by Tom Feiling
By 1831, the empire had become more than a source of materials and markets; it was a venture in which the entire country had a stake, and a useful way of cohering a nation that was increasingly prone to internal strife. Yet the empire had also changed, as the center of gravity moved away from the Caribbean colonies to India and beyond. Not all of Britain’s imperial subjects appreciated the three C’s—Christianity, commerce, and civilization—that the mother country was offering them, and the British found themselves embroiled in several colonial wars. Victorian thinkers worried that the empire had lost its moral purpose, and as the typical Briton grew more anxious, the ideal Briton, unfazed by wild natives or wild nature, became more appealing.
Eighteen thirty-one also saw publication of Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative of his Shipwreck and Consequent Discovery of Certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea, an extraordinary reimagining of the English colony on Providence. Its author, Jane Porter, is little remembered today, but she was one of the most successful novelists of her day. Much of her success was down to her obsessive interest in Britain’s national heroes, and The Scottish Chiefs, her retelling of the life of William Wallace, was one of the first historical novels ever written. Her rose-tinted perspective owed much to the pride she took in being related to one of the chiefs of Scotland’s MacGregor clan. The same vanity inspired Sir Edward’s Narrative, which holds a mirror to Britannia’s bloated glory, and shows the imperial imagination at its most deluded.
The virtual disappearance of Providence gave Porter a blank slate on which to rewrite the history of the island, and thereby Britain’s role in the Caribbean. The story is set in 1731—exactly one hundred years before the book was written, and one hundred years after the Providence Island Company dispatched the Seaflower to the island. Edward Seaward is the son of a ‘poor but honest farmer’ from the suitably saccharine-sounding village of Awbury, near Bristol.2 Like Robinson Crusoe, Edward’s story begins with an irrepressible desire to go to sea. His nephew invites him to join him as a merchant in British Honduras (modern-day Belize), but he cannot imagine going without his childhood sweetheart, ‘the simple-hearted, single-minded daughter of the curate of Awbury.’ Like all of Porter’s heroines, Eliza is brave, intelligent, and determined to do what is right, and as the author points out in the preface, she and Edward exemplify ‘sound and truly British principles, religious and moral.’ Far from discouraging Edward’s flight of fancy, Eliza tells him, ‘the providence of God is with you, whether in England or in the solitary desert.’ They get married, and when the time comes for the newlyweds to leave for Bristol docks, Edward’s father gives him ‘his blessing and my mother’s Bible.’
They sail first to Kingston, the capital of England’s wealthiest colony. But the city was built by its slave traders, plantation owners, and sugar merchants, not its church ministers, and the Seawards soon realize that it is no godlier than Port Royal, the swashbuckling city it was built to replace. When Eliza asks a local merchant how many churches Kingston has, he replies, ‘One, I believe; but I never have been in it.’ ‘“Never in it!” repeated my Eliza, with an emotion of surprise. “O no,” resumed he; “scarcely any one here ever thinks of going to church. We have too much to do…”’
Leaving Kingston for British Honduras, the Seawards’ ship is engulfed by a terrible storm. Driven onto the jagged reef of an isolated island, the ship is wrecked and the crew drowned, leaving our twin pillars of Christian rectitude as the only survivors. On coming ashore, Eliza is overcome by an ancestral fear of being eaten by the natives, but in the days that follow, she realizes that she and Edward are the island’s only inhabitants, and that far from being a desert, they have been cast into a latter-day Garden of Eden. But what saves them from starvation is not the mercy of God, but the wreck of their ship. What they call the ‘ark of our deliverance’ is packed with all the accoutrements of modern life, and at every challenge to the nous of this quintessentially Victorian couple, Edward roots around in the hold until he finds a solution, be it a bow saw, steam iron, coffee cup, or inkpot.
Thanks to ‘the workshop of the world,’ they are able to replicate a typical middle-class Victorian household on the island. Spared the indignity of eating earthworms and binding broken limbs with her last scrap of clothing, Eliza goes about putting her kitchen back in order. Fidele, their King Charles spaniel, has also survived the shipwreck, and when he catches an iguana, Edward uses his spyglass to light a fire. He cooks the strange lizard on the embers; the merchant they met in Kingston was right: it tastes like chicken. They supplement their diet with sea biscuit from the hold of the ship and fruit from the trees, ‘never omitting to gather up the seeds of our fruits as we used them.’ The following day, Edward plants the pumpkin, orange, and watermelon seeds, while Eliza turns her hand to basket weaving. As she admires her handiwork, she is quick to draw lessons from their misfortune. ‘I now began to think a good basket-maker no despicable personage in society,’ she says to herself.
