by Tom Feiling
But even this was enough to unnerve Tomás O’Neille. For as long as the islands were under the jurisdiction of the captain general of Guatemala, there would always be meddlesome inspectors prowling the rickety jetty that served as the island’s dock. If only colonial jurisdiction over the islands could be reverted to Cartagena, four hundred eighty miles due south, the island’s smugglers might get some peace. O’Neille made his case in a letter to Madrid; he explained that while Cartagena was farther away than Guatemala, it was to windward of San Andrés, whereas Central America was to leeward. This meant that the guardacostas would always find it easier to reach the island from Cartagena than from Guatemala. In 1803, O’Neille got the response he had been hoping for: the authorities confirmed that all Spanish territories between Cape Gracias a Dios and Veraguas, including San Andrés and Providencia, would henceforth be considered part of the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada and administered from Cartagena.
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The steep slopes running from the peak to the sea made Providence less suited to cotton cultivation than San Andrés. This deterred more ambitious settlers, made the large-scale importation of slaves unnecessary, and ensured that while San Andrés prospered, Providence remained a backwater. From time to time, a Jamaican merchant ship would arrive in the harbor to buy dried turtle meat, timber, and the little cotton Francis Archbold was able to produce at Bottom House. In return, the islanders were able to buy hammers and nails, pots and pans, shoes and cloth, canvas for their sails, and the clay pipes in which they smoked their tobacco.
However, the frugality and isolation of life on Providence did not put off all comers, and Archbold and his friends were soon joined by more English speakers. Following the American War of Independence, many of those who had remained loyal to the British crown sought refuge in the Caribbean. Finding few opportunities for poor whites around Kingston, some founded new communities in the west of Jamaica. Others heard about the little islands four hundred ten miles south, where the people spoke English and land was cheap.
Among them was Philip Beekman Livingston, a sailor and merchant of Scottish descent who arrived on Providence in 1800. During the war years, Livingston had traveled widely aboard an American man-of-war. When his ship was captured by the Spanish off the coast of Chile, he made his way into the Andes and then north to Cartagena, where he found passage on a ship bound for the United States. But he had made it no farther than Kingston when the ship began to take on water and eventually sank in the harbor. Taking this for an omen, he boarded a merchant ship bound for Providence, where Francis Archbold sold him land and slaves, and he started growing a little cotton.
If Providence’s settlers were looking forward to a future of peaceful productivity, they were to be disappointed. ‘History’—the awesome rumbling of great nations on the move—was poised to sweep through the islands again. The Americans’ triumph over their colonial masters had inspired few emulators in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, but its impact on the instigators of the revolt that became the French Revolution cannot be exaggerated. The revolution in turn brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Combining the tradition of the absolutist king with the ideals of the revolution, Napoleon led his armies across Europe in an unprecedented campaign against the anciens régimes. Among the decrepit structures in his sights was Spain’s Habsburg monarchy. In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain, deposed King Charles IV, and put a Bourbon king on the throne.
The French invasion sounded the death knell for the Spanish Empire. Not only did the crisis distract attention from the colonies, where even the highest-ranking colonial officials seemed indifferent to the fate of their European masters, it forced Spain to find common cause with England in the struggle to expel the invaders. Like France, England turned to its colonies to finance its military campaigns, for it could not keep large armies in the field for years at a time without imposing high taxes on imports of sugar, cotton, and rum.
Yet the country most at risk of losing its Caribbean possessions was not Spain, but France. The jewel in France’s imperial crown was Saint-Domingue—modern-day Haiti—which had first been settled in 1659, just four years after the English captured Jamaica. In 1794, France’s revolutionary government had abolished slavery in all of France’s overseas territories. But swayed by the country’s merchants, his wife’s Caribbean connections, and his own racism, Napoleon set about restoring slavery in France’s wealthiest colony.
The leader of the revolution for a free Haiti was Gen. François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had been born into slavery as the son of Coromanti parents. He rose to prominence espousing the revolutionary ideals of republican France, which ennobled the huge revolt that spread through the plantations in 1801.*4 Although Napoleon’s Grand Armeé defeated the black general the same year, its victory was short-lived. The French forces might have marched across Europe and defeated its most renowned armies, but they proved no match for yellow fever. Brought low by ‘yellow jack,’ the foreigners were seen off with little difficulty when the Haitians next took to the battlefield, and in 1804, Haiti declared its independence.
Among the forces Napoleon sent to Haiti to restore French rule were the third and fourth Polish demi-brigades, which had been created in 1794, in the wake of attempts by Russia, Prussia, and Austria to further partition Poland. In desperation, remnants of the Polish army had retreated west, in the hope of persuading Napoleon to establish a professional Polish army in exile. The French emperor made them his ‘Polish Legions,’ and after several years fighting alongside his Grand Armée in Italy, France, and Austria, he sent them to Haiti, where they set about smothering one people’s aspirations for freedom in the hope that Napoleon would revive their own. It was an irony of the age of nationalism that sickened many of the Polish soldiers, and when the time came to board the supply ships for home, many of them chose to stay behind.
