The Island that Disappeared Page 2
Elfrith was a privateer, and he had come looking for prizes. He was carrying letters of marque—a license authorizing him to attack and rob Spanish merchant ships, granted by the state in times of war to any citizen with the means and intent to deprive King Philip IV of his ill-gotten gains. After his accession to the throne in 1625, King Charles had wasted no time in declaring war on Spain. By extension, this meant royal authorization for a privateering war against Spanish shipping.
Among the English shipowners to recognize the extraordinary opportunity this posed, none had been quicker on the uptake than the Earl of Warwick. Warwick had first issued commissions to corsairs in the Caribbean in 1618. Of all the privateering ships that had set sail between 1626 and 1630, half had sailed for him. Elfrith was one of the earl’s most experienced privateers, a headstrong and argumentative man who liked nothing better than picking off a lone Spanish ship and then boasting of what he had done back in port. He had grown up listening to stories of Sir Francis Drake’s audacious raid of Cartagena in 1586, and considered himself heir to the noble tradition of robbing the Spanish, established by Queen Elizabeth I.
Until Elizabeth came to the throne, England had had no colonies, nor was it allowed any. Pope Alexander VI had confirmed Spain’s dominion over the vast continent on the other side of the Atlantic in 1493, when he issued the Inter caetera. By this papal bull, a line was drawn north to south through the Atlantic Ocean; beyond the line only the soldiers and priests of the king of Spain were allowed to pass. English, Dutch, and French ships had no business crossing the line, and foreign sailors found cruising American waters were liable to be killed on sight.
In the eyes of Catholic Spain, the New World was God’s reward to the Spanish king for the reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. The long struggle to expel the Moors had been completed in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus first sailed to the Americas. As the historian Francisco López de Gómara told Emperor Charles V, after the Creation and the coming of Jesus Christ, the discovery of the Americas was the most important episode in the history of the world.
Good Queen Bess had not been deterred by Iberian claims to exclusivity in the Americas. In 1592, a squadron of English men-of-war seized the Madre de Deus, an enormous Portuguese galleon returning from India with a cargo of gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, amber, musk, tapestries, and ebony. Sale of the cargo had raised £500,000, half the net value of the entire English Exchequer. Under Elizabeth’s rule, privateering (licensed piracy) became a mainstay of English moneymaking. The queen grew to depend on her sea robbers: without them, and the money they made from privateering, England would not have defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Of course, were it not for the sea robbers, King Philip II would not have felt the need to launch an armada in the first place, but that would be to overlook the religious dimension of the conflict. The typical privateer saw himself as a combination of loyal knight, dutiful public servant, and devout man of God—and saw no contradiction between the three. Sir Francis Drake had sailed with a sword in one hand and a copy of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in the other. The Book of Martyrs didn’t just record the suffering of the Protestant martyrs; it related their deaths to the wider war between Protestant and Catholic, Christ and Antichrist, whose climax was fast approaching.
Ever since Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament in 1526, Protestant merchants had looked for a chance to combine their love of God with their hunger for riches. Their sponsorship of the privateers’ voyages into distant seas gave them a chance to line their pockets and to hasten the fall of the Catholic Church—the Whore of Babylon mentioned in the Book of Revelation in the Scriptures. The Elizabethan privateering tradition gave them a divinely ordained sense of purpose, and a generation of seafaring heroes that the entire country could celebrate.
Yet by 1627 those glory days seemed long gone. Following her death in 1603, Elizabeth was succeeded by James Stuart, who showed little interest in taking the fight to the Spanish. The country’s privateers were called back to their home ports, and its merchant adventurers were encouraged to divert their efforts into the more prosaic task of building colonies in North America. By 1629, James’s son, Charles I, had been on the throne for four years and had already earned a reputation for incompetence and duplicity. Shortly after his accession to the throne, he declared war on Spain, but he was notoriously fickle and easily swayed by the pro-Spanish faction at court, which argued for a less belligerent stance toward England’s traditional foe.
