The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Into this scene of devastation stepped the Miskito king, who was curious to see how his new neighbors were getting on. The arrival of George Frederick Augustus, accompanied by several of his ministers, was ‘a perfect Godsend to us, as he caused his people to hunt and fish for us,’ Dr. Douglas recalled. The king ‘spoke and read English remarkably well,’ for he had been educated and crowned in Jamaica, under the watchful eye of the island’s governor. Sir George Nugent’s wife remembered ‘his little savage majesty’ as ‘a plain, puny looking child,’ who came to tea one day.

  He wore a crown of silver gilt, ornamented with mock stones, upon his head, of which he seemed very proud. He became quite savage in a short time. He cried, roared and yelled horribly, and began to pull off his clothes in the most violent manner, and was nearly naked before we could have him carried out of the room.10

  But George was now twenty-six and raised in the ways of a Jamaican gentleman. Dr. Douglas describes him as ‘a tall and handsome-looking man, but a most debauched character,’ who ‘drank excessively, swore a good deal, and was excessively fond of playing at “All-Fours.”’*4

  While one of his ministers prepared a meal for the settlers, another told them the history of the Miskito Coast, the highlight of which was the destruction of the settlement that the Spanish had built at Black River thirty years before. ‘With diabolical glee,’ he described how they had surrounded the main longhouse while its inhabitants slept, put the thatch to the torch, and massacred them as they tried to escape. The king even showed Dr. Douglas the site of the old settlement. Cutting through the bush with his machete, he uncovered the ruins of what had once been the Spaniards’ church and, next to it, ‘the remains of what had been a good stone house,’ where the governor had lived. It was only then that Dr. Douglas realized that the house his Garifuna friends had built for him stood on the site of the Spaniards’ hospital, which ‘accounted for my having found some square tiles and a lot of broken glass while levelling my floors.’

  Dr. Douglas was remarkably slow to catch the king’s drift. He recalled that after the king and his ministers had told him what they did to foreigners they took a dislike to, they ‘rather suddenly, and in great or pretended wrath,’ took to their dories and paddled away. Colonel Hall explained that the king had demanded that he take an oath of allegiance to the ruler of the Miskito Coast. When he refused, the king told him that he had never granted Gregor MacGregor the title of prince or the right to sell land, that MacGregor was a scoundrel, and that the new arrivals were trespassing on his territory.

  Bereft once more, and still suffering for want of medical supplies, the settlers’ fevers grew worse. Within a week, nine more had died, and more deaths would have followed had a schooner not arrived from British Honduras. Capt. Marshall Bennett had been on his way from Belize to Cartagena, but ‘having heard through the English papers of our settlement,’ thought it prudent to stop by. The following day, he took fifty-seven of the stricken settlers back to Belize. Dr. Douglas was one of the hardy few who chose to remain at the site of the imaginary colony, but within days of Bennett’s departure, he came down with a crippling headache. He was by then ‘as thin as a whipping post, and as yellow as a guinea,’ and would probably have died had the superintendant of Belize not sent out a second ship, which evacuated the last of the settlers.

  In Belize, Dr. Douglas was found lodgings with ‘a very kind negress’ and spent the next four months languishing on the brink of death. One morning, he was pulled out of bed ‘by a procession of sailors who carried me on board of a schooner in a hammock slung on an oar.’ The ship spent a few days in Havana and then sailed to Boston, where he made a full recovery and was discharged. Dr. Douglas’s adventure in colony building had almost killed him, yet he was remarkably sanguine about Gregor MacGregor’s pie in the sky. ‘As far as I could learn at the time, and have since learnt, the conduct of the directors was perfectly in good faith, and their objects perfectly legitimate. They signally failed from ignorance.’

  The Prince of Poyais had his own ideas of where the blame lay: MacGregor accused Colonel Hall of mismanagement, and the merchants of Belize of deliberately sabotaging his colony out of jealousy. In August 1823, he sent a third party of settlers to Poyais. Finding nothing at Black River, they proceeded to Belize, where they were assigned a new site at Stann Creek, forty miles north of the capital. But they were no better prepared for the rigors of colony building than their predecessors and soon deserted the place. In the autumn, MacGregor sent out another five ships of settlers, but each was sent back by Royal Navy vessels.

