The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Armed with acres of mosquito netting, Lorenzo Baker was now in a position to conquer the mosquito empire of Central America. Returning south, he began building banana plantations, and it was from this modest beginning that the mighty United Fruit Company emerged. Within a generation, the company’s land holdings had grown so vast that it could bribe the region’s politicians in lieu of paying taxes and overthrow any government that questioned its dominance of the region. Thereafter, the economies of Central America and the Caribbean became entirely dependent on American capital.

  Providence was also drawn further into the Yankee orbit. So many islanders left in search of work in Central America that when Dr. Herman von Tietje first reached Providence in 1910, he thought he had come to an island of women. With so many men away working, the women had to till the fields and look after their broods of children by themselves. Dr. von Tietje had come to the island from his native Austria via Boston and Panama. Along with his library of medical textbooks, he brought everything he needed to build the first modern house on the island, and when it was finished, people came from all over the island to admire its concrete walls, tiled bathroom, and network of copper pipes. He also brought the medical equipment he needed to practice as a doctor and a dentist, which was just as well, for modern health care had sailed away from Providence with Dr. Eccles five years before. When the first issue of the Searchlight, the islands’ first newspaper, rolled off the press in San Andrés in 1912, it carried an advertisement for the Austrian’s services. It boasted that Dr. von Tietje had ‘the best-equipped surgery in all Central America,’ and could ‘cure every case of haemorrhoids (piles) without the knife,’ and ‘all diseases of the male and female sexual organs.’3

  In the nineteen years he spent tending to the islanders’ medical complaints, a lot of women came to the doctor’s surgery, and he had children with several of them. Herman von Tietje was an enigmatic figure; even his daughters didn’t know why he had chosen to spend the last third of his life on an island that most of his countrymen had never even heard of. But he had a confidant in Ephriem Archbold, the captain of the ship that had brought him to the island from Colón, and when the doctor died in 1931, the captain divulged his friend’s secret. Herman had fled to Providence because of the Mayerling Incident. The mystery surrounding the discovery of the lifeless bodies of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and Baroness Mary Vetsera at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling on the morning of 30 January 1889 was the greatest cause célèbre of its day. It was no secret that Rudolf and Mary had been lovers, and while the circumstances of their deaths have yet to be ascertained, they probably committed suicide after the imperial household forced Mary to have an abortion.

  Dr. von Tietje didn’t tell Captain Archbold exactly how he came to be involved in the incident, but if he was the doctor who performed the operation, he had good reason to flee. Crown Prince Rudolf had been first in line to inherit the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his suicide caused a dynastic crisis with consequences more devastating than anyone could have imagined. Since he had no offspring, the succession passed to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was opposed to the growing reconciliation between the Austrian and the Hungarian parts of the empire. Matters came to a head when the archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914; a month later, troops were fighting the opening battle of the First World War.

  Dr. von Tietje had been determined to keep his secret, which explains why, shortly before he died, he set fire to his house. The only modern building on the island, the best-equipped surgery in Central America, and all of his possessions went up in flames. The suspicion that he had been trying to burn incriminating evidence only grew stronger after Captain Archbold fulfilled his friend’s last request and placed a death notice in the Panama Star and Herald, informing the general public that Herman von Tichenbach had just died.

  * * *

  Among Dr. von Tietje’s other friends on Providence was an English Catholic priest called Richard Turner. In the nineteenth century, the island had served as a refuge for Colombians driven into exile after getting involved in the internecine political conflicts raging in the country’s rural districts. There was no one to minister to them until the turn of the century, when the first Catholic priests arrived from Baltimore. But Bogotá became suspicious of the Americans’ intentions in the western Caribbean after the Panamanians voted to secede from Colombia and drafted in Father Turner to replace the American priests.

  Conversions to Catholicism were few—just a handful of islanders from the better-connected families—but thanks to the $100 a month that the Colombian government allocated for the upkeep of the island’s mission, a group of Capuchins were dispatched to the islands in 1926. The brothers and sisters on Providence were led by Father Carcagente, who followed the precedent set by the Baptists and Adventists by opening a school next to the capacious Catholic church in Freetown.

  Their arrival was part of Bogotá’s attempt to ‘colombianise’ the islanders. Motivated largely by fear that Colombia might lose the islands to the United States, ‘colombianisation’ was remarkably similar to the process of reducción that the Spanish had used to subjugate the natives of South America during their conquista of the New World. As seen through Capuchin eyes, the world was divided into the civilized, the semisavage, and the downright barbarian. Civilization was synonymous with the Catholic faith and the Spanish language. As applied on Providence, that meant rote learning of Spanish expressions that none of the class understood, and the creation of a generation of cowed, semiliterate children who knew all about the conquistadores and nothing about Francis Archbold, much less the Providence Island Company.

  Until 1923, Colombia’s national independence day had not been celebrated on the islands, but 20 July had become a public holiday thereafter. The islanders would don their Sunday best and ride their horses to the church for a commemorative service. Father Turner would lead them in singing ‘Te Deum,’ and then the intendente led them from Freetown to the mayor’s office in Town, where he delivered a speech reminding them of the loyalty they owed to the fatherland. The children were given a sandwich and a bottle of King Cola—a rare treat from the Canal Zone—and there was free rum for the men, who typically drank until they passed out.

