The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  While the Spanish soldiers slept in their scattered farmsteads, the Brethren used the light of the moon to familiarize themselves with what would soon be theirs. By sunrise they were well placed to stifle any alarm. The official who had been appointed to take Gerónimo de Ojeda’s place as governor of Santa Catalina was Esteban de Ocampo. His garrison was two-hundred strong, but many of its soldiers were elderly, none had had any experience of combat since driving the English off the island twenty-five years before, and most of them were incapable of handling, much less firing, a musket. Ocampo awoke fully expecting to pass another day of resigned contentedness, so the sight of the Brethren of the Coast’s ensign, with its leering skull over two crossed cutlasses, was the realization of his worst fears. He surrendered without a fight, and by eight o’clock that morning, an English flag was flying over the ramshackle battery once known as Fort Warwick.

  Reviewing the fort’s munitions, Henry Morgan was surprised to see Queen Elizabeth’s coat of arms on the rusting cannons—relics from the days when the English government was run by stouter hearts than those at the present king’s court, they had been pressed into service to defend their lordships’ colony. For the old Providence men among the Brethren, it was something of a homecoming. To the surprise of the Spanish veterans, the invaders treated them well. They were locked in the church, but the French Catholics among the Brethren insisted that no harm should come to them. One of them even asked Ocampo’s chaplain to celebrate Mass and invited the governor and his men to join them. Having given thanks—whether to God, Neptune, or fate—they spent the next three days looting the island’s stores. By the time they had finished, the garrison’s veterans were left with nothing but the clothes they were standing in. When they protested, Mansveldt ordered that they be given a change of clothes, by way of thanks for surrendering so willingly. The Admiral of the Brethren left a small garrison on Providence, took his one hundred eighty prisoners to his ship, and sailed for Portobello to put them ashore.

  Esteban de Ocampo and his Spanish, Portuguese, and African veterans must have watched the island recede from view with relief, as well as some foreboding. While Philip IV had done little to fortify the island or relieve their terrible solitude, he was sure to find a scapegoat for its capture, for it allowed the English to plant a foot in the door to his treasury.

  From Portobello, Mansveldt and Morgan sailed back to Port Royal to inform Thomas Modyford that they had recovered Providence for its rightful owners. The governor rebuked Admiral Mansveldt for taking the island without a commission, but he knew that if he were to punish him, he risked jeopardizing the Brethren’s allegiance to the crown. Besides, the capture of Providence was undoubtedly a triumph, whether he had ordered it or not. In the face of a fait accompli, he told the admiral that he could not ‘without manifest impudence but accept the tender of [the island] on his Majesty’s behalf.’16

  The merchants of Port Royal, who did not have to feign circumspection, welcomed Mansveldt’s recapture of Providence. Emboldened by their reception, the Admiral of the Brethren asked the governor’s permission to recruit men for the resettlement of the island. But for reasons of his own more than reasons of state, Modyford told him to look elsewhere, so he sailed for Tortuga, where he hoped to find recruits among the French buccaneers living on the island. It was to be his last voyage: Mansveldt was captured en route by a Spanish guardacosta and taken to Cuba, where he was executed.

  On hearing of the capture of Providence, the Spanish ambassador to the Court of St. James in London protested to Lord Arlington in the strongest possible terms. But the secretary of state denied all responsibility for the attack, insisting that it had not been ordered by his government or the governor of Jamaica. Having made his excuses, Arlington wrote to Modyford thanking him for his ‘gift,’ and the governor made hurried arrangements for the resettlement of Providence.