Among these renegades was a Polish aristocrat by the name of Teodor Birelski, who clearly saw a brighter future for himself in the Caribbean. The Haitian revolt had prompted the first rumble of the wars the Spanish colonies would fight to secure independence from Spain. Men of all nations rushed to put themselves at the service of the Creole patriots, and this led to a revival of the privateering tradition in the Caribbean. They sailed under the flags of the aspirant republics of Peru and Argentina, and considered all Spanish ships legitimate targets for plunder.
In 1805, Teodor Birelski had been fighting in Haiti as one of sixty Polish and French troops assigned to the Mosquito, but captain and crew turned to privateering and began robbing British ships as they made their way home from Kingston. So successful were these Franco-Polish pirates that the governor of Jamaica sent out a warship to pursue them. The Renard chased the Mosquito from Cuba into Charleston, and then back down to Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico, with the ship’s French captain managing to escape what seemed certain capture on several occasions.
It was while cruising off the Miskito Coast that the Mosquito put in at Providence for victuals. None of his descendants know why Birelski chose to stay on the island; it may be that he was deliberately marooned after falling foul of the ship’s captain; or maybe, after years of fighting, he was simply taken by the romance of living on an isolated island.
Given that he changed his name to John Robinson shortly after his arrival, the last explanation seems the most likely. Since its first publication in 1719, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had been translated into most European languages. Teodor Birelski was an educated man and was likely familiar with Daniel Defoe’s novel. If so, his arrival on Providence would have struck him as more than a coincidence, for the island’s name chimes with one of the book’s recurring themes—the providence of God over even the most benighted members of his flock.16
Twenty years after Francis Archbold first came ashore, the population of Providence had risen to three hundred. The men and women who resettled the island spawned offspring at a rate only found among people on the brink of extinction. Francis Archbold ha
d six more children, by whom we don’t know. Philip Beekman Livington married Francis’s daughter Mary, thereby uniting the two families that have dominated island life from that day to this. Thomas Taylor, who had come to the island from the Miskito Coast, went on to have children by five different women, and his friend John Britton was no less promiscuous.17
Stable, monogamous households were few and far between on Providence, for while most island men had wives, they also had mistresses. Polygamy was the norm for both settlers and slaves on Jamaica, and the mores of the bigger island provided the template for family life on Providence. That polygamy should have been so prevalent on Jamaica should come as little surprise, for the lack of churches and schools on the island caused a complete breakdown of the institution of marriage. There were very few white women available to the overseers and men of their ilk, since most were the wives or sisters of their employers, and strictly off-limits. So it became customary to seduce the ‘wives’ of the slaves. In a society as cruel and hierarchical as Jamaica, it should come as little surprise to find that poor whites took particular pleasure in seducing the wives of the ‘better sort’ of slave—those with skills to offer or some authority in the community. The whites were ‘heartily despised’ for this last, most intimate act of robbery.18
*1In colonial times, the English called the island ‘Providence,’ while the Spanish called it ‘Santa Catalina’ (or sometimes ‘Santa Catalina de Providencia’). Since becoming part of Colombia, the island has become known as Providencia, while the adjoining island has been called ‘Santa Catalina.’ But the islanders continue to call them ‘Providence’ and ‘Ketleena.’
*2‘Duppy’ is a Caribbean corruption of the Adangme word adope, meaning ‘ghost.’ The Ga-Adangme people are prevalent in Ghana and Togo; between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries many of them were enslaved and sold to English slave traders.
*3Charles Johnson was long believed to be a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe. These days, that theory isn’t much respected, and the author’s true identity remains a mystery.
*4Toussaint L’Ouverture changed the island’s name from Saint-Dominigue to Haiti, which was the original Arawak name.
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The Last Englishman
TOMÁS O’NEILLE’S DIPLOMATIC SKILLS HAD served him well. He was the Spanish governor of two isolated islands of English speakers, mostly the descendants of wandering pirates and castaways. While he gave the colonial authorities no reason to doubt his loyalty to the king of Spain, he made his living running contraband into their ports, a duplicitous balancing act that was the basis for the bigger island’s prosperity. By 1805, San Andrés was a thriving cotton producer, where eight hundred slaves toiled in the plantations, while four hundred settlers worked as overseers, administrators, and smallholders. But it was not Jamaica: many of the settlers were of mixed race, and the island’s biggest slave owner, Francis Bent, was a black man.
Then Francis Archbold, the leader of the settlers on Providence, rocked the boat. That year, he appealed to the governor of Jamaica, Sir George Nugent, for protection. Notwithstanding his declaration of loyalty to the king of Spain, he had always considered himself a British subject, he told him. Sir George sympathized. In March 1806, Capt. John Bligh landed on San Andrés aboard the Surveillante with 144 soldiers and proclaimed the island a territory of the British crown. Overawed by the cannon bristling at the warship’s gunwales, Tomás O’Neille offered no resistance when Bligh arrested him, shipped him and the thirty soldiers at his command to Cartagena, and unceremoniously dumped them on the beach.
