by Tom Feiling
His first prize was a Spanish slave ship, which he took off Trujillo and successfully ransomed for eight thousand pounds of indigo, two enormous gold chains, and 2,000 pieces of eight (£96,000 in modern money). He returned to England, where he sold his prizes to the earl’s friends in the City of London, before heading back to the Caribbean to round up the remaining privateers of Providence. In July 1642, he rendezvoused with Samuel Axe and William Rous, the former commanders of Fort Warwick, on the island of St. Kitts. He made Axe his vice admiral and captain of the two-hundred-forty-ton Valentine, and appointed Rous commander of his land forces. Next, he hired the Dolphin to serve as his supply ship. Its master was Lewis Morris, another Providence veteran, who as a teenager had spent three years living with the Miskitos as security for Prince Oldman’s safe return from England.
Providence’s former privateers were akin to a lodestone, attracting loose particles wherever they went. On Barbados, they found no end of men willing to sign up on the usual principle of ‘no purchase, no pay.’ Jackson took on five hundred men and turned away twice that number, with ‘every one that was denied entertainment reputing himself unfortunate,’ according to the voyage’s anonymous journal keeper.17 The six vessels in Jackson’s fleet sailed north, aiming for the island of Hispaniola. The Spaniards’ first and largest Caribbean colony had miles of unguarded coastline on its southern shore, where runaway servants and slaves eked out a living from hunting the huge herds of cattle that the island’s first Spanish settlers had abandoned to roam wild. They lived on beef, which they grilled on ‘boucans’ (hence the name ‘buccaneer’), traded cowhides for gunpowder and rum, and made a name for themselves as soldiers for hire.
William Jackson was a formidable soldier, but like so many of the first English adventurers to venture into Caribbean waters, he was a terrible mariner. He sailed without a rutter and soon got lost en route to Hispaniola. When the crew began suffering for want of victuals, William Rous ‘did greatly encourage and suscitate the dropping spirits of his men, and by showing himself a forward pattern of plausible patience, taught them the readiest way to support languishing nature by eating of boiled hides.’
By the time they reached Hispaniola in December, Jackson was having second thoughts about attacking such a well-fortified colony, and announced that they would instead mount an assault on the smaller island of Jamaica. He found more willing volunteers among the buccaneers and sailed west with eight hundred ninety men and sixteen ships under his command. The Spanish authorities had not afforded Jamaica much importance, and Jackson’s men were able to rout its two thousand defenders without a fight. So taken were the invaders by the island that they wanted to settle it right away. ‘The temperature of the clement, and salubrity of the air may be well discerned in the good complexion and long life of the inhabitants, who here attain to greater age than those in many of the neighbouring islands,’ wrote the journal keeper. The fertility of the island soils, the wealth of fruit growing in its trees, and the prosperity of the Spaniards’ plantations inspired him to flights of rhapsody not heard since the discovery of Providence. ‘Whatsoever is fabled by the poets, or maintained by historians concerning the Arcadian plains or the Thessalian Tempe, may here be verified and truly affirmed,’ he raved.
Long before the first party of Englishmen ventured ashore at Cape Gracias a Dios, the Miskitos had prophesized that a gray-eyed race of men would come and save them from Spanish tyranny. William Jackson found the same divine validation for their voyage to Jamaica after speaking to the Spaniards’ African slaves, who told him of ‘the inward desire they had to change their old masters.’ He assured them that the English would soon be back to drive the Spaniards out for good. On hearing this, the Africans ‘seemed greatly to rejoice,’ for it corresponded with ‘a confident opinion long rooted in them, that they shall one day come under the subjection of the English.’
Jackson ransomed Jamaica for ‘200 beaves [cattle] and 10,000 pound weight of cassavy bread for the victualing of our ships…and 17,000 pieces of eight (£816,000 in today’s money).’ After returning the island to its governor, his men spent the next two weeks slaughtering and salting their cattle. It was at this point that a letter arrived from England, informing William Rous that he had been elected MP for Dartmouth. He sailed for England and took his seat in the Long Parliament in time to celebrate Oliver Cromwell’s promotion to the head of the largest of the Parliamentary armies.
