The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  As the buccaneer army closed in on the Spanish force, Pérez de Guzmán ordered his cavalry to charge, ‘wherewith the battle was instantly kindled very hot.’ His horsemen found themselves galloping across marshland and were soon cut down by volleys of shot from Lawrence Prince’s vanguard. In Morgan’s words, as the survivors veered away to make room for the foot soldiers, ‘they were met with such a warm welcome, and were pursued so close, that their retreat came to plain running.’

  In desperation, the Spanish ‘did work such a stratagem as has seldom been heard of, viz. attempting to drive two droves of fifteen hundred cattle into our rear.’ It was a cunning move, but the Brethren were accustomed to hunting wild cattle and managed to turn the herd back to charge its keepers. What followed was by all accounts a rout, and after pursuing the fleeing soldiers for three miles, Morgan declared the battle won. The Brethren had lost less than a dozen of their number; the Spanish over six hundred.

  Charging down the lanes that separated the city’s palatial gardens, they took the first of Panama’s forts with ease. The second was better protected, and the struggle to take it raged for several hours. In the midst of the fighting, Morgan’s men considered retreating from the fray, but their luck turned when a Spanish patrol happened to return to the fort, accompanied by a group of monks and nuns. The buccaneers put them into service as human shields, and the second fort soon fell.

  With events spiraling beyond his control, Pérez de Guzmán retreated to a neighborhood on the edge of the city and ordered that the city’s principal fort be detonated. Such was the rush to destroy what could not be saved that forty of its two-hundred-strong garrison died in the ensuing blaze. Undeterred, the governor ordered his soldiers to burn the entire city to the ground, in the hope that the invaders would lose heart and head back over the mountains. Most of Panama’s houses were built of resinous cedar and were ablaze in minutes. As fires raged across the city, attacker and defender alike sought to douse the flames: the former in the hope that they might save their prize; the latter, their property. They struggled in vain, and by midnight, the wealthiest city in the Americas had been reduced to ashes.

  The buccaneers were exhausted and hungry, and many of them were showing the first symptoms of the malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery they had contracted on their journey over the mountains. But they wanted their prize as greedily as a king wants his taxes, or a bishop his tithes, and they were no less ruthless.14 They knew that the city’s merchants, clerics, and officials had spirited away their valuables at the first word of their approach, so the following morning, and every morning that followed for the next month, Morgan sent armed groups to search the ruined city and the outlying farmsteads. Three thousand of the city’s inhabitants were seized and dragged to the admiral’s makeshift headquarters for questioning. Under duress, those who had hidden their valuables in cellars and attics divulged their hiding places. But many admitted that they had loaded their goods onto ships bound for Peru before hiding themselves as best they could in the surrounding villages.

  According to one citizen, Henry Morgan was the only one of the pirates ‘noble enough to the vanquished enemy.’ But his Brethren recognized no such bounds, and embarked on a chaotic campaign of killing, robbing, and raping the people of Panama. As secrets were spilled, caches uncovered, and loot dragged back to the admiral’s headquarters, their haul increased in size until it reached the ceiling. While Morgan waited for the next eminent citizen to be brought before him, he counted and recounted the pieces of eight, doubloons, cruzados, and crowns arrayed before him. Only when he was confident that the last coin, gold bar, and precious stone in the city were in his possession did he give the order to load the king’s 175 pack mules, and make ready for the return journey to Portobello.

  The raiders set out on 14 February 1671. The journey back proved more arduous than the one that had brought them to Panama, for many of them were ailing, and once they were in the mountains they soon ran out of food. Such was their hunger that they were reduced to eating jungle rats. When the rats ran out, and with no prospect of the sea to sustain them, they loaded the panniers onto their backs and ate their mules.

