The Island that Disappeared Read online

  John Winthrop watched anxiously as growing numbers of New Englanders opted to follow John Humphrey to Providence. The first contingent of thirty men, five women, and eight children left Boston Harbor in two sloops under the command of the merchant William Pierce in May 1641. The Spanish attack had threatened to undo all the company’s good work, but God had intervened to fend the enemy off, the new governor told them. With the promise of hundreds of experienced colonists journeying south to a new English colony in Central America, prospects looked bright for the Puritans of Providence.

  * * *

  Gen. Francisco Díaz Pimienta was commander of la flota, the fleet of ships that carried supplies to Cartagena every year, and a veteran of the struggle to expel the Dutch from Brazil. The general took the failure to pry the pirates’ grasp from Santa Catalina as a slight on his country’s honor, and was determined to exact his revenge. After journeying to Madrid to remonstrate with King Philip IV in person, permission was duly granted for a third attempt to dislodge the heretics. The king put three galleons at the general’s disposal, his only condition being that the expedition should be complete before his treasure fleet sailed in January.

  This time, the Spanish invasion was planned with extreme care and precision. General Díaz Pimienta waited until the hurricane season was well passed, calculating that the pirates who had sought shelter in the island’s harbor would be roving once more by then. He interrogated four Englishmen in the dungeon at Portobello to find out more about the island’s defenses, took on a Moorish pirate who had spent time on the island as his pilot, and personally oversaw the outfitting of eleven warships in the docks of Cartagena. His second-in-command, Adm. Rodrigo Lobo, would sail as commander of the fourteen hundred infantrymen, while Antonio Maldonado y Texeda, a veteran of the previous year’s attack, would command the six hundred seamen.

  Two weeks later, as Humphrey was still at sea, the general’s flagship dropped anchor off the reef. The following day, he sent out a launch to reconnoiter the island, bravely drawing the enemy’s fire to test the range of their weapons. He would invade from the east, he decided. But on the night he assembled his forces, a storm moved in from the west, and his fleet narrowly escaped being swept onto the reef. He tried again the following night, but there was ‘so much rain that they were almost drowned,’ and they had to retreat to their ships for a second time.

  The islanders had by now spotted the Spaniards’ landing craft and lit beacons to warn of an imminent attack. Watching hundreds of militiamen spread out along the coast, the Spanish officers were so disheartened that they urged their general to abandon the enterprise. But Díaz Pimienta was determined to make one more attempt at a landing. Since the winds were still blowing from the west, they would sail around the northern tip of the smaller island and gamble on being driven into the harbor. If they were fast enough, they would escape the worst of the cannon fire from Fort Warwick. It was an audacious proposal, and as the report prepared for the king when it was all over made clear, Díaz Pimienta had ‘more trouble overcoming the opposition of his friends than his enemies.’

  As the sun rose on the morning of 24 May, the general waved his handkerchief from the bow of his flagship, the attack standard was run up, a signal shot fired, sails raised, and a brisk breeze blew the Spanish longboats into the harbor below Fort Warwick. Although cannonballs rained down on them from the fort, ‘carrying away masts, sails and some men, the speed of the launches spoiled the enemy’s aim.’ Eighty of the islanders, accompanied by many Africans, ran to the beach to confront the invaders and, in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, ‘defended themselves with great valour.’ But they were outnumbered by the hundreds of Spanish soldiers who rushed ashore; twenty of the islanders were killed, and the survivors were forced to retreat to Fort Warwick.

  General Díaz Pimienta marched into New Westminster at the head of the invading force, took possession of the governor’s house, and raised the Spanish standard over its roof. He told Antonio Maldonado y Texeda to have his men track the survivors into the bush, flush out any pockets of resistance, and station a garrison in each of the other twelve forts.

  The scout sent to investigate Fort Warwick estimated there to be five hundred well-armed Englishmen within its stone walls. Díaz Pimienta had neither the time nor the resources to lay siege to the fort; what he did have, however, was the unwitting collusion of Andrew Carter, the island’s cowardly interim governor. The general was still considering his options when a launch flying a white flag came aside the pier in New Westminster. On board were the two Spanish friars from the island’s prison. They came bearing a message: in return for safe passage to Cádiz, and the same rations afforded the passengers of a Spanish ship, Andrew Carter was prepared to surrender the island.

  Shortly afterward, General Díaz Pimienta took possession of Fort Warwick ‘in the name of the king, with the solemnity belonging to such acts.’ After disarming the island’s militiamen and their commanding officers, he requisitioned sixty cannon of between four and twelve pounds apiece, thirty-two smaller cannon, and four large catapults. In an adjoining storehouse, he found large quantities of muskets, harquebuses, and munitions, which Carter had been preparing for the new colony on the Miskito Coast. The 398 Englishmen, women, and children the general took prisoner were spared the sword, the Junta de Guerra de las Indias having decided it advisable to ‘grant the privileges of surrender with mercy, although it was not usually granted in those parts.’

