by Tom Feiling
‘Good’ was the reply to every enquiry of local people as to their life, health, and government…Only one old man had a complaint; having spent his working life in North America as a mechanic, he could find nothing mechanical which needed repair. Being no good at ponies, he was bored.1
The journey to Providence was a long one, involving a flight from London to Bogotá, and a connecting flight to San Andrés, from where I could take a catamaran to Providence. The price at least, had not changed since 1629. As David Fiennes observed, ‘In Henry Halhead’s day the fare from England to Providence was £6. If one takes a factor of 50 for currency inflation, the fare is the same today, give or take a few pounds.’ I decided to break the journey by spending a day and a night on the bigger island. All Colombians know San Andrés: if they haven’t been there on holiday, they know that of the thirty-two departments in their country, el archepiélago de Providencia, San Andrés y Santa Catalina is the only one where English is the official language.
My hostel was run by Colombians from the coast and was decked out with the fishing nets, ships’ wheels, and hardboard cutlasses you would expect to find in any tourist town that trades on its piratical past. There were brochures in reception intended to lure me to the must-see sights at Morgan’s Cave and the Pirate Museum. Outside Morgan’s Hotel, the tourists milled around with their kids or perused the imported booze and digital cameras on offer in the duty-free shops. They wandered the aisles with an air of disdain. Even the ‘native crafts’—carved coconut shells painted to depict scenes from old-time Caribbean life—were made in China. I recognized their beer bellies and sunburned arms from home, and imagined them working as taxi drivers or shopkeepers in Medellín, Bucaramanga, or Bogotá. They were ‘the middling sort,’ still hemmed in between the corrupt rich and the idle poor, with a tenuous grip on respectability and not enough money for a trip to Miami.
Until the 1950s, San Andrés had a population of five thousand; these days, it is close to eighty thousand. The Avenida 20 de Julio, named in commemoration of the day Colombia won its independence from Spain, had barely warranted the name in 1950, for it was less an avenue than a sandy track leading from the wharf to the office of the intendente (the Colombian appointed to oversee goings-on on the islands). Until the late 1950s, when Colombians began flocking to the island, the avenue had been flanked by large, two-story wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs and verandas bound by crosshatch woodwork. I spotted a few remaining traditional Caribbean houses, but in most cases, the ground floor had been sold to ambitious shopkeepers from the mainland, who were quick to brick up the veranda and replace the wooden shutters on the windows with iron bars.
Slouching in the shadows cast by the shops’ awnings were the island’s beggars: skinny, old black men with no shoes on their feet, who gazed absently beyond the unseeing eyes of the tourists in their sunglasses. As young men, they had been fishermen or farmers, but they had been made redundant by their island’s tourist-friendly transformation, and had gradually melted into the shadows, like ghosts tied to a world in which they no longer had any part to play.
Early the next morning, I went to the wharf to catch the catamaran. Few of the Colombians that visit San Andrés bother to travel the additional forty miles north to Providencia, and most of the passengers were locals. I found a seat on the open deck at the stern and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, we were in the middle of the sea, and there was no sign of land in any direction. A little girl had instinctively taken shelter in the arms of the old man sitting opposite me and was clinging to his neck as if he were a buoy. He was tall, still well built, and kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. The only thing that distracted his gaze were the man-of-war birds cruising overhead, following the catamaran as they have every vessel to have passed through those waters. He told me that the man-of-war is much admired on Providence, and not only for its impressive wingspan. Like the islanders’ piratical forebears, it doesn’t fish for itself, preferring to snatch its food from the beaks of other seabirds.
When a speck of land appeared on the horizon, the passengers gravitated toward the bow to watch it grow, and we were soon skirting the low cliffs of Providence’s western shore. They receded into steep slopes, dotted with coconut palms and ragged plantains, whose fronds reflected silver the light of late morning. We passed Black Rock, the site of the fort where Capt. Andrew Carter had made his last stand against the invading Spanish, and came into the curve of the bay, where the low ground runs a mile inland from the shore. The old man pointed out Old Town, which had once been known as New Westminster, and behind it, the black cliffs at the end of the ridge that runs into the mountainous heart of the island.