  Among the first to heed Modyford’s call for volunteers was Sir Thomas Whetstone. A nephew of Oliver Cromwell, Whetstone had won royal patronage after encouraging the officers of the Navy to switch their allegiances to the new king. That done, he financed the fitting and victualing of four vessels, and left London for the Caribbean with a group of adventurer friends, hoping to go privateering in the South Seas (the Pacific Ocean, in modern parlance). Once in Port Royal, he fell in with Edward Mansveldt, who persuaded him to join another expedition to plunder the Spaniards’ cocoa plantations. Flush with the spoils of another audacious raid, Whetstone invested in land in Jamaica and was elected to the Jamaican House of Assembly. He was eventually appointed its speaker, though ‘more by the desire of the general [Modyford] than the election of the gentlemen.’17

  Cromwell’s nephew was determined to play a leading part in resettling his uncle’s cherished island. Such was Whetstone’s enthusiasm for Providence, he even offered to transport reinforcements for the garrison in his own ship. Touched by his generosity, Modyford appointed him deputy governor of the island, and put at his command Maj. Samuel Smith, Capt. Stanley Steven, and a troop of thirty-two soldiers. He reserved the governorship for his brother, Sir James Modyford, doubtless at the intercession of their uncle George Monck. Sir James’s contribution was an important one: In 1664, King Charles had granted him a five-year license to carry reprieved felons to Jamaica. With a ready, if not willing, workforce at their disposal, the Modyford brothers were well placed to realize Edward Mansveldt’s plan to make Providence a private fiefdom, from which they could plunder Spanish ships, whatever the state of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Naturally, they could not admit so base a motive to anyone but themselves, and they assured anyone who asked that Providence had been taken in the name of King Charles.

  Thrilled by a familiar concoction of patriotic zeal and the prospect of private gain, Modyford ordered a broad seal for the island to be etched onto a silver plate, just as the Providence Island Company had in 1630. His brother would carry it ashore when the island was deemed ready to receive him. Sir Thomas Whetstone, Maj. Samuel Smith, and the other members of the advance party set sail in June 1666. Whetstone was carrying letters of marque authorizing him to attack Dutch or Spanish vessels ‘wherever they might be found to the southward of the Tropic of Cancer.’ The governor of Jamaica also granted him permission ‘if you find it prudential, to invade any of the lands, colonies, or plantations in America.’ The grandiose scheme to build an English empire in Central America looked set to be reprised.

  * * *

  Royal Field Mar. Juan Pérez de Guzmán, governor and captain general of Panama, president of the audiencia of Tierra Firme, and caballero of the Order of Santiago, could barely contain his rage when he was told that Santa Catalina had fallen to the English. Although Edward Mansveldt had spared the lives of the island’s one hundred eighty inhabitants—a rare act of mercy from such a bloodthirsty pirate—he had not spared them their honor, showing them ‘so little esteem’ that he had them ‘unceremoniously thrown ashore’ at Portobello.18

  Pérez de Guzmán’s rage was only heightened by the cowardice of the relevant authorities. Instead of coming to the islanders’ aid, the governor of Cuba had parroted the absurd rumor that fifty ships, carrying three thousand pirates, were about to conquer Central America and thereby divide the Spanish Caribbean in two. Pérez de Guzmán reserved particular ire for Esteban de Ocampo, who had surrendered the island without so much as a show of resistance. The governor of Santa Catalina had ‘committed a serious and atrocious crime worthy of repugnance and punishment,’ he wrote to his superiors in Madrid. Criminal charges were brought against Ocampo and seven of his officers, who were sent to Seville and imprisoned in La Casa de Contración.

  In an impassioned speech to the junta de guerra in Panama, Pérez de Guzmán argued, ‘it was absolutely necessary to send forces unto Santa Catalina, sufficient to take it from the pirates, the honour and interest of his Majesty of Spain being very narrowly concerned herein.’19 The retaliatory expedition should be mounted immediately, if the pirates were
not to fortify the island as a base for more raids on the king’s settlements. Flushed with righteous indignation, the junta voted ‘as one would expect from hearts as Catholic as they were Spanish: to destroy the encroaching thieves.’ Some of its members even suggested that the expedition be extended to include the retaking of Jamaica. Pérez de Guzmán convinced them that, for the time being at least, they should focus on Santa Catalina.

  The Spanish government was no less outraged than the governor of Panama. It assured the junta de guerra of its wholehearted support, and promised to send a thousand men to the Caribbean to join the expedition. Its only condition was that the island be recaptured before January 1667, so as not to delay the annual sailing of the treasure galleons. As ever, the king had creditors to consider and was entirely dependent on American gold and silver to pay them.