  Of the three hundred Scots to be stranded on the Miskito Coast, two hundred had died, whether in accidents, of disease, or by suicide. Just forty-five made it back to Britain, where they fully publicized their terrible experiences. The Prince of Poyais fought back against what he called ‘the bare-faced calumnies of a hireling press,’ and sued the Morning Herald for libel.11 He lost the case, but that didn’t stop him issuing a new prospectus for his chimerical colony. Undaunted by the howls of protest from emaciated settlers and bankrupted investors, he even took it upon himself to write and publish a constitution for the government of the Miskitos. Only when an anonymous handbill began circulating in the City of London, warning investors of ‘Another Poyais Humbug,’ did he flee to France, where he again tried to sell shares in his non-existent fiefdom.12

  By this time, the Colombian government had got wind of the scam. In October 1824, Gen. Francisco de Paula Santander, the acting president of Gran Colombia, issued a decree prohibiting ‘any enterprise directed to establish foreign colonies or settlements along the Miskito Coast.’13 Gregor MacGregor appealed to Simón Bolívar, his former comrade-in-arms, but his plea met with little sympathy from el Gran Libertador. After MacGregor’s wife died in 1838, he gave up his ludicrous pretensions and left Scotland for Venezuela, where he was reinstated in his former military rank and given a military pension. He died in Caracas in 1845 and was buried with full military honors in the city’s cathedral.

  *1At times, Jane Porter’s shadowing of the original Puritan colony on Providence is uncanny and leads one to wonder how she came to know so much about a drama that had been completely forgotten in England. Sir Edward relates that Simmonds was one of ‘seventeen white families, amounting to fifty-three souls, [who] arrived here in the Mary, from Bristol, driven from England by the pressure of the times incident to the severe winter of 1739.’ Was Porter aware of the Mary that had been captured by pirates on its way to Providence in 1639? Did she know about John Symons, the settler who ended his days languishing in a dungeon in Algiers?

  *2Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was an English aristocrat, diarist, and poet, and wife of the British ambassador to Turkey. She is chiefly remembered for her letters describing her travels around the Ottoman Empire, but she is also known for introducing smallpox inoculation to Britain. Her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was the grandson of Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, who was in turn a cousin of Edward Montagu, Earl of Manchester, a prominent Providence Island Company shareholder.

  *3Since the Caribs had been largely exterminated by the 1820s, the natives that James Douglas met were probably Garifuna. The Garifuna are mixed-race descendants of the Africans who interbred with the native Carib and Arawak peoples of the region. They speak Garifuna and can be found along the coast of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

  *4All fours, also known as high-low-jack or seven-up, is an English tavern trick-taking card game that was a popular gambling game in English taverns until the end of the nineteenth century. It is still played in Trinidad and Tobago.

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  How the Light Came In

  THE REALITY OF LIFE IN Poyais was a world away from Jane Porter’s divinely protected fantasy of life on Seaward Island, but the ideal commonwealth that the Providence Island Company had envisaged was eventually realized. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the islanders discovered the commerce, Christianity, and civilization
that were purportedly central to the British imperial mission, though the British played no part in their passage to the island. There was no prince or enlightened governor to fulfill the ideal, nor was it the work of a native despot. Instead, it was realized gradually, by the islanders themselves. This triumph, all the more remarkable for being completely overlooked by the outside world, was the culmination of a long struggle with what might be described, both literally and metaphorically, as the forces of darkness.

  The British Parliament had outlawed the buying and selling of slaves in 1808, as part of a gradual turning away from mercantilism, the economic model that had provided much of the funding for the Industrial Revolution. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Whitehall turned its attention to India, southern Africa, and Australia: new lands in which to grow cotton and wheat, raise cattle, and mine iron, copper, and gold. But only in 1834 did Parliament pass the Slave Abolition Act, which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire.