Such were the thoughts ebbing and flowing through Captain Elfrith’s mind as he surveyed the island through his spyglass. Then he caught sight of something unwelcome: a little ship riding at anchor in the harbor. Scanning east, he spotted a narrow sandbar, framed by mangroves, which led to another, much smaller but equally green island, where a small band of men were cleaning their weapons. On a rocky promontory beyond the sandbar was a stockade, armed with two cannon. Elfrith and his men drew their cutlasses: if the men on the beach were Spanish, they were unlikely to welcome the arrival of foreign interlopers.
It took them the best part of the afternoon to reach the sandbar. The descent was steep at times, and they had to use their weapons to cut a path through the ferns and bromeliads underfoot and the lianas hanging from the boughs overhead. On more than one occasion their progress was interrupted by a steep cliff, and they had to clamber down slopes of soft, black stone to the flatter land below.
Emerging from the woods, they walked along the sandy shore toward the men on the spit. ‘We come in peace,’ they shouted, as they drew their cutlasses. ‘We are Dutch,’ the strangers’ leader replied in English. This made them fellow interlopers in the king of Spain’s western lands. Stuffing his clay pipe with roughly shredded tobacco, William Blauveldt invited Daniel Elfrith to join him for a smoke. He and his men were hoping to capture one of the Spanish merchant ships that regularly ran supplies to the coastal towns, he told the Englishman. They had arrived on the island a few days before to take on fresh water and hunt the wild pigs and pigeons that lived in the woods. They had built the armed stockade that Elfrith had spied from the peak to guard against any Spanish vessel that might come looking for them.
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There is no record of the first European to land on the island the Spanish called ‘Santa Catalina.’ Nor is there any account of the first sailor to reach San Andrés, the low-lying island that Daniel Elfrith had sailed from the previous day. Both islands appear on the Carta Universal, which was the most authoritative map of the known world when it was published in 1527. Christopher Columbus likely passed them in 1502, when he was probing the coastline of Central America in his misguided search for a westward passage to the Indian Ocean, but he made no mention of either of them. Until Elfrith’s arrival, the only recorded visitor was Sir Francis Drake, who took on fresh water at Santa Catalina on his way to the Spanish port of Nombre de Dios, whose storehouses of gold and silver bullion he raided in 1572.
The Spanish customarily named unknown islands after the day on which they were discovered. Every day of the year corresponds to the name of a Catholic saint: 25 November is St. Catherine’s Day, and 30 November is St. Andrew’s Day, which suggests that whoever discovered Santa Catalina reached the island five days before reaching San Andrés. But aside from naming them, the Spanish paid no heed to either island for they were too small and too isolated to hold any promise for a conquistador. The English settlers scratching a living from the soils of New England were committed smallholders, but even the lowliest Spanish soldier regarded the prospect of tilling the land with disdain. He had come west looking for gold, and he left the mining of it to enslaved Indian labor.
In the 134 years that had passed since Pope Alexander VI sanctified the Spanish king’s dominion over the New World, an army of soldiers, priests, and royal officials had taken possession of mainland America. But Daniel Elfrith and William Blauveldt were not the first infidels to spot an opening. In 1620, the Conde de la Gomara, pre
sident of the audiencia of Guatemala, noted that the western Caribbean had become infested with foreign adventurers, pirates, escaped slaves, and indomitable Indian tribes, ‘each more ferocious than the next.’1 He advised the king to send an expedition to Santa Catalina, so as to deny the intruders a foothold. But Philip IV chose to ignore the Conde’s advice. Los piratas ingleses were of less concern to the king than the nearby shallow reefs of Roncador, Quitasueño, Serrana, and Serranilla, which had already been the cause of many a shipwreck. The royal maps used by ships’ captains plying la carrera de Indias drew their attention to the reefs, not the islands. Santa Catalina was deemed an irrelevance.
