The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  was certainly the best outpost we could have wished for, and the most suitable for espionage. The island is completely surrounded by reefs that extend for several leagues in all directions, so there is no danger of being surprised by the enemy at night.2

  To make the smaller, adjoining island of Santa Catalina better able to withstand a siege, Codazzi had his men remove the sandbar that joined it to the main island (thanks to the channel they dredged, the two islands have been separated by one hundred meters of water ever since). Meanwhile, he had the island’s battery, which had been in ruins since the departure of Henry Morgan, equipped with heavy-caliber cannons. For the first time in almost one hundred fifty years, Fort Warwick would serve as an anti-Spanish bastion ‘in the heart of the Indies and the mouth of the Spaniards.’ Pressed into service by a new generation of patriots, it became known as Fort Liberty.

  Codazzi was enamored of Providence. Thanks to the huge variety of crops the islanders cultivated in the hills, he enjoyed a healthy diet of corn, bananas, yucca, sweet potatoes, peppers, mangoes, pineapples, papayas, tamarinds, oranges, watermelons, and coconuts. Like the islanders, he ate iguanas often and with relish, for ‘guana’ was delicious meat. At the end of every meal, he smoked homegrown tobacco and drank home-roasted coffee, which he sweetened with homemade cane syrup. Unlike the denizens of the other Caribbean towns he had visited, the inhabitants of the little town the newcomers called ‘Santa Isabel’ lived in well-built wooden houses with solid doors and windows, each set well apart from its neighbor. Every householder kept a well-stocked liquor cabinet, and most of them seemed to have a black mistress as well as a white wife. Surrounding the main house were the shacks of their slaves, ‘of whom there are a great number.’

  The arrival of an army of liberation on such a prosperous, self-contained island threw the community into turmoil. Several of the islanders, including Philip Beekman Livingston, found common cause with the newcomers and dedicated themselves to the struggle for independence. They put their slaves to work alongside the soldiers in fortifying the island against attack, and when Louis-Michel Aury announced plans to raid the Spanish settlements on the coast of Central America, several of them willingly signed up. Aury’s first privateering voyage from Providence was a great success: he captured a Spanish ship off Santa Marta, which was found to be carrying 50,000 escudos (£4 million in today’s money). He sent half of the prize to Gen. Simón Bolívar, the head of Nueva Granada’s government in exile, and distributed the rest among the members of his crew. He even looted Trujillo, which hadn’t been sacked since Henry Morgan’s day.

  Next, Aury sailed north to New Orleans to buy weapons and ammunition for the patriot forces that were fighting near Cartagena. The rendezvous with his Creole comrades at a little fishing port near Cartagena went smoothly, but Aury and his men were arrested by the colonial authorities as they headed back out to sea. They were taken in for questioning, but having already delivered their consignment of weapons, the authorities had no evidence to implicate them in any wrongdoing. Philip Beekman Livingston, who had thrown in his lot with the patriots, told them that they were just fishermen from Providence who had been caught up in a storm and swept south. He assured them of their steadfast loyalty to the Spanish crown and the authorities let the rebels go.

  Louis-Michel Aury’s greatest stumbling block was not colonial Spain, but the difficulty he faced in convincing Gen. Simón Bolívar of his trustworthiness. Agustín Codazzi went to Bogotá on various occasions to petition Bolívar in Aury’s favor, but el Gran Libertador regarded Aury as little more than a pirate, and he met Codazzi’s pleas with indifference bordering on contempt. So the war went on without Aury, and as the prospect of expelling the last Royalist soldier from Nueva Granada became ever more realistic, the Frenchman and his pirate army were soon forgotten.

  Aury did his best to live down the disappointment he felt at being spurned by the man he idolized above all others. The fortification of Fort Liberty was complete, and the island was regularly patrolled by a well-drilled artillery corps and a cavalry corps of a hundred horses. He had twelve warships in the harbor, all ready to carry his six hundred soldiers and four hundred sailors to war in Nueva Granada. But until General Bolívar entrusted him with a mission on the mainland, he was a rebel without a cause.