  But after the Capuchins arrived, Protestant schoolchildren were told to stay away on 20 July. Baptists were the devil, said Father Carcagente, who even baptized some Baptist children into the Catholic faith without their parents’ consent. Those that resisted were reminded that they were bastards, for parents who had married in a Baptist church were living in sin, and the children of such unions were illegitimate in the eyes of God. Colombia’s constitution was no less insistent on religious uniformity, and since the law did not recognize children born out of wedlock as legal heirs, the entire system of land ownership on Providence was suddenly thrown into question.

  Not long after, the Colombian president declared that the island was at imminent risk of being invaded by the Nicaraguans and ordered the Baptist high school closed down, on the specious grounds that the building was needed to house the fifty soldiers due to arrive from Cartagena. No soldiers came, but ‘colombianisation’ went on apace. Protestants were excluded from jobs in local government, and their children were barred from receiving scholarships to study on the mainland. Many of them responded by converting to Catholicism and signing up for Spanish classes, an act of surrender that led to their being branded ‘job Catholics.’

  One day in 1928, the nuns at San Luis School on San Andrés told the girls that they would be having a Bible study class the following day, and that each of them should bring the family Bible to class. This came as some surprise to their parents; while they didn’t know much about the church of Rome, it was common knowledge that the Catholic church did not encourage its followers to read the Bible for themselves. But the girls did as they were told, and on arriving for class the next day, they were told to put their Bibles on a table at the back of the room. While one of the sister
s distracted their attention with a lesson on the geography of the Amazon, the others carried the Bibles into the yard, doused them in kerosene, and set them alight.

  News of the sacrilege was quickly to spread across both islands. Within a few days, the coconut palm the Bibles had been burned under died, an act of divine retribution that was only compounded by the terrible blight that afflicted practically all the coconut palms on San Andrés over the following three years. The blight was an unmitigated disaster, for the island was supplying half the coconuts eaten in the United States at the time. The largest of the American importers, the Franklin Baker Company, had been sending its steamship from Hoboken, New Jersey, to its wharf on San Andrés every three months, but it stopped coming once the blight took hold, and the company began importing coconuts from the Philippines instead.

  The coconut trade, which had been paying for all the accoutrements of modern living since emancipation, collapsed. Families on both islands were made destitute, for many Providence men had gone to San Andrés to work in the coconut groves. The smaller producers, most of whom were the grandchildren of slaves, sold their groves to the bigger landowners, most of whom were the descendants of slave owners. For the first time since the 1630s, hunger stalked the islands, and hundreds of jobless men had no choice but to leave in search of work in Central America. But it was a bad time to go, for the Great Depression had brought mass unemployment to the entire region, and they found themselves competing with idle hands from all corners of the Caribbean. Many islanders considered the blight divine punishment for the burning of the Bibles, and railed at the Colombians and their religion. Whatever its cause, it was a rude awakening to the risks inherent in monoculture and the vicissitudes of the modern world.4

  * * *

  I found Rodrigo Howard sitting with his friends on the short boardwalk that ran parallel to the road leading out of Town. A retired schoolteacher, he was still slim at the age of eighty, with a head of close-cropped gray hair. He was going to do some weeding on the plot behind his house, he said, and invited me back to his house to talk. I followed him up a steep flight of wooden stairs that led from the road running past the Catholic church in Free Town to his single-story wooden house, and we settled into armchairs that sighed under our weight.

  Like the rest of the islanders, Mr. Howard had sealed the wooden walls of his house with several layers of gloss paint to keep the termites out. But the passage of time had turned the magnolia sepia, and it had had a similar effect on the rest of his sparsely furnished front room. A TV stood on a Bakelite-topped cabinet, with legs that stuck out at angles, as things tended to in the 1950s. Inside the cabinet were some dog-eared LPs, though I couldn’t see a record player. ‘All those records are brought from Colombia. Most is porro and so on,’ he told me. ‘Me and my wife were married here, but for my career, we went to a place in Sucre named Corasál. I was teaching there for eleven years, in a Roman school. My time over there, I got to know about religion, and owing to the fact that the Baptists derived from the Catholics…’

  He looked at me bashfully, as if gauging my reaction to the revelation that he had become a ‘job Catholic.’ I gave him a blank look, which didn’t help him. ‘Well, to me the Catholic have more what Jesus was preaching. But my family is all Baptist besides me, and they don’t say that.’

  I asked him about the first settlers of Providence, and he hummed recognition. ‘Theodor Birelski was my great-great-great-great-grandfather,’ he said. Very slowly, Rodrigo Howard shuffled to the bookcase on the far side of the room. His back was straight but stiff, as if each bone in his spine had fused to its neighbor. He returned with a heavy tome with a dark blue leather cover, on which the word ‘Howard’ had been embossed in gold, and sank back into his chair. He didn’t open the book but placed both his hands on the cover, as if to warm them. ‘Simon Howard,’ he said with great deliberation. ‘I think he came here from…’ There was a long pause. ‘…Boston.’

