The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Thomas Modyford’s policies, and the men he hired to realize them would shape Jamaica forever. George Monck was keen to maintain the aggressive intent that had inspired the Western Design, and thanks to his counsel, the new king was no less committed to empire building than Cromwell. Memories of Providence were uppermost in the minds of the Committee for Foreign Plantations’ members, and they kept English plans for the colonization of Central America alive. In March 1666, Modyford remarked that the Miskito Coast and the River San Juan remained ‘the properest and most probable places to lay a foundation for the conquest of the whole of Central America, if ever the reason of state at home require any attempt.’2

  For the time being, however, reasons of state kept his attention focused on Jamaica. There were still pockets of resistant Spanish settlers and runaway slaves in the island’s mountainous interior, and although Adm. Robert Blake had destroyed the Spanish fleet at Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands in 1657, the Spanish had already made two attempts to retake the island, both of which were repulsed.

  Charles II had reasons of his own to adopt a belligerent stance. In 1656, he had sent Lord Arlington to Madrid to seek Philip IV’s help in recovering the throne. He had offered to return Jamaica, and even to deny his merchants access to Spain’s colonies, but Philip had stood aloof, and his indifference earned him the new king’s lasting resentment.

  Once the crown was firmly sitting on his head, Charles demanded ‘good correspondence and free commerce with the plantations and territories belonging to the King of Spain or his subjects in the West Indies.’3 This went down well in Port Royal, which had supplanted Spanish Town as Jamaica’s capital, in recognition of the importance of trade. Until land was cleared for sugar plantations, the island’s prosperity would depend on its role as an entrepôt for English canvas, rope, cloth, and iron, all of which were in strong demand in the towns and villages of the Spanish Main.

  But free trade was a concept alien to Philip IV. Despite his country’s inability to supply basic goods to its colonies, and the exorbitant prices its merchants charged for what little they did, merchants on the Spanish Main were forbidden to trade with foreigners. The Spanish monopoly on trade with its colonies created economic stagnation at home and made it even more dependent on American silver and gold. It also gave rise to corruption, inefficiency, and smuggling on a vast scale in the Caribbean.

  The chief beneficiaries of the trade in contraband goods were the myriad small workshops that sprang up in England in the years after the Restoration, and by extension, Charles’s tax collectors. In 1662, the Committee for Foreign Plantations had told Modyford’s predecessor that, ‘If the governors of the King of Spain shall refuse to admit our subjects to trade, you shall in such case endeavour to procure and settle a trade with his subjects in those parts by force.’4

  Since Philip had no intention of granting the English the right to trade with his colonies, and Jamaica’s position ‘within his bowels and in the heart of his trade’ was always likely to provoke another attempt to recapture the island, Modyford made defense his top priority.5 Without it, the planters could have no confidence in the long-term future of the colony and would not invest in the sugar plantations and mills the island needed to thrive.

  The Royal Navy might have been dominant in European waters, but it was not yet able to offer Jamaica permanent protection, so he was dependent on English merchant ships to defend the island from attack. Fear of a surprise Spanish attack would bind Jamaica’s governor to its privateers for the next twenty years, and Modyford made no attempt to disguise his ties to these private armies. Instead, he assumed the right to grant privateering commissions to the captain of any merchant ship willing to combine legal trade with ‘the subduing of all our enemies by sea or land within and upon the coasts of America.’6 A letter of marque from the governor of Jamaica was indispensible for any captain hoping to plunder Spanish ships and settlements; without it, he was little better than a pirate. This was no concession to the Spanish; rather, it was a guarantee that Modyford—and King Charles—would get a cut of whatever booty was landed in Port Royal.