  Pérez de Guzmán put 185 troops under the immediate command of Capt. José Sánchez Ximénez, the mayor of Portobello. Forty-five soldiers from the original garrison on Santa Catalina signed up for the retaliatory expedition. According to Pérez de Guzmán, the veterans had ‘lion hearts’ and were ‘zealous to return to reclaim their honour.’20 What he didn’t tell his superiors in Madrid was that half of them were without arms, and their rations were woefully inadequate, for he had connived with a local magistrate to defraud the paymaster of the funds the crown had allocated to the expedition.

  Captain Sánchez Ximénez’s fleet sailed from Portobello on 1 August 1666. Once at sea, a rumor swirled belowdecks that the pirate army on Santa Catalina had swollen and was now a thousand strong. As if portending trouble to come, they hit a storm, which battered their ships and made them miserably seasick. It was ten days before the fleet caught sight of Santa Catalina, and it took the ships another two days to beat their way through the high seas to the island’s harbor.

  On coming ashore, Captain Sánchez Ximénez could see no sign of the pirates, so he sent an advance party to reconnoiter the abandoned shell of New Westminster. The pirates had retreated to Fort Warwick, so he sent a scout with a letter informing the usurpers of his instructions to retake Santa Catalina. Maj. Samuel Smith replied that ‘the island had once belonged unto the government and dominions of the King of England, and that instead of surrendering it, they preferred to lose their lives.’

  Sánchez Ximénez retired to his flagship and was considering the best course of action to take when three Africans approached in a canoe. Contrary to appearances, they told him, Fort Warwick was occupied not by a thousand-strong pirate army, but a small contingent of ordinary soldiers. The following morning, Sánchez Ximénez laid siege to the fort and settled in for a long wait. Two days later, he was puzzled to hear what sounded like cannonballs ricocheting off the rocks behind their redoubt. Being without ammunition, the English had resorted to cutting down the organ pipes from the abandoned church before their retreat to the fort. They had sawn them into short lengths and were now using them as missiles, ‘discharging in every shot three score pipes at a time.’21 Sánchez Ximénez sent word that unless Major Smith surrendered immediately and unconditionally he would put them all to the sword. After consulting Sir Thomas Whetstone, Smith accepted the terms of surrender at midnight on 17 August 1666. Providence had been in English hands for just eighty-one days.

  Sánchez Ximénez had his prisoners clapped in irons and began interrogating them. Among the incriminating documents his men found were blank letters of marque and Thomas Modyford’s instructions for the formation of a government. They also recovered his order to send all Spanish prisoners to Port Royal, ‘so that they might be treated in the same manner that English captives had been treated by the enemy.’ What did this mean? the Spanish captain demanded to know. The governor of Jamaica clearly intended to retain the island whether it was taken in peacetime or not. Sánchez Ximénez also discovered that among his prisoners was Sir Thomas Whetstone, ‘whose other name was Cromwell.’ Hearing the name of the late Lord Protector, he had his prisoners bound and chained in the hull of one of his ships and told its captain to take them to Governor Pérez de Guzmán in Panama.

  When news of the fall of the pirates’ lair reached the streets of Panama, ‘the city blazed like midday at nine that night.’ The city’s bishop sang ‘Te Deum,’ and a procession of Jesuits circled the cathedral repeatedly, giving solemn thanks to God for delivering Santa Catalina from the heretics for a second time. Sánchez Ximénez had agreed to treat his prisoners according to the articles of good quarter, but Pérez de Guzmán had no time for such niceties. The thirty-two English soldiers were put to work building Portobello’s Castillo de San Geronimo. Even their guards admitted that each of them was expected to do the work of three slaves, despite being perpetually weak from hunger and lack of sleep. However, the officers among them were not expected to perform manual labor. Instead, Pérez de Guzmán ordered that Sir Thomas Whetstone, Maj. Samuel Smith, and Capt. Stanley Steven be chained to the floor of their ten-foot-by-twelve-foot dungeon ‘forever.’ At the end of each day, they were joined by the thirty-two emaciated soldiers, who fell into a cramped and fitful slumber while Franciscan friars abused them, their king, and their religion.