‘Gentlefolk often wonder how servants and other working people can eat so much,’ says Edward, as he sits down to dinner. ‘If I had ever entertained such a wonder, it was now no longer to me a mystery.’ In a passage that must have delighted and appalled Porter’s readers in equal measure, he not only washes their clothes, but prepares a pepper pot for dinner, while his wife ‘lies down on our friendly settee to repose.’ As he helps her to wring out the sheets, he tells her, ‘Our situation shows how much is to be effected by mutual assistance…To such a lesson, at least, is the tendency of God’s providence in the order of His creation.’
Sitting on the wooden platform between the plank house and the stone kitchen Edward has built, ‘each on a commodious chair, and our dear little dog in front of us,’ they reflect on the lives they have left behind. They agree that they are ‘experiencing more real enjoyment than the world’s society, with all its blandishments, could bestow!’ Edward even manages to enjoy himself: one evening, reminiscing about his struggle to catch a fish, he ‘laughed heartily again and again,’ in ‘an excess of mirth neither natural nor habitual to me.’
The Seawards have no idea ‘whose dominions we were in, or even of the probable name of the spot where we were, for our situation did not exactly answer to any island, or islands, laid down in the chart I had found in the captain’s chest.’
The only clue is the brass belt buckle that Edward comes across while clearing piles of bird manure from the mouth of a cave. ‘I rubbed the plate with some sand, and thought I made it out to be Spanish…it must have lain there a long time; perhaps a century.’ Using a crowbar—another miraculous find in the hold of the wrecked ship—he breaks through a fissure at the back of the cave and stumbles across a chamber piled high with canvas bags, each of which contains five hundred gold doubloons. In one of them, he spots an English coin dating from 1670. Eliza is wary of the corruption that wealth brings in its train, but Edward soon reasons his way to taking ownership of the treasure. Still, his sleep is troubled by strange dreams that night.
One morning, three months after coming ashore, they are ‘struck dumb by the sudden appearance of a large canoe between us and the opposite island.’ It is carrying two men, two women, and a girl, all of whom are black.
The elder of the men stepped out, and stooping before me, embraced my knees. I raised him up, while my wife, with the look of an angel, gave him the melon, and I, to show him I had no misgivings, took a clasp-knife from my pocket, and putting it into his hand unopened, made signs to him to cut the melon and divide it among his party.
This is Diego, his wife, Rota, and Xavier and his wife, Hyacinthe, Cuban slaves, and the only survivors of a second wreck on the reef. Edward tells them that they are free to return to Cuba or stay on the island—they choose to stay.
‘I hope we shall be able in time to teach them to know that God who delivered them from death, and placed them here in security and abundance,’ Eliza says to her husband that evening. But before they can make acolytes of their new friends, th
e Seawards must teach them the natural order of things. ‘For their happiness and our own, they must be accustomed to look up to us for everything, and therefore be made to serve us as servants, but not as slaves,’ Edward tells Eliza. He puts Diego to work tending their crops, while Eliza instructs Rota in gutting a fish for their dinner. Xavier turns out to be a carpenter, so Edward finds a saw, axe, and adze in the hold of the ship, and puts him to work building a plantation house, whose ‘elevation was sufficiently commanding, when compared with the huts of Diego and Xavier, to give it an air of superior consequence.’
Elevated to their rightful place, Edward has the pleasure of seeing his wife ‘restored to her former gentlewomanly condition by His providence, relieved from toil, and all the menial offices of culinary labour.’ The Seawards are now ‘able to read a good deal, and enjoy frequent walks, arm in arm, in intellectual converse: happy in ourselves, and happier still in seeing those around us happy.’ They spend their days decorating their new home with the shells they find on the beach, and building a shelf for their books, which include ‘the noble Shakespeare…the nobler Bible…the Spectator, and Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress.’