  The martial spirit was good for England’s colonies. Stolen Spanish goods brought New England merchants to Port Royal, and their cargoes of fish, corn, and hides were welcomed by the settlers of Jamaica. Yet when Thomas Modyford arrived to take up the post of governor in 1664, he was carrying orders to cease all attacks on Spanish shipping. For the time being at least, Charles was keen to placate the Spanish. This left Port Royal’s sea captains high and dry. Takings from privateering shrank to a pittance, and many sailors were left practically destitute. With no reason to stay in Port Royal, most privateers left for the ramshackle buccaneer settlements on the island of Tortuga, which had been ungoverned since the days when it was known as Association Island. The ‘lawless motions’ of the privateers were always of great concern to Thomas Modyford, for as he watched them leave, he knew that it would only be a matter of time before they turned pirate and started attacking the English ships that supplied Jamaica. He also knew that without them, the island was virtually defenseless. The governor of Jamaica considered the king’s order to rein in the privateers ‘the saddest error of all governments in this most active age.’

  Fortunately for Modyford and his privateering friends, a war for international commercial supremacy broke out between England and Holland in 1665. To induce the island’s only defenders to return to Port Royal, he began issuing letters of marque, authorizing them to attack Dutch ships. Sailors from Jamaica were soon waging an aggressive privateering campaign against the Dutch, but Modyford continued to commission attacks on Spanish interests too, reasoning that ‘it must be force alone that can cut in sunder that un-neighbourly maxim [of the Spanish government] to deny all access of strangers.’7 Later that year, he ‘caused a war against the Spaniards to be solemnly proclaimed by beat of drum and proclamation at Port Royal,’ and privateers returned in droves, their appetites whetted by the prospect of renewed attacks on Spanish ships and settlements.8

  In declaring war on Spain’s colonies, Modyford was defying the Committee for Foreign Plantations, but both parties recognized the tightrope he was being asked to walk. King Charles didn’t want to antagonize the Spanish any more than he had to, but he admitted that, ‘It is not easy for us to prescribe rules and directions for you as our service and the benefit of that island may require.’9 The lack of definitive instructions from London made Modyford’s balancing act a little easier. In his reply to the king’s letter, he expressed his hope that Charles would grant him ‘that commission which the wise Romans gave their generals, so well did they understand the rule of trusting him that was on the place, who clearly sees what cannot be imagined by much wiser men at so great a distance.’10

  * * *

  In another letter to the king, this one written in August 1665, Thomas Modyford makes his first mention of Henry Morgan, the man who would do more than any other to shape Jamaica in the early years of English rule. Morgan was born in Wales in 1635 and had grown up with war and soldiering. Looking back on his life in 1680, he admitted,

  The office of Judge Admiral was not given me for my understanding of the business better than others, nor for the profitableness thereof, for I left school too young to be a great proficient in that or other laws, and have been more used to the pike than the book.11

  Morgan arrived in the Caribbean at the age of twenty, as a soldier in the army charged with realizing the Western Design, and took part in the failed attack on Santo Domingo. Following the capture of Jamaica, George Monck nominated Morgan’s uncle, Col. Edward Morgan, to become lieutenant governor of the new colony. The young Welshman was also fortunate in that another uncle, Thomas Morgan, had been Monck’s right-hand man in his subjugation of Scotland after the Battle of Dunbar. Between them, his two uncles smoothed Morgan’s path to the governor’s house.

  In January 1665, Modyford made Morgan an officer in the fleet of small ships that sailed from Port Royal under Jamai
ca’s best-known privateers, Captain Jackman and Captain Morris. Guided by the ever-present William Blauveldt, the Dutch veteran whom Daniel Elfrith had met when he first came ashore on Providence, Jackman and Morris rounded Cape Gracias a Dios and sailed down the Miskito Coast. If they were to storm a ship or town of any size, they would have to take on more men, for successful privateering was all about weight of numbers (while the typical crew of a hundred-ton merchant ship was around twelve, a privateer of the same size would likely carry at least eighty men). Blauveldt was their introduction to the community of six hundred foreigners who lived on the coast, many at Bluefields, the community of itinerant buccaneers that had been named after the old Dutchman.*1

  Most of Bluefields’ inhabitants were English or African, and many were veterans of the colony on Providence. The contrast between life in New Westminster and life on the Miskito Coast could not have been starker. On Providence, they had long wrestled with the competing claims of hectoring preachers and abusive captains, and they had no interest in returning to the life of the indentured servant. Lord Saye had warned against democracy, a world in which ‘every man is a master, and masters must not correct their servants.’ Yet the buccaneers lived with so little government (indeed, so little subordination to any form of authority) that for a time they were indeed all masters.

