runaways. One of them was a forty-year-old soldier from London called ‘Herbatons.’ The other turned out to be a twenty-three-year-old Dutchman called Juan Yons. Both claimed to be Catholics. They told the alcalde mayor that they had deserted Catalina because they were tired of eating potatoes.

  * * *

  There are few firsthand accounts of the experience of slavery, and fewer still from the early years of European involvement in the slave trade. The first known account is that of Olaudah Equiano, a leading member of the Sons of Africa, a group that campaigned for an end to the slave trade in London in the 1780s. Although Equiano wrote his Interesting Narrative*2 more than one hundred fifty years after Francisco Biafara was sold into slavery on Providence, much of what he remembered of his life in Africa would have been familiar to Biafara, and his description of village life is worth considering in more detail.

  Oluadah Equiano writes that he was born ‘in the year 1745, in a charming, fruitful vale named Essaka.’2 The location of Essaka is not clear, but it seems likely that Equiano was referring to the village of Isseke in the Niger delta, which divides the Bight of Biafara from the Bight of Benin. Equiano came from the Igbo tribe. According to his Interesting Narrative, the soils around Essaka were rich and farming was productive. Manners were simple and luxuries few, but the villagers had more than enough to eat, and there were ‘no beggars.’ The village blacksmith forged iron tools—hoes, axes, shovels and picks—that they used to cultivate crops like yam, which they boiled and pounded to make fufu, their staple food. They also produced cocoyams, plantain, peppers, beans, squashes, Indian corn, black-eyed peas, and watermelon. They cultivated tobacco and cotton, which the women spun and wove to make cloth, and raised cattle, goats, and poultry. The blacksmith also forged weapons, while other metalworkers manufactured delicate ornaments and jewelry.

  Equiano writes that money was ‘of little use’ in Essaka, since they bartered with neighboring communities for whatever else they needed. While the land was communally owned and farmed, there was a clear division of labor and status. The villagers prided themselves on their fierce localism and resistance to central authority, and Equiano mentions that ‘our subjection to the king of Benin was little more than nominal.’ Equiano owed allegiance to his father, the male head of the household, who was in turn governed by the council of elders. At the other end of the social scale were Essaka’s slaves, who were usually prisoners of war or villagers who had been found guilty of serious crimes, like kidnapping or adultery.

  By the time Equiano reached the age of eleven, slave raiding was flourishing around the Igbo’s lands. When the adults went out to work in the fields, they took arms with them in case they were attacked by marauding bands in search of people to enslave. The Oye-Eboe were to be treated with particular caution. These ‘stout, mahogany-coloured men’ were from the southern Aro tribe. They often came through the Igbo’s territory to trade the guns, powder, and beads that they bought from the Europeans on the coast for the village’s slaves. But the Aro also encouraged raids of ‘one little state or district on the other,’ and Equiano remembers how any local chief who coveted the Europeans’ goods would ‘fall on his neighbour, and a desperate battle ensue.’

  One day, Equiano was taken prisoner by an Aro slave merchant and shipped downriver to the Bight of Biafara, the vast curve in the coastline where three great rivers—the Niger, Imo, and Cross—meet the sea. Slave traders took their captives down these rivers to one of three ports: Old Calabar, Bonny, or New Calabar, where they sold them to the Europeans.

  Most of the Africans who were sold into slavery had never seen a white man before. An English slave trader by the name of John Matthews recounted his meeting with a man ‘of bold constitution’ while looking for slaves off the coast of Sierra Leone in the 1780s. The African ‘looked at the white man with amazement, but without fear.’ He carefully examined the man’s skin and hair, compared them with his own, and then ‘burst into laughter at the contrast and, to him no doubt, the uncouth appearance of the white man.’

  Most slaves boarded John Matthews’s ship ‘in a state of torpid insensibility.’ When he asked them why they were so listless, one of them told him that they believed that ‘the white man buys him either to offer him as a sacrifice to his God, or to devour him as food.’3 This belief in European cannibalism was not universally held—people from the interior, like the Igbo, were more likely to hold it than people from the coast, like the Akan—but Olaudah Equiano certainly came to the slave ship fully expecting to be eaten by his captors.

  It took the captain of the Ogden eight months to gather enough men, women, and children to fill the slaves’ quarters. While he waited, Equiano was kept below decks for days at a time. Many of those on board died, most likely of ‘the bloody flux…thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.’ The ship filled with the troubled spirits of the dead, who the living could neither bury nor placate with offerings. Equiano grew sick and waited to die. In this morbid state, his thoughts settled on the dead who had been thrown to the sharks that circled the Ogden. ‘I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.’

  By 1756, the year Olaudah Equiano was sold into slavery, British slave traders were frequent visitors to the coast of West Africa. But in 1634, the year Sussex Camock first tried to procure African slaves for the Providence Island Company, slavery was still a complete novelty, for the English at least. The Spanish, however, had long depended on slave labor, and Francisco Biafara was more than likely carried to the Americas aboard a Portuguese slave ship. Between 1600 and 1640, Portuguese merchants shipped over two hundred fifty thousand Africans to Spanish America. Portuguese slavers, merchants, and missionaries had been probing the coast of Guinea Bissau since 1450, and the Spanish relied on them to sell them their wares, human or otherwise.