  He and his fellow officers found girlfriends in Kingston and Santo Domingo, and brought them back to Providence to enjoy the proceeds of their privateering raids. When funds ran low, they went out in search of more plunder, for in spite of General Bolívar’s opprobrium, the Allied Republics of Chile and Argentina were still prepared to issue Aury with letters of marque. But without a war to fight, privateering in the name of colonial freedom soon became robbery for nothing nobler than base greed. Aury and his men began attacking not just Spanish ships, but any vessel that happened to be cruising the western Caribbean. Idle soldiers waiting for the call to arms became wealthy raiders, waiting only for the next outbound ship. There was no end of men with reason to join the pirates on their fortified island. Creole patriots, Haitian insurrectionists, Yankee adventurers, Italian republicans, and English sailors made redundant by the end of the Napoleonic Wars arrived from Port-au-Prince, New Orleans, and Kingston. The island’s harbor became crowded with privateering vessels and sailors comparing the prizes they had seized in Havana, Portobello, and Santa Marta.

  Providence’s storehouses were soon packed with cash, bullion, and merchandise worth sums the islanders could only imagine. In Kingston, it was said that the island’s pirates had amassed booty worth $250,000 (over £50 million in today’s money). The American captain of a ship that Aury captured in 1819 called him ‘the most stubborn bandit facing us today.’3 But the governor of Jamaica was keen to see the triumph of the patriot cause, in Spanish America at least, and recognized Aury’s piracy as legal. It was a return to the buccaneering days, only this time the privateers sailed not under the flag of England, but that of the Allied Republics of Chile and Argentina.

  * * *

  Thanks to Louis-Michel Aury, Providence and San Andrés played a vital yet rarely acknowledged part in Latin America’s struggle for independence. Most Colombians are unaware that the islands were actually the first territories of Nueva Granada to be liberated from Spanish rule, and yet in spite of the great service Aury made to the patriot cause by running weapons across the Caribbean and coming to the aid of the besieged patriots of Cartagena, Simón Bolívar was never able to overcome his disdain for the Frenchman. In 1821, Bolívar made his true feelings known in a cutting letter. ‘I no longer need the services of pirates that only besmirch the national flag in the eyes of the world,’ he wrote.4

  This was not the first time a pirate from Providence had fallen foul of an erstwhile ally. Spurned by his idol, Aury wrote letters to members of Congress in Bogotá to convince them of his patriot credentials, in the hope that they would give him a position in the new government. He was waiting to hear back from them when he was thrown from his horse and severely injured. ‘Arriving in Providence, I discovered that the general had fallen from a horse and was not at all well,’ wrote Codazzi. ‘After just six days, I watched him pass away in my arms amid the sobbing of his lover, a slave and another woman who had given him lodging.’ Aury’s second-in-command never had anything but admiration for Aury’s courage and devotion to the cause of colonial freedom. ‘The loss of this man was irreparable,’ he wrote.

  With the Spanish driven from Nueva Granada and their leader dead, the revolutionary era came to a close for Aury’s men. ‘Suddenly Providence turned chaotic, because everyone wanted to govern, and none to obey,’ wrote Codazzi.5 Peace was only restored when a ship arrived from Cartagena with money to pay off the foreign soldiers and sailors, most of whom soon left the island for pastures new. The same ship brought news from the Andean town of Cúcuta, where a congress of patriot generals and prominent Creoles had declared Simón Bolívar president of an independent Republic of Gran Colombia. The scattered territories of Nueva G
ranada were to be consolidated as a unified, independent state and provisions made for a new constitution.

  On 23 July 1822, Providence proclaimed its allegiance to the new republic. The chaplain of Fort Liberty led the soldiers in singing ‘Te Deum’ and offering thanks to God for their deliverance from colonial oppression. Bells were rung and rounds of artillery fired as the Colombian tricolor was raised over the fort. Providence was now part of the Intendencia de Providencia y San Andrés, which would become the sixth canton of Cartagena.6

  There is no record of how the islanders felt about the ‘independence’ that was foisted on them, just as there is no way of knowing how they felt about the four-year occupation of their island. Several prominent islanders, including Francis Archbold and Philip Beekman Livingston, certainly added their signatures to the pledge of allegiance to Gran Colombia. But with the island’s government effectively still in the hands of Lt. Col. Jean-Baptiste Faiquere, the Frenchman who Aury had appointed Providence’s governor, they are unlikely to have had much say in the matter.

