The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  The story is telling for two reasons: not only does it show how slippery the truth becomes in the hands of men determined to spin a good yarn, it inadvertently lays bare the organized criminality on which England’s wealthiest Caribbean colony was built. But no holidaymaker can resist the lure of a good pirate story, however tenuously anchored it may be to the truth. If Morgan were ever to return to the Caribbean, he would make his fortune not by licensed piracy, but by suing all the hotel proprietors, restaurant owners, and owners of shoreline caves who have appropriated his name to advertise places that he never even visited.

  Shortly before leaving Providence, I paid another visit to Tony Archbold’s clapboard bungalow on Ketleena to give him a photocopy I had made of Henry Morgan’s family tree. It showed that, contrary to popular myth, the Admiral of the Brethren was no philanderer. He remained faithful to his wife Elizabeth to the end and died childless. He left half of his estate to her and divided the other half between the children of the two men who had risen through the ranks of the Jamaican plantocracy with him. The first of those men was Charles Byndloss; the second was Henry Archbold.

  “This is very, very important,” Mr. Archbold said, and a wonderful smile spread across his face. Morgan’s family tree proved that the long-held assumption that the Archbolds were descendants of Henry Morgan was untrue. But for the first time, an islander could corroborate that he indeed shared a connection with the Admiral of the Brethren, not by blood, but by love. A month after leaving Providence, I was traveling through the English-speaking towns on the Caribbean coast of Central America when I heard that Tony Archbold had died. What follows is the story of how Providence was resettled, gleaned from the books, articles, and assorted old papers that the island’s historian never got to read.

  * * *

  1789: emerging from a sea that shimmered near silver in the light of midmorning, the island looked like a black peaked hat. As Capt. Francis Archbold drew closer, he saw that it was no more than five miles wide, but its greenery suggested that its soils were rich. When his sloop was just a league from shore, the seabed rose from the depths, turning the cobalt water a brilliant turquoise. Archbold dropped anchor on the edge of the reef, rowed ashore in his canoe, and stepped onto a short beach of white sand partially shaded by coconut palms. He made for a deep crease in the greenery, where a fast-flowing stream coursed down from the peak to the sea. It was his first taste of fresh water since leaving Kingston, four hundred ten miles to the north.

  Archbold decided to settle the flat ground in the south of the island. He had arrived with several of his family’s slaves, whom he set to work felling trees and clearing rocks. Among the white men to have accompanied him was a carpenter, who went into the woods to fell cedar and ironwood. He made foundation posts and planking, and set about building some rudimentary huts.

  No white family could claim to have deep roots on Jamaica, but Francis Archbold had a better claim than most. There had been Archbolds on the island since 1655, the year the English wrested it from the Spanish. Col. Henry Archbold had served under Henry Morgan when the latter was the island’s lieutenant governor, and had risen to become a powerful member of the Jamaican Assembly. But the principal heir to the family’s holdings had sold up and returned to England in 1770. Francis had been left with nothing and joined the growing ranks of men with no prospect of owning land for themselves.

  By 1789, Jamaica had changed beyond recognition since Henry Morgan’s day. There was an insatiable demand for tropical goods like sugar, cocoa, tobacco, coffee, and cotton in Britain, and it was met by the plantation owners of its Caribbean colonies. The islands accounted for four-fifths of Britain’s income from colonial trade, and the sugar business had paid for some of the grandest public buildings of Georgian London, Liverpool, and Bristol. Sugar was also a vital spur to British industry. By 1789, half of Britain’s exports were destined for its colonies. That year, trade with India was worth £2 million, whereas trade with the Caribbean was worth over £4 million, half of which was with Jamaica.5

  Although Jamaica had risen to become Britain’s wealthiest colony, it was entirely dependent on the mother country. Britain took all it produced but also ensured that an island capable of supplying practically every tropical crop known to man grew little apart from sugar and cotton. Such was the island’s self-neglect that it had to import most of its food from the thirteen colonies; when trade was cut off by the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776, fifteen thousand Jamaican slaves died of starvation.6 In return for Jamaica’s sugar and cotton, Britain exported the lessons it was learning from its Industrial Revolution. The division of labor and the creation of specialist professions, first developed in Britain’s textile mills, were transplanted to Jamaica, where the sugar estates became more akin to rural factories than any English farm.

