by Tom Feiling
Among the plan’s other designers was another man determined to avenge the Spaniards’ capture of Providence: Thomas Gage, whose book The English American, or A New Survey of the West Indies, had been published to great acclaim in 1648. A lively account of the author’s travels in Central America and the Caribbean, it was the first such book to be written in English. No Englishman had immersed himself in Spanish colonial life as Gage had. He came from a family of Catholic priests and, as a child, had been sent to French Flanders to attend a Jesuit college sponsored by the king of Spain. But he turned his back on his Jesuit upbringing and embraced the Dominican Order, an act of defiance that earned him the contempt of his father, who disinherited him and forbade him from returning to England.
In 1625, Gage traveled to Spain, where he joined a group of fellow Dominicans who were bound for the Indies. Despite the king of Spain’s ban on foreigners in the New World, he managed to hide himself in a barrel of ship’s biscuit and spent the next twelve years ministering to the natives of Guatemala. It was while there that he began to question the Catholic faith and asked to be allowed to return to England. But his request was denied, so he began amassing the money he would need to make his escape. This he managed to do in 1637, making his way from Guatemala to Nicaragua and eventually boarding a ship bound for Cádiz. By chance, the ship was also carrying William Rous and the crew of the Blessing, who had been languishing in Santa Maria’s city’s dungeon since their disastrous attempt on Santa Marta the year before.
Thomas Gage made it back to London in time for Christmas 1637; he had been out of the country for twenty-four years. He was welcomed by his family, his father being long dead, and in 1642, he converted to Protestantism. He went on to become an especially zealous Puritan, whose exposure of recusant Catholics went some way toward assuaging the doubts of his fellow ministers. He was granted a living near Deal and settled down to write an account of his extraordinary adventures. The English American confirmed everything the English had heard of the ‘Black Legend’ of Spanish cruelty. He described the oppressive encomienda under which the native peoples of the Americas were forced to work, and echoed William Jackson’s condemnation of the decadent state the Catholic Church had fallen into. But he also drew his readers’ attention to the fabulous mineral wealth of the Spanish Empire and the wonderful opportunity to ransack it that had been lost with the fall of Providence. ‘Though but little, [Providence] might have been of a great, nay greater advantage to our kingdom than any other of our plantations in America,’ he wrote.7 It was a wrong that many of his readers were determined to put right.
Another key contributor to the Western Design was the Barbados planter Thomas Modyford. Barbados had been settled just two years before Providence, but it was burdened with none of the scruples attending the Puritan colony. The island’s planters were a notoriously hard-nosed bunch; the shipping agent Peter Hay complained that they were ‘so unfaithful that I can have no payment of them but by violence.’ They attracted indentured servants from England with promises of the new El Dorado, and then drove them into the bush to clear ground for tobacco fields. But the island’s soil did not yield a good crop; after trying some Barbadian tobacco, John Winthrop called it ‘foul, full of stalks and evil coloured.’ Barbadian tobacco was worth so little that merchant ships didn’t even bother calling at the island, and by 1639, its settlers were ‘wearied out with the small profits they reaped in their toilsome labours,’ and desperate to leave the island for a more promising location.8
Later the same year, the Earl of Warwick offered to buy the island for £12,000 (just over £1 million in today’s money), thinking it might be a good place to try his hand at growing sugarcane. The deal fell through, but the turn to sugar was made the following decade under Philip Bell, the former governor of Providence, who ran Barbados for the best part of the Civil War years. Bell invited Dutch experts to the island to impart what they had learned about growing sugar in Brazil, and by a process of trial and error, the island’s farmers learned how to produce high-quality, refined white sugar.9
Until then, they had struggled to replicate the workings of a typical English village, with white servants laboring in the fields, but the Dutch told them that better results could be had by using African slaves. The first sugar crop was shipped in 1643, and with the money made from sales in England, they were able to invest in the plantations, slaves, and mills they needed to produce sugar on a large scale. Nowhere in England could investors count on such a disciplined, unpaid workforce—or such gargantuan profits. Sugar cultivation was so lucrative that Barbados was soon producing nothing else. Such was its dominance that it became an alternative currency on the island: a pair of shoes could be had for thirty pounds of sugar and a good horse for three thousand pounds.