  Díaz Pimienta had expected to find fifteen hundred slaves living on Providence, so he was surprised to find just three hundred eighty Africans on the inventory. What he didn’t know was that for fear of another insurrection, Captain Carter had just sold a thousand slaves to the colonists of St. Kitts and the Somers Isles. The general divided the Africans into two groups: Three hundred and five of them were sent to Cartagena and sold at auction; another fifty-three were destined for the marketplace in Portobello; and he gave the remaining twenty-two slaves to his officers by way of reward. That evening, the Spaniards sang a festal Te Deum on the parade ground in front of the governor’s house, before going to Hope Sherrard’s little church to celebrate Mass. When the service was over, General Díaz Pimienta let it be known that from now on the island would be known as ‘Santa Catalina de la Providencia.’

  Spanish reports had always painted the English colony as a near-destitute den of unrepentant pirates and heretical seers, so Díaz Pimienta was surprised to find the Englishmen’s fields full of ripening corn and beans, and their pens stocked with thousands of well-fed pigs. Despite its diminutive size and utter isolation, the island was blessed with rich soils and a gentle climate, and if the vial of quicksilver he found in the governor’s house was any indication, it also had deposits of precious metals.

  Even if the king chose not to settle the island, the general could see that it was always likely to attract unwelcome attention from Spain’s European rivals. So instead of dismantling the fortifications, as he had been instructed by the Consejo de Indias, he decided to improve on them. He appointed his most trusted lieutenant, Gerónimo de Ojeda, governor of the island and put at his disposal a garrison of one hundred Spanish and fifty Portuguese soldiers. Before embarking for Cartagena, the general made sure that they had enough corn and beans to last them until the next harvest, and wished them well. His parting instruction was that they ‘live model Christian lives, go to mass regularly and demonstrate other exercises of virtue, so as to be a good example to foreigners, and to God.’

  The sale of the indigo, gold, and cochineal that Díaz Pimienta recovered from the foreigners’ storehouse raised 500,000 ducats (the contemporary equivalent of £12 million) at auction in Cartagena, which more than paid for the expedition (tellingly, Andrew Carter had declared none of these prizes to the company’s shareholders). News of the fall of the pirates’ lair prompted joyous relief on the city’s streets, and grand festivities were held to celebrate the king’s victory. In the following two months, more merchant ships entered
Cartagena’s harbor than in the previous two years. Similar celebrations erupted in Portobello, Santa Marta, Tolú, and every other port on the Spanish Main that had suffered at the hands of Providence’s privateers. In gratitude for his leadership of the campaign that expelled them, General Díaz Pimienta was summoned to Madrid, where he was feted as a hero and awarded the Military Order of the Knights of Santiago by Philip IV himself.22

  * * *

  The English prisoners spent the summer of 1641 in Cartagena, waiting for the arrival of the armada that would take them to Cádiz. Since none of them spoke Spanish, they could only guess at what their captors were saying about them, but after years of listening to the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, they were shocked by how well they were treated. The men were lodged in quarters supplied by the Compañía de Jesús and given a generous allowance for food and drink, while their wives and children stayed with private citizens, who ‘had asked for them with pleasure.’

  But not all of the islanders had been captured. Around one hundred fifty of them escaped into the hills and watched with the maroons of Palmetto Grove as their friends were rowed out to the galleons waiting in the harbor. When the Spanish ships had sailed out of sight, they made their way down to the wooded bluff overlooking New Westminster and watched a crowd of strangers toast their good fortune around the fire pit that had been their meeting place for the last ten years. They were homeless; at nightfall, they dragged their dories from the mangroves and began rowing for the Miskito Coast.

  Nor had all of the slaves fallen into the Spaniards’ clutches. In the latter stages of the battle, a group had commandeered one of the privateers’ ships riding at anchor in the harbor and made their escape. The English had been careful not to teach slaves skills as valuable as navigation, but somehow they too made it to the Miskito Coast, where their ship was wrecked just south of Cape Gracias a Dios. The previous year, a slave ship called the Newton had been wrecked farther south at Karata. Its human cargo had become the first Africans to land on the Miskito Coast as freemen, and it seems likely that the escapees joined them.

  In the years that followed, the fall of Providence spurred the creation of other English-speaking outposts. Refugees from their lordships’ island were instrumental in founding isolated coastal settlements from Panama to Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula. Some found shelter in the ramshackle pirate communities that had sprung up on the Miskito Coast, particularly at Bluefields, which had been named after the Dutch buccaneers William and Abraham Blauveldt. Others found their way to William Claiborne’s outpost on the island of Ruatan, where Samuel Axe had recently built an armed stockade. The following year, they were driven out by a Spanish expedition, so Captain Axe led them first to St. Kitts and then to the Earl of Warwick’s short-lived colony on Tobago, an exodus that would in turn lead to the creation of an equally short-lived settlement on Trinidad in 1649. Other refugees from Providence sailed under a Scotsman by the name of Captain Wallace and founded the village that eventually became Belize City.*2

  As for John Humphrey and the contingent of settlers from New England, they were on St. Kitts taking on fresh water when they first heard that a fleet of Spanish ships had been sighted off Providence. Their captain, William Pierce, recommended that they return to Massachusetts, but his passengers insisted on pressing on. ‘Then I am a dead man!’ he said. He dropped anchor in Providence harbor just a few days after the departure of the Spanish fleet for Cartagena. There were no other ships to be seen; nor did there seem to be anyone working in the fields. Pierce was approaching the shore, hailing for the harbour master as he went, when his ship came under a barrage of cannon fire. Most of it did little more than rip holes in his sails, but one hit him in the chest. The first mate pulled the sloop out of range of the Spaniards’ guns, but within an hour Captain Pierce was dead.