  The democratic spirit that prevailed on the coast owed much to the culture of their Miskito hosts. When the first settlers of North America called the natives ‘faithless, lawless and kingless,’ they had meant it as an insult.12 The buccaneers would have considered it a compliment, for their indomitability was akin to a badge of honor. The humble toil and patient accumulation urged on them by Providence’s Puritan ministers meant nothing to them, and after twenty-four years of buccaneering, the routine humiliation they had suffered at the hands of their employers was a distant memory. Free to live as they liked, they fashioned dice from the teeth of the manatee and gambled away what little they had. No longer tied by the strictures of Providence’s artificial ‘families,’ or Rev. Hope Sherrard’s watchful censoriousness, they were free to drink mishla with the Miskito men, take their friends’ sisters as wives, and raise families of their own.

  Like the Miskitos, their lives were often idle, broken by spells of frenetic, sometimes violent activity. They learned to sleep in hammocks strung between poles and preferred to hunt fish than till fields. They made what little money they needed by cutting dyewoods, which they sold to passing merchant ships from Jamaica, and running contraband to isolated Spanish settlements farther down the coast. Sometimes, guided by their Miskito friends, they ventured inland to raid the Spaniards’ cocoa plantations.

  Like the Miskitos, they produced no cloth, pottery, or basketry. But they appreciated the fruits of other men’s labor: they relied on the leather and metal goods they were able to procure from the merchant ships, and whenever they came by a cargo of clothing destined for the wealthy households of Granada or Panama, they lavished attention on their costumes. To parade on the beach in stolen ruffs and silk shirts was a form of drag, as subversive as it was ridiculous (although the suggestion that they wore earrings is a figment of a Victorian writer’s imagination).

  In place of the indenture, which committed the servant to his master, they committed themselves to one another. They became ‘the Brethren of the Coast,’ a brotherhood that encompassed all buccaneers. According to James Burney, an early chronicler of piracy in the Caribbean,

  Every buccaneer had his chosen and declared comrade, between whom property was in common, and if one died, the survivor was inheritor of the whole…Bolts, locks, and every species of fastening, were prohibited, it being held that the use of such securities would have impeached the honour of their vocation.13

  The buccaneers’ sense of honor was one of the few fragments of European life they kept, for it bound them to their mother country’s imperial mission and ennobled a journey that had begun when they first joined the army of vagrants tramping the country lanes of England. Judging by James Burney’s account, some of the buccaneers also kept up a keen hatred of the Spanish.

  It is related of a Frenchman, a native of Languedoc named Montbars, that on reading a history of the cruelty of the Spaniards to the Americans, he conceived such an implacable hatred against the Spaniards that he determined on going to the West Indies to join the buccaneers; and that he there pursued his vengeance with so much ardour as to acquire the surname of the Exterminator.14

  When William Blauveldt told the Brethren of the Coast that Jackman and Morris were looking for crew to join them on a privateering cruise down the coast, there was no shortage of takers. From Bluefields, he guided the little fleet down the coast to the mouth of the River San Juan, where they transferred to their canoes and began paddling upriver. The river was wide and still, and its banks were crowded with tall, verdant rushes. On distant sandbanks, crocodiles could be seen sunning themselves to warm their cold blood amid the huge beached logs that rushed downstream in the rainy season. They heard howler monkeys roaring from distant treetops and watched as troupes of spider monkeys swung from tree to tree on the far bank. After rowing one hundred miles upriver, they came to Lake Nicaragua, a magnificent inland sea whose surface is broken by two towering volcanoes. On the far shore stood Granada, a city of wealthy merchants and storehouses stacked to the rafters with barrels of rum, gunpowder, and powdered gold. Its garrison was no match for eighty heavily armed buccaneers, and the raiders soon had the run of the place.