  The Admiral of the Brethren only divvied up the spoils of the sack of Panama when they made it back to the mouth of the River Chagres. Each of the buccaneers received between £15 and £18 (£1,494 in modern currency), a share that would be the source of bitter complaints in the taverns of Port Royal for years to come.15 Allegations of Morgan’s skulduggery were supported by his personal surgeon, Richard Browne, who claimed that he ‘cheated the soldiers of a very vast sum, each man having but £10 a share [in money and plate].’ Browne also claimed that before sailing for Jamaica, he saw Morgan ‘cast away’ nineteen of the thirty-six ships in his fleet, abandoning their crews at the mouth of the Chagres. Once at sea, several other ships ‘were forced to leeward, where hundreds were lost, starved,’ and just ten of the admiral’s ships made it back to Port Royal. Having invested heavily in his audacious raid of the wealthiest city in the Americas, many of Jamaica’s merchants now faced ruin. Richard Browne called the sack of Panama, ‘half the undoing of this island.’16

  But Browne and Esquemelin—and the many later writers who drew from their accounts of the sack of Panama—may have been mistaken about the supposed treachery of the Admiral of the Brethren. Browne reckoned the total value of the plunder to be £70,000, but Henry’s secretary, John Peake, put it at just £30,000—half the value of what had been captured in his attack on Maracaibo two years before. The Jamaica Assembly certainly didn’t feel swindled: its members passed a motion giving the island’s admiral ‘many thanks for executing his last commission,’ with the speaker noting that the assembly ‘approves very well of his acting therein.’17

  It may simply be that Morgan’s greatest military exploit was his least profitable. Even if he was as duplicitous as Browne alleged, the assembly’s members had no cause for complaint. In the two and a half years since he was appointed the island’s admiral, Morgan and his Brethren had brought pieces of eight worth £237,000 into Port Royal. Considering that in 1669 the total value of England’s exports to its Caribbean colonies was just £107,000, their contribution to the governor’s finances is astonishing.18 Thanks to them, the colony on Jamaica had rushed through its infancy and was now well able to stand on its own two feet.

  * * *

  Back in London, the diarist John Evelyn expressed his wonder at the sack of Panama, a feat that ‘had not been done since the famous Drake.’19 The story of how the Brethren of the Coast had burned Spain’s greatest American city to the ground became a favorite yarn in London’s taverns, just as it was in Port Royal’s. According to Sir William Godolphin, the English ambassador to the Spanish court, the news threw the queen regent into ‘such a distemper and excess of weeping and violent passion, as those about her feared it might shorten her life.’ In his investigation of the circumstances leading up to the disaster, the Spanish crown prosecutor found that the city’s defenders, from the governor down to the lowliest Indian archer, had fled the approaching enemy ‘like chickens.’ In terms reminiscent of Pérez de Guzmán’s own condemnation of Esteban de Ocampo in 1666, the crown prosecutor opined that Panama’s governor ‘should receive the greatest and gravest punishment possible.’20 Pérez de Guzmán was sent back to Seville to stand trial, but he escaped due process by dying shortly after his arrival in Cádiz.

  Spanish fury took time to subside, but it soon became apparent that the sack of Panama was not a sign of things to come, but the last spasm of the criminal monster the governor of Jamaica had created. Neither Spain nor England wanted to jeopardize the treaty they had signed the previous year. Article seven of the treaty, which granted England jurisdiction over the territories it held in 1670, would cause friction and occasional conflict for the next hundred years, but the Spanish were largely resigned to the English presence in the Caribbean. In return, the English dropped all talk of building an empire in Central America.

 
; The Spanish did not know it yet, but the sack of Panama was to be Morgan’s last great raid. Following the proclamation of peace, Jamaica’s merchants turned their backs on the Brethren of the Coast and headed inland to invest their ill-gotten gains in land for plantations and sugar mills. The buccaneers’ depredations had broken the Spaniards’ hold on the Caribbean and forced them to acknowledge the English presence in the region. They had protected the English at Jamaica from expulsion, imprisonment, and death itself, just as they had the Dutch at Curaçao and the French in Saint-Dominigue. But with the king of Spain reconciled to the foreigners’ colonies, Jamaica’s merchants could live without the sea rovers.

  Their change in outlook found favor at court, for King Charles was coming to the realization that privateering was not worth the grief, notwithstanding the cut he stood to take from the enterprise. Privateering and the peaceful pursuit of trade had never been compatible. Royal patronage of the privateers had been sound policy when the English were newcomers to the Caribbean, but now that England, Holland, and France had naval squadrons capable of taking on and defeating Spanish men-of-war in battle, the Brethren of the Coast were surplus to requirements.

