The Island that Disappeared Read online

  Wine and silk were luxuries that the English particularly resented importing from foreigners. The Virginian colonists had found native vines and mulberry bushes growing wild. Surely, these native variants demonstrated that North America was capable of producing wine and silk? The company issued reams of instructions for the careful cultivation of imported varieties of grapevines and mulberry bushes. The settlers succeeded in producing several barrels of insipid wine, but their vines were dead by the end of the year, killed off by the severe cold of a Virginian winter. The colony’s silk farmers fared little better: only after importing French silkworms to eat the profusion of native mulberry bushes did they realize that the American variant was too tough for French worms. In exasperation, the Crown dissolved the Virginia Company in 1624. Left without the patronage of king or company, the settlers turned to tobacco, which proved so well suited to the climate that it was soon growing wild on the streets of Jamestown.

  If England’s New World colonies were to succeed at anything more than ‘a more regulated kind of killing of men,’ as a Virginia Company report of 1621 put it, English merchant adventurers would have to secure accurate information about the American climate. Traditional thinking about climate was based on a ragbag of half-baked ideas inherited from classical sources. According to Aristotle, the world’s weather was divided into zones, with the most moderate temperatures to be found midway between the equator and the North Pole. Aristotle’s a priori reasoning suggested that Virginia would have a climate similar to southern Spain. But as the colonists were to discover, Virginia might be on the same latitude as southern Spain, but oranges and lemons don’t thrive in Richmond as they do in Seville.13

  One of the first Englishmen to challenge Aristotle’s deductions was the cleric Samuel Purchas. Though he never traveled ‘200 miles from Thaxted in Essex, where [he] was born,’ Purchas listened with rapt attention to the stories told by sailors returning to England from foreign voyages. What he heard led him to think that Aristotle and his tradition were impeding rather than advancing his understanding of the world. In 1625, he published Purchas his Pilgrimes, a collection of travel stories and scientific speculations that became required reading for England’s first colonial adventurers.* Purchas advised anyone wanting to cultivate exotic crops to draw lessons from their own experiences and not pay too much attention to Aristotle’s thoughts on the subject.

  Capt. Samuel Axe took all four volumes of Purchas’s book to Providence as part of his library of books on farming, botany, and general science. The island seemed to offer boundless possibilities for the cultivation of exotic plants. The company prepared a long list of elaborate instructions for the settlers, and told Captain Tanner to remain on the island until the Seaflower’s hold was full of produce to sell to the apothecaries of London. Mulberry bushes, canary vines, Guinea pepper, and pomegranate seedlings were to be procured from the colonists on Barbados, and silk production was ‘to be made trial of.’14 The company was particularly excited about the prospect of growing castor oil plants, which could be used to produce the soap needed by England’s woolen manufacturers (English soap was made of fish oil, which left clothes with an ineradicable stink).

  The company was also hoping to find a cure for syphilis among the exotic plants growing on the island. Syphilis had been unknown to Europeans when Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas, but by 1539, when the Sevillian doctor Ruy Díaz de Isla wrote The Serpentine Malady, over a million Europeans had been infected with the disease.15 Casting around for a scapegoat, the Italians called it ‘the French disease,’ while the French called it ‘the Italian disease.’ Syphilis was in fact an American disease, most likely brought to Europe by sailors returning from Columbus’s first voyage. Many of them had joined the army of King Charles VIII when the French invaded Italy in 1495. Meeting the low immunity of the natives of Europe, the syphilis bacteria mutated into its deadliest form. Large pustules appeared on the victims’ bodies, the flesh fell from their faces, and within a few months of contracting the disease, a third of them were dead.

