The Island that Disappeared Read online

  At times, he was almost sympathetic to their complaints. When the ‘masters of the families’ presented him with a petition outlining their grievances, he found ‘no cause to mislike their demands.’ But on other occasions, their complaints riled him: on 20 November, he was ‘all this day much troubled with multiplicity of businesses, and found good cause to wish for the day of my deliverance!’

  Picking apart the tangled threads of the islanders’ grievances, the same names recur time and again: Hope Sherrard, Henry Halhead, and Richard Lane. ‘There is nothing among the Old Councillors more common than to make themselves parties and judges,’ Butler complained to the shareholders. ‘There is not an act that has passed in your council of war since it was erected but one way or other some or all of them have secretly attempted to bring it to contempt.’15 In another letter, he even accused the Old Councillors of plotting to overthrow him while he was away privateering.

  As time wore on, Hope Sherrard became the bane of Butler’s life. ‘I went not to church upon this Lord’s Day neither in the morning nor afternoon,’ he wrote in early October, ‘and the reason was that Mr Sherrard had published that upon this day he would administer the Sacrament of the Supper, but admit only such as would enter into covenant with him.’ Two weeks later, he found the island’s minister ‘strangely possessed with a strain of uncharitable and dangerous suggestions out of the pulpit,’ and stopped going to church altogether. ‘I found I might far better spend the afternoon at home and so did, and Captain Axe with me,’ he wrote. Yet even when he was ensconced in the governor’s residence, he was not safe from Sherrard’s invective. Two months later, he ‘went not at all to church upon this Lord’s Day, [yet still] found cause to grieve in hearing what I should have heard if I had been there.’

  There was some respite when William Blauveldt returned to the island with several tons of corn, ‘which we got at one of our new discovered islands from the cannibal Indians there by force.’ These were the Corn Islands, two tiny outcrops sixty miles off the Miskito Coast, so called ‘from the abundance of maize or Indian wheat there usually planted by the barbarous natives.’16 But even the good news was tainted by bad: Blauveldt’s frigate was towing an empty Spanish vessel, whose crew ‘brought us news of two galleys newly come out of Spain to Cartagena, for the keeping of those coasts.’

  In his next letter, Butler informed the shareholders that not only were the settlers growing ever more restless, and the Spanish threatening to attack any day, but their slaves and servants were fleeing to the coast in growing numbers. By New Year 1640, the governor was becoming increasingly cutting.

  I went not to church upon this Lord’s Day at all, finding Mr Sherrard’s invective sermons to be rather mis-spending of the day than otherwise, and so became wearied with them. By the report of them that heard him, he fell very foul upon one of his own flock, giving out furious and very un-beseeming words in respect of the time and place—though perhaps not in respect of the person.

  As the colony entered its tenth year, its governor was increasingly inclined to spend weekdays, as well as Sundays, at home. ‘I kept at home all this day and with far less distractions by the country’s occasions than ordinary,’ he wrote. But the lull proved short; by mid-January, there was ‘a return of business, occasioned rather by the general disturbers than the general people.’ With the coming of another year, the settlers reiterated that unless the company addressed their grievances, they would join the ramshackle community that had sprung up at Cape Gracias a Dios.

  Perusing their petition, Butler found it to contain an interesting proposition. ‘They would me to take the pains for them (as despairing of all other help) to make a voyage into England and to solicit a redress.’ The islanders’ need for a spokesman to present their case at Brooke House gave him the perfect excuse to leave the troubled colony with his honor intact. He spent his last Sunday on Providence at home, ‘having nothing but discouragements from Mr Sherrard’s preaching.’ That evening, ‘many of the people dined with me, coming purposely to take their farewells.’ The following day he sailed for London.

  *William Pierce and John Rolfe, the man who married Pocahontas, were among those that met Daniel Elfrith when the Treasurer docked in Virginia in 1619. His ship was carrying the first Africans to land in North America. Ironically, the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in the New World, was established the same year. Hillary Rodham Clinton is Pierce’s tenth great-granddaughter. See www.findagrave.com/​cgi-bin/​fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=103843198.

