The Island that Disappeared Page 9
But the article had gone on to say that while in Madrid, the Duke of Buckingham met a Spanish official who told him about the Miskito Indians. According to ‘Don Fennyn,’ the Miskitos were more resistant to Spanish encroachment than any other native tribe of Central America. Yet they were ‘besotted by a prediction that there shall come a nation unto them, with flaxen hair, white complexion and grey eyes, that shall govern them.’4 If Don Fennyn was to be believed, the Miskitos looked upon the English as their liberators.
Just as young Spaniards grew up listening to stories of the villainous English pirate Don Francisco Draco, so the shareholders had grown up listening to the ‘Black Legend’ of Spanish cruelty toward the Indians of South America. Several of them were likely to have read the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Published in 1583, it offered a firsthand account of how the Spanish had betrayed their Christian duty to convert the heathens, and had instead enslaved them. Elfrith’s rutter showed the Miskito Coast to be just 150 miles west of Providence. Was this not a sign from God, reminding the shareholders of their duty to carry the Gospel to the benighted natives of the New World? The company’s secretary, William Jessop, hurriedly composed a letter to Philip Bell, instructing him to mount an expedition to the coast.
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Christopher Columbus had visited the coast of Central America on his third expedition to the Americas, but it was only on his fourth and final voyage that he actually landed on the isthmus. Shortly afterward, his ship was engulfed by a storm and would have been wrecked had he not found shelter in a lagoon close to a headland. ‘¡Gracias a Dios que hemos salido de estas honduras!’ he declared (‘Thank God, we’ve escaped these depths!’). As a result, the cape became known as Cabo Gracias a Dios, and the gulf that ran west from it, Honduras. In the years that followed, the Spanish built prosperous towns at Panama, Granada, and Guatemala, but they showed little interest in the Caribbean coast. Between Portobello and the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, a distance of over twelve hundred miles, they established only two settlements. Their control over the rest of the coast was nominal, and the Miskito Coast was still practically unknown.
As the island’s admiral, Daniel Elfrith was the natural choice to lead the expedition. But the company was unwilling to give too much leeway to the sailors on the island council, most of whom were veterans of countless skirmishes with the Spanish and had little understanding of their patrons’ evangelism. Elfrith and the other old hands were told to focus their attention on building the island’s fortifications, and leadership of the expedition was instead entrusted to Richard Lane, a devout man of God and eminent botanist with a keen interest in the flora and fauna of the New World. The company’s secretary, William Jessop, told him ‘to ingratiate yourself and your company with the Indians,’ find out ‘what things are most in esteem’ among them, and ‘by a civil carriage, modest behaviour, and affable condition, labour to possess them with the natural goodness of the English nation.’5
But Richard Lane couldn’t be expected to mount an expedition to the Spanish Main alone. Capt. Sussex Camock and Capt. Samuel Axe, both veterans of the Thirty Years’ War, were no diplomats, but at least they knew how to sail. They were authorized to take as many men as they needed. They took fifty, among them William Blauveldt’s brother, Albertus, who knew the coast as well as Daniel Elfrith. They sailed on the Golden Falcon in 1633.
Each man aboard had his own reasons for befriending the Miskitos. The more trepidatious among them hoped that the coast would serve as a refuge in the event that the Spanish drove them from Providence. The tenant farmers hoped to find precious dyewoods and exotic crops that could be transplanted to the colony. The artificers and servants only hoped to meet some Miskito women, who might alleviate the dearth of female company in the colony.
The Miskito Coast stretches for two hundred seventy miles from the mouth of the River San Juan, on the border between contemporary Costa Rica and Nicaragua, north to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then west to the mouth of the Black River in Honduras. There are few landmarks in the lagoons and mangrove swamps—so few that Miskitos traveling down the coast in search of turtles navigated by misshapen trees and stands of cabbage palms. Sussex Camock had the crew of the Golden Falcon row ashore in longboats, and Richard Lane led a small party to explore the inland savanna. They found it to be boggy, suitable for pasture but not cultivation. Beyond the sandy hills, which were crowded with pines and cedars, were mountains covered with dense jungle.
