The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Their island haven is a free port, and its governor welcomes all traders, but it attracts privateers as well as refugees. When a Dutch skipper arrives, Sir Edward tells him ‘there were no harbour charges exacted here; that trade was free, excepting in spirits, wine, or beer, which could not be sold or landed without my permit.’ But the sinful ways of the buccaneers cannot be avoided: after the Dutchman’s crew get drunk on rum that they have illegally brought ashore, some of the settlers also succumb to temptation. They buy a case of gin from the Dutchman and proceed to get blind drunk. When Sir Edward hears about their defiance of his law, he rows to Black Rock and smashes the remaining bottles. One of the ‘debauchees’ subsequently catches a fever and dies. It is the first death on the island, and one that the governor calls ‘a punishment from a higher power.’

  Shortly afterward, he receives a letter from the governor of Jamaica warning him of ‘very unfriendly, not to say hostile, proceeding on the part of the Spaniards towards the commerce of England.’ When several islanders are captured by the Spanish and held captive in the dungeon at Portobello, Captain Drake avenges the kidnapping by seizing a Spanish merchant ship, which is found to be carrying a valuable cargo of indigo, cocoa, and ‘Peruvian bark’ (cinchona, long used by indigenous peoples as a treatment for malaria and much in demand in British India). It fetches $80,000 at auction in Kingston.

  Yet in spite of the latest war between England and Spain, Sir Edward stays true to his humanitarianism. When a ship of the guardacostas founders on the reef, he finds accommodation for the crew and tells Xavier to repair their vessel. But he finds it harder to accommodate the privateers. Although they spend some of their loot on George Street, ‘the profusion of money, the introduction of wine and spirits, and the presence of our profligate visitors’ are ‘a great nuisance to the place.’ After ‘frequent counsel with those I loved and esteemed,’ Sir Edward closes the port to the privateers.

  Edward and Eliza reflect on how life has changed in the eleven years since they first came ashore. Seaward Island is prosperous and has ‘improved in all the arrangements of social life…Our laws were few, but wholesome; and we desired to make our holy religion the rule of our conduct. In consequence, the population was healthy, orderly, industrious, and contented.’ Most of the black islanders are by now coming to the end of their seven-year indenture, and some are earning wages as freemen. The Seawards’ example has ‘excited a salutary emulation for something beyond a hut, a garment, and a meal,’ and the governor sees the yearning for self-improvement ‘at every habitation within and without, and in the dress of the inhabitants.’

  But as the community has grown more vigorous, its founders have become less so. The May rains bring fevers, and Eliza is among those to sicken. She only recovers ‘slowly and imperfectly,’ and is inclined to melancholia. ‘The child is grown up,’ she tells her husband. ‘We may leave it to itself now.’ They sail for England, and as the island recedes from view for the last time, she sighs at ‘the recollection of the time when that land was to me an earthly paradise.’ But her wistfulness soon passes; flush with the money they make from the sale of Henry Morgan’s treasure, they buy a townhouse on Bruton Street (high society having gravitated from Holborn to Mayfair in the century since the island was last governed from London).

  The next seventy-four pages of the original manuscript of Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative are missing, but the last four pages have survived, and the story picks up just as Seaward Island is about to be surrendered to the king of Spain. Sir Edward tells the secretary of state that he ‘cannot suffer the people to be treated in this manner, abandoned like dogs,’ but the minister insists that ‘the thing is done.’ ‘O, my love, it is too much,’ he confides to Eliza, ‘to see our people turned over to the Spaniards without security, or even stipulation.’ Yet Eliza has become strangely indifferent to the island’s future: ‘They will soon find another home and be satisfied…Besides, it is God’s will, my dear Edward, in the dispensations of his providence, that our islands should again become a desert.’ Sir Edward resigns himself to the Spanish takeover, though not before telling the secretary of state that he expects ‘a proper settlement will be given, for such as may choose to go to the Mosquito shore.’ The secretary of state agrees and makes arrangements for the evacuation of the islanders to Cape Gracias a Dios, where he will ‘satisfy the Indians for six square miles of land, such as might be fixed on for their residence.’ With this last gesture of enlightened beneficence, Seaward Island passes out of English hands for the last time.