One Sunday, their servants are amazed when Edward tells them that they are not to work on the Sabbath. But Diego crosses himself when he hears the words ‘Jesu Cristo,’ and prostrates himself at his master’s feet. ‘I took a little water, and dipping my finger in it, moved it on the forehead of each one present, saying, “May it please Thee, God, to add this individual to Thy holy Church.”’ The sight of their crops ripening in the sun, and their commodious accommodation gives Edward great satisfaction, but
the happy condition of our negro friends was still more gratifying even than all this. Their orderly conduct, their attachment, their progress in speaking English, and the pleasure they seemed to take in learning what God had revealed to man in the Scriptures, gave us a deep feeling of holy joy.
But the idyll cannot go undisturbed by villainy. One morning the castaways are awoken by the sound of cannon fire. Running to the shore, they see a Spanish brig firing on an English schooner. After Edward shoots at them with his musket, the brig wheels away, and the schooner’s crew are able to come ashore. Over dinner, their captain expresses his amazement at landing on an island of free blacks—why doesn’t Edward sell them in Kingston? he asks him. This is Edward’s chance to school an old Caribbean hand in the rudiments of Christian morality. ‘These much-valued negroes that surround me are as free as I am,’ he tells him.
With these words, Edward realizes God’s purpose for the island: far from being a lucky escape, ‘the providential arrival of the poor castaway negroes, and then of the schooner worked together to give us the means of planting a colony of refuge in that blessed haven.’ Convinced of the godly role they have been assigned to play, he sails to Kingston with the schooner’s captain, returning with provisions and more settlers, including a group of wandering New Englanders, and the twenty-two-year-old Capt. Francis Drake, ‘an excellent fellow,’ who has ‘no pretensions to modish attire.’ The Seawards leave the island in Drake’s capable hands and return to London to secure official recognition of their island.
At a meeting in Whitehall, PM Sir Robert Walpole asks Edward to show him the island’s location on a map of the West Indies. But it is not marked, for as Edward explains, ‘neither England, nor Spain, nor any other country, has ever thought it worth their while to take possession of those rocks.’ The process of granting a patent is far from straightforward, says Sir Robert, and Edward will have to be patient. But as old Caribbean hands know from bitter experience, politicians are a duplicitous breed, and it is only the intervention of good Queen Caroline that saves Edward’s request from endless bureaucratic wrangling. The queen has heard all about their little settlement from Eliza, and tells Sir Robert to grant Edward the patent without delay. He pays five shillings an acre, is appointed governor of Seaward Island, and is knighted Sir Edward Seaward.
Before they return to their transatlantic home, Eliza orders ‘low-heeled boots and some new articles of furniture, besides an outfit of glass and china and crockery ware, damask linen and cutlery.’ While his wife is shopping, Sir Edward goes to inspect the weapons at the Tower of London. England and Spain have fought several wars since Henry Morgan’s day, and the guardacostas continue to harass British shipping. Yet far from throwing their weight behind the region’s privateers, the Commissioners of Trade and Foreign Plantations have ‘sat three years on the British claims for redress.’ Sir Edward has no more trust in Whitehall’s commitment to defending the colonies than Thomas Modyford did, and orders ‘ten guns for the battery…to be prepared on the open ground below the mansion.’
The island’s new governor also contracts a doctor to join him on Seaward Island. He promises Dr. Gordon a salary of £50 a year, with ‘the medicines to be found at the public expense, or at mine.’ To tend to the islanders’ spiritual ailments, he also employs the services of Reverend Rowley, who has weak lungs that he hopes will benefit from the warm air of the Caribbean. ‘I liked his appearance and his manner,’ says Edward. ‘Being much subdued, either by religion or want of health, [they] stamped on him that air of meekness which seems the distinctive mark of a true Christian.’ Sir Edward’s last recruit is Rosalie, the teenage daughter of ‘a Protestant clergyman, of the remnant of the Huguenots.’ She is presented to the Seawards by her mother, a Frenchwoman who ‘has sought in your country that protection we could not find in our own.’