The party came to the mouth of a large river and headed upstream. The river teemed with turtles and alligators, freshwater sharks and stingrays, and its banks supported great stands of mahogany. Venturing into the jungle beyond, they spotted anteaters, armadillos, and wild pigs foraging in the undergrowth. That evening, when they gathered around the campfire to smoke their pipes, they watched monkeys clambering through the branches overhead, and listened to the distant roar of jungle cats.* In the days that followed, Lane’s party traveled forty leagues—about one hundred twenty miles—upriver, carrying knives, axes, machetes, and glass beads, which they hoped to barter with the inhabitants of the riverside villages they came to. The natives knew nothing of metalworking and welcomed these strange tools, but had little to offer in return.
Meanwhile, Capt. Sussex Camock was cruising the shallow coastal waters. He found that the most desolate stretch ran from Cape Gracias a Dios to what became known as Brancman’s Bluff, sixty miles to the south. It was largely barren land, and the sand flies were far from hospitable, but it was there that the Miskitos lived. There were no more than two thousand of them, living in longhouses that accommodated up to twenty-five people. The Miskitos were happy to act as conduits for Captain Camock’s trading venture. In return for the Englishman’s knives, axes, machetes, and glass beads, they sourced a variety of exotic plants from the tribes that lived farther inland. Captain Camock built huts and storage sheds, and a busy trading post soon sprang up at the cape.
Among the goods the Miskitos brought back from their forays inland was lignum vitae; this was a promising discovery, for resin from the ‘wood of life’ was believed to be an effective treatment for syphilis. Being the island’s only botanist, Richard Lane was also keen to secure supplies of pine gum, agave, and sarsaparilla. These days sarsaparilla is used as a flavoring for drinks, but in seventeenth-century England, it was used to treat a variety of maladies, among them syphilis, elephantiasis, and scrofula. The Miskitos also supplied him with the red annatto berries that they smeared on their skin to ward off the sand flies. Lane thought it would make a good dye for their lordships’ woolens.
Among the other items on Richard Lane’s shopping list were several oddities gleaned from stories told by early English travelers to Asia. The Miskitos tried and failed to procure the bezoar stone said to grow in the stomachs of certain small animals, which the English believed to be an antidote to various ailments. Nor could they find the ‘stone in the alligator’s head’ that their strange new friends asked for, though they doubtless cracked a few heads open along the way. Instead, they introduced Camock to the manatee, which ‘has a stone in the bladder, very helpful to women in travail.’6
Members of the expedition had plenty of time to wonder after the Miskitos during their stay at Cape Gracias a Dios. They were sturdy, squat people who went naked but for a loincloth, which they made by pounding the inner bark of a tree related to the rubber tree into a coarse sheet. They wore ornaments in their noses, lips, and ears, and carefully oiled and combed their straight black hair. Theirs looked to be an easy life: In the morning, the men went hunting or fishing. During the rainy season, when rising floodwaters forced the fauna onto isolated knolls, there were plenty of deer and wild pigs to be found; when the floodwaters receded, they revealed alligator, tortoise, and lizards’ eggs in the riverbanks. The brackish lagoons were home to a variety of fish, including a species of large mullet that they harpooned at night by torchlight. They also ate m
anatees, which Camock likened to veal, and green turtles, which they harpooned with heavy palm wood spears tipped with flint, attached to twenty feet of silk-grass line.
When Captain Camock first saw the Miskito men whiling away their afternoons in their hammocks, he thought them lazy. But he was astonished by the distances they covered in their canoes, with no sign of fatigue. They seemed to have an almost spiritual affinity with their canoes, which they called ‘dories.’ When a Miskito boy came of age, his father felled a tree, burned away the core with hot coals, and hollowed it out to make his son a dory. When the old man died, his son would bury his paddle and harpoon alongside his body, and split his dory in two.
