The Island that Disappeared Read online

  The slave revolt on Association was the first to take place in any English colony, and it unnerved shareholders, officers and tenants alike. When news of the revolt reached London, the company issued fresh instructions to Nathaniel Butler: the import of unskilled Africans was to be prohibited, and any slaves captured from Spanish ships sold. In the weeks that followed, William Pierce was one of several shipmasters to load slaves into the hull of his ship, along with the island’s tobacco and cotton crops, in the hope of finding a buyer on the docks of Virginia or New England. With luck, he would be able to exchange them for American goods like whiskey, molasses, and cloth, which were sure to fetch good prices back on Providence.*

  The ban on the import of more slaves did not go down well with the island’s farmers or its fort builders. The Africans had supplied them with the manpower they lacked, and they had acquired a taste for the relative ease and plenty that came with unpaid labor. With so many officers, farmers, and servants out privateering, and those who stayed behind reluctant to give their time and energy to Captain Axe’s fort-building program, they were soon short of hands again. With great reluctance, the company agreed to admit more slaves but insisted on ‘a strict watch being kept to prevent plots or any danger to the island.’5

  Yet no amount of planning could calm the fear of a repeat of what had happened on Association. The settlers came to regard the Africans as the enemy within and complained that such men would readily abet the Spanish when they next attacked the island. By March 1637, the company was again complaining that the island councillors were admitting too many Africans, despite ‘knowing how dangerous they may be if you should be assaulted with an enemy, or in case they would grow mutinous.’6 But the settlers’ fear of the Spanish proved stronger than their fear of their slaves. The solution they settled on was to import more Africans and then work them so hard that they wouldn’t have the energy to rise up in revolt.

  It was this fear of the slaves that finally pushed the shareholders to make some concession to the English migrant’s desire for land of his own and a voice in how the colony was governed, in the hope that the arrival of more white hands would mitigate the need for black ones. They announced that any family prepared to journey to Providence with six or more servants would immediately be granted the right to buy the land they farmed and given a say in deciding who sat on the island council.

  But these concessions remained vague and unfulfilled, and did nothing to address the lifelong servitude the islanders had imposed on the Africans. On 1 May 1638, they rose up in open revolt. Since Francisco Biafara’s testimony is the only record of an African voice on Providence, there is no way of knowing what precipitated the uprising, but they had probably heard about the revolt on Association and knew that their masters would be distracted by their May Day celebrations.

  Nathaniel Butler’s diary provides no details of the revolt itself, but the entries he made in the following days show that he was determined to reassert control and set an example to any African tempted to challenge his bondage in future. The island’s governor sent mounted search parties to comb the hills, and a number of runaways were recaptured and brought back to New Westminster. They were executed on the parade ground in front of his house, and another fifty Africans were put to death for conspiracy. Yet a number of slaves found refuge with the runaway community in Palmetto Grove, where they managed to eke out a living as maroons. By day, they raised small plots of corn and potatoes and tended a few goats. By night, they crept down to the fields where they had once labored to steal plantains, beans, and cassava.

  Samuel Rishworth was not on Providence when the slave revolt broke out, having made the ten-week journey to London in order to put the settlers’ second petition of complaint before the shareholders. The Old Councillors felt that they had been deliberately sidelined by the new council of war, he told them. The foundations of their godly settlement were being cynically undermined by the traffic in slaves and the privateers who brought them to the island. Unless the shareholders responded with meaningful reforms, he and his fellow Old Councillors would leave Providence for New England.

  Rishworth’s appeal elicited much hand-wringing from William Jessop, but by the time he returned to the island in late summer, it was clear that the company had neither the mind nor the means to effect the changes he wanted to see. Rishworth, along with his ‘great family and many children,’ immigrated to Barbados, where slavery had yet to take root.7 He died there the following spring. His wife and most of his children left no trace on Barbados either, for they soon succumbed to the diseases that ravaged the colony in its early years. However, Samuel, Jr. survived, and eventually made it back to Coventry, where he died in 1666.