Jackson and the rest of the privateers sailed on to Trujillo, ‘where each man expected to make himself a second Croesus.’* But the port had been plundered by Dutch and French privateers since the captain’s last visit, and they found it ‘in a very poor and ruinous condition. Upon diligent search, we found diverse chests of sugar, tobacco, sarsaparilla and some small quantity of plate, but nothing of any considerable value.’ Before leaving the town, they were approached by a group of one hundred twenty Miskitos who had been evacuated from the island of Ruatan after the capture of William Claiborne’s tiny colony. They humbly requested that their gray-eyed friends take them home, so Jackson made for Cape Gracias a Dios, where
the Indians in their canoes came aboard our Vice Admiral to visit their old acquaintances, Captain Axe and Lewis Morris, the master who had formerly lived among them. These Cape Indians are our friends and diverse of them speak and understand our language, by reason of the great correspondence they held with the islanders of Providence before it was taken up by the Spaniards.
From the Miskito Coast, the privateers headed south, in the hope of finding gold in the colonial villages of Central America. Their initial forays inland came to nothing, ‘yet it is certain that the Spaniards enjoy and possess incredible mass of wealth in those parts…for Castilia de Oro, or Golden Castle, has not his name for nothing.’ Not to be discouraged, they made for Bogo del Drago (today’s Bocas del Toro, on the border between Panama and Costa Rica), where ‘Captain Wolner with some of his men, going unadvisedly on shore, were suddenly seized by a company of cannibals and man eaters, and never after seen.’ It was a timely reminder that not all the native peoples of the Americas regarded the English as their liberators.
Undeterred, Jackson made for Tolú, ‘the garden of Cartagena, from whence that magnificent metropolis is furnished with all manner of dainty provisions.’ Finding ‘good pillage’ in the town, they stayed for four days, but the inhabitants refused to negotiate a ransom. Incensed by their stubbornness, Jackson burned their town to the ground, ‘leaving them to cuddle their crosses in dust and ashes.’ His contempt for the Spaniards’ religion only grew more bitter when he reached the indigenous village of Chaupotón, where the Indians’ ‘heathenish temples are now become the monasteries of Franciscan friars.’ Not only were the Spanish ‘mixing paganism with the pure religion of Almighty God,’ they kept
these poor Indians under a miserable servitude and subjection, and they themselves living in all manner of luxury and excess, of which we had sufficient proof by taking two of these epicures in the night time, whilst they were drinking and revelling with their whores.
Captain Jackson had seen enough; after almost four years of roving, raiding and pillaging, he was feeling both sated and inspired, and decided to sail for England. For want of firepower, he had failed to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet, but he returned to Deptford with a welcome taste of things to come: a huge cargo of indigo worth 150,000 pesos (£7 million in today’s money). But he was also carrying something of even greater value: knowledge, both of the Caribbean and Spain’s weakening hold on it.
The strength of the Spaniards in these occidental regions is far inferior to what they have themselves so much boasted of…These American Spaniards are an idle, cowardly and effeminate people, not exercised nor brought up in war-like discipline, but much degenerating from the spirits of their ancestors, who first conquered those parts.
William Jackson’s account tallied with the reports of the English ambassador in Madrid. Dependency on American gold and silver had sapped the str
ength from Spain’s domestic economy. The king’s treasury was empty and the foreign bankers he had come to depend on were unwilling to extend him more credit. Not only were foreign privateers disrupting legal commerce between Spain’s Caribbean ports, the country’s merchants were being undercut by their foreign rivals. Spain still held the three big islands of the Greater Antilles—Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. English, French, and Dutch colonists were still confined to islands so small they barely warranted inclusion on Spanish maps—the English had Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. But the Spanish had neither the ships nor the men needed to evict them, and the interlopers were intent on extending their reach in the Caribbean basin.