On festive occasions, such as followed a successful hunting trip, the men invited neighbors from miles around to come to their village to partake of a fermented brew they called ‘mishla.’ After a few cups of mishla, they would start to tell stories, which often ended in drunken brawling. Unsurprisingly, the women hid the men’s weapons as soon as they started drinking mishla. The life of a Miskito woman looked similarly relaxed. Apart from gathering fruits, berries, and coconuts, there was little to do. They needed maize to make mishla, but they preferred to steal it from neighboring tribes than to grow it themselves.
Aside from their bouts of extreme drunkenness and the casual violence they meted out to neighboring tribes, Captain Camock was appalled to see that the Miskitos left deformed children on the shore to be eaten by seabirds. But he also noted that they were capable of great tenderness, were quick to forgive, and showed no signs of vengefulness. Nor were they divided by rank or property. There was a headman, who was selected for his hunting prowess and called himself a king, but he seemed to have little real authority. His longhouse was set apart from the others, but that was all that marked him out from the rest of the tribe.7
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Following the expedition’s return to Providence, Philip Bell prepared several trunks, packages, earthenware jars, and rolls of hides for dispatch to England. Among the cornucopia of exotic goods to find their way to market in London was sugarcane, the local variant of which Captain Camock judged to be ‘as fair as any in the world.’8 However, the two most promising commodities traded at the cape were both new to the merchants of the City of London. The first was a tough seagrass that Camock had found growing in abundance on the sandy soil of the Miskito Coast. Following trials made by ‘Mr White of Dorchester,’ who testified that ‘Camock’s flax’ made ‘a very fine thread, and spins much better than ordinary flax,’ the company judged it to be ‘a solid commodity fit for the general manufacture,’ worth at least four shillings a pound.9 The shareholders ordered two hundred tons of the stuff, and set about hiring a bigger ship. The Miskitos had also introduced their new friends to an American variant of the vanilla plant, which they called ‘dette.’ ‘Men of understanding’ told company secretary William Jessop that dette would also prove valuable, so he instructed Camock to source cuttings to grow on Providence.10
Jessop’s letter acknowledged that Providence’s climate had proven too hot for castor oil plants, and drew Philip Bell’s attention to his latest procurement of seedlings. These included indigo, which yielded the rich blue dye that had long been the preserve of the Spanish nobility. The company also instructed the governor to plant more food crops, for a second party of colonists would soon be arriving on the Charity. As soon as the islanders were producing enough food to feed them, more would follow.
Sussex Camock’s expedition to trade with the Miskitos was the first of many. In August 1634, the company instructed him to build a small redoubt at the cape, in recognition of the trade’s importance. On his next trip to the coast, Captain Camock took four cannon, some smaller arms, and a supply of ammunition, under strict instructions not to let them fall into the Miskitos’ hands. But the Miskitos were fascinated by the guns and soon became expert in their use, to the delight of the English and the lasting regret of their neighbors.
As time went on, the English and the Miskitos grew to depend on one another. ‘These Indians are extremely skilled in spearing turtles, manatees and fish,’ the privateer and surgeon Alexander Exquemelin was to write in the 1670s.11 ‘An Indian is capable of keeping a whole ship’s company of 100 men supplied with food.’ Turtles were an especially important discovery, for they could be kept alive below decks for months on end, supplying fresh meat to sailors on the longest voyage.