  [10]

  The Last Days of Their Lordships’ Isle

  BUTLER LEFT THE GOVERNMENT OF Providence in the hands of Capt. Andrew Carter, who had arrived with him three years before. The company had been sufficiently impressed by Carter’s conduct as muster master general of Fort Warwick that it had appointed him to the island council and the council of war the following year. Carter’s henchman was the fearsome Elisha Gladman, the keeper of the armaments at Fort Warwick, who was another of the army veterans to have arrived with Butler. Neither man had any sympathy for the Old Councillors, and with Butler out of the picture, Carter was free to rule the island as an autocrat. He spent his days touring the island’s forts and driving its servants and slaves to ever greater exertions, and his nights drinking and carousing with visiting privateers in the comfort of the governor’s house. The Old Councillors accused the interim governor, and self-styled ‘general, admiral, councillor of war and councillor of the land,’ of ‘executing the office of government without oath, banishing some, imprisoning others without alleging any cause, and winking at horrible crying sins.’1 Their lordships’ isle had never seemed so far from God.

  Yet its privateers were flourishing. Early in 1640, sailors from Providence captured a Spanish merchant ship off Portobello, which was found to be carrying 80,000 pesos (the equivalent of over £3.3 million today). In the spring, they seized a ship carrying dyewood worth 600,000 ducats (£14.4 million) off the Miskito Coast. The English were ‘annihilating’ Spanish commerce in the Indies, said Don Melchor de Aguilera, the captain general of Cartagena, who had tried and failed to take the island five years before. On several occasions, the city had been threatened with starvation, and rumors abounded that the English, supported by brigades of ‘vile negroes’ from the Miskito Coast, were planning to invade.2 Don Melchor renewed his plea to his superiors in Madrid, urging them to take action against the English pirates.

  For five long years, those pleas had met with obfuscation, as the Spanish government and their Portuguese allies poured their efforts into the struggle to retake Brazil from the Dutch. But with Brazil restored to Portuguese control, the Spanish were finally free to tackle the pirates of Providence. This time, the colonial governors would be granted the men and ships they needed to snuff out the foreigners’ colony once and for all. The generals of the king’s fleet agreed to take on the challenge (although they turned down Don Melchor’s request that his twelve-year-old son be appointed commander of the invasion fleet; the campaign would instead be led by Antonio Maldonado y Texeda, the sergeant major of Cartagena).3 Two eight-hundred-ton galleons, three frigates, two tenders, one caravel, and four launches were made ready for the attack. Between them they carried six hundred Portuguese troops, two hundred Spaniards, and two hundred black Creoles.

  The Spanish attack of May 1640 is described in a letter to the company written by Hope Sherrard.4 When the islanders first sighted the Spanish fleet approaching from the south, they seemed less than perturbed. ‘Some of the inhabitants scoffingly made answer that surely they were [not ships] but so many boobies,’*1 wrote Sherrard, and did nothing to be ‘any whit more watchful, or to bestir themselves in preparation.’5 The Spanish did the same, waiting a league offshore,

  partly, as we conjectured, hoping to get some intelligence of the state of our island by renegades, as they might well do, seeing many English and negroes had formerly so desperately adventured to flee from us to them in several boats and canoes.


  By the following morning, the alarm had been raised and beacons lit at each of the island’s thirteen forts. According to the Spanish account of the attack, Maldonado y Texeda was expecting to find Santa Catalina defended by two hundred farm laborers, so the sight of an island ‘naturally fortified, and more so by art,’ bristling with ranks of armed men and commanded by experienced officers came as an unwelcome surprise. But as Sherrard’s letter makes clear, the English force looked more impressive than it was: Most of the militia were at sea and most of the ‘officers’ were little more than ‘ciphers and lookers on.’ The men who hurried down from their shacks in the hills to Black Rock Fort were ‘bareheaded and barefooted, with scarce enough clothes to cover their nakedness.’ In their haste to take up their positions, they neglected to take either food or water into the fort, an oversight for which they would later suffer terribly. Although plenty of slaves and servants had fled at the first sight of the sails of the Spaniards’ ships, the majority was determined to defend the forts they had laboriously built over the past decade. The ‘weaker sex,’ who were numerous by this time and included some who were ‘big with child,’ rushed to Fort Warwick with their infants and toddlers, where they and Hope Sherrard ‘did by the powerful engine of prayer lay siege to heaven.’6

