The Island that Disappeared Page 7
This only exacerbated the shortage of manpower in the fields. William Jessop assured the seven family heads that more servants would be sent out on the next ship. In the meantime, the ‘fathers’ would just have to work their ‘children’ harder. Servants were commodities to be bought and sold, and wherever possible, the company paid the members of the island council in servants rather than pounds sterling, for cash could be spent in England and might encourage them to come home. Knowing that their servants would be free men in two years’ time, they were keen to get as much unpaid labor out of them as they could.
Since Capt. William Rudyerd had more servants than anyone, he decided to lead by example, taking his whip to a young servant called Floud, who he accused of laziness. Instead of returning to work, Floud complained to the governor. But Philip Bell couldn’t overawe an arrogant troublemaker like Rudyerd as he might have at home; experienced military men had to be courted with care, for Bell depended on them to train the militia. So the governor sent Floud back to his master, who tied him to a tree and whipped him again, this time with rods. Three months later, young Floud died, presumably of his wounds. On his return to London in 1634, Captain Rudyerd was brought before the company court and asked to explain his ‘cruel usage’ of his servant. He told the bench that he had used ‘all fair means to prevent the scurvy which through laziness was seizing upon him.’ Only when ‘fair means’ failed did he give Floud ‘a blow that might set himself to his business.’
Savage as his treatment of Floud might sound, it was well known that the first signs of scurvy were ‘a general laziness and evil disposition of all the faculties and parts of the body.’ Poor Floud wasn’t able to testify, but one of his friends confirmed that ‘through laziness he had got the scurvy,’ and that he had been refusing to work for some time before Rudyerd whipped him. Floud’s friend also mentioned that ‘some in the island had suffered many degrees beyond him,’ which suggests that Rudyerd was not the only member of the island council to take a whip to one of his servants.28
Scurvy plagued all the colonies and claimed the lives of more sailors than any contagious illness. The sufferer would complain of ‘itching or aching of the limbs’ and ‘shortness and difficulty of breathing, especially when they move themselves.’ His friends might notice his eyes turn ‘a leady colour, or like dark violets,’ and a ‘great swelling of the gums…with the issuings of much filthy blood and other stinking corruption thence,’ which caused ‘a terrible stinking of the breath.’29
The causes of scurvy were ‘infinite and unsearchable.’ Was it caused by ship’s biscuits, salted pork, or a disease of the spleen? Was it contracted from dirty clothes, the damp sea air, or the heat of the day? Without a diagnosis there could be no prognosis. Ships’ surgeons had seen sailors recover from scurvy after eating fresh fruit and greens—but they would just as readily prescribe a mug of beer mixed with an egg yolk, bran with almonds and rosewater, or ‘a good bath in the blood of beasts.’30
The court pronounced itself satisfied with Captain Rudyerd’s account. It found his ‘drunkenness, swearing, ill carriage towards the governor and other misdemeanours’ less than satisfactory, but was unwilling to punish the commander of the settlers, and the trial was abandoned. Before leaving the court, Captain Rudyerd told the company that the only crop ever likely to flourish on Providence was potatoes, and that ‘the island in respect of itself is not worth keeping.’31
Cruelty to servants was common in the colonies, and it often sparked revolt. Father White witnessed a servant uprising on Barbados in 1634.
The very day we arrived we found the island all in arms to the number of about 800 men. The servants of the island had conspired to kill their masters and make themselves free, and then handsomely to take the first ship that came, and so go to sea.32
Runaway servants often joined forces with runaway sailors, who also faced routine abuse from the authorities. Between them, they made up the best part of the community of buccaneers that had sprung up on Cuba’s isolated south coast.
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At the company’s foundation, the shareholders had raised £3,800 in working capital. By 1633, each ‘adventure’ had increased in value to the astronomical sum of £1,025, which meant that they had to raise yet more cash. Although they were all impatient for profits, some shareholders were slow in advancing the company the money it needed to hire and fit the next outbound ship, so the company’s treasurer, John Pym, came to rely on the largesse of the lords among them to see the colony through its infancy. They were united by their faith in God, who had led them to Providence. If the settlers’ crops failed, it only showed His hatred of sloth. He also disapproved of tobacco farming, which was why tobacco prices in London had slumped; it was just as well that the settlers had sent so little back on the Seaflower.