In putting together his Western Design, Oliver Cromwell also sought the advice of his merchant friends in the City of London. During the Civil War years, England’s merchants and financiers had looked on with jealous impotence as their Dutch rivals reaped huge profits from their trade with the Caribbean. With the victory of Parliament and the return of more stable trading conditions, they put pressure on Cromwell to take measures against the Dutch. The result was the Navigation Act of 1651, whose chief architect was the Providence Island Company’s former agent in the City of London, Maurice Thompson.
The Navigation Act marked a turn toward mercantilism, the economic theory that would guide England’s colonial policy for the next one hundred fifty years. Mercantilists believed that for any colony to thrive, it needed at least one of three things: a precious metal, a cheap supply of labor, and a staple crop or commodity to sell at home. They insisted that England’s colonies existed for the benefit of the mother country and, as such, should not be allowed to trade with her commercial rivals. It was hardly free trade, and it was bitterly resented in the colonies, but mercantilism gave English manufacturers a firm footing on which to build an export trade.
The Western Design was the first, fantastically ambitious attempt by an English government to devise a strategy for world domination. While it signaled another attempt by bombastic Puritans to return to the glory days of Queen Elizabeth, it was much more than an exercise in nostalgia. The Design was the first step in the transformation of the colonial model, away from the self-sufficient English farm idealized by Puritans like Lord Saye, and toward the slave-driven rural factories favored by planters like Thomas Modyford. Yet Cromwell’s motives were ultimately religious: if the Spanish could be dislodged, and the mercantilist model rolled out across the Caribbean, the true religion would be safe from its enemies forever.
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The expedition charged with realizing the Western Design was headed by Gen. Robert Venables, a veteran of the Parliamentary army who had spent the past five years fighting in Ireland, and Vice Adm. William Penn.* Although Penn was able to recruit well-trained sailors and his ships were in good shape, the recruitment of the expedition’s land forces was a cack-handed affair. All the regiments of England were instructed to send volunteers, and this gave the officers of the New Model Army an opportunity to rid themselves of their worst soldiers. When numbers rose no higher than two thousand five hundred, press gangs marched through the streets of English towns ‘by beat of drum,’ collaring ‘common cheats, thieves, cutpurses and suchlike lewd persons.’10
It was not an auspicious beginning, but on Christmas Day 1654, eighteen warships, twenty transport vessels, and three thousand soldiers and sailors left Portsmouth for the Caribbean. Following their arrival in Barbados, the drum went out again on the streets of Bridgetown, offering freedom to any indentured servant who volunteered for the campaign to break the Spanish hold on the New World. Among those to sign up were many of the one hundred fifty men who had fled Providence after the Spanish invasion of 1641, including Samuel Axe and Andrew Carter, who was back in the Caribbean after his spell in a dungeon in Cádiz.
Lewis Morris, the Providence veteran who had rampaged around the Caribbean with William
Jackson in 1642, was made colonel of ‘the Barbado Regiment.’ He managed to recruit three thousand five hundred men, but General Venables was not impressed by them, calling them ‘the most profane, debauched persons that we ever saw, and so cowardly as not to be made to fight.’ Finding able-bodied recruits on Barbados was far from easy; the island might have been England’s wealthiest colony, but it was also its most drunken. One of the products of sugar refining is rum, and on an island chronically short of fresh water, the ‘hot, hellish and terrible liquor’ was cheap and plentiful.11 The combination of ambitious planters freed from the strictures of home, servants impatient to improve their lot, and Irish prisoners of war was a heady mix. Drunkenness was so rife on Barbados that men were often seen lying comatose at the side of the road, where they were bitten and sometimes even eaten by land crabs.