From the catamaran, we piled onto the wharf and into the little square in front of the harbormaster’s office. It was all very quiet in the village that the locals call ‘Town.’ A few old people were sitting on benches set in a low wall, silently watching the visitors melt away, giving the odd slow nod to those they knew. I sensed the deep familiarity seeping between them and my own strangeness. For the last four months, I had tried to picture the lay of this land. Now it was real, and suddenly I felt completely foreign.
My e-mail inquiries from England hadn’t met with much response, but I’d managed to negotiate rental of a flat on the second floor of a concrete block at Maracaibo, in the northeast corner of the island. The owner had recommended that I pay a visit to Luis Dann Newball when I arrived. Since the only road on the island is a twelve-mile-long ring, few islanders own cars, but practically everyone has a scooter. As well as being the island’s only builders’ merchant, Luis Dann’s was the only place to rent scooters. We agreed a price for a four-month rental, and after dropping off my luggage and the box of history books I had brought out from London, I set off to explore.
I headed clockwise. There was no one on the road, the sun was warm on my face, and a light breeze was blowing from the northeast. For the first time in ages, I felt free to do what I liked, when I liked. From Town, the road headed up to the island’s only clinic, and then down to its only electricity-generating plant. I puttered past the warehouse where the beer deliveries were kept and the island’s little airport, and then crossed the tail end of a long spur that ran from the Peak to the Three Brothers Cays, where the man-of-war birds were circling over their offshore aeries.
Philip Bell was right: by anyone’s standards, Providence must be accounted utterly beautiful. Thirteen million years ago, a string of volcanoes threw up lava that bridged the straits that divided North from South America. Providence was created by a stray volcano, seventy miles off the coast of what would become Central America. The island is dominated by the Peak, whose spurs run down to the sea, creating steep valleys and the sheltered coves where most of the islanders live. This accounts for the strange combination of round boulders and what must once have been lava: a fine, sandy adhesive that binds them together like mortar. It was as if the island began as a vast cathedral of soaring spires and buttresses, which had gradually been eroded to create its rich soil, leaving only the pinnacles to blacken under the combined onslaught of brilliant sunshine and torrential rain. From the road, some of these rocky outcrops resembled the ruins of the forts that had once defended the island from attack. But as I would discover in tramping its hills and valleys, no trace of the Puritan colony has survived. Once Hope Sherrard’s church collapsed, termites would have bored their way into its timbers, and the sun and rain would have turned them near weightless, like corpses in a desert.
Five thousand people live on Providence today, clustered in any one of seven villages. Each has its plain church, and each is the domain of a small group of families. The Huffingtons and McLaughlins can be found in Lazy Hill; the Livingstons and Bryans in Southwest Bay; and the Newballs and Archbolds in Town. Before leaving Bogotá, I had visited the Biblioteca Luís Angél Arango, one of Latin America’s most important public libraries, in search of books about Providence. One of my finds was The Genealogical History of Providencia Island
by J. Cordell Robinson. Over page after page of family trees, I had tried to establish which Newball, Livingston, or Howard had married which Archbold, Taylor, or Robinson over the past nine generations.
It was nigh-on impossible, but it was clear that until the 1950s, the island’s white families were obsessively close-knit. The Newballs and the Robinsons in particular were known for marrying their cousins, and as the gene pool shrank, growing numbers of Newballs were born deaf, the result of a mutant gene that the first Newball, an English lawyer called Francis, brought to the island in the 1830s. The last wholly white islander died in the 1950s, and although race remains Providence’s prime divider, the majority of islanders fall somewhere between black and white. ‘Some is white and some is black, but most is the colour of chewed tabac,’ as a visiting anthropologist was told in the early 1970s.