  As admiral and now lieutenant governor, it fell to Morgan to persuade his Brethren to abandon the rover’s life for more mundane pursuits. Those who had not gambled away their cut of the spoils invested it in land, and in time joined Jamaica’s ‘plantocracy’—the cabal of wealthy landowners who would make a killing from sugar in the years to come. But those lacking the ambition, capital, or commercial nous required to build a plantation had few options open to them. Morgan had orders to hang those who refused to move with the times and would no doubt have strung up more of them had so many not succumbed to malaria, snakebite, or starvation in the jungles of Panama.

  With the gallows of Port Royal straining under the weight of their Brethren’s rotting corpses, most buccaneers didn’t need telling twice. Some went to the Bay of Campeche on the coast of Mexico, where they turned to the logwood trade to make a living. Others returned to the Miskito Coast and the contraband trade, which continued to thrive long after Spain had declared itself open to free trade. Thomas Modyford was quick to encourage such ventures. By keeping ‘these soldierly men within peaceful bounds,’ he had a reserve army ‘always ready to serve His Majesty in any new rupture.’21

  Those who didn’t settle in Campeche or Bluefields passed northeast, through the Straits of Florida to Carolina or the Bahamas, where a new generation of pirates would emerge in the opening years of the eighteenth century. These were the men of all nations who became renowned for their brutality under fearsome villains like Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach and ‘Black’ Sam Bellamy. No longer welcome in Port Royal, they ensconced themselves at New Providence in the Bahamas, which was named in memory of the island that has since been known as Old Providence.

  Their lordships’ isle also fell victim to the peaceable tide lapping Caribbean shores. In time, the buccaneers whom Morgan had left to man the garrison grew tired of waiting for him to return from Panama and sailed to Port Royal. Still, Sir James Modyford was confident that Providence would be resettled once he found an acting governor to take the place of the emaciated Maj. Samuel Smith. In the meantime, he commissioned Morgan’s cousin, Col. Bledry Morgan, to sail for New Westminster and hold the island on his behalf, while he went about recruiting the three hundred soldiers he would need to keep it in English hands for good.

  But Bledry Morgan’s departure was delayed, and by the time he was ready to sail, Providence’s would-be colonizers had been overtaken by events beyond their control. Lord Arlington, the secretary of state who had done so much to secure the peace with Spain, was a typical Restoration statesman. Morgan’s biographer writes that while ‘outwardly charming,’ he was ‘thoroughly unscrupulous and self-seeking. Patriotism meant little to him and he was faithless even to a good cause, regarding public office solely as a means of procuring his own pleasure and profit.’ Lord Arlington had little faith in Thomas Modyford or Henry Morgan to observe the Treaty of Madrid, so in June 1671, he sent Sir Thomas Lynch to Port Royal to take up the post of lieutenant governor, with orders ‘not to permit any pirates whatsoever to set forth from Jamaica.’

  On his arrival, Lord Arlington’s man ‘apprehended several of the chiefest actors herein and condemned them to be hanged.’ Lynch was also carrying orders to arrest Modyford on a charge of ‘making war and committing depredations and acts of hostility upon the subjects and territories of the King of Spain in America, contrary to his Majesty’s express order and command.’ Jamaica’s governor was taken prisoner and sent back to London on the next ship.22 After twenty-four years in the Caribbean, seven as governor of Jamaica, Thomas Modyford found himself a prisoner in a damp stone cell in the Tower of London. Charles II was quite prepared to sacrifice England’s colonial heroes to appease the king of Spain when he saw fit. Fifty-four years before, his grandfather, King James I, had had Sir Walter Raleigh executed in the Tower’s courtyard. Now it was Thomas Modyford’s turn to wonder how a loyal patriot could have fallen so foul of his monarch.

  A few months later, Morgan was also sent home, partly to explain his decision to attack Panama, but mainly to appease the king of Spain, who was still demanding the return of the 6 million Spanish crowns he was alleged to have stolen. Just two weeks prior to Lynch’s arrival, Thomas Modyford had given Morgan a reception to thank him for his services to the island. Now he too was stripped of his titles and sent back to London in disgrace.