  The Spanish ships sailed north, past Southwest Bay and New Westminster, until they reached Fort Warwick. But their guns ‘did little hurt at all, unless it were to our trees,’ and when the fort returned fire, the invaders were forced to withdraw. An hour before sunset, the bulk of the thousand-strong Spanish force scrambled into launches and made an attempt to land at the mouth of the river that flowed through New Westminster. Robert Hunt was able to keep them at bay with volleys of cannon fire from Black Rock Fort, but due to an oversight on Andrew Carter’s part, he had only five cannonballs at his disposal. When his guns fell quiet, the first of the Spanish contingent, among them ‘the choicest and stoutest soldiers in the whole fleet,’ made for the beach between the fort and the river’s mouth.

  The English force that Andrew Carter led to the beach consisted of just seventeen officers and a hundred settlers. As the Spanish launches drew closer, the words of a chant, repeated with ‘a dreadful and formal tone,’ rose above the sound of the breaking surf: ‘Perro, diablo, cornudo [dog, devil, coward], sa sa sa…’ According to Hope Sherrard, Carter took fright and was seen ‘ducking at every shot’ from their muskets. He and his clique ‘had taken upon them to be our chief commanders,’ but in the heat of battle they ‘showed no small weakness and pusillanimity, being so far from directing or encouraging others that they needed it most of all themselves.’ When the invaders rushed ashore, crying ‘Victoria! Victoria!’ they turned tail and made a dash for the safety of Black Rock Fort. In the midst of the ensuing battle, Carter was found hiding in the kitchen, frantically eating his soldiers’ supplies. Believing all to be lost, he ordered Captain Hunt to spike the guns and have his men beat a retreat to Fort Warwick, ‘so that they might all die together.’

  Reinforcements arrived just as the governor was preparing to abandon the fort, and it was only their ‘vehement outcries’ that forced the garrison to stand its ground. The settlers rained down musket shot on the Spanish soldiers, who were making their way over the rocks at the foot of the small cliff on which the fort stood. When their supplies of gunpowder were exhausted, they were reduced to throwing stones at the enemy. Even in the heat of battle, they did not dare to arm their slaves, but ‘our negroes, thinking themselves to be as sufficient as others, did good execution by this means.’7 The combination of musket shot and stones killed several of the Spanish officers. Suddenly leaderless, the soldiers panicked and ran back to the beach. As Sherrard wrote:

  The enemies were now vanquished, yet through the darkness of the night our men knew not of it, being so busied in fight that they could not mind the enemies crying for quarter, so that for half an hour’s space, they never ceased pouring in shot among them, till they had scarce an enemy left to shoot at.

  Searching the hundreds of sodden corpses strewn across the beach, the islanders found dozens of tiny portraits of the saints, ‘besides bread and cheese in the snapsacks, with pumpion [pumpkin] seeds and peas to plant.’ The invaders had clearly planned to settle the island for themselves. At daybreak, search parties set out to track down the Spanish soldiers who had fled into the hills. The settlers’ prisoners were still in shock when they arrived at Fort Warwick; Don Melchor had assured them that the English ‘would fly away like so many sheep at the very sight of an enemy approaching.’

  Despite Andrew Carter’s promise of quarter to those who surrendered, he had all his prisoners put to death. Capt. Joan de Ibarra, the would-be governor who ‘had vowed that he would either take the island or leave his carcass there,’ suffered an especially cruel end: Carter cut his arm off so that he could watch him bleed to death. When the captain asked why he had singled him out for such barbarous treatment, Carter told him that he had seen him kill one of his slaves with a rock during the battle.