  Syphilis was revenge of sorts for the various infectious diseases that Columbus and his men introduced to the people of the Americas, but it was far from being Europe’s biggest killer. Columbus was heir to a long tradition of importing incurable diseases. In medieval times, Genovese merchants had been at the head of the caravans that journeyed to China to buy silk. For the return leg, they were joined by plague-infected rats, which boarded their ships at their trading station in the Crimea and disembarked at Genoa. During the course of a promenade concocted in the winter of 1627, Cardinal Richelieu sent eight thousand soldiers from Montferrat in the foothills of the Alps to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, where they were to assist in laying siege to the Huguenots. The plague pandemic they propagated as they made their way across France caused the death of a million people, none of whom suspected that their grisly end was the inadvertent price to be paid for reducing their country’s Protestants to obedience.16

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  Aside from the difficulties inherent in raising exotic plants, the colony on Providence was beset by quarrels from the day the advance party arrived. Many of the servants still found the idea of selling their labor to the highest bidder, irrespective of person or place, quite a novelty. Husbandmen and cottagers were accustomed to working from sunrise to sundown when the farmer’s crops needed planting or harvesting, but in the interim, they led lives of relative ease. There were no consumer goods for them to buy, so while their wages only covered the bare necessities, there was little point in earning more. In return for their loyalty, the lord of the manor offered them a degree of security and comfort that the ‘free’ laborer could only dream of. ‘A follower of a great lord was wont to say that he had in effect, as much as his lord, though he were owner of little or nothing,’ wrote John Robinson, who was pastor to many of the Pilgrims who sailed aboard the Mayflower in 1620.17

  The prospect of becoming a free man didn’t make it any easier to face three years of unpaid labor, working all hours under the tropical sun. The young servants were keen to make a good living, but they were also individualistic, resentful of distant authority, and a long way from the familiar restraints imposed by church, lord, and master. Now they were being commanded to follow the orders of men they didn’t know from Adam, who in turn took their orders from the governor, who was in turn only doing what the company in London told him to do. As the company’s council in London put it, ‘England has not yet solved the problem of stimulating the poorer sort to work hard in their callings.’18

  The family heads soon found cause for complaint too. When they took receipt of the tools and seeds they needed from the company’s magazine, they realized that the company favored some over others, and that a tenant farmer was only as powerful as his patron on the company’s council. For as long as there were trees to fell, undergrowth to clear, and paths to cut, there was little time to dwell on such trifles, but as time went on, other grumbles came to the fore. The prices of goods sold from the company’s magazine, and the company’s monopoly on the supply of those goods both rankled. Shortly after their arrival, a Dutch ship had dropped anchor in the harbor. Its captain offered them supplies at better prices, but the farmers had to turn him down, as they were only permitted to buy from the company’s store. It struck them as ironic that, after so much righteous indignation at the Spaniards’ refusal to trade with foreigners, an English company should deny the benefits of free trade to its own tenants.

  The commander of the settlers, Capt. William Rudyerd, had experience of colony building and knew that unity and good order were to be preserved at all costs. But he was not perturbed by the settlers’ bickering. He reminded them of their good fortune in having come to such a healthy island, where the ‘bloody flux’ (probably dysentery) and the ‘burning fever’ (probably typhoid) that had killed so many settlers in Virginia were unknown.

  Rudyerd also reminded them that ‘we are environed with enemies,’ and that th
eir efforts would be in vain unless the island was capable of resisting a Spanish attack.19 So in addition to their duties in the fields, the farmers, craftsmen, and servants were expected to pitch in with the construction of the island’s fortifications. Under the direction of Capt. Samuel Axe, they were put to work at Fort Warwick, which was being built on the site of William Blauveldt’s little redoubt on a low cliff on the smaller island, where it overlooked the harbor. Since the settlers also had to be able to use firearms, they would receive militia training from the garrison’s officers twice a week.