  In his speech to the Congress of Cúcuta, Simón Bolívar had said, ‘Once this work, born of our wisdom and my zeal, is done, nothing will remain for us to achieve but peace.’ It was a vain hope: no sooner had the ink dried on the Declaration of Cúcuta than the government of Gran Colombia came under attack from within, as the regions comprising the new state fought to keep control of their land, slaves, and authority. Unable to find a compromise with the government in Bogotá, the constituent states of what are today Venezuela and Ecuador seceded. What was left of Nueva Granada—modern Colombia and Panama—descended into a civil war that pitted secular liberal against Catholic conservative, centralist against federalist, and slave owner against slave. It was the first of what would prove to be a series of internal conflicts that would keep the Colombian government occupied for the next eighty years.

  Cartagena’s distant sixth canton was to all intents and purposes forgotten in Bogotá. The position of intendente of Providence and San Andrés was not a coveted posting. Bogotanos with friends in the Secretariat of the Interior only knew the islands as a good place to send the black sheep of the handful of families that ran the country. Typical of the tragicomic figures charged with overseeing the islands’ affairs was Antonio Escalona, who was appointed intendente in 1833. During the outbound voyage from Cartagena, his ship was engulfed by a storm. As high waves crashed onto the deck, and the vessel began to list, its passengers became violently seasick, none more so than Escalona. So traumatized was the new intendente that when they eventually docked at San Andrés, he swore that he would never board another ship for as long as he lived.

  His oath must have amused the islanders, for in addition to Providence and San Andrés, the sixth canton included the Corn Islands—Big Corn and Little Corn—two tiny islands off the Miskito Coast that had been settled by men from San Andrés sometime before 1810. Faced with the prospect of a regular, stomach-churning 250-mile round-trip to report on conditions in San Luis, the only settlement on Big Corn, the new intendente came up with a novel solution. He decided to give the same name to a group of shacks in the south of San Andrés. This would allow him to report back from ‘San Luis’ without having to go to sea again. Befitting such a duplicitous man, Escalona also had two wives, one in North End, and the other in ‘San Luis.’ His ruse was only discovered in 1844, after the governor of Cartagena decided to investigate the islanders’ complaints about their intendente. Fearing the consequences of an official investigation—to say nothing of the voyage back to Cartagena—Escalona shot himself through the head in 1845.

  * * *

  With the wars of independence at an end, most of Aury’s men had drifted away. But some chose to stay. One was Simon Howard, a soldier turned pastor from Georgia, who went on have two children with Mary Tayler, and another seven with Ana Pabla de los Ríos, a Colombian from Cimití in the new department of Bolívar, who had come to the island twenty-five years before to work as Tomás O’Neille’s housekeeper. Another was Ralph McBean, a Scottish captain in Aury’s army, who bought land around the lagoon on the east side of the island. Another Scot who chose to stay was John Hawkins, the namesake of the legendary privateer who is recognized as being the first Englishman to carry enslaved Africans to the New World.

  Naturally, Antonio Escalona never visited Providence, and in his absence, the island reverted to the self-government it had enjoyed before Aury’s arrival. The only resident Colombians on the island were the magistrate and his two assistants, whose only task was to feed the handful of dissidents from the mainland languishing in the island’s jail.7 The islanders still traded with Kingston, and as late as 1871, the U.S. State Department seemed to think that the U.K. still had a claim on Providence. But neither island held much interest for the British either. With the wars of independence over, San Andrés and Providence became strategically insignificant, and with the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States sent a clear signal to the old colonial powers that it was embarking on a new, expansionist phase, and would have no truck with European meddling in American affairs. Echoes of Captain Bligh’s claim that the British were the islands’ rightful rulers were heard long after he returned to Kingston, and many islanders believed that the islands would continue to maintain some kind of connection with Britain. But the British claim to the islands went over the horizon with Bligh’s ship, and the islanders have been strangers in their own land ever since.