  It would appear that God did not mean for the New Englanders to make Providence their home after all. They spent an anxious night at anchor a league off shore, arguing over their next move. John Humphrey convinced the first mate to make for Cape Gracias a Dios, but the discussion over what God wanted them to do next only became more heated when they arrived on the Miskito Coast. Having turned their backs on Massachusetts, most of them were reluctant to return—but living with buccaneers, runaway slaves, and heathen Indians was none too appetizing a prospect either. Humphrey chose to stay at the cape, but most of his followers opted to return. They reached Boston in September, just as the first of the colony’s birds were flying south for the winter. By November, Humphrey too was ready to give up on the Caribbean. He sailed for England, and docked at Deptford shortly after Andrew Carter and the rest of the islanders who had been imprisoned in Cartagena arrived from Cádiz.

  The last ship to leave the company’s dock for New Westminster had sailed six months before. Among the latest contingent looking to start over on Providence were Richard Lane and the island’s new minister, Nicholas Leverton, who were still flush with hopes for the rejuvenation of the island’s divine mission. As the familiar electric blue of the reef came into view, it didn’t take them long to realize that the island had been taken for the Antichrist. Reverend Leverton suggested that they ‘venture a brush’ with the Spanish, ‘wherein they killed a great many of their men, and forced their armed longboats ashore.’ But they too were eventually driven away.

  They spent the next two years careering around the Caribbean, during which time they ‘had many preservations (almost miraculous) from famine, the Spaniards, and violent storms.’ Richard Lane’s luck eventually ran out: he was drowned off the coast of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. Nicholas Leverton fared better: he spent a year preaching in the Somers Isles before returning to England, where ‘he was received with great honour and respect by the Lords proprietors of the island of Providence.’

  The loss of their island was a terrible blow, but their lordships didn’t give up their claim to Providence. As King Charles had himself acknowledged five years before, the island had become the business of all Protestant England, and would remain so for as long as Spain denied England the right to trade in the Americas. In a letter to John Humphrey written in August 1641, the shareholders assured him of their continued support and invited him to consider some ‘public undertakings, which may shortly come to a resolution here touching the West Indies.’ They felt sure that such ventures could only ‘further improve and advance your beginnings.’23 It was to be the Providence Island Company’s last letter.

  *1A booby is a seabird common in much of the Caribbean.

  *2The name ‘Belize’ is thought to be a corruption of ‘Wallace.’

  [11]

  ‘Little More Than the Summit of a Hill’

  IN JUNE 1641, THE LONG Parliament passed an act declaring ship money illegal. Charles gave the act his assent in August, but if his concession was supposed to mollify his opponents in Parliament, it was forgotten in the crisis created by his standoff with the Scots. Then, in October, news reached London of a second, still more dangerous rebellion, this time against English settlers in Ireland. Tensions between natives and newcomers had been rising for years, but the uprising was sparked by fears that Charles was about to give in to the Puritans’ call to curb Catholicism in Ireland. The prospect of a religious crackdown, combined with popular frustration at the passivity of the Dublin Parliament, drove people to take matters into their own hands. Across Ulster, native Irish vented their anger at their Protestant neighbors, who had taken their best lands and persecuted their religious leaders. By the time the bloodletting came to an end, over fifteen thousand Protestants and Catholics were dead.

  In the minds of jingoistic English, the Irish rebellion of 1641 showed their obsessive dread of a Catholic conspiracy to be well founded. Graphic woodcuts depicting bloodthirsty mobs of rampaging Irishmen were prepared, and bills posted across the country. The number of dead was said to have passed two hundred thousand, and rumors spread that the rebels were on their way to England. In Puritan circles, the rising was assumed to have
had the king’s blessing, for allegations of Charles’s latent Catholicism had never gone away. But the king was no less appalled by the rebellion than the Puritans, and immediately asked Parliament for the resources needed to mount a full-scale offensive against the rebels. For the time being, most English were still prepared to rally around their monarch. But John Pym was not; he responded to the Irish Rebellion with the Grand Remonstrance, which reiterated Parliament’s grievances and proposed a dramatic increase in its powers to keep the king in check.

  Charles was furious: he accused Pym and his colleagues of treason for their collusion with the Scottish Covenanters, and even stormed into the Commons to arrest the culprits himself. ‘All the birds are flown,’ he said, on finding his tormenters absent from the chamber. Turning on his heel, he stormed out, as cries of ‘Privilege! Privilege!’ rang out from the benches. The same cry went up from angry crowds outside Parliament. Charles’s bad-tempered attempt to interdict his opponents was interpreted as a failed coup by a despot who certainly could not be trusted with command of the army. Suspected Catholics and courtiers were attacked in the street, and some were even killed. London was rapidly turning against the king.