  * * *

  Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative was a great sensation and ran through several editions over the course of the nineteenth century. Part of its appeal lay in Jane Porter’s artful blending of history and fantasy, which makes it a pioneering work of the genre that has since become known as historical fiction. Even readers who had never heard of Providence speculated that the story might be true, so closely did it chime with their understanding of Britain’s civilizing role in the world. One journalist recalled that Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative ‘was so like truth that—as I was told by one of the Admiralty clerks—three intelligent members of staff were employed for several days searching for evidence whether the island did or did not actually exist.’3

  In truth, Jane Porter’s book owed more to 1831, the year it was first published, than it did 1631. There was much talk of emancipation that year, and it ended with the Baptist War, the largest slave insurrection Jamaica had ever seen. Being unwilling to accept the implications of the revolt, loyal imperialists embraced Jane Porter’s book and its suggestion that the British were the Caribbean’s enlightened benefactors. Intoxicated by the myth she had created, Porter insisted that the story was true, and that she had only edited a diary that she had been given by the writer’s family. She did not divulge the diarist’s name, but it was likely her eldest brother William Ogilvie Porter, a naval surgeon who had traveled widely before retiring to become a doctor in the Bristol area. While Jane Porter makes no mention of Providence, she clearly knew the island’s history well and was happy to rewrite it for a generation hungry for good news from Britain’s Caribbean colonies.

  Karl Marx’s oft-cited maxim that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce originally appeared in Scorpion and Felix, a little-known novel that he wrote in 1837. ‘Every giant…presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine,’ he wrote. ‘The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain.’ Marx was thinking of the French Revolution, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Louis Philippe, ‘the bourgeois king’ who took his place, when he wrote those lines, but the same pattern can be seen in the history of Providence. The original story is that of the Providence Island Company, the tragedy that followed is the slave-driven factory that the British created in Jamaica, and the farce is Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative.

  But perhaps the inclusion of a mere novel in Marx’s schema is a cop-out. If so, there is another Providence-related farce to consider: the misguided attempt to build a British colony on the Miskito Coast in 1822. By chance, this was the brainchild of another member of the MacGregor clan. Like his distant relative Jane Porter, Gregor MacGregor was a creature of the age of nationalism. If she was intoxicated by Britain’s civilizing role in the world, he was no less obsessed by the patriotic rhetoric of Latin America’s republican revolutionaries. She wanted to mythologize Britain’s colonial history and spurned uncomfortable facts for the sake of a palatable story. He wanted to turn his own life into a myth, and, in the process, perpetrated one of the greatest frauds of all time.

  During the wars for Latin American independence, Gregor MacGregor styled himself as a devoted servant of the patriot cause and carried eight hundred British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars from Liverpool to San Andrés, where they hoped to join Simón Bolívar’s struggle to free Latin America from Spanish tyranny. MacGregor proved himself a valiant commander, but he was also an egomania
c, with a knack for fusing insurgent causes with his own. After the abject failure of his attack on Cartagena in 1815, which he only escaped with great difficulty, he sailed to Cape Gracias a Dios, where he met George Frederick Augustus, the king of the Miskitos.4 The Miskito kingdom was by then under British protection, and King George Frederick Augustus was eager to please a hero of the struggle with imperial Spain. He granted MacGregor eight million acres—an area the size of Wales—to build a colony at the old Black River settlement, which had been abandoned after the Treaties of Versailles in 1783. MacGregor told himself that when the war was over, he would become ruler of his own private fiefdom. With this vision of future grandeur to inspire him, he threw himself back into the fray.