Beyond Rocky Point, the road was shaded by the boughs of great cotton trees, whose beardlike blossom littered the corrugated iron roofs of the old wooden houses. Toward the south of the island, the faces grew darker, and by the time I reached the woods at Bottom House, I was the only white person around. From there, it was a long climb to the army base at the top of Morris Hill, from where the Colombian military scans the seas for the first sign of incursion by the Nicaraguans, who have long maintained that the islands are theirs. Coiling back down to meet the sea at Southwest Bay, the road took me past garden hotels and the porches of simple concrete houses, where families gathered to shelter from the sun and watch the scooters go by. The bay was an archetypal Caribbean idyll of white sand beach fringed by coconut palms, and was completely deserted.
I realized that I had given my last cigarette to the island’s only beggar, so I turned off the road at the foot of Morris Hill, past a paddock where three hale old black men were admiring a mare, and down a little road to what looked to be a corner shop. There was no one behind the counter, so I called hello, but no one came. For the first time in my life, I found myself alone in a shop with only the goods for company. My eyes wandered over the shelves of washing powder, tinned vegetables, and long-life milk. I had half a mind to take a pack of Bostons from the other side of the counter but found that I didn’t have three thousand pesos in change, so I walked toward the light spilling through the back door and onto the veranda of the house behind. After hallowing over the sound of a Colombian telenovela (soap opera), I heard a woman shout and a big-boned boy of sixteen came out rubbing his doe eyes. He mumbled a greeting and shuffled past me in his flip-flops to the shop, where he sold me my Bostons.
Heading back to Town, I passed the tourists’ chalets at Freshwater Bay and parked up next to a sign that pointed down a steep flight of concrete steps to Almond Bay. Next to the sign was a concrete bus shelter in the shape of a huge octopus balancing on its tentacles—not that the island had any buses. Luis Dann Newball had told me that the bus shelters had been built by the last mayor, but his successor didn’t want to pay for the bus service (I was never able to work out whether this was a cause or a consequence of the islanders’ dependence on their scooters). I walked down the path, as little bright blue and green lizards scampered into the bush. In the field beyond, an egret was perching on the back of a recumbent cow, which was chewing the cud and appeared to be looking out to sea.
There wasn’t much to see at Almond Bay, apart from a rickety wooden hut with a dirt floor, where a mestizo man was offering empanadas to the handful of tourists on the beach. A skinny old man with knobbly white knees, an English-style flat cap, and a delighted look on his face was picking his way across the pebbles in his bare feet. He looked familiar, for I had only been out of London a couple of days, and I wondered if he might be English. ‘¿Que maravilla es esta isla, no?’ he asked me with the air of one rejuvenated. I could not have agreed more. He bought a coconut from the man in the hut, who lopped off the top with his machete and stuck a straw in the hole, and headed back up the path.
‘Un cachaco [someone from the mountains around Bogotá],’ said the man in the hut, who was wearing the boltiao hat of woven cream and brown straw popular on the Colombian coast. I bought a coconut and asked him where he was from. His parents were from La Guajira, the desert peninsula that protrudes into the Caribbean from Colombia’s north coast, he said. But he had been born on the island and had never left it. When I told him where I was from, Delmar looked at me with curiosity, as if meeting a character he had only read about in stories. ‘The English was here one time,’ he said, switching from Spanish to English. I gave him what I hoped was a look of complete surprise, for I was keen to find out what the islanders knew of Providence’s history. ‘English come in the fourteenth century. About the time Christopher Come-bust-us discover America.’ But that was all he had for me; he didn’t know who the English visitors were, or why they had come.
But Delmar knew all about Henry Morgan. ‘In the cave on Ketleena is where he buried his treasure,’ he told me, pointing across the glittering water of the bay to the smaller, adjoining island of Santa Catalina.*1 Morgan’s Cave looked to be just short of Morgan’s Head, the rocky outcrop that a Victorian visitor likened to ‘the profile of an elderly ruffian.’ If Delmar was to be believed, it was there that the Admiral of the Brethren stashed the gold and silver he amassed during the raid of Panama in 1671. My response was as obvious as it was naïve: if they all knew the location of the treasure, why had none of them managed to find it?
