by Tom Feiling
In 1871, the Colombian Congress made primary education free and compulsory throughout the republic, and stipulated that the school on Providence should be financed from the sale of guano.* By 1873, there was a school at Rocky Point, where Alejandro Archbold taught twenty-five students, and another in Town, where Cleveland Hawkins taught a further forty. Since the Colombian Ministry of Education had no idea how to educate English speakers, Archbold and Hawkins devised their own curriculum. By the turn of the century, over 90 percent of islanders could read and write. But education went no further than primary level, so anyone who could afford to sent their children to high school in Jamaica or the United States.
That meant the children of the island’s upper class. Members of this elite band invariably owned upwards of five acres, as well as a cargo boat, and most of them were Robinsons, Archbolds, or Newballs from Smooth Water Bay. Their determination to keep their family trees ‘clear’ of black blood had resulted in generations of intermarriage between the Robinsons and the Archbolds—of the nine children Frederick Robinson had by Eugenia Archbold, four went on to marry other Robinsons. The most noticeable adverse effects were deafness and a mild form of mental retardation. Cordell Robinson, author of The Genealogical History of Providencia Island, claims that until recently, ‘nearly every family on Providence included at least one relative who to some degree was afflicted.’ Unsurprisingly, the ‘simple’ were not stigmatized as they were elsewhere. One visitor to the island recalled meeting ‘Brother Montague,’ who wandered the island humming hymns on request, and slept on the floor of whichever kitchen he happened upon. But he ‘kept a smile upon his face, and laughed for joy just to meet a fellow man.’12
Members of Providence’s lower class were invariably black and lived in Bottom House, Southwest Bay, and Freetown. Most of the men worked as laborers for the bigger landowners and fed themselves with what they grew on their plots. But some of them joined the crews of the cargo ships that were plying the western Caribbean in growing numbers, and this gave them the chance to visit distant relatives in English-speaking ports like Greytown, Colón, and Puerto Limón. Their material lives were not unlike those of their forefathers under slavery, but they were also members of the Baptist church, and their creed taught them that God had made all men equal. They relished the opportunity to better themselves, and by the close of the nineteenth century, the church had gone a long way toward cementing a new, moral hierarchy on the island, which vied for dominance with the race-based hierarchy ordained by slavery.
But the main factor working to undermine the color bar was promiscuity. Many black women worked as domestics in Smooth Water Bay, and this brought them into daily contact with men like Frederick Robinson. The nine children Frederick Robinson had by his wife, Eugenia Archbold, were not his only offspring, for he had twenty-seven children in all, by ten different women. One of them, Roosevelt Robinson, followed his father’s example and had sixteen children by seven women. Monogamy might have been the ideal, but it was not the norm, and many a landowner’s son made the nightly trek from Rocky Point, Lazy Hill, and Smooth Water Bay in search of the pleasures to be had at the bottom of the island. Having lots of children by lots of women enhanced a man’s self-esteem. It caused a lot of heartache for the mothers of his illegitimate children, but the women gained a measure of prestige—and perhaps some financial support—from these illicit couplings too.
The island’s minister fulminated at the philanderers from the pulpit, and several of the island’s most powerful men were ‘turned out of church’ for their adulterous relationships. But there were limits to what Livingston could do, and the respectability that he encouraged in his congregation was always at risk of being undermined by a man’s desire for a reputation. The tension between respectability and reputation was ancestral, for just as the islanders owed their religion to the Puritans, they owed their social lives to the pirates who had unseated them. In belated recognition of the facts of island life, Philip baptized all newborns, though he chose to bring ‘outside children’ into the Christian fraternity in the privacy of the mother’s home. Though it was never openly acknowledged, it was only the philandering of men like Frederick Robinson that saved Providence’s white families from a dwindling gene pool, and the likelihood that growing numbers of their children would be born with genetic abnormalities.
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Ann Eliza Livingston had been ill since 1856. Philip Livingston had done his best to treat his wife with the medical resources at his disposal, but he knew that if she were to survive, she needed to be treated in the United States. The American Baptist Home Mission Society wired him the money for two return tickets to New York City aboard a coconut ship, and they set out on the long journey north. The operation went well, but Ann Eliza’s health did not improve, and they returned to San Andrés prepared for the worst. ‘God will do better for her than me,’ Livingston wrote in his diary. ‘I can be of no more use.’13
Ann Eliza died in the summer of 1862. Following her death, Philip came to realize that whatever their outward show of godliness, the islanders still depended on superstition to explain the world around them. While his wife’s body was lying in its casket, they brought their babies to his house, in the belief that passing a newborn child over the casket would appease the dead woman’s spirit. When the casket was carried to the cemetery, onlookers pulled their shutters closed for fear that Ann Eliza’s spirit would enter their homes. And when it began to rain at her graveside, they said that it was because she was crying in heaven. Why was she crying? they asked one another. The speculation, insinuation, and gossip seemed endless. Livingston impressed upon them the importance of turning their backs on such heathenish leftovers. Funerals should be quiet, dignified affairs. Why wail and moan when Ann Eliza was bound for the glory of everlasting life? There was no room for ‘duppies’ in his church, nor the obeah men who claimed to talk with them.