Even in the midst of the Civil War, England’s imperialists had kept a careful eye on their colonies. During the Long Parliament, which continued to sit for the duration of the war, the Earl of Warwick was appointed both lord admiral of the navy and governor-in-chief of the colonies. In September 1641, just two months after he had given Jackson his letters of marque, a Parliamentary committee renewed the call he had first made in the 1620s, for the incorporation of an English company to rival the Dutch West India Company. Such a company would combine the functions of a private company with those of a national army, building colonies in the Caribbean, attacking Spanish ports, and storming the ships that sailed between them. But its broader purpose was to split Spain’s American empire in two and pave the way for the creation of a Protestant empire in Central America.
In 1643, Parliament established a Committee for the Colonies, whose members included the Earl of Warwick, John Pym, and Oliver Cromwell, to supplant the king’s Commission for Foreign Plantations. A pamphlet published the same year, Certain Inducements to Well Minded People, reiterated the imperial ideal espoused by the Providence Island Company, by calling for the creation of an English colony on the Miskito Coast. It was addressed to the many thousands who had suffered ‘by the plundering and utter ruin of their estates, by the cruelty of the Cavaliers, or through the decay of trading.’
By moving to the Miskito Coast, Englishmen would become ‘more free to each other, in acts of hospitality, courtesy, relief and commerce,’ as well as ‘more liberal to God in public and domestic duties.’18 Migrants were offered sixty acres, on lifelong freehold leases. They would have houses and gardens in the colony’s capital, and their servants would be granted the same when they completed their indentures. The proposed colony would be built on a familiar conflation of public duty and private gain: by taking the light of the true religion to the benighted Indians, an ambitious Englishman could become rich in Central America, and save his soul in the bargain. Many of the Providence Island Company’s former shareholders backed the scheme and set about raising the £300,000 they judged necessary to put the new colony on a firm footing.
*Croesus (595 BC—c. 546 BC) was the king of Lydia. He was renowned for his fabulous wealth and is credited with being the first monarch to issue true gold coins with a standardized purity for general circulation.
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The Western Design
FOLLOWING THE EXECUTION OF KING Charles, England was declared a republican Commonwealth, to be governed by Parliament, aided by the General Council, and presided over by Oliver Cromwell. The mightiest organs of state, including the House of Lords, were abolished, and power was devolved from London to the regions. Encouraged by the Puritan scythe that had cut the Royalists down to size, as much as by the end of royal censorship, the country was swept up on a wave of preaching, proselytizing and pamphleteering that would not be seen again until the mass mobilizations of the Victorian era.
Parliament had abolished episcopacy in 1646; with no bishops to police the religious life of the country, sects multiplied. According to a Royalist church minister from London,
every day begets a new opinion, it faring with them, as with the ancient heretics, who having once forsaken the truth wandered from one error to another, that they agreed only in this one thing: to do mischief to the Church of God.1
The execution of the king had put an end to the war in England, but it continued to rage in Ireland and Scotland. In August 1649, Oliver Cromwell sailed to Ireland to put down the insurrection that had begun with the rebellion of 1641. At Drogheda and Wexford, his troops engaged in mass slaughter, supposedly to avenge the deaths of Protestant settlers. If the Irish campaign stopped up the gap through which foreign powers might have come to the relief of their fellow Catholics, it also paved the way for the large-scale appropriation of lands that Cromwell had earmarked for his friends in the City of London who had financed the campaign. He treated the rebels much as the first settlers of New England had treated rebellious Indians: he had them shipped to Barbados in chains. In July 1650, his army crossed the River Tweed and routed the Scottish forces at Dunbar, and the following year, he crushed the combined Royalist and Scottish armies at Worcester.
After nine years of intermittent conflict, the civil wars were at an end, and Cromwell was free to roll out his Commonwealth across the three kingdoms. Preoccupation with domestic affairs gave way to an energetic interest in foreign pursuits.2 With a newfound confidence in the ability of the army and navy, the Caribbean still looked to many Englishmen a suitable arena for the national effort in empire building. Providence might have fallen to the Spanish, but over the next forty years, it would continue to inspire England’s most bellicose soldiers, sailors, ministers, and settlers. The island had become their talisman, and the prospect of retaking it fired their imaginations, just as William Jackson’s voyage around Spain’s decadent empire had in the war years.