  Back in 1658, when Col. Henry Archbold had bought his first plot on Jamaica, most of the land belonged to men like himself: old soldiers and sailors keen to leave the sea behind and make a living from farming. Plenty of them had been privateers, and they brought ashore the attitudes they had learned over thirty years of colonial rivalry, plunder, and war. One observer described the island’s first landowners as typically illiterate and ‘all trained up from boys in rebellion and murder.’7 They had relatively little money, but land was cheap, so they spent what they had on buying land and taking on servants. It took them some time to work out how best to raise sugarcane, but demand for sugar was strong in Britain, and they had every reason to be hopeful.

  There were just fourteen hundred slaves on Jamaica in 1658, but following the foundation of the Royal Africa Company in 1672, the supply of slaves became a crown monopoly. By the time Francis Archbold left Jamaica in 1789, there were two hundred fifty thousand slaves on the island, and most of its smallholders had been muscled out by those with capital to invest in plantations and sugar mills.8 Once the plantations were up and running, their owners saw no reason to stay in Jamaica and returned to London to enjoy their fortunes in style.

  In their absence, their servants took over the day-to-day running of the colony. They too had changed since Morgan’s day. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Irish and Scots had come to Jamaica in growing numbers, and by 1789, Scots made up the majority of the white population.9 Charles Leslie, whose New and Exact History of Jamaica was published in 1739, did not hold these newcomers in high regard. ‘Many of these menial servants, who are retained for the sake of saving a deficiency, are the very dregs of the three kingdoms,’ he wrote. By 1789, many of these ‘dregs’ had joined the resident elite of estate managers, merchants, lawyers, and magistrates. Members of the ‘plantocracy’ enjoyed an idle life. In return for filing an occasional report for his employer in London, an attorney could expect an annual salary equivalent in value to 6 percent of his estate’s output. Most white Jamaicans drank to excess (Governor Nugent’s wife, Maria, noted that, ‘the men of this country eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises’). They were also renowned for their choleric tempers and several of them embezzled funds from their employers’ accounts.

  On leaving Jamaica for a fresh start on another island, Francis Archbold would likely first have considered San Andrés. When Daniel Elfrith stopped by the island in 1629, he thought its low hills and lack of a natural harbor made it indefensible, and had sailed on to Providence. But potential settlers no longer had to make a priority of defense. Following Britain’s defeat in the American War of Independence, it had been forced to recognize the independence of its thirteen North American colonies. But the Treaties of Versailles that Britain signed in 1783 went further than that, for the war had united Britain’s European enemies, and they were determined to win back what they had lost over a century of rising British sea power. In their negotiations with Spain, Britain agreed to evacuate all settlers living in proximity to Spanish territories, including those on the Miskito Coast, and to resettle them in British Honduras—modern-day Belize—farther up the coast.

  T
he treaty brought peace to the Caribbean, but it left the status of Providence and San Andrés unclear. Although British ships evacuated eighty-nine English settlers from San Andrés, some of those living on the island defied the order to leave and asked King Charles III of Spain’s permission to remain.10 They had headed south from Jamaica in search of new beginnings, they explained. Since they were looking to raise sugar or cotton, most of them had opted to settle on San Andrés, which had more flat ground than Providence. They wanted no part in the tug-of-war between England and Spain, and only wanted to be left in peace.

  The viceroy of Nueva Granada granted the settlers their request, only for a court in Madrid to overrule him, and there followed several years of limbo, as Bogotá and Madrid jostled over who had the authority to consider the islanders’ request. Finally, an official was dispatched from Cartagena to enforce the expulsion order. Had he spoken English, San Andrés and Providence might be Spanish speaking today. But he did not, and the interpreter who accompanied him from the Spanish Main was evidently no Royalist. When the official returned to Cartagena, promising to present the islanders’ case to his superiors, Tomás O’Neille chose to stay on San Andrés. O’Neille was a Spanish-speaking Creole who had been born in the Canary Islands to Irish parents, and in this bilingual child of the Atlantic world, the islanders found their champion.