But the past could not be erased with a sweep of the preacher’s hand, as Livingston was about to find out for himself. During her illness, Ann Eliza had been cared for by the family’s housekeeper. When she died, Josephine Pomare stayed on to cook, clean, and look after the motherless children. Three years later, Livingston and Josephine went to the mayor’s office and asked to be married. This caused a terrible scandal on both islands: the women said that it was too soon after Ann Eliza’s death; the men muttered that a white man should not marry a black woman. This was rank hypocrisy, of course, because they all knew that prior to his marriage, Livingston had had two ‘outside’ children by a black woman. Ann Eliza had adopted both children, and the Livingstons had gone on to have two children of their own.
The following Sunday, Livingston walked to the pulpit with his single shot thirty-thirty rifle in his hand. When the pews were full, and the door had been closed, he laid it across the lectern. He had married of his own free choice, he told the congregation, and it was none of their business whom he had chosen to be his wife. After much preaching and many prayers, a conviction of their own sinfulness fell upon them. They admitted their shortcomings and asked their neighbors to forgive them. There had been no recorded baptisms in 1886; the following year, there were one hundred and ninety-six. This revival of religious conviction was Livingston’s crowning achievement and was remembered by the islanders for years to come. He died in August 1891, at the age of seventy-seven.
*The cays off Providence were covered in phosphate-rich bird droppings, which were much in demand among American fertilizer manufacturers. For a time, guano was the island’s chief export.
[19]
Modern Times
I SPENT FOUR MONTHS ON Providence and talked to many islanders about the changes that had swept over the island since its golden years. They were friendly, easygoing, and willing to talk, but also careful to ensure that I only spoke to the island’s most reputable figures. I was a guest from distant England, and it was important that I went home with the right impressions.
This made me all the keener to
talk to those perched on the lower branches of the island’s family tree, of whom Ed was undoubtedly one. I found him begging and sitting in the shade outside the bank in Town, his crutches on either side of him. He needed money for antibiotics, he said, and lifted the dressing under his shirt to show me a deep and festering wound on his hip. He also showed me his cédula (ID card), as if it somehow validated his story. It was hard to read his face; like many islanders, his predecessors could have been black, white, or Miskito, though he also looked to have some Arab blood. Ed was well used to the ‘cutting of eyes’ that people gave him as they waited to use the island’s only cash point. Since we were both outsiders, I made a point of joining him on the pavement, if only to hear an island story before I too made my excuses and left him to his worries.
One day Ed invited me to meet his stepfather. Baldwin was a Seventh-day Adventist and had a lot of unconventional beliefs that I might find interesting, he told me. We found him eating ice cream with a dark-skinned young man in the shade of his porch. I began by asking him why Adventists didn’t eat pork. ‘When God cast out the Devil from Man, he threw him into the heart of a pig,’ he said. ‘Swine have tiny worms that get into your brain and drive you crazy.’ Baldwin didn’t eat crab, lobster, or conch, either, for they too were scavenging animals.
‘Isn’t that right, pastor?’ he asked the man in the neighboring rocking chair. The pastor hummed agreement, absorbed in the bottom of his tub of ice cream. ‘The Bible says that Sunday is the first day of the week. Right, pastor? The last day of the week is Saturday, which is why God intended it to be the Sabbath day. Right, pastor?’ More quiet humming. The young pastor was clearly used to acting as Baldwin’s sounding board.
Baldwin looked down at me from the porch. His eyelashes looked to have been singed, and I pictured him doing battle with sulfur-coated demons. The Bible had given him a program, and espousing its unshakeable tenets increased his authority. Playing the part of judge in a courtroom of his own making, he could give vent to his nature, which was fastidious, unforgiving, and probably cruel. But what I knew, and he didn’t know that I knew, was that Baldwin had prostate cancer. So I was taking dietary tips from a dying man. I also knew that Ed hadn’t grown up in his stepfather’s house, with his mother and many siblings, but in his grandfather’s house farther down the road, for Baldwin resented having to compete with another man’s children for his wife’s affections.
The Seventh-day Adventists first came to Providence in 1905. Pastor Frank Hutchins and his wife arrived aboard the Herald, selling popular editions of the Bible. At nightfall, the residents of Old Town would row out to the Americans’ yacht to listen to his sermons. With his awestruck face illuminated by the gas lamps strung around its deck, they listened solemnly as Pastor Hutchins told them about the imminent destruction of the world. The abundance of shooting stars in the night skies that year was a sign of the Second Coming of Christ, he said, and many credulous islanders believed him. Even the skeptics among them found it hard to resist the appeal of Dr. John Eccles, the doctor-cum-dentist who had accompanied the Hutchinses to the island. The following morning Dr. Eccles set about pulling and filling their teeth, and fourteen islanders converted to Adventism there and then, some out of fear of the endless darkness that awaited the sinner after death; others out of gratitude to Dr. Eccles for putting an end to a lifetime of toothache.