  By 1821, the Spanish had been defeated and MacGregor was flat broke. He sailed back to London, where he sold the title deeds to his fiefdom to a group of City merchants for £16,000. Excited by the prospect of building a colony of their own, but also by the lucre to be made in trade with the newly independent republics of Latin America, they set about raising the money they needed by issuing interest-bearing bonds, assuring their investors of fantastic returns. They rented an office in the City of London, which they called the Poyais Legation. In the interviews he granted to Fleet Street journalists, MacGregor let it be known that he was to be addressed as ‘His Serene Highness Gregor, Prince of Poyais, Cazique of the Poyer Nation, and defender of the Indians.’ He proceeded to concoct ‘a grandiose, pretentious scheme to establish an overseas Arcadia for the surplus population of his native Scotland, while at the same time extending the hand of Calvin to backward pagan natives in some remote corner of the Caribbean.’5

  MacGregor left the job of signing up would-be settlers to the legation’s loquacious agent, Thomas Strangeways, who assured interested parties that Poyais was the sovereign territory of ‘an intelligent gentleman, who was many years senior Naval Officer in the Bay of Honduras.’ The Prince of Poyais had already built a magnificent capital called St. Joseph, a flourishing town of twenty thousand citizens, who drove their carriages along wide, paved boulevards and supped rum punch in the shade of colonnaded mansions. Their money was protected by the Bank of Poyais, and their laws by the Poyaisian houses of parliament. There was a theater, an opera house, and a magnificent domed cathedral, where the people of Poyais regularly gathered to thank God for their good fortune.6

  Now the prince was looking for upright settlers to carry British values of commerce, Christianity, and civilization to the surrounding wilderness. Thomas Strangeways told would-be migrants that

  on account of the richness of the soil, the luxuriance of the woods, the great salubrity of the air, [and] the remarkable excellence of its waters and provisions…Poyais is excelled by no country under the influence of British Dominion.

  He offered them land at two shillings an acre—roughly equivalent to the daily wage of a London laborer. Plenty of punters were hooked by Strangeways’s spiel. Britain was still struggling to get out of the slump it had fallen into after the Napoleonic Wars. Unemployment was high, social unrest was rife, and government ministers fretted that a revolution like the French might sweep the country. Many demobbed soldiers were keen to immigrate, and the government backed them, in a policy later denounced as ‘the shovelling out of paupers.’7

  By early 1822, the legation had raised £200,000, largely through the sale of land to five hundred unwitting Scots, who invested their life savings in MacGregor’s scheme. Among those to buy shares in the venture was George Wilson Bridges, a Church of England minister resident on Jamaica, who was typical of the pious hypocrites who passed for religious leaders on the island. Bridges made £1,000 a year conducting marriages, baptisms, and funerals for slaves, and an additional £240 a year renting out his vicarage in Mandeville for use as a tavern. He spent much of what he earned on mounting a campaign against the island’s missionaries and abolitionists. One might expect such a hardheaded man to have heeded the journalist who likened Poyais to the medieval utopia of Cockagne, a land so improbably blessed that ‘roasted pigs run about with forks in their backs, crying “Come eat me!”’ The same journalist also pointed out that Poyais had been Spanish territory since 1783, when Britain ceded its claim to the Miskito Coast. Yet the cynicism that marked Bridges’s career in Jamaica evaporated at the very thought of a new British colony in the Americas. Prince Gregor’s realm was ‘capable of producing, in the utmost perfection, whatever is peculiar to the tropics,’ he wrote.8

  Another to fall for MacGregor’s hokum was James Douglas, a Scottish doctor whose adventures on the Miskito Coast began when he happened upon an open letter from the government of Poyais, inviting ‘a well-qualified surgeon to accompany a party of settlers to the Mosquito Shore.’ Douglas got the job, stocked up with medical supplies, and made his way to Gravesend, where he boarded the Honduras Packet in November 1822. He and the other seventy-six passengers were delighted to meet Col. Hector Hall, who had been appointed governor of the new settlement. They were also delighted to be able to exchange their savings for Bank of Poyais dollars, which MacGregor had commissioned from the Bank of Scotland’s official printer.