  Following the slave revolt of 1638, Providence became the first English colony in which Africans made up the majority of the population, and the English became the privileged minority in a racial hierarchy of their own making. Slavery made sound financial sense, but the risk the English ran in giving the Africans a numerical advantage owed just as much to the pact they had made with God. Perhaps they flattered themselves that a Christian minority would only be able to rule over a heathen majority by dint of the special relationship they enjoyed with their maker. Or perhaps the shareholders were simply clutching at straws: their endless prevarication certainly suggests decisions made on the hoof. In 1638, the company gave the go-ahead for the purchase of one hundred more slaves to replace the white hands that had been repairing the forts. Yet a few months later, they wrote of their intention to send another two hundred English servants to Providence, ‘in exchange for negroes.’ This proposal, like so many the company made before and after, came to nothing; instead, Nathaniel Butler was authorized to bring another one hundred slaves to the island.

  The Africans were divided on how best to respond to their bondage. The boldest of them realized that the only lasting solution was to defeat their masters in battle. But their numerical superiority counted for nothing as long as the English held the harquebuses, cutlasses, and pikes in the arsenal at Fort Warwick. While some opted for regular meals and shelter over the hunger and endless watchfulness of a runaway, most were determined to join the maroon community in Palmetto Grove at the earliest opportunity. Despite being no more than three miles from New Westminster, the governor’s raids had only managed to burn a single cabin, for as Butler noted in his diary, the maroons ‘were so nimble as we could scarce get a sight of them.’

  With Palmetto Grove and ultimately the Miskito Coast as their beacons, growing numbers of slaves and servants opted to make the break. Butler’s diary tells of the sport to be had in hunting runaway slaves and how his ‘tame negroes’ could be trusted to bring the rebels back. One Sunday morning, he noted that ‘two of our wild negroes being discovered upon a hill near unto my house, my negroes made out after them, and caught one of them, and brought him away with them.’8 On another occasion, he granted twelve acres in Palmetto Grove to four settlers ‘because it was the sanctuary of our rebel negros; yet so by clearing of it I might force them from their freehold.’ Yet the organized repression needed to avoid a repeat of the previous year’s slave revolt was never made. Perhaps Butler saw the runaways as the Earl of Warwick saw the poachers in his Essex game reserves: as benighted souls whose disobedience was only to be expected.

  * * *

  With militarization and repression increasing, the mood among the settlers became still more anxious. Weren’t the signs of God’s displeasure to be seen all around them—in the rats scurrying from kitchen to storehouse, the fields abandoned to the weeds by planters greedy for Spanish gold, and the sullen glances of the heathens plotting to cut their throats? What use were more fortifications if God had withdrawn His blessing?

  Then, on 15 February 1639, they were blessed with a clear sign of His favor. The captain of a Dutch merchant ship had been passing Roncador, the hook-shaped atoll ninety miles east of Providence, when he spotted a young man lying on the sand. He was close to death, but the crew nursed hi
m back to health and took him to Providence. The islanders were amazed to see him again, for they had seen neither hide nor hair of him since the night two and half years before, when he and four of his friends had stolen a shallop and sailed for the Miskito Coast.

  The young man explained that they had been hoping to seize the small Spanish frigate that was known to patrol the coast near Cape Gracias a Dios, but their vessel was enveloped by a storm on the way to the coast and wrecked on Roncador. Only when the tempest abated did the castaways come face-to-face with their dire predicament. There is no source of fresh water on Roncador and no shelter from the midday sun. The only way they could stay alive was by drinking the blood of turtles, which they supplemented with the little rainwater they were able to collect in a tattered strip of sailcloth. Aside from raw turtle meat, they ate the eggs of seabirds. After eighteen months of this baneful existence, only one of them was still alive. He spent the next ten months alone, before he was spotted by the Dutch vessel and brought home.