John Pym urged them to concentrate on growing cotton ‘till better things may be obtained and brought to perfection, which will in time be greater profit.’33 He was already victualing the Long Robert and was about to load a mill, which the settlers could use to extract oil from their castor oil plants, and an engine, which would help them process the cotton crop.
John Pym had also contracted several ‘special agents’ to conduct agronomical experiments on the island. One was Gray Finch, a surgeon whose knowledge of exotic gums, oils, and resins was highly esteemed. Another was Richard Lane, a godly man and acquaintance of Lord Brooke, who would supervise the planting of the madder bulbs Pym had procured. Madder yielded a valuable dye, which cloth makers used to achieve a range of colors, from true red through purple, yellow, orange, and light blue. English cloth makers had to import madder from Europe; better that it be grown on Providence.
Richard Lane would also be working with the island’s apothecary, Joseph Lidsey, to find the mechoacan potatoes thought to grow on the neighboring island of San Andrés. Mechoacan was the source of a purgative called ‘jalap,’ much coveted by those prone to constipation. Believing jalap to be a drug of great value, John Pym ordered the dispatch to England of a ton of mechoacan potatoes. The realization of ‘the glory of that noble design’ was only a matter of time. In anticipation of bumper crops and riches to come, John Pym instructed Philip Bell to clear a further twenty lots of twenty-five acres each, one for each of the company’s shareholders.
*Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, can be seen as a continuation of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. It is partly based on manuscripts left by Hakluyt, who had died in 1616.
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Cake, Ale, and Painful Preaching: A Banbury Tale
IN LIGHT OF THE UPROAR Capt. William Rudyerd had caused, there was a clear need to dilute the influence of the military officers on the island council. Several of the heads of families were invited to sit at the top table, and John Pym drafted instructions to Philip Bell on ‘how to proceed against any fractious person.’ Since Rudyerd’s tirades had clearly been sustained by alcohol, ‘strong waters’ were prohibited for all but those few ‘well-qualified in temperance.’1
In March 1632, the company chartered a second ship, the Charity, to sail to Providence, and set about recruiting the responsible, God-fearing civilians worthy of settling a Puritan colony. From now on, recruits could expect to keep two-thirds of what they produced, instead of the customary half-share. Shaken by Lewis Morgan’s bitter invective, the company also hoped to recruit a good Puritan minister, to reassure the settlers that they were committed to their spiritual, as well as their economic, well-being.
They were also going to need more servants. But Sir Thomas Barrington met with a lukewarm response at the annual hiring fairs, for word of the settlers’ hardships had got back to the would-be migrants of Essex. Reports of mistreatment at the hands of overweening gentry folk did not go down well with young apprentices, and many of them opted to board ships bound for Virginia or Massachusetts instead. Those who signed up to sail on the Charity did so only on condition that their wives and children were allowed to join them. The company relented:
not only did they allow women and children to sail for Providence, they assured the existing settlers that they would send out more women and a midwife.
William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, went recruiting around Banbury in Oxfordshire. Lord Saye was among the grandest of the company’s Puritan grandees. Like his father before him, he dominated the town and the surrounding villages. His manorial courts, which he presided over personally, were models of efficiency. He was also a justice of the peace, with a well-earned reputation for offering sound justice. Lord Saye was well respected by the merchants and yeomen of Banbury, partly because he was more dynamic than the county’s other nobles, but more importantly, because he was a Puritan. The town’s godliness was well known across England. Banbury’s leading families were strict Puritans and had no time for the hotchpotch of unquestioned beliefs and archaic rituals that passed for religion in England. They wanted to see the Church of England divested of trinkets and baubles, and reduced to its essence: a meeting place for the devout to interpret the word of God. This led them into conflict with traditionalists for whom religion, saints’ days, and festivals were inextricable parts of daily life.