This prompted Delmar to talk of riptides, savage barracudas, and old William Archbold, who had found Morgan’s loot and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair as a result. No, recovering the treasure was far from straightforward, for it was protected by ghosts. When Morgan returned to Providence from Panama, he ordered his four most loyal slaves to dig him a ditch. After burying his haul, he beheaded each of them in turn and had their headless corpses thrown into the ditch, in the belief that their ‘duppies’ would guard his treasure against future interlopers.*2
In the months to come, I would hear many stories of pirates’ treasure, buried either on Santa Catalina or in the hills of Providence. Somewhere under the solid, black bubbles of volcanic rock lie the spoils of war accrued by Morgan and every other pirate to have stopped at Providence on his way back from the Spanish Main, among them Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and Edward Mansveldt. I had heard similar stories in the mountain villages around Bogotá, where the indigenous Muisca people are said to have hidden their gold from the invading conquistadors. In Colombia, such sites are known as guacas; like all ghost stories, they reflect an ancestral conviction that the dead will one day avenge past misdeeds. Providence might have been conquered by Spanish speakers since the last of the buccaneers’ ships faded out of sight, but the true wealth of its English-speaking inhabitants lay hidden, waiting for the day when an islander suitably qualified in the appeasement of angry spirits reclaimed it.
Delmar’s hoary musings amounted to little more than I had learned from the tourist brochures on San Andrés, but I couldn’t blame him for his ignorance of the island’s history. The story of how Providence was resettled went largely unwritten, and the little that was recorded was lost when a hurricane destroyed the archives in the office of the intendente in 1940. The islanders certainly felt some kinship with the buccaneers, but the events that bound them to the Brethren survived only in anecdotes passed down from grandparent to grandchild. The further back in time the story went, the hazier the details became, until all they could call upon were a few names and dates, bobbing unmoored on time’s tide. Without a clear line of descent, the islanders had grown accustomed to an intangible sense of being on the wrong side of history, ignored by mainlanders, and caricatured as pirates by the few tourists to make it this far north.
The truth, of a sort, could be found in the National Archives in Kew, but the prospect of an islander visiting London was so unlikely that it might as well have been the Ancient Library of Alexandria. Besides, what could the volumes of correspondence between the governor of Jamaica and the secretary of state in White
hall really tell them about the Brethren of the Coast? Even when Providence was key to England’s nascent empire, the rank and file’s opinions went unwritten. To the extent that pirate stories have any basis in the reality of what happened in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, the facts either come from Alexander Esquemelin’s History of the Buccaneers of America or Capt. Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates.*3 But neither author has much to say about the wider meaning of the Brethren, and both dismiss their ambitions as extending no further than fame and fortune.
I might have done likewise had I not come across James Burney’s History of the Buccaneers of America, which was published in 1816. Burney was an English rear admiral who retired from the sea to write about its best-known villains. He, at least, was in no doubt about the buccaneers’ radical intent, or how close they came to realizing it. ‘It was fortunate for the Spaniards, and perhaps for the other maritime nations of Europe, that the buccaneers…took no step towards making themselves independent whilst it was in their power,’ he writes.
[While] only two of them, [Edward] Mansveldt and [Henry] Morgan, appear to have contemplated any scheme of regular settlement independent of the European governments…before Tortuga was taken possession of for the Crown of France, such a project might have been undertaken with great advantage. The English and French buccaneers were then united, England was deeply engaged and fully occupied by a civil war, and the jealousy which the Spaniards entertained…kept at a distance all probability of their coalescing to suppress the buccaneers. If they had chosen at that time to form for themselves any regular mode of government, it appears not very improbable that they might have become a powerful, independent state.2