  Such was the fate that awaited any Protestant found ‘beyond the line.’ The only way out was to pay a bribe or ‘turn Papist.’ Many Englishmen considered the latter a fate worse than death, but others converted to Catholicism, and in sufficient numbers for foreign converts to become a novelty on the Spanish Main. Most became servants to local worthies, but a few became street attractions. One English privateer, who the Spanish had captured and forcibly baptized in the cathedral of Mexico City, was put on display in one of the city’s marketplaces. His keeper kept him covered in oil and offered a swab of cotton to passersby. A swab taken from the head of a converted heretic was considered a blessing and fetched a good price from penitential Catholics seeking forgiveness for their sins.22

  Despite clear evidence of the Modyford brothers’ plan to resettle Santa Catalina, Captain Sánchez Ximénez was no more able to defend the island than his disgraced predecessor. He appealed to the junta de guerra, whose secretary assured him that work was under way on the construction of an armada de barlovento (Windward Fleet). Until it was complete, the new governor would have to make do with the four hundred fifty men under his command. A third of them were Africans or black Creoles: some slaves, others freemen. Another third were soldiers, among them several veterans from the days of Gerónimo de Ojeda. The rest were common criminals. According to Alexander Esquemelin, whose History of the Buccaneers of America would do so much to romanticize the lives of the privateers in the century to come, the Spanish authorities used Santa Catalina as a penal colony, to which they ‘commonly banished all malefactors of the Spanish dominions in the West Indies.’23

  The island soon returned to the somnambulant state it had fallen into under Gerónimo de Ojeda. Overworked in the fields, soldier, slave, and prisoner alike sickened and died in alarming numbers. Eight months after relief supplies were supposed to have arrived from Cartagena, and in protest at his miserable existence, a soldier who had been court-martialed and banished to the island for an unspecified crime slipped through Captain Sánchez Ximénez’s window, crept to his bedside, and stabbed him to death ‘with such disgrace that he didn’t even have time to confess.’24

  *1Strictly speaking, the community of foreigners living on the Miskito Coast were not buccaneers, since they didn’t hunt cattle or roast beef on a ‘boucan,’ like their better-known brethren on Tortuga. But they were similar in most other respects.

  *2‘Zambo’ was the name given to the offspring of unions between the Africans and their Indian hosts.

  *3Playa de los Naranjos means ‘Orange Tree Beach,’ which is a fatal misnomer since the trees lining the bay are not orange but manchineel, whose fruit is highly poisonous.

  [14]

  Henry Morgan, Admiral of the Brethren

  IN AUGUST 1668, TWO YEARS after the Spanish recapture of Santa Catalina, a man arrived in Port Roy
al from Havana, little more than a skeleton in rags, his arms and legs heavily scarred and covered in sores. Maj. Samuel Smith was taken to the governor’s house, where he told Thomas Modyford that after being dragged from the dungeon at Portobello the previous month, he had been shipped to Cuba to await passage back to Spain with the annual flota. He had managed to escape his captors but had done so alone and had no idea what had become of the other officers. Presumably they had been lost, most likely to disease, somewhere between Portobello and Havana.

  By 1668, King Charles was in negotiations with the Spanish and was in no position to issue privateering commissions, at least not openly. But Thomas Modyford could, and he gave one to his friend Henry Morgan, who was keen to avenge the Spanish attack, rescue the other members of the advance party, and recapture Providence. Henry set about recruiting an army. There were more than two thousand buccaneers living in Port Royal in 1668, and their presence contributed to the port’s reputation as ‘a gilded Hades where Mammon held sway.’ They ‘gambled with heavy gold coins whose value no one cared to estimate’ and drank from cups embellished with ‘gems torn from half a hundred cathedrals.’1 At the death of Edward Mansveldt, the Brethren of the Coast had made Henry Morgan their admiral, so when he told them that he had twelve ships ready to sail for Providence, seven hundred buccaneers signed up for the voyage.