The town’s elaborately carved medieval crosses, made famous by the ballad Ride a Cockhorse to Banbury Cross, had not survived the Reformation. Regarded as symbols of papist idolatry, they had been demolished in a fit of iconoclastic fury. Even the morris dancers who led the townspeople in making merry at weekends had been branded pagans and driven away.
In the years that followed, the town had become a recruiting ground for radical sects, like the Separatists and the Independents, ‘tradesmen or mechanical fellows who will take upon them to know who shall be saved or condemned.’2 Traditionalists regarded their sermons as suspect at best, downright seditious at worst, and many of the town’s preachers were brought before the church’s high commission to recant their ‘mistakes’ in interpreting Scripture. The town recorder, Edward Bagshaw, was called to account for a sermon in which he condemned the wealth and earthly power of the bishops who policed the Church of England. At a time when the average merchant was making £45 per year, how could a bishop justify his annual salary of £1,300? Bagshaw wanted to know.3
Venal, corrupt, meddlesome bishops were bugbears for Puritans and Parliamentary constitutionalists alike—and Lord Saye was both. His nickname of ‘Old Subtlety’ was given to him by Charles I, as a mark of respect for his formidable skill as a Parliamentary strategist. The royalist Earl of Clarendon called Lord Saye ‘a man of close and reserved nature,’ and ‘a notorious enemy of the Church,’ who had ‘great authority with all the discontented party throughout the kingdom, and a good reputation with many who were not.’4
The presence in Banbury of such a shrewd and principled man made it easier for those of the same persuasion to hold their beliefs without fear. Banbury was famous for its cakes, ale, and love of a painful preacher, but it was also known for its fierce loyalty to Parliament. King James, who had been a great exponent of the divine right of kings, was well accustomed to dismissing Parliament when it wouldn’t let him raise taxes. Lord Saye became his most hardheaded opponent in the House of Lords, and even served time in the Fleet Prison after opposing one of his illegal money-raising ventures.
Thanks to its Puritan families and the Puritan lord who protected them, Banbury was perhaps the foremost town in England in its opposition to the ‘forced loan’ that King Charles imposed on the country’s taxpayers in 1626. Charles was unmoved by their protests and imprisoned four members of the town corporation for their resistance to his tax collectors. The forced loan was not the only royal tax that Parliament refused to authorize. Until King James came to the throne, the Royal Navy was a largely mercenary force that commissioned merchant ships to do its fighting in wartime. King James was, however, blessed in having a talented shipbuilder in Phineas Pett, whose fleet of five-hundred-ton ships were a match for anything the king’s European rivals could put to sea. When Charles came to the throne in 1625, he inherited a navy of thirty-seven warships, but he deemed them insufficient to realize his ambitions, and proposed levying a tax to fund the construction of more.
‘Ship money’ had been raised before, but only in counties bordering the sea, and only in times of war. By 1634, however, Moorish pirates were regularly taking captives from English coastal towns and selling them into slavery in North Africa. The government’s failure to see them off brought disgrace on a seafaring nation, so Charles decided to levy ship money on inland counties like Oxfordshire too. The county’s landed gentry resented the new tax, and nowhere more so than in Banbury, where successive writs of ship money met with stout resistance. Such were the men of high principle and unwavering courage that Lord Saye was counting on to become the model settlers of Providence.
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Until the late 1620s, Henry Halhead’s life had been as respectable and predictable as that of any other Banbury Puritan. He was born in 1577 into the most prominent family of woolen drapers in the town, which was, in turn, one of the most notable wool-producing towns in England. In 1600, when he was twenty-three and she was just seventeen, he married Elizabeth. They had two teenage daughters, Patience and Grace, and an eight-year-old son, Samuel. Unlike his brother Thomas, who was certainly wealthy, Henry was not a taxpayer, yet the brothers rose up through the ranks of the town hierarchy together. Like Thomas, Henry became a constable of the town corporation, a churchwarden, and, in 1630, mayor of the town, just as his brother had two years before. In one of the reports he prepared while mayor, Henry explained how he raised funds for the town’s workhouse by levying fines on its ‘drunkards, tipsters and swearers,’ adding, ‘as for rogues and vagabonds, we are little troubled with them, they like their entertainment so ill.’ Henry clearly had a sense of humor, albeit a rather heartless one, and was determined to impose the Puritans’ ‘culture of discipline’ on his hometown.