  After crossing the Atlantic, they put into Kingston for a few days. While he was there, Dr. Douglas attended the trial of a group of pirates who had been brought before the Admiralty Court. ‘They were of all colours, North and South Americans, British, negroes and mulattoes,’ he wrote in his account of his adventures. ‘I thought them the most savage, bloodthirsty, repulsive-looking wretches I had ever seen.’ It seems likely that at least some of the men in the dock had spent time on Providence when the island was under the command of Louis-Michel Aury. Made redundant by the death of their leader and the triumph of the patriot cause, they had been reduced to common piracy. In Henry Morgan’s day, seaway robbery had flourished only when it suited the governor of Jamaica; once the struggle to put the new colony on its feet was won, the buccaneers became a hindrance to legitimate trade and had to be brought to book. Now that the wars of independence were over, the same process was in train again. Dr. Douglas did not stick around to hear the judge pass sentence, but ‘when passing Port Royal Point on my departure, I saw 21 of the gang hanging in chains.’

  One morning in early February 1823, the Honduras Packet dropped anchor off the mouth of the Black River. The passengers scanned the forest canopy for the domed cathedral of St. Joseph, but the trees swept down from the mountains to the water’s edge in an unbroken green wave. The governor of the new settlement due to be built in the suburbs of the city, Col. Hector Hall, was as bewildered as the rest of the passengers. He sent a scout inland, but he came back no less mystified. The captain of the Honduras Packet, Thomas Hitchcock, had seen enough: he hauled anchor and sailed away, claiming nonpayment for services and supplies. He took the bulk of the expedition’s supplies with him and later sold them to the Miskitos at Cape Gracias a Dios.

  The settlers’ first days were spent clearing bush, pitching tents, and collecting rainwater. It was an inauspicious beginning, but the locals soon came to their rescue. ‘My Carib friends and I maintained a very good understanding during my stay on the coast,’ wrote Dr. Douglas. ‘They supplied me with game, fish and fruit, in return for bleeding them, an operation of which they were very fond, and were never tired.’ Dr. Douglas convinced his new friends to build him a house, and on the afternoon he took possession of it, he

  felt prouder than under other circumstances to have owned the best house in Finsbury Square. I bought a small canoe of mahogany wood, which I could easily paddle by myself, and what with improving my house, shooting, fishing, reading, and my slight professional duties, I passed my time most pleasantly for several weeks.

  For as long as the locals enjoyed the novelty of the white man’s medical treatment, Dr. Douglas could afford to be nonchalant.*3 But they soon tired of being bled, and once they had drunk the last of the settlers’ rum and bartered for the last of their powder and shot, they left. The settlers’ meager supplies dwindled away, an
d men little accustomed to hunting or fishing soon grew weak from lack of food. Their spirits were temporarily revived by the arrival of the Kennesly Castle, which arrived from the Scottish port of Leith with another one hundred sixty settlers. But they were soon deflated again: the newcomers had brought no provisions and no tents, assuming they would be able to buy both in St. Joseph.

  It rained heavily and incessantly in the following days. As the air turned sultry and oppressive, the newcomers came down with ‘bilious remittent fever,’ and within four days of their arrival, the first of them had died. Two weeks later, all but nine of the two hundred twenty settlers were sick with fever. ‘One family of seven persons—father, mother, and five sons—were all ill,’ wrote Dr. Douglas. ‘They lay on the ground on cane leaves. On visiting them this evening, I found the mother had been dead some hours, without the knowledge of the others.’

  The grisly farce began its inexorable descent. A man was killed by an alligator after his dory capsized in the river. A cobbler who had left his family in Edinburgh to take up a post as official shoemaker to the Princess of Poyais shot himself through the head. ‘Not being able to get anyone to dig a grave, I collected some brushwood, which I piled in his hut, and set fire to it,’ Dr. Douglas wrote. James Hastie, a sawyer who had journeyed from Scotland with his wife and three children wrote, ‘It seemed to be the will of providence that every circumstance should combine for our destruction.’9