  The buccaneers’ raid of Granada was the most audacious strike the English had yet made against the Spanish, and set a precedent for a wave of marauding on the Spanish Main. Over the next six years, buccaneers from the Miskito Coast, Port Royal, Tortuga, and the south coast of Cuba stormed and plundered four Spanish cities, eighteen towns, and thirty-five villages. They were led by the privateers of Port Royal—captains of merchant ships and hardened veterans of the English Civil War like Henry Morgan, who played an ever more decisive role in each raid. Thus Jamaica’s need for defense bound the island’s governor to the flotsam of England.

  The rise of Jamaica as a sugar-producing colony, and Port Royal as a privateering base, also revived relations between the English and the Miskitos. Following the attack on Granada, several Miskito men sailed back to Port Royal with Jackman and Morris, some to help put down the island’s first slave revolt, others to work as harpoonists on future privateering expeditions. It proved an enduring relationship, and Spain’s colonial authorities would spend the next one hundred fifty years trying to eliminate ‘the zambo and Miskito whip’ hanging over the traders of Granada and León.*2 Neighboring tribes also came to dread a visit from the buccaneers for they captured their young men and sold them into slavery and forced their young women to become their wives. The Indians around Bocas del Toro had once been keen to trade with the Brethren of the Coast, but as the newcomers melded into the fabric of Miskito life, other native tribes learned to flee at their approach.

  * * *

  The Brethren of the Coast’s ‘admiral’ was Edward Mansveldt, a Dutch sea captain that the English called Mansfield. While they lauded him as a brave and noble privateer, the Spanish cursed him as the most notorious of the pirates roving the western Caribbean. Mansveldt had received his first commission from the governor of Jamaica in 1659, and his exploits soon earned him the gratitude of the merchants and landowners who sat in the Jamaican Assembly. In 1666, he assembled a fleet of fifteen ships under his casual command, and five hundred of his Brethren. Most of them were English, Dutch, or French, but there were also Africans, Miskitos, Flemings, Genoese, Greeks, Levantines, and Portuguese among their number. In recognition of the leading role Henry Morgan had played in the sack of Granada, Mansveldt made the young Welshman his vice admiral.

  As ever, once at sea, the decision-making process was far removed from the vertical hierarchy that governed life in an English colony. Although the Admiral of the Brethren and the ships’ captains determined strategy, every
member of the crew had a say in their goals and where they should try to realize them. Thomas Modyford had given Edward Mansveldt a commission to attack the island of Curaçao, but men accustomed to fighting the Spanish were reluctant to rob a Dutch colony and the Brethren argued that there would be ‘more profit with less hazard’ in raiding a Spanish settlement. The democratic spirit prevailed, and Mansveldt bent to their disobedience.

  His fleet sailed for the coast of modern-day Costa Rica, where the buccaneers marched inland to sack the cocoa-producing towns in the Valley of Matina. But it was not a profitable raid, and after limping back to the coast, several of the ships’ captains opted to return to Bluefields. The remaining vessels regrouped at Bocas del Toro, a tiny archipelago whose mangroves had long provided shelter to itinerant buccaneers. They spent several days there, and it was while fishing and recuperating that the Admiral of the Brethren resolved to retake Providence. His first loyalty was to his fellow buccaneers, who hoped to make the island a secure and permanent base from which they could raid the Spanish Main without waiting for the governor of Jamaica’s authorization.

  On 25 May 1666, five ships dropped anchor on the edge of the reef that runs down Providence’s eastern flank. The Brethren lowered longboats into the water and rowed their way along the reef, until they came to a narrow passage near to the southern tip of the island, ‘where they say ship never came.’ According to Thomas Modyford, Mansveldt was ‘an excellent coaster,’ a skill that was ‘his chief, if not only, virtue.’15 Passing through a breach in the coral, one longboat made for the beach at Southwest Bay (which the Spanish called Playa Grande), while the other headed for Manchineel Bay (which they called Playa de los Naranjos).*3