Prior to the fleet’s departure, Cromwell had told Venables and Penn that he would not ‘tie you up to a method of any particular instructions.’12 He had complete faith in his Western Design, if only because ‘providence seemed to lead us hither.’ Free to strike where they liked, Thomas Gage, who was returning to the Caribbean as the soldiers’ chaplain, advocated a wholesale attack on Central America. With its long coastlines and weak defenses, the Spanish dominions were there for the taking, and he was confident that the entire region could be secured within two years.
But Venables and Penn ignored Gage’s advice and opted instead to attack Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, which was conveniently situated to leeward of Barbados. The commander of the expedition’s land forces was Maj. Gen. Robert Sedgwick, a New Englander who had sailed in the Mayflower. He decided to copy the tactics used by Sir Francis Drake when he had attacked the city almost seventy years before. But the assault was a fiasco. From their camp on the outskirts of the city, Venables had his men march as far as the city walls, but contrary to Gage’s confident prediction, the local Indians chose to fight alongside their Spanish masters, and their stout resistance prompted a wholesale retreat.
Back at camp, the English soldiers found that the supply ships had yet to arrive; with no tents to protect them from the torrential downpours, their leather breeches rotted on their bodies, and their gunpowder turned to a sodden cake. Knowing little of basic hygiene, they soon came down with typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever. The ships’ surgeons blamed the vapors of the night air and bled them, but this only drained what little strength they had left. Those who didn’t die from disease succumbed to heatstroke brought on by wearing too many clothes or dysentery from eating rotten rations and putrid meat. By the time the eight-thousand-strong English force left Hispaniola, two thousand of them were dead. Among the victims was Thomas Gage, who contracted malaria on Hispaniola and died the following year.
In the aftermath of the botched attack on Santo Domingo, Venables and Penn fell upon one another in a bout of mutual recrimination. If they were to avoid disgrace in London, they would have to secure an easy but suitably spectacular success elsewhere. Lewis Morris reminded them of Captain Jackson’s rout of Spanish Town in 1642, and the decision was hastily made to attack Jamaica. The Blue Mountains came into view early on 8 May 1655, and by the end of the following day, the island was in English hands.
The Western Design had struck a victory of sorts. It was one that no one had foreseen, and it would have profound implications for the future of England’s nascent empire. Two weeks later, William Penn and two-thirds of the fleet sailed for home, leaving Robert Venables on Jamaica to recover from a bout of dysentery. As soon as he was able, he followed Penn back to England, supposedly at the request of his men, who asked that he inform the Lord Protector of the atrocious conditions they were living in.
On their return, Cromwell charged both men with deserting their posts, relieved them of their commands, and imprisoned them, if only briefly, in the Tower of London. The capture of Jamaica was small recompense for the failure to take Santo Domingo. News of their failure to break the Spaniards’ hold on the Caribbean was quick to spread through Puritan circles. God had laid England ‘low in the dust’—but why? Cromwell repeatedly called for days of fasting and humiliation in the hope of an answer, but none came. The army that he had assembled to take Hispaniola had not been a godly one, he told himself. Opportunistic servants eager to escape their indentures made poor substitutes for the devout yeomen who had supplied the backbone of the New Model Army.
‘God is angry,’ said Robert Sedgwick, the commander of the expedition’s land forces. ‘What God will do with this Design I know not. I was willing some time to believe God was in it, but He yet seems to disown us.’ Unlike its authors, Sedgwick saw a fundamental flaw in the Western Design. ‘It is not honourable that Your Highness’s fleet should follow this old trade of West India cruisers and privateers, to ruin and plunder poor towns and so leave them,’ he told Cromwell.13 Providence’s Old Councillors had long railed against the reckless folly that brought the curtain down on their colony, but this was the first time a senior Puritan had acknowledged that pillage and plunder were no way to finance the building of a godly community. With the failure of the Western Design, the bridge between the Elizabethan ideal of a foreign policy directed by devout Protestants and the more pragmatic, commercially minded policy espoused by merchants in the City of London was broken. Oliver Cromwell was left to wonder at the wreck of his venture and appealed to his advisers to tell him ‘what they thought the mind of God was.’14
As the first reports came back from Jamaica, he began to get an inkling of His intentions. The island had all the blessings of Providence in abundance. It was perfectly situated to harry the sea traffic passing along the Yucatan Channel and the Windward Passage, two of the Caribbean’s principal sealanes, which the Spanish galleons used as they made their way from Cartagena to Havana. It also had a magnificent natural harbor, almost entirely enclosed from the sea, and of a size sufficient to shelter the entire English fleet. Buoyed by a conquest he had neither ordered nor foreseen, the Lord Protector sent Robert Sedgwick back to Jamaica with eight hundred soldiers from the New Model Army.