  They waited three years for a definitive answer to their request. Finally, in May 1792, a letter arrived from Madrid informing them that they would be allowed to stay. Tomás O’Neille was appointed governor of las islas de Providencia y San Andrés, which would henceforth fall under the jurisdiction of the captain general of Guatemala. The king of Spain clearly thought it better to have a band of English farmers living on one distant island than a garrison of impoverished Spanish soldiers wasting away on another.

  * * *

  After the English were driven off Providence by the Spanish in 1641, a handful of refugees had made their way to the Miskito Coast, where they waited for a time when they would be able to return to the island. After 1670, they were joined by some of the pirates and privateers that Henry Morgan had driven out of Jamaica. Among the other refugees to find shelter on the coast over the next hundred years were runaway slaves and servants, and smallholders muscled out of Jamaica by the sugar barons. Their forays on land and sea supplied them with sarsaparilla, mahogany, dyewoods, and vanilla, which they bartered with Jamaican merchant ships for arms, ammunition, and farming tools. Most of them took Miskito wives, and light-skinned Miskito children were soon growing up with English as their first language. In 1739, the governor of Jamaica reported that there were 537 whites and 1,677 slaves living on the coast, ‘the majority of whom could live nowhere else.’11

  By 1789, most of them had left for British Honduras, but some, perhaps the great-great-grandchildren of those who had fled Providence in 1641, opted to return to the island. Among them were John Britton and Thomas Taylor, who were both of Anglo-Miskito heritage. Once on Providence, they joined Francis Archbold in asking for the clemency of the king of Spain. They had come to the island not to engage in piracy or war, they protested, but to cut wood and tend crops. They proclaimed their loyalty to the king, promised not to trade with the English merchants of Jamaica, and agreed to convert to Catholicism as soon as the king sent a priest to the islands.

  In theory at least, Tomás O’Neille was responsible for both islands, but his control over what happened on Providence was nominal, and he left Francis Archbold in peace. Francis’s new house in the south of the island became known as Bottom House. When the work was complete, the men who had helped Francis to build it gathered around the island’s first table and watched as he sketched a rudimentary map of the island. He drew a series of lines running from the peak to the shore, and apportioned a plot of land to each of them. That done, each man began clearing the bush for cultivation.

  After three years, their number had risen to thirty-two, including wives and children.12 Each family had its own house and garden, where they grew corn, yucca, and potatoes. They gathered fruit from the wild trees that grew in the woods, and hunted pigeons and wild pigs. Like those who had settled the island one hundred sixty years before, they became skilled fishermen, for the reef was a feeding ground for shoals of snapper, grouper, and sea bass, and enjoyed the tender meat of the green turtle.

  But if they were to advance beyond basic subsistence, they would need to clear much more ground and plant crops to sell to the merchant ships. So in 1792, Archbold sailed for the Gold Coast of Africa, home of the Coromantis. It was a journey he had made many times before, for he had once been a slave trader and knew the Gold Coast well. Thanks to the role the Coromantis played in fomenting revolt among their fellow slaves, Barbadian planters had passed a law prohibiting their purchase. Yet perversely, Jamaican planters actually preferred them over other ethnicities, and Archbold was similarly undeterred.

  There is no record of how many enslaved Coromantis boarded his ship, but of the twenty-one that survived the voyage across the Atlantic, there were likely to have been more women than men. Women were given more spacious accommodation, where they could move about unchained, and they could also trade sex for favors from the sailors. Conditions for men were worse, and any who dared resist Archbold’s crew could expect cruel punishment.13 Archbold sold one or two slaves to each of the settlers, keeping most of them for himself. His foreman, an African who he called ‘Loyalty,’ put them to work clearing the bush around Bottom House, and when that was done, he had them plant cottonseeds.