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Returning to the Somers Isles, Daniel Elfrith rushed to tell the islands’ governor about his exciting discovery. Philip Bell welcomed his father-in-law’s return and listened to his account with great interest. Their patron, the Earl of Warwick, had been looking for a location in which to build a new colony, as the Somers Isles’ experiment was close to collapse. Most of the seedlings the settlers had brought out from England had withered in the sun, the few that had taken root were buffeted by the high winds that blew in off the Atlantic, and much of their meager harvest had been eaten by rats.
While Elfrith went to check on the state of his fields, Philip Bell wrote a letter to the Earl of Warwick’s agent and closest business partner, his cousin, the Member of Parliament Sir Nathaniel Rich. If his father-in-law’s description of the lush island was accurate, the proceeds made from crops grown on Santa Catalina would surely ‘double or treble any man’s estate in all England,’ he wrote. The island also offered great opportunities to privateers, for it lay ‘in the heart of the Indies, and the mouth of the Spanish,’ just three days’ sailing from the ports at Portobello and Cartagena. It was already blessed with excellent natural defenses; once fortified, he felt sure that it would be ‘invincible.’2
Sir Nathaniel Rich received Bell’s letter at the end of April 1629, and immediately sent word to the Earl of Warwick. The earl was one of the wealthiest men in England, and the single biggest sponsor of its fledgling trade and colonization projects. He had been running the Somers Isles Company for over a decade, and had invested large sums of money in colonies and trading missions in Massachusetts, Virginia, Guyana, and the East Indies.
The first meeting to discuss the colonization of Santa Catalina was held on 19 November 1630 at Lord Brooke’s house in Holborn, though only ‘when the plague then raging in London had abated sufficiently for members to assemble together.’3 The twenty-strong gathering included some of the most powerful men in England. Among them were leading members of the House of Lords like the Earl of Warwick, Lord Brooke, and Lord Saye and Sele, and several of the commoners that they sponsored in the Lower House: ambitious, talented men like John Pym, Sir Thomas Barrington, Oliver St. John and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd.
What marked these men out from their peers was not their wealth or power, but their devotion to God. The Puritan wing of the Church of England had been around since the days when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne, though most of those so labeled considered it ‘an odious name,’ used only by the ‘lewd and profane of life.’ They preferred to call one another ‘loving friend.’ Although most Puritans considered themselves loyal members of the Church of England, the most powerful of them undoubtedly formed a class within a class. The defenders of ‘the true religion’ needed one another, for the road to salvation was riddled with pitfalls, and those intent on walking it needed guidance, as well as protection from their foes.
When etiquette allowed, it was only natural that they should marry their brethren’s sisters, nieces, and cousins. Most of the men who gathered at Brooke House that day were related to someone in the room. Oliver St. John was married to a cousin of Sir Thomas Barrington, who was in turn the brother-in-law of Sir Gilbert Gerard. Barrington was also a cousin of other prominent Puritans in the House of Commons, like Oliver Cromwell and John Hampden.
The men who gathered at Brooke House were rooted in the local government of rural England, but they were anything but parochial. Their religion was under threat from enemies at home and abroad, and this gave them an international outlook. They had been raised on a diet of anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish rhetoric, which conflated the superstition and idolatry that they regarded as inherent in Catholicism with the sloth, tyranny, and cruelty that they associated with the Spanish.
But they also wanted to emulate Spain, for since discovering the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, it had enjoyed a golden age the likes of which had never been seen before. By 1629, however, King Philip IV’s empire was overextended and ripe for collapse. Two years before, the Dutch admiral Piet Hein had captured his annual treasure fleet off the coast of Cuba. The one hundred tons of silver that Hein brought back to Holland was valued at more than 11 million guilders (£89 million in today’s money) and funded the Dutch army for the next eight months. Why shouldn’t England repeat Hein’s success and deprive the followers of the Antichrist of their ill-gotten gains in the bargain?