  More than half of the slaves sold by Portuguese merchants came ashore at Cartagena, which was the main port of entry for slaves bound for the silver mines and sugar plantations of the Spanish Empire.4 Aside from its importance as a port, the city was also of great commercial, political, and military value to the Spanish, and word of its great wealth had been quick to spread across Europe. In 1586, Sir Francis Drake captured the city and put two hundred houses to the torch before the authorities agreed to his ransom demand. Thanks to the depredations of English privateers like Drake, the city’s defenses were vast, second in size only to those of Havana.

  Like everything else in Cartagena, the construction of its walls was only made possible by the seemingly inexhaustible supply of enslaved Africans, and Africans and their Creole offspring made up the majority of the city’s population. Any white person of standing, whether clergyman, stonemason, or cobbler, owned slaves. Most had one or two to look after their household, and those who owned more often rented them out as laborers. Cartagena’s slaves worked as cooks, laundresses, nurses, maids, porters, oarsmen, and town criers. They made buttons and guarded warehouses; salvaged shipwrecks and cleaned floors; delivered babies and buried the dead. On the farms and ranches around Cartagena, they raised livestock and planted maize, yucca, and plantain, and on the boats that carried goods up the River Magdalena toward Bogotá, they worked as navigators, cooks, and deckhands.

  The typical cartagenero slave might have had few rights, no voice in government, and little protection under (or from) the law, but he was considerably worldlier than the typical English servant on Providence. By 1635, Cartagena was a hundred years old. Slaves like Francisco Biafara were familiar with the comings and goings of the slave ships, and the floating population of sailors, government officials, and merchants that
passed through the city. Francisco knew the Spaniards’ language, religion, and way of life, and as a deckhand on Doña Mariana’s boat, he was probably more familiar with Santa Marta, Portobello, and Havana than his mistress.

  * * *

  Although the colony on Providence occupied most of their time and energy, the Providence Island Company had not one, but three colonies. The second was San Andrés, which they largely ignored, and the third was the small island of Association. Located off the coast of Hispaniola, it attracted little of the shareholders’ attention, but its governor, Christopher Wormeley, had been permitted to buy African slaves from its inception. In trying to procure slaves for Providence, Sussex Camock turned first to Wormeley.

  Nothing had been heard from Association for several years, so in 1635, when a fourth party of settlers sailed for Providence on the Expectation, the company told Capt. Cornelius Billinge to put in at the island on the way, and find out if it was still under English control. It was not: Just a few months before Billinge’s arrival, a Spanish fleet carrying two hundred fifty soldiers had landed on the island and captured its only settlement. Wormeley was able to make his escape, but the rest of the colonists were not so lucky. One hundred ninety-five of them were hanged, while the remainder were thrown into the hold of a Spanish ship and taken to Caracas, where they were left to waste away in the city’s dungeon. It was an object lesson in what interlopers who dared to ‘cross the line’ could expect from the Spanish authorities.

  The loss of Association put paid to any hope of sourcing slaves from the company’s other holdings in the Caribbean. Sussex Camock could rely on roving Dutch traders to supply him with a few Africans when they dropped anchor in Providence’s harbor. But the Dutch, like the English, were relative newcomers to the Caribbean and could only acquire slaves by robbing the Iberians’ ships as they sailed between West Africa and Cartagena, Portobello, and Havana. For as long as Spain and England were at peace, such opportunities would be few and far between.

  The only dependable supply of slaves came via Captain Camock’s Miskito friends, who brought small numbers of Africans to the trading post he had built at Cape Gracias a Dios. The more enterprising of the native tribes had made a business of hunting down and capturing slaves who had escaped from domestic service in Spanish towns like Granada and Trujillo. The life of a runaway slave was a precarious one, and unless he could make his way to the safety of a palenque—a fortified stockade of fellow runaways—he was likely to be captured by local Indians. He would then be taken downriver, passing from the hands of one tribesman into those of another until he reached the coast, where the Miskitos would barter him with the ‘grey-eyed men’ for the iron tools and weapons that they had come to prize. Once on Providence, he would be sold to one of the captains at Fort Warwick or to one of the island’s farmers.

  The company was never entirely comfortable with the Africans’ presence and was quick to specify that each household was to have no more than one African for every two English servants. The Miskito children living with them were to be raised as Christians, but no such stipulation was made for the Africans. Watching the rest of his ‘family’ leave for church every morning and evening, the new arrival must have wondered at his new ‘father,’ who seemed so dedicated to the monastic way of life, and the God who reigned over this practically all-male society. It was a hard life, but it was not without its pleasures. Most of the island was still virgin forest, and some nights, when his fellow ‘children’ stole away into the woods, he was invited to join them. Far from their ‘fathers,’ they were free to drink rum with other young men, listen to the sound of the fiddle and the mandolin, and even dance with one of the handful of women living on Providence.