  The English-speaking settlements dotted around the western Caribbean were not British colonies, but they looked to the governor of Jamaica for guidance in matters of the law. Francis Archbold’s daughter Mary, who had married the American sailor and merchant Philip Beekman Livingston, inherited a great deal of land and slaves on Providence. In March 1834, she decided that their nineteen-year-old son, Philip Beekman Livingston, Jr., should return to the island to liberate the family’s slaves. Livingston had been born at home in Bottom House in 1814, and spent his early childhood wandering the family’s cotton fields. But his parents wanted him to have some schooling, and since there was no school on the island, they moved to Jamaica when he turned twelve, and bought a farm near Kingston, which they called Providence Plantation. Livingston left school at the age of fifteen, was apprenticed to a merchant ship, and spent the next five years carrying goods between Kingston and London.

  A few months before he was due to complete his apprenticeship, his ship docked in Kingston, and Livingston asked the captain’s permission to pay a visit to his aging mother. The captain refused, so on the night before they were due to sail for the ports of northern Jamaica, he jumped ship. The captain hurriedly took on a replacement, hauled anchor, and set sail. A day out of port, the ship was wrecked on a reef in Annotto Bay, and the entire crew was eaten by sharks. For Livingston, who was already a God-fearing young man, this was no lucky escape, but ‘one of the links in the chain of events in God’s providence.’1

  He thought the same of his mother’s decision to give their slaves their freedom. Officially at least, the Colombian government had banned the trade in slaves in 1822, but nobody paid any attention to the new law on Providence. Slaves often died before their time, and most of the island’s landowners regarded slave owning as both a necessity and a right. But the annual return on the price of a slave had been shrinking ever since world cotton prices peaked in 1790: when Francis Archbold sowed the first cottonseeds on Providence, a pound of raw cotton had fetched 36 cents in New Orleans, but by 1830, the price had fallen to just 8 cents per pound.2

  Young Philip Livingston left Jamaica for Providence, where he emancipated the family’s slaves, divided the family’s land between them, and kept a share for himself. Many of the island’s landowners followed his example and freed their slaves voluntarily, giving each of them a small plot of land on which they could build a house and grow enough food to sustain themselves. But plenty of them refused, muttering that slaveholding was their birthright, and that by setting them free, Livingston would only make the blacks harder to dominate.

  By 1846, when the island’s magistrate prepared a report for the government in Bogotá, the population of Providence stood at 1,925, of whom just 137 were still enslaved. John James Davidson also found that whereas almost half of the male slaves were over sixty, two-thirds of the female slaves were under forty. This suggests that while most of the enslaved workforce had been emancipated, the island’s white families were still not willing to free their domestic staff.3 In 1851, Bogotá followed the British example and abolished slavery throughout the republic, but plenty of slave owners were accustomed to ignoring the government’s orders and stubbornly held out against emancipation. Only in 1853, when Livingston wrote to the British consul in Bogotá, who raised the matter with the Colombian president, did government agents visit the island to tell the last of its slave owners that the game was up.

  When the news that they were to be freed reached the shacks that had grown up around Bottom House, their inhabitants erupted in celebrations that lasted for a month. The same happened in Freetown, the settlement built by the island’s freemen on the ribbon of flat ground between Town and Old Town (the name given to the village that had once been called New Westminster). But the last of the island’s slaves were not free yet: their owners insisted that they would only give them the land they needed to support themselves after they had given them another three years unpaid work. The black population had advanced, but only to the status of indentured servants. Full emancipation, and the precious title deeds to a plot of land, only came in 1856. Even after becoming property owners, many former slaves couldn’t afford to keep the plots they were given and sold them back to their former owners in return for enough money to build a house.

  * * *

  Until the late 1700s, the enslaved population of the Caribbean had known nothing of Christianity, and the Church of England showed no interest in proselytizing among them. Consequently, the religious life of Providence’s slaves was governed by the beliefs passed down by the first arrivals from West Africa. While divided by language and culture, all the slaves came from societies that practiced some form of witchcraft. In the Caribbean, it came to be known as obeah.