Since his father had left his estate to Thomas, Henry was dependent on the wool trade to make his living. Like Essex, Oxfordshire had grown prosperous on the backs of its sheep, and the county was a major supplier of quality wool to cloth makers. Henry made his living selling ‘hats, bands, jurkins, dublets, points, breeches, stockings, garters, shoes and all other necessaries’ to the yeomen and husbandmen of north Oxfordshire.
But by 1632, the wool trade was in crisis. City of London merchants were buying up land around Banbury and enclosing it for sheep pastures, just as they were around Braintree in Essex. Henry wrote a pamphlet denouncing the enclosure movement, in which he described how cottagers turned off the common land were ‘constrained to flee into other towns.’ Consequently, every town was ‘mightily increased with poor people, who press into such towns and erect cottages…to the great annoyance and charge of the places whither they are driven.’ The recession in the cloth trade combined with the influx of landless cottagers to drive up the poor rates paid by the property owners of Banbury, and brought Henry to the point of bankruptcy.
Coincidentally, it was Henry’s trenchant opposition to the enclosure movement that first brought him to the attention of Lord Saye, who was the local champion of the landless against the evils of enclosure. Henry found himself on Lord Saye’s side again in 1628, when King Charles decided to station a regiment of soldiers in Banbury. Billeting, as it was known, was often used to punish towns that dared resist the king’s taxmen. In the pamphlet that Henry wrote denouncing enclosures, he also complains that ‘the free quarter of soldiers is so exceeding burthensome,’ for the army expected its hosts to pay for its upkeep, and the soldiers often caused trouble in town.
The army was not a popular force. England had no standing army, and the body of men that passed for one was a thoroughly unprofessional organization. The military commander Edward Cecil described how he went about recruiting men for the anti-Spanish campaign in the Netherlands. ‘We disburden the prisons of thieves, we rob the taverns and alehouses of tosspots and ruffians, we scour both towns and country of rogues and vagabonds.’5 So little
-liked was the army that in 1625, when the threat of invasion appeared imminent and Charles ordered his subjects to help the army to fortify the country’s defenses, his plea went largely unheeded. Indeed, it was the fear that billeting was the beginning of a permanent military presence in the counties of England that convinced many Englishmen and women to leave England for the Americas.
King Charles gave the job of billeting his troops in Banbury to Sir William Knollys, Earl of Banbury. As lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire, the aging earl was responsible for the county’s military affairs. He noted that ‘the causers of this denial are all neighbours to Lord Saye, who…has his instruments herein.’6 One of those instruments was undoubtedly the town’s mayor, Henry Halhead. Lord Saye knew Henry well. Apart from their staunch Puritanism and shared opposition to enclosures, the Halheads were old business acquaintances of his lordship’s family. Lord Saye was anxious to recruit someone to act as ‘father’ to the passengers on the Charity, for he didn’t want to see a repeat of the casual mistreatment that Capt. John Tanner had meted out to his passengers on the Seaflower. What could be more natural than his lordship’s suggestion that Henry take up a seat on the island council?
It seems likely that Henry would have heard about the New World from Mary Showell, who was known in Banbury for the Virginian catskin that she wore in the winter months. It was a gift from her son Isaiah, who had sailed for America a few years before. When Isaiah returned to his hometown, word soon spread of the substantial stock of tobacco and property he had built up in Virginia. Lord Saye’s promise of a fresh start in a new land caught Henry’s imagination. Unlike Virginia, the colony on Providence offered true Christians an opportunity to build a new, more godly society that would, in time, inspire God-fearing Englishmen to challenge the timorous hypocrites running the country’s churches.