Their delight in the island’s potential was irrepressible. Jamaica was extraordinarily fertile, and being twenty-five times the size of Barbados, it offered endless opportunities to Englishmen with the ambition, capital, and slaves needed to clear the bush for sugar plantations.15 Sedgwick found just fifteen hundred Spaniards living on the island and an equal number of slaves. They had cleared little of the bush, and when he headed inland, the only signs of their presence were the pigs and cattle they had abandoned to roam wild in the hills. To a convinced Puritan like Sedgwick, such neglect of God’s bounty was testament to the decadence and sloth that had overcome the Spanish imperialists since their conquest of the New World.
The infant colony on Jamaica quickly became ‘the Lord Protector’s darling.’ For the first time, an English colony would be settled not by lone entrepreneurs or private companies, but by the government. But the capture of Jamaica could only ever be partial recompense for the loss of Providence. ‘It is much designed amongst us to strive with the Spaniards for the mastery of all those seas, and therefore we could heartily wish that the island of Providence were in our hands again,’ Cromwell wrote in a letter to Jamaica’s first governor. ‘It lies so advantageously in reference to the Main, and especially for the hindrance of the Peru trade and Cartagena, that you might not only have great advantage thereby of intelligence and surprise, but even block up the same.’16 The Western Design had struck its first victory, but the Lord Protector would not sleep easy until Providence was in English hands again.
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Jamaica’s Spanish settlers were taken to Cartagena, where they spread the news of Cromwell’s capture of the island and his plan to retake Providence. The city’s colonial officials might have considered such an outcome a blessing; keeping a garrison on Santa Catalina was costing them 20,000 pesos (£960,000) a year, but without significant investment in its fortifications, it was practically indefensible. Yet
Madrid was determined to hold on to it, and the loss of Jamaica only brought into stark relief the need to repair its fortifications. Muskets, powder, and harquebuses were dispatched on the next ship. In a letter to King Philip IV, Gerónimo de Ojeda admitted that he and his men awaited the heretics’ arrival ‘with infinite concern.’17 Over the course of 1657, they saw English vessels reconnoitering the island on three occasions, but the enemy stayed several leagues offshore, and by the following year, the garrison had returned to its melancholy slumber.
Two years later, Fernando de la Riva Agüero, captain general of the Spanish Main in Panama, wrote to his majesty to remind him of the neglected garrison on Santa Catalina, and ‘the travail that soldiers in that solitude have so long suffered.’ Were it not for Governor Ojeda, their plight would have been considerably worse. ‘I have heard for many years that only his good nature, care and tenderness have conserved the garrison in peace and happiness,’ Riva Agüero wrote. Perhaps some new recruits might be sent to relieve the soldiers? He also suggested dispatching four hundred slaves to clear land for plantations capable of yielding crops on a large scale, and fifty ‘women who have been leading scandalous lives in Cartagena and Panama.’18
Any surprise Gerónimo de Ojeda might have felt at Riva Agüero’s sudden interest in his island was tempered by his advancing age. The island’s governor was by then in his fiftieth year of service to his king. The soldiers in the garrison had been with him since driving the English out in 1641, and they had grown old together. Despite their country’s independence from Spain and the repeated requests to be repatriated that they had made as young men, even the Portuguese soldiers had become resigned to island life. The garrison was past caring what the colonial authorities had planned for them.