  * * *

  Although the first years Francis Archbold and the other settlers spent on Providence are largely a matter of guesswork, thanks to a government inspector’s visit to San Andrés in 1793, a picture emerges of a thriving community. José del Rio found ten large white families and 293 slaves living on the larger island. There was no central settlement, for each family had its own little plot of land, and these were scattered all over the island. They enjoyed an excellent diet of maize, squash, yams, oranges, avocados, plantains, and coconuts. They grew tobacco, coffee, sugarcane, and indigo—just enough for themselves—and raised pigs, chickens, and turkeys. They also grew allspice trees, whose fruit they traded with merchants from Cartagena, and cardamom plants, which they fed to their turtles.

  Although they had cut down most of the island’s biggest cedar trees to serve as planking for Jamaican merchant ships, they still found enough timber to build houses for themselves, and José del Rio was much impressed by their skills with axe and hammer. The island’s slave owners told him that cotton from St. Andrew’s, as they insisted on calling their island, was the best in the world, and fetched much better prices in Liverpool than did cotton from Santo Domingo. What they didn’t tell him was that despite the ban on trade with Kingston, they had sold their entire cotton crop to the captain of a Jamaican merchant ship. With the money they made from the sale, they were able to buy goods like rum, butter, and Madeira wine.

  One day, Governor Tomás O’Neille invited José del Rio to a banquet in the home of the island’s biggest slave owner. In addition to the splendid spread, the government inspector was struck by how the islanders’ general industriousness allowed them to ‘cultivate a certain degree of mutual friendship.’ Thanks to their peaceful contentedness, they were ‘able to keep order without need of magistrates or an official religion,’ which was unheard of in a Spanish colony.14 Their only complaint was the poor quality of the drinking water; since there were few streams on the island, they had had to build tanks in which to store the rainwater that ran off their roofs.

  But José del Rio knew more than he let on. Despite the islanders’ subterfuge, he could see that the source of their wealth was not farming, but the trade in contraband goods, which they smuggled from Jamaica to the Miskito Coast. This was in clear breach of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so on his return to the Main, he recommended that the islanders be removed to Bluefields. In 1795, the captain general of Guatemala issued another or
der for the islands to be evacuated.

  Once again, Tomás O’Neille appealed to Madrid for protection. The captain general was right to complain about the English merchants of Jamaica, for they were interfering in Spain’s legitimate trade with its colonies, he wrote. But it would be quite wrong to blame the islanders, who remained loyal subjects of the king of Spain, and would be only too glad to see the back of the smugglers. He suggested that the captain general send out one of the guardacostas ships to drive them away. Once again, the order to leave was rescinded.

  But the idea that the settlers were loyal to Spain could only ever be pretense: the only Spanish speakers on the island were O’Neille and the thirty soldiers who had been dispatched from Guatemala. The colonial authorities had always been keen to see Spanish taught on the islands, and had even suggested sending Spanish families to San Andrés, in the hope that the islanders would ‘get to know our language and customs,’ and in time, ‘feel themselves Spanish.’ But as O’Neille wrote in a report some time afterward, ‘the islanders still speak English and know nothing of Spanish.’

  A few years later, another inspector was dispatched to San Andrés to investigate reports that the islanders were not only buying and selling from the Jamaicans, but had started trading with the Americans, whose merchant ships were roving the Caribbean with growing confidence. Their stores were said to be full of English and American goods waiting to be smuggled up the River San Juan to the townspeople of Granada and León. What everybody knew, and nobody wanted to admit, was that official connivance in the smuggling of English goods into Spanish ports had been going on for years. Moreover, Tomás O’Neille was sharing the spoils of the smuggling business with his commercial agent in León, who happened to be his father-in-law. With everyone bar the king of Spain getting a cut of the action, contraband was a boat that nobody wanted to rock. The inspector’s inquiries were met with bemused shrugs, and he returned to the Spanish Main none the wiser, venturing only that it was ‘evident that neither the islanders nor the English want to see a change of governor.’15