The free population of San Andrés welcomed the arrival of the British, for like Francis Archbold, they had always considered themselves crown subjects. Yet memories of how the British had deserted them in signing the Treaty of Versailles were still fresh in their minds. Hedging their bets, they asked that as and when Captain Bligh left the island, he take them with him. It was all very well being scooped back into the Anglosphere, but if the islands were left undefended, they would rather be evacuated to Jamaica or the Miskito Coast than stay and face reprisals from the Spanish.
But Bligh proved a blithe spirit: he departed San Andrés just two months after he had arrived, leaving behind a handful of soldiers to fend off the inevitable counterattack. Sure enough, the junta de guerra wasted no time in putting Tomás O’Neille at the head of a contingent of fifty soldiers with orders to expel the invaders, and in October 1807, the governor retook San Andrés for Spain. When he found that several prominent landowners had been fomenting relations with the governor of Jamaica prior to the invasion, he had them charged with high treason (although Francis Archbold managed to escape punishment).
It was a bad time to be proclaiming loyalty to the Spanish crown. O’Neille’s imperial masters were in crisis: with the king driven into exile, and Napoleon’s army still occupying the country, the fragility of Spain’s empire was plain for all to see. When, in July 1810, the new viceroy of Nueva Granada wrote to the islands’ governor to ratify his term of office, O’Neille hastily stepped down, alleging ill health. His timing was impeccable; on 20 July, Nueva Granada declared its independence from Spain, and the following year, Venezuela did the same. This prompted a fierce backlash from Madrid, and both colonies were soon embroiled in a war for liberation from European rule.
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For many years after the outbreak of hostilities, Providence was unscathed by the wars of independence. Jacob Dunham, an American who made his living trading around the western Caribbean, had no trouble reaching the island from New York in the summer of 1817. ‘We arrived at Old Providence in 17 days,’ he wrote in his diary, and were greeted by:
a motley group of English, Spanish and Curaccoa natives of all colors…[who] urgently requested me to give them a ball…I had a trunk full of sheepskin morocco ladies’ shoes on board, which cost at auction thirty-one cents per pair. I sold most of them here at two dollars per pair. Many of them were danced out in one night.1
Dunham spent the following day enticing the islanders with his cargo of ‘one hundred and sixty different articles to be sold at retail,’ including ‘calicoes, jackonets, muslins, shoes, ribbons, jewelry, cologne water, pomatum, beads and liquors.’
Yet when Dunham returned two years later, he found that the war for independence had finally caught up with the island. ‘On our arrival at Old Providence, I found a small fleet of vessels there called patriots (another name for pirates), who had taken possession of the island and hoisted the Columbian flag.’ On entering the harbor, Dunham’s ship was embargoed, and he was taken ashore for questioning. ‘They had hanged one American, and severely flogged another for some crime, giving him one hundred lashes under the gallows,’ he wrote. Although the occupiers ‘pretended to hold some commission from General Bolivar,’ Dunham demanded that they return his vessel and was able to escape the island with his precious cargo intact.
The leader of these patriot-cum-pirates was thirty-one-year-old Louis-Michel Aury, a French privateer who would spend his short, roving life clamoring for official recognition as a committed fighter for the independence of Latin America. He had first heard about Providence in the summer of 1818, as he was trying to curry favor with the diplomatic representatives of the half a dozen Latin American governments in exile that had found sanctuary in Kingston. The governor of Jamaica was happy to sponsor their plans to throw off the Spanish yoke, and offered no objection when his guests began issuing letters of marque to willing privateers. The combination of public glory and private enrichment enticed Louis-Michel Aury to accept a commission from the Argentine consul, who told him about a small island off the coast of Nicaragua that would make an ideal base from which to run arms to the mainland.
Aury was delighted to be accepted into the patriot fold and began casting around for recruits in Kingston. By the time his flotilla of fourteen ships was ready to sail, he had been joined by eight hundred soldiers and sailors with a stake in the overthrow of the Spanish. Most were Fren
ch veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, but there were also Mexican, Chilean, and Argentine patriots, and two hundred battle-hardened Haitians. He also recruited one hundred fifty white Jamaicans and a large contingent from the southern United States. Some of them were attracted by the lure of privateering, others by the opportunity to overthrow the Spanish Empire, which remained the principal obstacle to free trade in the Caribbean, in spite of the assurances made in the Treaties of Versailles in 1783.
Aury sailed first to San Andrés, where he deposed the man who had taken Tomás O’Neille’s place as governor without firing a shot. The prominent slave owners who sat on the island council breathed a sigh of relief when he told them that their island was of no interest to him, and that he intended to base his force on the neighboring island. Within days of his arrival on Providence, the island had become a vast barracks, divided into an English camp, a French camp, and an American camp. While he awaited the arrival of the reinforcements he needed to launch an assault on the mainland, Aury set about fortifying the island against a Spanish attack, aided by his second-in-command, Agustín Codazzi, a twenty-four-year-old Italian engineer and naval gunner who was no less committed to the patriot cause. In his Memorias, Codazzi writes that Providence: