The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Although the islanders bartered the produce of their plots with their neighbors, they needed cash to trade with passing merchant ships, and Collett was pleasantly surprised to be able to buy fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit for the crew of HMS Thunder with pounds sterling. Aside from the cotton crop, their main source of cash was the turtles that nested on the cays of Serrana, Roncador, and Serranilla, seventy-five to one hundred miles northeast of Providence. ‘Tortoiseshell’ had been coveted since the days of Cleopatra, who is said to have used it to decorate the walls of her palace. The first Spaniards to reach the coast of Central America had seen the native chiefs use tortoiseshell for ornamentation, and it had returned to vogue thereafter. By the 1830s, it was in such demand in London and New York that a single turtle was worth $50 (almost £12,000 today).

  At the start of the turtle-hunting season, Pierce Archbold would run up to the cays in his sloop with a crew of young turtle hunters, who often spent a month there, leaving only when he picked them up again on his return from the Miskito Coast. Their principal object was the hawksbill turtle, which has tougher meat than the green turtle, but better-quality shells. Because of its value, and the opportunity to interact with outsiders that it provided, only whites were allowed to go turtle hunting.

  Few traders stopped at Providence, and this put the islanders at a disadvantage when Peter Shepherd’s boat came into the harbor. Every year, Shepherd sailed away from Providence with thirty thousand pounds of raw cotton, tropical woods like cedar, ironwood, manzanilla, and dyewoods, and smaller quantities of honey and coconuts.10 In exchange for the islanders’ produce, he supplied them with everything they needed for the months ahead, be it rope, hoes, tar, kerosene lamps, fishing hooks, hooped barrels, or earthenware jars. Most of their earnings went on cloth, which arrived from Britain via Jamaica. Cloth was exorbitantly expensive, and the irony of a community of cotton producers having to pay over the odds for the finished article was not lost on the islanders, most of whom had permanent black marks against their names in Shepherd’s ledger. His near monopoly on trade gave him enormous leverage, which he often exploited to his own advantage, but he could be munificent too. When the price of tortoiseshell slumped in 1830, forcing the islanders to the edge of penury, he extended them the credit they needed to see out another year.

  The most eagerly awaited event in the island calendar was the grinding of the sugarcane, when the Archbold brothers invited their neighbors to spend a few days cutting cane and loading it onto carts for the horses to carry to the island’s only sugar mill. After a day in the brothers’ cane fields, the workers would gather at the mill to bottle the precious raw cane juice, which they used to sweeten their coffee, cakes, and preserves. Cane juice was also the source of ‘cumfire,’ the rough liquor that sustained those who chose to stay at the mill for the night. Illuminated only by the light of the moon and a kerosene lamp, they would tell stories of buried treasure and the ghosts that stood guard over it. The scene was enlivened by their ballads, which were sung to the accompaniment of a fiddle, a mandolin, and an accordion.

  Sailors and fishermen from the Cayman Islands often timed their visits to Providence to coincide with the cane-cutting season. They came south in their catboats, attracted by the tortoiseshell trade, the delicious meat of the green turtle, and the good times to be had at the mill.11 When they left, they took word of the islanders’ knowledge of the sea with them, and Providence men were soon in demand as pilots for the merchant ships that traded up and down the Miskito Coast. Some of the islanders settled there, taking the names of Archbold, Howard, and Robinson to the English-speaking communities on the coast. Their places were taken by the Cayman islanders who settled on Providence between 1830 and 1880. Most of them were of Scottish descent, and they added their names—McLaughlin, Rankin, and Bush—to the island’s family tree.

  * * *

  It was an idyllic life. While they knew little, if anything, about the original Puritan colony, by the time they passed away, the men and women who had resettled Providence with Francis Archbold in 1789 had realized the ideal of the self-sustaining farm so cherished by the Puritans. They grew their own food, built their own houses and boats, sewed their own clothes, and even made their own hats. Archbold’s sons labored in the fields alongside their slaves, and nobody was idle or insubordinate. There was no overweening governor to answer to, and no company lecturing them on how best to raise vanilla plants. Their trade with Peter Shepherd could hardly be called free, but they made up for any deficiencies by bartering with their neighbors. They lived in peace, were remarkably long-lived, and undoubtedly more prosperous than the inhabitants of a typical English village of 1835.

  Yet they were impoverished, and their isolation was never splendid, for the piratical element had triumphed. The only law they recognized was the one that condemned black men and women to lives of perpetual slavery. All they knew of the modern world was what they learned from Jamaica, which had all of the material comforts that the modern world could offer, and none of its civilization. Since C. F. Collett, the Royal Navy officer who visited Providence in 1835, only hints at the islanders’ moral shortcomings, we can only assume that they were similar to those of the white community four hundred ten miles to the north. White Jamaicans had not been guided to the Caribbean by an ideal, and the idea that they might be fulfilling a divinely ordained plan would have struck them as laughable. They had come to take their places in a vast machine owned by their absent employers and protected by their employers’ allies in the House of Commons.

  With the plantation owners absent in England, laziness, lack of initiative, callousness, and egotism became defining characteristics of the plantocracy. They found nothing on the island to give them cause to improve themselves, and the semiliterate majority viewed the very idea of schools with disdain. According to Charles Leslie, whose New History of Jamaica was published in 1739, teachers were ‘looked upon as contemptible, and no gentleman keeps company with one of that character.’12

  Nor did white Jamaicans have a religious life to speak of. To become a clergyman in Jamaica was the office of last resort for an Englishman who had failed in every other profession. Charles Leslie found the island’s clergymen to be ‘the most finished of our debauchers.’ Another historian has called the story of the Church of England’s Jamaican outpost ‘perhaps the most disgraceful episode in the history of that institution.’13 The colony’s planters and army officers dutifully attended church every Sunday, but the service was an empty ritual, whose main purpose was to convince one another of their shared superiority over their heathen slaves and give their wives a chance to show off their finest clothes. Describing the situation in a letter to the bishop of London around 1720, the rector of Kingston wrote that most members of the plantocracy ‘have no maxims of Church or State, but what are absolutely anarchical.’14

  ‘To what, I say, can we attribute this?’ wondered Charles Corbett in his Essay Concerning Slavery, which was published in 1746. ‘To indolence in some, and perhaps stupidity in others; but in far the greatest part ’tis owing to a narrow selfishness, and total unconcern for everything that does not regard their immediate interest.’15 It is not hard to see why Samuel Johnson referred to Jamaica’s planters as ‘English barbarians,’ and called on his friends to drink a toast to the next slave insurrection.16

  Did Francis Archbold migrate to Providence to perpetuate this benightedness, or to escape it? Fifty years after his arrival, there was still no church on Providence or San Andrés. In a report he prepared for the captain general of Guatemala, Tomás O’Neille admitted that while ‘youths of both sex have already traveled to England and the United States…all they know of Christianity is the baptism.’17 He asked the captain general to send him an Irish priest—‘the Irish are well liked here because they speak English’—but nothing had come of his request. As for Collett, he appreciated the islanders’ hospitality but noted they had:

  neither form nor observance of religious duties. Marriages are
contracted by civil ceremony and bargain, and their only recognition of a supreme power is in the respect they pay to Sunday, which is marked by a total cessation of labour, and attention to external appearance.

  In the absence of a minister, newborns were baptized by the chaplain of the Colombian guardacostas, and since there were no schools on the islands either, they grew up unable to read or write. To one raised in the belief that Christianity was the bedrock on which civilized life rested, as Collett undoubtedly was, the idea of a prosperous and contented community living without religion was baffling. Yet he found the islanders to be perfectly upstanding. ‘They have few temptations to drunkenness, restrictions being placed on the introduction of spirituous liquors,’ he wrote approvingly, before adding that ‘to speak of the moral character of these people would perhaps be hazardous.’

  Considering the conflict between Puritanism and piracy that defined the original colony on Providence, what was the ‘moral character’ of the men and women who succeeded them? Collett makes no mention of the drunken singsongs of the cane-cutting season, the islanders’ promiscuity, or the lives of the enslaved population, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he only saw what his hosts wanted him to see. He spent much of his time with the island’s magistrate, but John James Davidson didn’t have much call to practice his legal skills, and for want of an income, he had turned to farming. On the rare occasions when a crime was committed, he left it to fathers to punish their children, and owners to punish their slaves.

  Collett noted that theft was dealt with ‘severely,’ which probably meant flogging. On an island of British runaways and former mariners, most of whom had learned the rudiments of colonial life in Jamaica, the whip was likely the chief censure. In England, the whip had been used to punish recalcitrant soldiers, sailors, and servants for generations, and the same hard line was taken in Jamaica, where it was customary to flog slaves judged to be lazy or argumentative. The punishment for repeat offenders was one that John James Davidson had learned from the Miskitos: a dory would be loaded with fruit and water, and the culprit banished from the island for life.

  As well as having no religion, education, or law, neither island had a doctor. If someone fell ill, he might be taken to Kingston, but that was four hundred fifty miles away, so in all but the most extreme cases, the islanders fell back on the bush medicine practiced by the Miskito, black, and Zambo women, who would comb the hills for the plants they needed to treat everything from labor pains to dysentery.

  And then there was slavery. In the years following the arrival of the twenty-one Coromanti slaves that Archbold brought to Providence from the Gold Coast, more slaves were brought to the island from the west coast of Africa, via Kingston. According to the late Oscar Bryan, Providence’s wise fool and most knowledgeable historian, the new arrivals included Mongala from the Congo and the kingdom of Benguela (who were usually classed as Angolan), and Ibo and Montete from Nigeria.18 Jamaica’s first historian, Edward Long, says that Gold Coast slaves tended to dominate those from other regions of Africa. Whether they played the same role on Providence is a matter of guesswork, but it seems unlikely. Although the slaves were sent to different parts of the island, they often found themselves working together, and many of them were bound by the strong ties of friendship they had forged in the terrible conditions that prevailed in the Middle Passage. It was customary for slaves who arrived on the same ship to call one another ‘shipmate,’ and the term became synonymous with ‘brother’ or ‘sister.’ So strong were the bonds that sexual intercourse between these ‘shipmates’ was considered taboo.

  Jamaican planters referred to the one to three years that it took an African to adjust to his new life on the plantation as the ‘seasoning’ period. In Henry Archbold’s day, slave owners had a vested interest in keeping their slaves healthy, for they wanted them to reproduce. They bought male and female slaves in equal numbers and tried to re-create some semblance of family life. But that changed once large-scale sugar production got off the ground, and the planters began trafficking slaves from Africa in the thousands. Natural reproduction became unfeasible, because a quarter of their enslaved workers died during seasoning, whether of malnourishment, illnesses contracted during the Middle Passage, or the savage treatment meted out by their overseers. Practical Rules for the Management of Negro Slaves urged that ‘no encouragement [be] given to bring up families, the general opinion being that it is better to purchase new Negroes than to rear Negro children.’19

  Although there are few clues to the daily lives of the island’s enslaved population, the life of a slave on Providence is unlikely to have been as grim as that of a Jamaican slave, or a slave on San Andrés for that matter, for their owners had every interest in ensuring that they had the strength needed to produce children. Cotton wasn’t the mainstay that it was on San Andrés, and aside from the Archbold brothers, most of the islanders were poor smallholders, who could not afford to send for more slaves every time one of them died. Nor did the enslaved live as part of a distinct, separate community, as they did on San Andrés. Instead, they lived in artificial families of between three and six men and women, in wattle and daub shacks built at the end of their owners’ gardens. Such close proximity couldn’t help but create a certain intimacy between master and slave.

  But the fundamentals of the relationship remained the same: a puerile game of one-upmanship based on deprivation, humiliation, and endless petty rules. The slaves’ only days off work were Sundays and every third Saturday, which they spent tending their own vegetable patches and working in their shacks, for they were expected to feed, clothe, and house themselves. Some of the men would take to their dories on a Saturday to catch fish, but they weren’t allowed to trade with Peter Shepherd. Turtle hunting at the cays was not allowed, but some masters allowed their slaves to catch the odd hawksbill turtle in McBean’s Lagoon. With the proceeds, they were able to buy a little cloth, but never enough to clothe a family, so most of them spent their lives wearing their owners’ castoffs. Never far from destitution, they had little choice but to steal from their masters’ gardens. Even in death they were kept separate and unequal. White islanders were buried in the cemetery in Town, where their graves were marked with a token wooden cross. Black islanders were buried in ‘the heathen burial ground’ in Southwest Bay, where nothing marked a man’s final resting place but a clump of weeds.

  *1£3 to £4 in 1830 would be worth £148 to £197 today.

  *2The Miskito term for a dugout canoe was one of the few native words the English speakers adopted.

  [17]

  ‘A Sort of Lying That Makes a Great Hole in the Heart’

  BY 1831, FEW BRITONS HAD heard of Providence, and fewer still were aware of its role in the development of the empire. So little was known about the island that the Dictionaire Geographique Universal, published in Paris that year, could state with confidence that it was ‘not inhabited.’ On the rare occasions that the name came up, it was usually in reference to New Providence in the Bahamas, or Providence, Rhode Island. The planters and merchants of Jamaica and Barbados, who were making a killing from slave labor and the English sweet tooth, had no use for Providence, for it was too small and too mountainous for sugar plantations. The island had played its part, luring the adventurers of the Providence Island Company to New Westminster with the promise of riches and righteousness.

  But William Dampier, the pirate who visited the island in 1680, was mistaken in thinking that Providence was ‘without interest to the English.’ The imperial drama might have shifted to Jamaica, but as timeserving bookkeepers and sadistic overseers took the places once occupied by Puritans and privateers, England’s swashbuckling days were revived in literary form. Readers thrilled by the tales of derring-do in Alexander Esquemelin’s History of the Buccaneers of America had been given another treat in 1724, when Capt. Charles Johnson published A General History of the Pirates. These books became templates for a welter of stories about pirates, castaways, and buried treas
ure that captured the public imagination just as the events on which they were based receded further into the past. The rise of the adventure story coincided with an era of momentous changes that kept England in a state of fear and uncertainty. As London luxuriated in its new finery, nostalgia became a feature of modern life no less than consumer luxuries. Not that nostalgia was anything new for the English, for among the spurs that had driven the colonists of the Providence Island Company to cross the Atlantic in the 1630s was their nostalgia for the glory days of ‘Good Queen Bess.’

  As noted earlier, Charles Johnson was long thought to be a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, author of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but the true author was most likely Nathaniel Mist, a sailor turned publisher. Both writers were quick to realize that stories from the early days of colony building could be turned into money-spinners, once suitably tailored to flatter the prejudices of the book-buying public. Tales of adventure set in distant lands amid a cast of strange peoples highlighted the qualities thought to be common to all Britons: self-sufficiency, daring, and enterprise.

  As well as being a pioneer of the true-crime genre, Daniel Defoe was perhaps the first writer to dramatize a real-life story: in his hands, the facts were made to serve his imagination. Yet the author of Robinson Crusoe felt strangely deflated by the book’s success. ‘This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime, and yet very little regarded in that part. It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.’1