  Hope Sherrard proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for the recovery of the shipwrecked mariner. In the sermon he preached that evening, he had him ‘offer up public thanksgiving for his deliverance, make confession of his vicious life and register a vow of future atonement.’9 For the islanders, the return to life of a man given up for dead was a miracle akin to that performed by Jesus to bring Lazarus back to life. Their isolation put them at the mercy of the elements and the Spanish, but God had not forsaken them. Amid the darkness that lay all around, He had lit a beacon to guide them.

  Obedience to a wrathful God didn’t come easily. In 1650, Ralph Josselin, the Puritan minister of the Essex village of Earls Colne, watched two of his children and his best friend die in the space of a week. In his diary, Josselin wondered why God had seen fit to punish him so; all he could think was that He was angry with him for his ‘unseasonable playing at chess.’ The Puritans’ belief in divine providence might strike the modern reader as the egotism of men with narrow horizons, whose minds had been sealed by the perpetual swirling of a reasoning process devoid of common sense. When things went well, Puritans praised God; when they went badly, they muttered about the impenetrable mystery of His omnipotence. Divine providence could be used to justify anything, yet it explained nothing. It looks little different from superstition, the irrational belief in the power of inanimate objects that the Puritans were so set on transcending.

  But for men like Ralph Josselin, mere mortals were in no position to understand God’s intentions—and yet they were obliged to try. For those determined to find consolation in the midst of uncertainty, even a calamity could be taken as a sign of God’s mercy. On hearing that a parishioner’s newborn daughter had died a few days after falling ill, Josselin wrote that God had done ‘wonderful good’ by drawing out the infant’s agony, for it had prepared her parents for her death.10

  Listening to Hope Sherrard’s interpretation of what God might have meant by saving the young man’s life on Roncador, Nathaniel Butler was struck by the minister’s selective memory.

  It now brought to every man’s mind and observation that, whereas the apparent evidence of God’s mercy in as high or a higher nature had been manifested toward Captain Axe and his company in their escape from the enemy; [and] to those five persons that came safe unto us in an extreme leaking boat from St Christopher’s [St Kitts]; and towards the forty-nine persons that arrived safely with us from the Barbadoes, and all this done within the space of four months…none of this had been remembered by Mr Sherrard in the same kind, as if the safe being of this one man had either been of more remarkableness in itself, or be of more acceptableness with him than all the rest put together.

  * * *

  By the spring of 1639, the captain of every passing merchant ship was clamoring for letters of marque from Providence’s governor. After seven months spent adjudicating in the petty squabbles of grasping planters and pettifogging preachers, Nathaniel Butler was keen to do some privateering of his own. He called a meeting of the island council to inform them of his decision. ‘The most by far of the people seemed very well satisfied,’ he noted in his diary, although ‘some of the Old Councillors would needs be of another mind.’11

  Ten days later, Butler left Providence for the Miskito Coast, accompanied by eighty of the island’s most experienced soldiers, among them Captain Parker in the Spy, Captain Morgan in the Gift of God, and Captain Mathias in the Hopewell. In the five years since Captain Camock built the trading post at Cape Gracias a Dios, the coast had become a well-known place of refuge, and Butler found six hundred Englishmen living there, along with two hundred Miskito Indians.12 ‘The Indians of the Cape came presently unto us and are a very loving people, but the poorest Indians that ever I saw,’ he wrote. ‘There went with us from the Mosquitoe [Cays] two Indians, and from the Cape five more that were so earnest to go that they would take no denial.’

  From the cape, the three ships sailed west into the Bay of Honduras. They captured the Spanish settlement at Trujillo but found it ‘most miserably poor and utterly empty of inhabitants, having all of them run away one way and conveyed their goods out another way.’ Stymied, they made for the little island of Ruatan, forty miles off the coast from Trujillo. The year before, the Providence Island Company had granted William Claiborne a patent to build a colony on Ruatan, but he was unable to extend much in the way of hospitality to his visitors. Stymied again, they tramped into the bush in search of victuals. ‘Some of our men…met with some cassadoe [cassava] roots, which they greedily eating half-raw half-roasted without squeezing out the juice, it made them all very sick, and killed one outright,’ Butler recorded.