  June 11 was proclaimed a day of thanksgiving. The islanders, ‘both English and heathen,’ gathered on what they now called ‘Bloody Beach’ to give thanks to God for their deliverance. Just two of them had been killed in the attack, Sherrard wrote, and they were no great loss, since one had been a ‘runaway’ and the other a ‘miscreant.’ Sherrard also recorded, with gratitude and wonder, ‘the loyalty in adversity of the negroes who had often rebelled in times of prosperity.’ He made a great bonfire of the crosses and icons the Spanish had brought ashore, and explained to the Africans ‘that the Gods whom our enemies trusted in and called upon could neither save their worshippers from slaughter, nor themselves from the fire.’

  The Old Councillors had witnessed many signs of divine providence when the fighting was at its fiercest, and they emboldened them to confront their cowardly governor. Hope Sherrard led them to the governor’s house, where they tried to oust Carter, ‘pleading a right by charter to choose their own government,’ and demanding that Richard Lane be appointed governor. Enraged, Carter ‘privately armed some of the ruder sort,’ who seized Lane, Sherrard, and Halhead and threw them into the prison that Nathaniel Butler had built to house his Spanish captives. Their only company was the two Spanish friars Butler had celebrated Easter with a year before.

  A few months later, they were shipped back to England on the Hopewell, which docked at Bristol in January 1641. Carter addressed the letter that went with them not to the shareholders, but to Archbishop William Laud. All four men, he wrote, ‘were disaffected to the liturgy and ceremonies of England.’ Laud read Carter’s letter with interest; it gave him further cause to tighten the screw on the Puritans’ influence in the colonies.

  The shareholders received the news of the repulsion of the Spanish attack with joy. It gave them ‘further arguments of hope’ that God had reserved their venture for ‘some special services to his own Glory and the honour of this nation.’ They found the Old Councillors innocent of all charges and ordered that they be released from the improvised cell in the hold of the Hopewell immediately. Nathaniel Butler had left the island without their permission and had had no right to appoint Andrew Carter as his successor. As for Carter’s execution of his Spanish prisoners, it was a crime ‘so heinous, so contrary to religion and to the law of nature and of nations that it ought not to escape without punishment.’8 He was ordered to return to England immediately.

  Although Richard Lane was persuaded to return to Providence, Hope Sherrard and Henry Halhead had had enough. Sherrard left the company’s service and became the vicar of Sandwich in Kent. His parishioners found him ‘pious, peaceable in conversation and a great blessing to the town,’ but the town’s mayor thought otherwise. He was already concerned by the number of nonconformists in the town and could not countenance the appointment of another painful preacher. He petitioned the House of Lords to have Sherrard removed from his post and ‘incensed rude seamen and others against him.’ Driven fro
m Sandwich by his persecutors, Sherrard moved to Dorset, where he disappears from the records.9

  When he left Banbury in 1632, Henry Halhead had vowed to stay on the island ‘until the Isle of Great Britain might deservedly be christened the Isle of Providence.’ But England seemed as far from God as ever, and his hopes for a godlier community in the Indies had been shattered. Halhead died shortly after returning to his hometown. However, the pamphlet he had written before leaving for Providence, with its impassioned denunciation of the enclosure movement, found vindication when Parliament came out against large-scale enclosures in 1641. The previous year, enclosures had sparked riots all over England, and MPs agreed that since their introduction, the country’s fields had supported less livestock and produced less food. But their opposition proved short-lived: By 1643, the House of Commons was dominated by Puritan landowners, many of whom had been made rich by enclosures. The drive to enclose what had once been common land picked up momentum again, and more husbandmen and cottagers found themselves tramping the country’s roads. Some of them walked as far as the docks of London, Bristol, and Plymouth, and eventually to new lives in the New World.

  * * *

  While Henry Halhead’s hope that England would be ‘born again into a new and free state’ had yet to be realized, the country was certainly feeling the pains of childbirth. According to the Earl of Clarendon, the English Civil War began with ‘a small, scarce discernible cloud in the north, which was shortly after attended with such a storm that never gave over raging till it had shaken, and even rooted up, the greatest and tallest cedar of the three nations.’10