  The company hoped that any teething pains the settlers might feel on arrival would be eased by the island’s Puritan minister, Rev. Lewis Morgan. Despite being only twenty-two, Morgan was judged by the company to be ‘a very sufficient scholar for his time, and a studious and sober man.’ He moved into the governor’s house, where he was expected to tend to the spiritual needs of Philip Bell and his family. Morgan liked Bell, calling him ‘a man whose countenance proclaims him grave, his words eloquent, his deeds religious—he is all a Christian.’ Morgan was delighted by Providence too: in a letter home, he compared it ‘to the Eden of God,’ and reveled in having found ‘all things according to our heart’s desire.’ He was confident that the settlers would soon have crops sufficient to fill the hold of the Seaflower. ‘Oranges, lemons, vines, pomegranates, rhubarb we have planted and they prosper. Indigo, cochineal, cloves, pepper, mace, nutmeg, raisins, currants and I doubt not but the land will bear as well as any land under heaven.’’20

  To fulfill his responsibility for the ‘well ordering’ of the settlers, Reverend Morgan was expected to lead them in prayer at sunrise, before they headed into the fields for the day, and again at sunset, ‘so that [God’s] blessing may be upon themselves and the whole island.’21 At the end of evening prayers, Morgan liked to lead the congregation in the singing of psalms. Psalms were the godly alternative to ballads and folk songs, ‘which tend only to the nourishing of vice, and the corrupting of youth.’22

  Captain Rudyerd appreciated the need to inculcate Christian piety in his charges, but he had nothing but contempt for psalm singing, which was never part of traditional church services. Morgan was quick to upbraid the captain for his sacrilegious remarks, and Rudyerd took umbrage. As the younger brother of Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, and a cousin of the Earl of Warwick himself, Captain Rudyerd had left a grand lifestyle and solid connections in England. He demanded the respect of his peers, and the submission of his inferiors, of which a mere priest was undoubtedly one.

  But Lewis Morgan stood his ground, and in so doing, became the conduit for the settlers’ grievances. He penned a letter to the company in which he complained that Captain Rudyerd’s drunkenness and high-handed treatment of the settlers had kept the colony in an uproar for as long as he had been there. He also took aim at the company: far from laying the foundations for a community of devout believers, the shareholders appeared to be ‘solely and covetously desirous of profit.’ He charged the shareholders with ‘putting on a hypocritical show of godliness for the encompassing of ungodly ends.’

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  While the shareholders awaited the return of the Seaflower, they set about ‘scouring the world for the richest commodities’ to furnish their island.23 Thanks to their friends at the East India Company and other trading ventures, the company’s dock at Deptford was soon crowded with barrels of exotic seedlings, shoots, and plants waiting to be shipped out to Providence on the next ship. There were rhubarb roots, pots of scorzonera (black salsify, a root vegetable thought to cure snakebite and the plague), and fustic saplings, which yielded a yellow dye coveted by England’s cloth manufacturers.

  As they waited, their expenses mounted. Hire of the Seaflower, which they had already had for more than a year, was costing them £130 a month. The company’s treasurer, John Pym, urged patience; only with God’s blessing would their efforts be rewarded. The company was not alone in investing large sums in a new colony with little or no return: Between 1630 and 1643, England’s merchants and adventurers spent £200,000 (almost £18 million in today’s money) on hiring and fitting out two hundred ships for the voyage to the New World. None would see a return on his investment until the 1650s.

  When the Seaflower finally made it back to London in March 1632, Capt. John Tanner explained that his return voyage had been delayed by an attack by the Spanish coast guard in the Straits of Florida at the end of December. He had lost an eye, many of his crew had been killed, and only after fighting their way clear of the Spanish ships had they been able to head out into the Atlantic. When the company opened the bundle of letters that Tanner was carrying, and read about his mistreatment of the Seaflower‘s passengers on the outbound voyage, they were tempted to sack him, but in light of his stalwart defense of the company’s property, they chose not to. The company’s husband John Dyke was not so fortunate; for his sleight of hand in depriving the settlers of their victuals, he was ousted from the board.