  So utterly insignificant did Providence become that, were it not for the account of a foreign visitor, it might have been entirely forgotten in Britain. In 1835, the Royal Navy commissioned the captain of HMS Thunder to prepare a survey of the Caribbean coast of Central America. En route to the coast, the crew spent several weeks on Providence, and one of the officers, C. F. Collett, described life on the remote island in an article that was published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Collett had heard of Providence even before he reached the island, perhaps from childhood stories of Henry Morgan, for he mentions ‘the notoriety of its having been the resort of both former buccaneers and more modern privateers.’ But there was ‘no late authentic description’ of the island for him to draw upon, and he had no idea ‘from whom, or when, it received its present name of Old Providence.’8

  Collett was rowed to shore from HMS Thunder by the harbor pilot, Mr. McKellar, who claimed to be one of the island’s oldest inhabitants, and ‘boasts of being a Scotchman.’ McKellar was another of the patriot soldiers who had arrived under Aury and decided to stay. He had settled down with one of Francis Archbold’s daughters, and went on to have several children with her. Collett recalled that he ‘was in the habit of amusing us with many interesting anecdotes of the exploits of General Aury and his followers, in which he generally figured as a principal character.’

  Jacob Dunham would have found few takers for his moccasins on postwar Providence. With the patriot soldiers gone, just nine houses remained in the once-flourishing town of Santa Isabel. But each family still had its own house, built on ironwood piles hewn from the woods on Ralph McBean’s land, and their slaves still lived in the shack in the garden. Half of the 342 people on the island were enslaved—but that is not to say that every white man on the island owned slaves. A slave cost a lot of money—113 silver pesos on average (ten times the value of a cow, and the modern-day equivalent of £21,000).9 The magistrate, John James Davidson, had five or six slaves; William Newball, an English barrister who had come to Providence with his wife, had three. But Ralph McBean and his wife had just one, and many islanders did not have the money to buy a slave. Instead, they worked the land with their wives and children.

  The islanders’ plots were scattered across the island, and despite the adjustments made to accommodate the growing number of heirs and new arrivals, the oldest islanders could still recognize the boundaries that Francis Archbold had sketched at his kitchen table forty-three years before. Collett spent a good part of his day on horseback, riding t
he rough path that followed the shoreline or following the tracks that led up into the hills. The islanders’ horses were ‘a fine breed, rather small, and purchased at £3 to £4 sterling a head,’ he noted.*1 Southwest Bay was still lined with manchineel trees, and in the steeper valleys, there were still a few stands of the cedar trees that the Puritan settlers had used to build their huts. Yet much of the interior remained uncultivated, and it was there that ‘the animal creation’ was afforded ‘the greatest profusion.’

  When the islanders wanted to travel to other parts of the island, most of them took to their dories.*2 They had learned to make dugout canoes from the Miskitos, and were as comfortable on the water as they were on land. Collett began his day by paddling his dory offshore and dropping a plumb line into the water to take soundings for the nautical chart that he had been instructed to prepare. From his dory, he could see fields of sugarcane ripening in the sun and noted that the fertility of the island’s volcanic soil was such that it required little cultivation to produce ‘a sufficiency for the inhabitants.’ In addition to their kitchen gardens, they had planted hundreds of fruit trees, and ‘sapodillas, mangoes, oranges, tamarinds, plums, and limes are plentiful…Nature appears here in abundant luxuriance,’ he marveled.

  The owners of the best of the flat ground were Francis Archbold’s three sons: James, Pierce, and Francis, Jr. Most of their fields were given over to cotton, but the resemblance to San Andrés ended there. Collett says that on Providence cotton was ‘cultivated more or less by everyone,’ whether free or enslaved, and the working day lasted only until noon. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons, the islanders tended their kitchen gardens. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, they went fishing. The cattle that Archbold had brought over from Jamaica had flourished on the rich pasture that fringed the island, and Collett judged their descendants to be ‘generally in good order.’ But they were outnumbered twenty to one by the island’s pigs, which didn’t need pasture and were good receptacles for kitchen waste.