  Obeah was used to communicate with the dead, who were believed to hold power over the living. In 1929, an old Jamaican woman told the folklorist Martha Beckwith that the dead lived on in a person’s shadow, which was identified with the tricky spirit. ‘It’s not the soul [that makes the duppy], for the soul goes to heaven. And it’s not the body, for we know that goes away into the earth. It’s the shadow,’ she said.4 The only person who could communicate with the dead was the obeah man, who was synonymous with shadow catcher. The obeah man could kill by catching a person’s shadow, thereby holding him spellbound.

  When the Baptist preacher and abolitionist James Phillippo arrived in Jamaica in 1823, slaves were prohibited by law from practicing any form of religion, and he was among the first white men to preach to them. Phillippo spoke to an obeah man, one of one hundred fifty on the island, and through him made a study of obeah, which he called ‘a species of witchcraft employed to avenge injuries or a protection against theft.’5 But the obeah man was also a doctor, for ailments that couldn’t be treated with bush medicine were held to be the work of malicious spirits, summoned by malicious neighbors. As a result of this conflation of spirit and body, the parts of doctor and priest were usually played by the same person, and the obeah man was the most powerful man in the community.

  Obeah was an art held to be a science. When an epidemic broke out, the community wanted to know why, and this sparked endless speculation and invective (the same hysteria was seen in New England at the height of the witch trials in the 1690s). The accusing finger was usually pointed at whoever was deemed to have offended the spirits of their ancestors. This could be anyone regarded as solitary, proud, or generally uncooperative, but the accusation was usually leveled at the sick, the disabled, the elderly, or anyone encumbered by memories of Africa, for the motherland was both cause and cure of the slaves’ woes.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, there was a religious revival in Britain, and this coincided with the rise of the abolitionist movement. The Baptist church took the task of enlightening the heathen masses seriously and sent its first missionaries to the Caribbean in 1792. In 1815, Parliament responded to the campaign to abolish slavery by passing an act that compelled the Church of England to appoint curates to spread the Gospel among the slaves. Slave owne
rs were expected to provide ‘proper places besides the church’ for their slaves, ‘where divine service might be performed on Sundays and holidays.’6 Slave owners liked the propaganda effect of the act, for it suggested that they were becoming more attentive to the spiritual needs of their heathen charges. But even after the church dropped the fee for baptizing a slave to 2 shillings and sixpence, they refused to give their workforce the time they needed to go to church or learn to read. Religious faith and literacy were direct challenges to their power, and most Church of England curates were no less cynical about their new duties. In 1826, a slave owner described watching a curate assemble a hundred slaves and baptize them en masse, pocketing 2 shillings and sixpence a head.

  The opposition that the Baptists encountered in Jamaica only grew more bitter as the number of baptized slaves grew. The Colonial Union, which mobilized the island’s lower-class whites against emancipation, took to burning down Baptist and Methodist chapels, and missionaries often found themselves tarred and feathered by angry mobs. In 1831, matters came to a head when the Baptist convert Samuel Sharpe roused fifty thousand of his fellow slaves to rise up against the planters. In the aftermath of the revolt, a thousand slaves were hanged and fourteen Baptist chapels were burned to the ground.

  The revival of religious conviction was also apparent in the United States, where it came to be known as the Great Awakening. It spawned countless sects and competing denominations, of which several became vehicles for abolitionism and black redemption. By the 1840s, there were three million black Baptists in the United States, gathered in churches such as the Six Principles Baptists and the Baptists of the Spirit of the Two Predestined Seeds. Philip Livingston, Jr., had heard about this revival when he was living in Kingston, and in the autumn of 1844, he made a trip to Oberlin, Ohio, where he listened to many Baptist sermons and decided to join the Baptist church. He was baptized in Lake Erie, and on New Year’s Day 1845, he was granted his preacher’s license.