Impressed by their skills as fishermen, Captain Camock invited several Miskito men to return to Providence with him. Each side was amazed at the other’s strange customs: The Miskitos were dumbstruck by the wooden world of the Golden Falcon, and the thick woolen clothes their new friends wore even at midday. The English couldn’t understand how the Miskitos could live without names. In 1684, the privateer William Dampier described how the Miskitos ‘take it as a great favour to be named by any of us, saying of themselves that they are poor men and have no name.’12
A knowledgeable and willing Indian guide was priceless to anyone unaccustomed to Caribbean life. The Miskitos taught them to use aloe vera to treat their sunburn and to prepare tea with the young leaves of the annatto plant to treat their diarrhea. They had brought a supply of iguanas with them from the coast, which they kept as fresh food whenever they went into the hills to cut wood with the carpenters. They also took the English to the cays of Roncador and Quitasueño, where the turtles came ashore to lay their eggs.
When the shareholders learned that there were Miskito men living with the settlers on Providence, they stipulated that if they could not be restrained from practicing their idolatrous worship, they were to be removed from the island, ‘so there may be no mixture of paganism with the pure religion of Almighty God.’ They were reassured to discover that the Miskitos performed no religious ceremonies, had no idols, and made no sacrifices. They had many superstitious beliefs—they feared rainbows and believed that certain trees were haunted—but even the most vituperative Puritan could not fail to be struck by their readiness to hear the word of God.
Converting the natives of Central America to the true religion had always been a priority for the company. As Rev. Hope Sherrard put it in a letter written to his patron, Sir Thomas Barrington, shortly after his arrival, ‘The Lord in mercy crowns their honours’ noble undertakings in these parts with a glorious purpose, yet the gospel may be planted on the Main. What glory thereby would accrue to God!’13 The company suggested that Miskito children be invited to live on Providence as well, ‘if they may be had with their parents’ good liking.’ With three new ministers due to arrive on the Charity, the heathen children could be given a Christian education whose benefits they could share with the rest of their tribe when they returned to the coast.
Within a year of Sussex Camock’s first voyage to the coast, Miskito children had joined the all-male households of New Westminster. The company told their English ‘fathers’ they were to treat them ‘as tenderly careful as if they were your own.’ They raised them as they might their servants’ children, expecting them to perform simple tasks around the home from the age of ten and to attend church in the evenings.
While the company found a ready place for Miskito men and their children, Miskito women were more problematic. The company was well aware of the settlers’ hunger for female company, but didn’t want to antagonize their only allies in the region, and ruled that no Miskito women were to be brought to the island, ‘for fear of some inconveniences depending thereon.’14 Only with time did they realize that most Miskito men would happily barter their wives and daughters with their new friends in exchange for a good knife. In the years to come, several of the islanders took native wives. Even Philip Bell, who had come to Providence with his English wife, had his Indian woman.
Such was the warmth between native and newcomer that the Miskito headman-cum-king even agreed to send his young son to England as a guest of the Earl of Warwick. Perhaps he was fulfilling the prophecy recounted to the Duke of Buckingham by ‘Don Fennyn’—that a gray-e
yed race of men would come and live among them, and deliver them from the cruelty of the Spaniards? His trust in the English was not blind, however: before he would allow his son to sail for England, he asked that the company send a young Englishman, Lewis Morris, to the coast to act as security for his safe return.
The Miskito prince, whom the English called ‘Oldman,’ left for England with an assortment of gifts, among them silk grass, textiles, potions, and remedies. He lived in London for three years, was assigned a tutor, and soon ‘acquired a working knowledge of English, a taste for the accoutrements of European life and a desire to please his new friends.’ Young Oldman became a great favorite at the court of King Charles, ‘from whom he met with the most gracious reception, and who had him often with him on his private parties of pleasure.’ Charles admired ‘his activity, strength and many accomplishments.’15 Oldman would likely have stayed in London longer, but his sojourn was cut short by news of his father’s death.
Before he left England, Charles gave him a laced hat to serve as a ceremonial headdress and a document requesting that he lend assistance to any Englishman who happened upon the Miskito Coast in future. Oldman returned home armed with a newfound sense of his own importance, bestowed on him by his powerful benefactors. At his coronation ceremony, he led the Miskito elders in swearing allegiance to his new friend Charles, king of England.