  The company’s decision to import slaves was a blessing to the tenant farmer. A slave could be had for one hundred fifty pounds of tobacco, which was considerably less than the three hundred pounds of tobacco he had to pay for an English servant.5 And because enslaved Africans could be procured locally, they freed the farmer from his dependence on the goodwill of the company, giving him a measure of freedom he had never known before. So it was that the Englishman’s freedom came to depend on the Africans’ captivity.

  In the second half of the eighteenth century, abolitionists would turn to the Bible to justify their opposition to the commerce in people, but in the early years of English involvement in the slave trade, few Christian consciences were troubled by slavery. Were the Africans not the descendants of Ham, the errant son cursed by Noah and possibly blackened for his sins? For many Christians, it followed that this benighted race of people would only benefit from working as the unpaid apprentices of God’s chosen people.*3

  In seeking to turn a profit in a colony still struggling for breath, the Providence Island Company’s shareholders had every reason to forget their avowed intent to take the true religion to the heathen peoples of the world. In a sly reinterpretation of their sacred mission, they argued that the trade in Africans was lawful ‘during their strangeness from Christianity.’6 The ungodly people of the world were mere instruments of God’s will, sent by Him to test the faith of His saints on earth. What most provoked God’s wrath was not the settlers’ cruel treatment of servants, sailors, and non-Christians, but their pride, gluttony, and sloth. Few things roused the Puritan William Prynne to fury more than the sight of a fringe on a man. ‘Lovelocks’ were ‘an effeminate, unnatural, amorous practice, an incitation of lust [and] an occasion of sodomy.’7 The oppression of one’s social inferiors was a minor infraction by comparison.

  The only opponent of slavery on the island council was Samuel Rishworth. He believed that Christianity prohibited the holding of slaves, and was appalled by the company’s easy recourse to forced labor. His was probably the first English voice to raise itself against slavery in the Americas. But the shareholders had no sympathy for his protests. They condemned his ‘groundless opinion that Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude,’ adding that ‘we do utterly dislike Mr Rishworth’s behaviour, it being both undiscreet…and also injurious to ourselves.’8

  When Rishworth refused to back down, he was accused of ‘defiance of the governor and malfeasance at the council table,’ and dismissed from the island council, although he was restored to his seat before the year was out. The shareholders were still trying to entice ‘colonists of the solid Puritan sort’ to Providence and could not afford to antagonize a man with close ties to one of the most prominent Puritan families in New England. So Rishworth stayed at the council table, where his defiance earned him the grudging respect of his fellow farmers. Unbeknownst to them, he often crept to the slaves’ quarters under cover of night, where he assured them that God was with them and promised to help them regain their liberty.

  *1Félix Beles was Philip Bell, Captain Alfero was Capt. Daniel Elfrith, and Captain Rus was Lt. William Rous.

  *2The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was published in 1789. Ironically, Equiano was recruited for a project on the Miskito Coast in 1775, by which time he had been a free man for seven years. He used his African background and Igbo language to help select slaves and manage them as laborers on sugarcane plantations.

  *3According to Martin Luther King, Jr., the idea that the curse of Ham justified the enslavement of black people was ‘a blasphemy’ and ‘against everything that the Christian religion stands for.’

  [8]

  ‘A Nest of Thieves and Pirates’

  AFTER HEARING FRANCISCO BIAFARA’S ACCOUNT of the time he spent on Santa Catalina, Capt. Juan de Ribas sent a messenger over the mountains from Portobello to Panama with his report. The city’s governor consulted with his opposite number in Cartagena over how best to respond to the news that the English had established a colony on the island. But the Spanish State was a bureaucratic monolith that left no room for the initiatives of its colonial officials, so they decided to ask Madrid for advice.

  Ordinarily, such petitions me
t with prevarication from the royal authorities. The Consejo de Indias—Council of the Indies—had received similar reports from the Spanish ambassador to London in March 1634 but had not reacted, and even after receiving confirmation from Panama, it did nothing. King Philip IV had more pressing concerns: his armies were bogged down in northern Italy, where his generals found themselves pitted against the combined forces of France, the Papal States, and Venice. The situation in Germany and Flanders, where his forces were locked in struggle against the armies of the Protestant nations, was no more encouraging.

  Then came a lull in the fighting against France, and in the short interval before battle was resumed, the king and his ministers turned their attention to the problems facing their New World empire. The English colony on Santa Catalina was the latest in a string of audacious swoops made by the king’s uninvited guests. Over the past five years, the English had secured footholds in Antigua, Tobago, and St. Lucia; the French in Martinique and Guadeloupe; and the Dutch in Curaçao. Yet the gravest threat undoubtedly came from the colony on Santa Catalina: the island was ideally suited for an attack on la carrera de Indias, the most important sea-lane in the Caribbean. Once a year, a fleet of the king’s ships ploughed la carrera laden with gold, silver, and precious stones sufficient to cover the entire annual expenditure of the most powerful state in Europe. If the English pirates were to capture the king’s galleons, his treasury would run dry in a matter of months. In May 1635, a fleet left Cartagena with instructions from the city’s governor to destroy New Westminster and restore Spanish dominion over the island.