Accompanied by this emissary from the world of modern medicine, Pastor Hutchins and his wife spent the next month preaching and singing in the island’s seven villages. The pastor went with his portable organ strapped to his back, the dentist with his Gladstone bag of basic medical supplies, while Mrs. Hutchins urged them on with her psalm singing. They spent twenty-eight consecutive nights preaching and singing, clambering over rocks on the shoreline to speak to the fishermen, and hiking into the hills to visit the most isolated huts.
Among the first to convert to Adventism were members of the Robinson, Archbold, and Newball families of Smooth Water Bay. The Adventists were keen educationalists, and in 1911, they built the island’s first Adventist school at Rocky Point. Its only teacher was Rudolph Newball, who had just graduated from an Adventist school in Alabama that provided vocational training for ‘coloured’ students from the Caribbean and Latin America. Newball taught classes in Bible studies, natural history, English, algebra, typewriting, and the organ. He charged a peso a month, a fee which many of his pupils paid by catching and selling fish before they went to school. When one hundred of them had signed up for classes at his one-room school, he had those in the higher grades teach what they had learned to those in the lower grades. His school became known for its order and discipline, as well as the mutual love and respect between teacher and pupils. In 1977, ninety-five-year-old Rudolph Newball told his daughter that none of his pupils had ever disappointed him.1
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The Americans’ confidence in reinterpreting their sacred texts for the modern age increased in tandem with their country’s international ambitions. Seventh-day Adventism was just one of a plethora of Christian sects originating in the Great Awakening of the 1840s, and it is no coincidence that the term ‘manifest destiny’ was first heard in the United States in 1845. The term was coined by the journalist John O’Sullivan during the campaign for Spanish Texas to join the Union. He saw it as the ‘manifest destiny’ of the United States ‘to overspread the continent allotted by providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.’2 Later that year, Texas became another of the United States.
Five years later, California followed suit, and news of the discovery of gold in its hills spread east. In the absence of a railway across their vast country, Americans wanting to join the gold rush had to sail down the East Coast, through the Florida Straits, and across the Caribbean to Greytown in Nicaragua. From there, they could take a paddle steamer up the River San Juan and across Lake Nicaragua to Rivas, and join the mule train for the short journey down to the Pacific port of Brito, where they would find a third ship waiting to take them up the coast to San Francisco. This tortuous journey spurred on the builders of the Pacific Railroad, but it also convinced their political representatives of the need to build a canal through the isthmus of Central America. A canal would allow East Coast ports to trade with the West Coast, but its scope was ultimately global: by dividing Central America, it was said, the United States would unite the world.
In June 1902, Congress approved construction of the Panama Canal, and by November, the province of Panama had declared its independence from Colombia. The country was in the grip of the War of a Thousand Days, the last and most vicious of the fratricidal bouts that had been convulsing the country since its declaration of independence from Spain, and was in no position to challenge its breakaway province. By the Isthmian Canal Convention of 1904, Panama granted the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land between the Caribbean and the Pacific ‘in perpetuity.’*1
As American engineers set to work building the canal, workers poured in from all over the Caribbean, and the Canal Zone became the latest, and most powerful Anglosphere to spring up on the coast of Central America. For a time, there was even talk of building facilities on San Andrés or Providence to store the coal that passing steam ships would need. The USS Nashville came to San Andrés, and a State Department representative tried to persuade the islanders to join the Panamanians in seceding from Colombia. They refused, perhaps because several of them were familiar with the United States’ system of racial segregation, having been denied admission to American universities. In 1913, the U.S. government gave Bogotá an indemnity of $25 million for the loss of Panama, its shipping lines switched from steam to diesel, and all talk of secession came to an end.
Although San Andrés and Providence remained Colombian territories, their ties to the Canal Zone only grew stronger after the canal opened in 1914. The Canal Zone was a prosperous haven, run by fellow English speakers with a familiar love of orderly calm, and the islanders found their feet quickly. So m
any of them went to Colón that it was said that there were more of them in the town than there were on the islands.
Others gravitated up the isthmus and found work building the railways in Costa Rica, which was fast becoming a major supplier of tropical fruit to the American market. The American palate had long balked at tropical fruit, but in 1869, Capt. Lorenzo Baker of Boston happened to buy some bananas while he was in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He took them back to New England, where the strange and exotic yellow fruit sold well. Returning to Jamaica, Baker bought a derelict sugar estate in Portland parish and began growing bananas. But further expansion was hampered by the Jamaican planters, who dismissed banana cultivation as ‘a backwoods nigger business.’ The obvious solution was to build plantations in Central America, but as the Panama Canal’s builders had discovered to their cost, yellow fever made the region a death trap for new arrivals.
Fortunately for Lorenzo Baker, a Cuban doctor was about to make the greatest advance in medical science since Edward Jenner’s discovery of a vaccine for smallpox in 1796. Dr. Carlos Finlay had spent thirty years trying to convince the authorities in Havana that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes. They ridiculed his theory, but he persevered with his research, and by the turn of the century, he had hit upon the evidence he needed to prove it. The authorities backed his proposal to eradicate the mosquitoes’ breeding grounds, and in 1901 Havana was declared free of yellow fever.