  Captains Parker, Morgan, and Mathias decided to make for the Isle of Pines, just south of Cuba, where they hoped to find victuals and fresh water. A week later, they dropped anchor off a small, deserted island. Butler wrote:

  About this island there was a difference of opinion amongst some of our best mariners (such mariners were our best) whether it were the Isle of Pines or some of the small islands called the Keis. We sent off our boat, partly to take a fuller view and partly to look for water here, which returned unto us an hour within night without resolution any way.

  Officers and crew were by now close to starvation. Two days later, they met a Dutch ship whose officers gave the three captains a basic lesson in navigation, ‘being by them led as the blind man by his dog,’ according to Butler. But they were still all at sea three weeks later.

  For all that, our blind guides went on in their mad course, steering away lustily to the leeward for one whole watch. Not being able to cloak any longer their arrogant ignorance, they brought the ship to a tack and lay north-north-east, as if they intended to find where they were at Cuba, since they could not at sea.

  By the following Sunday, the three ships had been at sea for nigh on two months. With nothing to eat and still no sight of a Spanish ship, much less dry land, they were close to despair. ‘The alhistical [hysterical] master was in such a diabolical fury, it being the Lord’s day, that he…burst out publicly into these words, that surely there were some witches in the ship, and that for his part he cared not though she sunk down right in the sea,’ Butler wrote. ‘And thus once again am I fallen among the dumb beasts.’

  On 9 August, he made the mistake of asking the Spy’s officers where they were going.

  But their opinion was not thought fit to be divulged, lest the discovery of so palpable an ignorance in our guides of the round-house might throw them into desperate if not devilish courses, they being well known to be men prostituted to all vileness and rather bent to do anything than to acknowledge their errors.

  On 5 September, the three captains told the governor that the Isle of Pines seemed to have disappeared. ‘And so once again for Providence,’ wrote Butler, ‘being a voyage of about six score leagues, and having a small mark to hit and especially by our marksmen, with not full fourteen days victuals of any kind at all save water.’ They made it back to Providence on 12 Septe
mber, ‘and thus by the gracious conduction of our most blessed, most merciful and most omnipotent Lord God we finished our tedious and dangerous voyage with rest and comfort.’

  * * *

  Many of the settlers rejoiced when the governor returned from his cruise empty-handed. ‘When they heard that we had taken the town of Trujillo and found it empty, some of them showed as much joy as they had been Spaniards,’ Butler wrote in his diary.13 There was more bad news for him when the Swallow came into the harbor the following morning. ‘By her we had certain intelligence that the Earl of Warwick’s pinnace the Robert, where Captain Barzie commanded, was taken by the Spanish near the Bay of Tolu and the captain and most of the chief men carried prisoner into Spain by the galleons.’ Not only had some of Providence’s most successful privateers been captured, the governor of Cartagena was ‘very importunate [demanding] with the general of the galleons to make an attempt upon Providence.’

  The islanders’ news was no less discouraging, for conditions had worsened considerably in Butler’s absence. There had been a time when the island was practically self-sufficient in food, but since being given license to raid Spanish shipping, several of the company’s tenants had abandoned their fields to the weeds. The supplies of dry food in the islanders’ sheds, which had been meager since the Spanish attack of 1635, were practically exhausted. The same was confirmed by a Spanish prisoner, who described the island as ‘a den of pirates living like savages on raw potatoes and turtle meat.’14 A week after his return, Butler handed William Blauveldt a privateering commission and sent him to sea ‘to look abroad for victuals.’

  For the next six months, the governor was back in the familiar business of listening to the complaints of the island’s most querulous farmers. It was a thankless task, and he committed his growing exasperation to his diary. ‘I stayed at home, but had continual business and spent almost the whole day in hearing, examining, preparing and deciding of diverse differences and of sundry natures between party and parties,’ reads a typical entry.