The lessons of the fall of Providence were far from clear. Some of the company’s shareholders blamed the lack of government support for the venture; others, the company’s failure to find a profitable crop. The contradiction at the heart of Puritan imperialism seems to have passed them by: the company had failed to attract the industrious ‘middling sort’ that had made a success of New England in sufficient numbers. In the absence of right-minded settlers, the godly had been outnumbered by the earthly, and by the time the shareholders offered their tenants the opportunity to buy the land they farmed, and a say in who governed them, it was too late.
Back in 1628, John Pym had opposed extra-Parliamentary taxation in Parliament, asking ‘who will contend, who will endanger himself for that which is not his own?’3 The same words might have been etched on the epitaph for the colony on Providence. By 1640, there were six representative assemblies in the colonies: Barbados, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven. As in England, the franchise was limited to property owners, but the colonists’ demand for more autonomy still caused alarm at home, for there were no nobles in the colonies to steer the voters’ judgment, and commoners were considered incapable of wielding authority responsibly.
The Somers Isles Company had more success than the Providence Island Company, both in building a devout community of believers and in replicating the life of an English village. By 1638, the company had built nine churches, a chapel, and five houses for the island’s ministers. Unlike Providence’s Old Councillors, the Somers Isles’ godlier settlers were brought low, not by privateers, but by the Privy Council in London, which interfered in the religious life of the colony to a degree never attempted on Providence. Prior to his imprisonment, Archbishop Laud had condemned unlicensed ministers who went to the Somers Isles to ‘preserve their factious and schismatical humours,’ and ordered them back to England.4
Oliver Cromwell had no intention of persecuting his fellow believers for their interpretation of Scripture—at least, not unless they were Catholics. ‘In things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason,’ he once said.5 His abiding purpose was to make the reformed religion secure, which meant protecting England from its enemies within, as well as preparing for a potential invasion by the Spanish. Neither danger would go away until the link between Spain and the source of its riches had been severed.
Yet Cromwell was unsure of how best to proceed. Seeking the counsel of men more learned than himself, in 1651 he initiated a correspondence with John Cotton, New England’s foremost interpreter of Biblical prophecy. ‘What is the Lord doing? What prophesies are now fulfilling?’ he asked him. The minister told him that ‘to take from the Spaniards in America would be to dry up the Euphrates,’ and reminded him of the prophesy made in Revelation 16:12. Mankind’s last days on earth would begin when ‘the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.’ Cotton’s suggestion that Cromwell might be one of ‘the kings of the east,’ and that the Euphrates could be interpreted to mean the Caribbean was all the justification England’s leader needed.
In 1653, Cromwell took the title of Lord Protector. The Manifesto of the Lord Protector was the work of a committee that included among its members Lord Saye’s son Nathaniel Fiennes and Cromwell’s Latin (or foreign) secretary, the poet and arch-Puritan John Milton. The manifesto asserted that Spain’s claim to exclusivity over America, whether by papal gift, discovery, or even settlement, was baseless. England had both natural and treaty rights to trade in the Caribbean, and Spain’s depredations against its merchants and colonies, to say nothing of their ‘outrageous’ treatment of the Miskitos, were justification enough for English aggression. ‘We must have war, where the Spaniards will not let us have peace,’ the manifesto concluded.6
After months of planning and consulting, Cromwell and his colleagues came up with an audacious plan to hit back at the archenemy of Protestantism. The Western Design was inspired by the Spanish invasion of Providence. Cromwell had four cousins among the Providence Island Company’s shareholders, and when the time came to put together a coherent program for imperial expansion, he consulted them closely. Several of the shareholders had died in the war years—John Pym and Lord Brooke in 1643, and Sir Thomas Barrington the following year. But the Earl of Warwick was lord admiral of the navy and governor-in-chief of the colonies, and William Jessop was effectively secretary to the Admiralty, and they were instrumental in shaping the design.