  When the contents of the Seaflower‘s hold were brought onto the company’s dock, the shareholders were disappointed to find that the settlers had only sent home a few sacks of poor-quality tobacco. Lewis Morgan’s letter explained why: the colony was in a state little short of mutiny. Many of the settlers’ complaints—of the company’s monopoly on the sale of their produce and the prices in the company’s magazine—were to be expected. Others—of the oppressive heat of late summer and the storms that uprooted their young plants in autumn—were inevitable. But Morgan’s letter, which was ‘stuffed with bitter expressions and savouring a spirit inclined to sedition and mutiny,’ cast aspersions on the company’s very motives.24

  Such insubordination was insufferable. In tending to the settlers’ spiritual welfare, Reverend Morgan was to be absolutely free from meddling, whether by the island council or the company itself. In return, he was to be consulted on all matters of importance. But he had not been invited to sit on the island council, for the running of the colony was not his business. As far as the Puritan grandees were concerned, Lewis Morgan could never be more than a highly trained and valuable servant. In response to their complaints, the shareholders ‘bitterly reproved the people’ for their ‘infamous libels.’ They were akin to the Israelites, ‘who were not satisfied with the promise of that good land which God had provided for them.’ To punish the Israelites, God had ‘let their carcasses fall in the wilderness as men most unworthy to enjoy so great a blessing.’ The settlers should take care not to invite the same punishment, the company warned.

  The shareholders felt particularly aggrieved by ‘the imputation of so dishonourable an end as covetousness.’ They had each invested £600 in the colony on Providence. Any City of London merchant would have balked at being asked to invest so much with so little prospect of a quick return: ‘Some of you know that in the other plantations, £25 or £50 a man was a whole adventure [share], and if any man were out £100 before return of profit, he was accounted a great patriot, but scarce a wise adventurer.’

  Lewis Morgan was clearly too young and inexperienced to bear the weighty responsibility the shareholders had entrusted to him. In a second letter, this one addressed to Philip Bell, they instructed him to ship the querulous cleric back to London ‘in strict confinement.’25

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  The fomenter of the mutiny was gone, but its causes remained. The company received more letters from Providence the following year. ‘We do not find here the largeness that was reported,’ one settler wrote. Drought had struck for the second year in a row, turning the river running through New Westminster into a trickle and killing his crops. Governor Bell had managed to procure pomegranate plants and Guinea pepper from Barbados, but they had failed to take root. The fustic saplings were still alive, but it would be many years before they yielded their precious dye. As for the rhubarb roots and scorzonera, nothing had come of them, and the island council was convinced that Providence wasn’t suited to sugar.

  Although the settlers had had a good tobacco ha
rvest, which they had been counting on to rescue them from penury, they discovered that woodworm had eaten through the rafters of the drying sheds, sprinkling the leaves with a bitter tasting dust that left most of the crop unusable. With no tobacco to trade and the last of their supplies exhausted, they were left feeling ‘like forsaken Indians.’ Some of them even asked permission to come home.26

  Had they still been in their home villages, they could have turned to the local alehouse for comfort. But there was no tavern on their lordships’ isle. ‘Take care that idleness, as the nurse of all vice, be carefully eschewed,’ the company had warned the island’s governor. Members of the island council were allowed to drink—several of them, like Captain Rudyerd, did little else—but the company feared its effects on the lower orders, and instructed Philip Bell to punish any servant found drinking. Swearing, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and making atheistic remarks were also punishable offenses. If their little island community was to secure God’s blessing, it would have to be a godly one.

  In the absence of a minister to confide in, those that could write confined their worries to their letters home. Anxious to nip trouble in the bud, the company intercepted them on arrival in London. In one, a settler asked a relative to send ‘cards and dice and tables’ on the next ship. The company’s secretary, William Jessop, told Bell to have them burned on arrival.27

  Nor did the settlers have female company, for the shareholders judged the island too dangerous for women or children. Valued members of the island council, like Philip Bell, and the wealthier heads of families had been allowed to take their wives and children to Providence, but the other settlers would not be permitted such comforts until the colony was capable of resisting a Spanish attack. Until then, the cooking and washing would have to be done by the island’s youngest servants.