In addition to licensed piracy, Protestant Holland had also shown the riches to be made by legal trade. Having secured control over herring fishing in the North Sea, the Dutch had become ‘waggoners of all seas,’ carrying goods to and from ports all over Europe. The Continent’s commercial and financial development was no longer directed from Paris, but Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and now the Dutch had colonies of their own at New Amsterdam and Curaçao.
A strong sea breeze from Holland blew through the City of London, and Dutch Protestants’ spirited defense of the true religion was taken as an example to all patriotic Englishmen. The twenty adventurers gathered at Brooke House had all enjoyed the benefits of having such a wealthy neighbor on the other side of the English Channel. Flemish weavers paid good prices for English wool, which accounted for 90 percent of the country’s exports. The wool trade had brought great wealth to many of England’s landowners, who had rebuilt their houses in the latest styles and furnished them with fine silks and tapestries from Holland and Italy. Their tables were laden with Spanish and French wines, and their dishes enlivened by exotic spices, currants, and citrus fruits imported from Venice and the Levant. As one observer wrote in 1587, ‘It is a world to see how many strange herbs, plants and unusual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane, Canary Isles and all parts of the world.’4 That year, luxury goods made up two-thirds of England’s imports; many of them were imported from distant colonies and trading stations run by England’s Spanish and Dutch rivals. Such conspicuous consumption of foreign goods undermined England’s merchants and weighed heavy on its balance of trade.
It might have been an inequitable state of affairs, but it was perfectly sustainable, and it took a war to bring matters to a head. The Protestant Reformation, based on the printed word and the spread of literacy among a minority of the population, had unleashed a furious reaction from the Catholic Church. This Counter-Reformation was punitive as well as defensive, and particularly in its early stages, it was incredibly violent. In 1618, the Catholic and Protestant powers of Europe had taken up arms to fight what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War. As the conflict intensified, European waters became infested with pirates, and English wool merchants found themselves cut off from their markets on the Continent. By the mid-1620s, England’s cloth trade had collapsed, and the country had fallen into a terrible recession. Many of those gathered at Brooke House came from textile towns and had seen for themselves the poverty and hopelessness that prevailed among their tenants and servants. It was said that the last ten years had been the worst the country had ever lived through. When the plague swept the country in 1625 and again in 1630, many took it as a sign of divine wrath at the benighted state of Englishmen’s souls. The ranks of the jobless swelled, and wages fell to their lowest-ever point. This was compounded by a series of poor harvests, which brought many villages in the north of England to the brink of starvation.
God, they
told themselves, was urging the country toward a coordinated program of imperial expansion. This would foster production of the cotton, dyes, oils, and fixatives that the English cloth trade needed, shift the balance of trade, and give productive employment to the idle hands milling in the squares of England’s market towns. It would also glorify ‘the true religion’ at the expense of Catholic Spain.
Yet the Stuart kings showed no interest in emulating the belligerent expansionism of Queen Elizabeth. Charles had shown himself eager to make his name as a warrior, and declared war on both Spain and France, but both campaigns were fiascos: Edward Cecil so mismanaged the attack on Cádiz that he entirely missed the Spanish galleons he planned to rob. He was unable to feed his own soldiers, many of whom died of malnutrition and disease, let alone defeat the armies of Catholic Europe. King Charles would play no further role in the Thirty Years’ War, and showed no interest in pursuing the aggressive foreign policy urged on him by the Earl of Warwick. Instead, he fell back on the crown’s long-standing policy of moralizing, exhortation, and false promises.
While Charles would have made a bad king under the best of circumstances, few of his subjects appreciated that he simply didn’t have the money to match the belligerence of continental monarchs like Louis XIII of France, whose annual income was ten times larger than Charles’s. The royal finances had been tending toward collapse since 1500—the Dissolution of the Monasteries was a windfall that only delayed the day of reckoning. Over the course of the sixteenth century, royal income had doubled, but prices had risen fivefold.5 If the king’s finances were to be put on a sound footing, Parliament would have to grant him the right to increase existing taxes and impose new ones.