Upon their arrival in the island harbor, Diego rows out to meet them ‘in the six-oared boat, with his men neatly equipped in white frocks and trousers, and straw hats.’ Reverend Rowley is struck by the warmth of the welcome. ‘“It is delightful to see such love between the negro and his lord,”’ he tells Sir Edward. ‘“Why is it not so everywhere?” “Because,” I replied, “I am not their lord. I teach them, as you will teach them, that God is their Lord; and I only his servant, though their benefactor.”’ That evening, governor, first lady, doctor, and minister sit down to enjoy ‘the greatest rarity in the tropical world: good English wedder mutton!’ which they round off with coffee and cigars, ‘giving three cheers to King George and the Governor.’
The following Sunday, Reverend Rowley gathers his flock at the island’s cotton tree, where boards have been placed on bricks to make rudimentary pews. The minister leads them in prayer, ‘and if there was not a general devotion in his congregation, there was every appearance of it.’ In the weeks that follow, he baptizes them and marries several couples who had hitherto ‘lived together merely by consent, as is the custom with all negroes and people of colour in Jamaica.’
The islanders’ newfound faith sanctifies their prosperity. After two years, their tobacco is ‘unrivalled’ and they are producing ‘the best cigars in the world.’ Thanks to their friendship with the Miskitos on the coast, they have hit on another valuable export: arrowroot, a source of starch, which is much in demand among London’s clerks and scribes. Francis Drake has twice visited the Spanish Main, ‘near to Cape Gracias a Dios and succeeded in procuring a family who understood in perfection the making of plait and fine hats from the leaves of the palm tree.’ The island’s principal merchant, a Dutchman called Van Kempen, ‘approved entirely of my project to establish a manufactory for straw hats from the palmetto.’ Van Kempen sets up a workshop, where the island’s women ‘are kept at work with their wheels and distaffs, spinning cotton.’
Thanks to their general industriousness, the islanders are soon producing valuable exports, ‘especially hats, Indian arrow-root, cigars, and stockings.’ With their earnings from the export trade, they build twenty large and comfortable houses at Black Rock, which form the island’s first street. Among the shopkeepers on George Street is William Gortz, a German butcher who makes ‘capital sausages of the turtle.’ Farther up the street are the premises of ‘Hart the mason, Herbert the tailor, Gerard Onder the weaver, [and] Pablo Ximenes the straw man.’ The street is crowned by the island�
�s church, ‘a plain building,’ which is roofed with the twenty thousand Welsh slates that Sir Edward’s uncle has brought out from Bristol.
Scanning the pews one Sunday, Edward is gratified to witness ‘the devotion of all present, and the great good order and cleanliness of old and young, Protestants and Catholics, Spaniards, Germans, Dutch, English, whites, blacks, and mulattoes.’ They are ‘a motley group’ of ‘soldiers and sailors, artificers and husbandmen; yet one flock, under one shepherd.’ Naturally, this microcosm of the Atlantic world is entirely self-sufficient, and when a ship leaves for Jamaica, ‘there was not an order for supplies of any kind.’
Word of the Seawards’ island haven soon reaches the region’s mariners, castaways, and renegades, and over the coming months, several of them make their way to the island harbor. The first of the newcomers are Martin and Purdy, two black Bermudans ‘of happy humour,’ who Edward contracts for a period of seven years, ‘after which it was understood their labours would be their own, and themselves to all intents and purposes free.’ Among the other refugees to find their way to Seaward Island are ‘a man and his wife of the name of Simmonds, who had kept school in Worcestershire.’ Simmonds becomes the island’s first schoolteacher and bringer of the last of the three C’s: civilization. His eager pupils learn how to read and write, but also how to make straw hats for export.*1
The island’s model school is complemented by its model doctor, who uses the latest advances in Western medicine to banish the last of the medieval killers. When the island is hit by an outbreak of smallpox, Dr. Gordon, ‘highly approving the inoculation plan introduced from Turkey by Lady Wortley Montagu,’ vaccinates all the islanders against the virus, and there are no fatalities.*2 The doctor is ever the humanist: when Francis Drake returns from the Miskito Coast with ‘two young negroes intended for Doctor Gordon,’ he tells the governor that he is ‘no friend to slavery,’ and will only take them on as servants. ‘And if you please, Sir Edward, we will call the man William Wallace, and the girl Joan of Arc,’ says the good doctor. In no time, he has ‘taught his man Wully to speak so much like himself that if it were not for his colour you might mistake him for a descendant of the patriot whose name he bore.’