  Was that around the time of independence? I asked. ‘No, it was before.’ He repeated the last word, and it hung in the air, grave and vague. ‘He got married to a nurse that was here to attend a Spanish group of soldiers. They had several children, boys and girls, and they married from other families. So all the Howards around this area—Providence, San Andrés, Panama, the coast—are coming from that fellow.’

  So are there Howards in Panama as well? ‘No. Some went from here to Colón and didn’t come back.’ Not for the first time, an islander had simultaneously confirmed and denied something I’d said. Maybe he hadn’t understood me but was too polite or too embarrassed to say so. ‘In a few hours, we can get to any of the Central American countries in launches. My father used to carry mango, orange, and coconut to Colón and Limón as a sailor. When I was a boy, there was only one teacher on the island, Rafael Archbold Taylor, so my father taught me to read in English, and arithmetic. He used to bring back our clothes and books from Colón. In those days, hardly any more fruit was here, only orange and mango. But in 1940, there was a large hurricane and all the orange trees fall down.’

  Mr. Howard pronounced orange as ‘o-REENJ,’ one of several examples I’d heard of what an American linguist believed to be Scottish pronunciation of Elizabethan English.5 The islanders pronounced turtle as ‘turkl’ and middle as ‘migl.’ They also called a chicken a ‘fowl,’ a pig a ‘hog,’ and used ‘vex’ when Britons would say ‘annoy.’

  Were there still links with Central America? I wondered. ‘These boats still go to Panama to bring cargo from there, but we don’t have anything to export anymore. Most of the young people just didn’t continue to farm. Some will go from here and meet them there, and talk with each other. But most only carry cocaine,’ he said with a resigned, faintly embarrassed smile.

  Looking out of the open window, I could see a cargo ship being unloaded on the dock. I was reminded of the catamaran trip I had made from San Andrés several months before, and was struck by an unexpected feeling of isolation. The sight of the sea was no longer a novelty, but until that moment, I had had no sense of being surrounded by it. I had been under a comforting illusion that I was living at the tip of a peninsula, rather than an island one hundred fifty miles off the coast of Central America. By most reckonings, isolation and loneliness are practically synonymous, but I didn’t feel alone. Providence might have been alone, but its people shared their separation with one another, and I was basking in some of the warmth they gave off.

  ‘They are going to dredge out the harbor. Every day getting something new,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Supposed to have a good future. But changes are becoming…’ I waited for him to finish his sentence, but that was all Rodrigo Howard had for me. He had ended as he had begun: vague and hesitant, as if peering through thick fog.

  * * *

  The blight of the coconut palms was a terrible blow to both islands, but the main driver of outward migration from Providence was not the collapse of the coconut trade, but the breakup of the handful of families that ruled the island. In the 1930s, its largest landowner was Frederick Robinson. He owed his wealth to the black workforce of Bottom House, who were bound to the old white man by a system of patronage that kept them in perpetual debt. When he died in 1936, he stipulated in his will that his land be divided between his twenty-seven children. This created fields that were too small to sustain a family, so many of them sold their shares and left for Cartagena or Barranquilla. The old man’s workers, who were now bereft of their principal source of credit, followed them, signing up as sailors and deckhands on the ships that ferried goods among the ports of the western Caribbean, and the island’s population went into a steep decline that wasn’t reversed until the 1960s.

  In the late 1930s, Bogotá began to show more interest in the islanders’ welfare. Non-Catholics were still barred from public office, but students from Baptist and Adventist families were offered scholarships to high schools on the north coast, and some of them went on to university in Bogotá and Medellín. The first hospital was bui
lt on San Andrés, the first motorcar arrived at the dock, and a yard in North End became the venue of the Ritz Theatre, where the islanders were able to watch Hollywood films for the first time (newsreels and cowboy films proved especially popular).

  It was around this time that the teacher and Adventist minister Rudolph Newball brought the first motorbike to Providence—not that it served much purpose, for the only paved road ran no farther than the hospital, a few hundred yards up the hill from the dock. The first electricity-generating plant was built in 1937; it supplied electricity to the houses and shops in Town, but only between six and ten o’clock at night. The rest of the islanders continued to use kerosene lamps to keep the darkness at bay, and this ‘dark pollution’ ensured that they continued to be haunted by ‘duppies’ and the ghosts of dead pirates.

  But thanks to a wind-up battery charger, the people of San Andrés were soon able to listen to radio broadcasts for the first time, and in September 1939, an American voice informed them of the outbreak of war in faraway Poland. In the opening stages of the Second World War, Colombia’s distance from the main theaters of conflict allowed it to remain neutral. But the islands’ proximity to the Panama Canal soon brought them to the attention of the Axis powers. Responding, American warplanes dotted the skies, the dock at North End became crowded with boats from the U.S. coast guard base in the Canal Zone, and when work began on the fortification of the canal’s defenses, many islanders found work in Colón again.