  Morgan had not been home for seventeen years. He had left in the days when England was a Commonwealth governed by the Lord Protector, but by 1672, Oliver Cromwell was not only dead, his corpse had been dug up by vengeful Royalists and hanged at Tyburn. London was still recovering from the great fire of 1666, but it was already being shaped by the gaiety, refinement, and corruption that came to be associated with the restoration of the House of Stuart. Struggling to get his bearings in a city so utterly changed, Morgan and the money he had brought back from Panama dropped out of sight. ‘Oppressed by a lingering consumption, the coldness of this climate and his vexations…[and] under the perpetual malice of a prevailing court faction, he wasted the remaining part of his life,’ lamented Sir Thomas Dalby, the author of an early history of the Caribbean published shortly after Morgan’s return.23

  With his brother and Jamaica’s greatest privateer out of the picture, Sir James Modyford’s dream of governing his own private island seemed destined never to be realized. Providence held little appeal for Thomas Lynch, and the merchants who might once have backed his venture were kept busy by their new plantations. In the decade to come, Jamaica would become the most valuable, as well as the gaudiest, jewel in England’s crown, but Sir James never mustered the energy needed to partake of its rise to prosperity. He died a bitter man in 1673, in his plantation house in the hills overlooking Port Royal. The Spanish were equally unmoved by the island’s potential. Juan Pérez de Guzmán’s successor visited Santa Catalina in 1672 and found it deserted. In his report to the authorities in Cartagena, he suggested that the guardacostas pass by from time to time to ensure it had not been resettled, but otherwise to forget about it, the island being ‘worthless to everyone.’

  When the last ship had left the island harbor and the last official report had been filed away in some distant colonial city, the name of Old Providence disappeared. Officially, at least, the island became an un-place. Capt. William Dampier, the pirate who would later become governor of New Providence in the Bahamas, passed by Providence in 1680 and judged the island to be ‘without interest for the English.’24

  Yet the freshwater streams and fertile soils that had lured Providence’s first settlers ashore did not disappear, and in the century that followed, the island may well have served as an occasional haven for pirates roaming the western Caribbean. Sailors who broke the rules aboard ship were often punished by being marooned on remote islands, and it may have become home to such castaways. Perhaps th
ey found shelter and sustenance with the original maroons? Nathaniel Butler had tried and failed to dislodge the runaway slaves of Palmetto Grove in the years before the collapse of the Puritan colony. Perhaps they survived, to be absorbed into Gerónimo de Ojeda’s geriatric garrison and then evacuated to Portobello in 1666. Or perhaps they managed to evade detection by Ojeda, and then by Mansveldt, Whetstone, Sánchez Ximénez, Ramírez de Leiba, and Henry Morgan, and, on sighting Dampier’s ship, dowsed their fires and waited for the tip of the mast to drop over the horizon before returning to their bucolic un-existence. In the absence of written records, there is simply no way of knowing what became of them—just as there is no way of knowing if there were Miskitos living on Providence before the arrival of Daniel Elfrith, or other Amerindian tribes before them.

  [15]

  Mariners, Castaways, and Renegades

  BEFORE LEAVING ENGLAND, I TRIED to find some trace of Providence. I found the Providence Island Company’s journal at the National Archives at Kew and a few letters from the company’s shareholders to its colonists in the British Library. But that was all. I heard that there was a plaque commemorating the company’s pioneering role in empire building at the Brittania Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, but if it ever existed, the college’s librarian wasn’t aware of it. Nor was there any mention of Providence in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The only other traces of the Providence Island Company were in the names of Brooke Street and Warwick Court, the Holborn streets where two of the company’s most illustrious founders once lived.

  At some point in the 345 years that have passed since the Satisfaction carried Henry Morgan away from the island for the last time, Providence also drifted over the horizon. Old Providence might prompt a flicker of recognition in the minds of a handful of Britons, but few would be able to put a face to the name. Of the few to know anything about the Providence Island Company, only one has seen it in its modern guise. David Fiennes, Lord Saye’s grandson ten times removed, spent a few days on Providence in 1977 on his way back from a business trip to Panama. In an article he wrote for the journal of the Banbury Historical Society, he recalled that the Colombian embassy in London hadn’t been able to tell him how to get to the island, and he had ended up hitching a ride to the island on a cargo ship from Colón. He found it a backwater. ‘There is no hotel,’ he wrote.