The Island that Disappeared
Page 43
Epilogue
ON MY RETURN FROM THE Corn Islands, I spent the summer writing at my mum’s house in Penzance. One day in August, the entire town showed up on the promenade dressed as pirates. They were hoping to set the world record for ‘most pirates ever assembled in a single place.’ Strange, I thought, as I wandered through the crowds of buccaneers sporting eye patches and three-cornered hats, a cardboard cutlass in one hand, a stick of cotton candy in the other. Strange it is, that old-world criminals like Henry Morgan should be more popular than ever, yet their modern-day incarnations so completely overlooked. Who among this crowd of pirate lovers could even name a latter-day pirate? The trial of the Somali Abduwali Muse in February 2011 was the first case of piracy to come before an American court in two hundred years, but it attracted considerably less attention than Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Fiction is not as strange as fact, but it is invariably more popular, and often considerably better paid. The latest installment of the Johnny Depp franchise has grossed $654 million to date, a sum that dwarfs the $53 million that Somali pirates earned in 2011.1
Strange too that an English town steeped in the small-town politics of strivers vs. skivers and still trying to sort worthy from unworthy poor should choose to dress up as pirates rather than Puritans. But perhaps I was missing the point; perhaps it was all just play, and all the more appealing for being a bit silly. Given a choice between Puritan and pirate, who would you side with: the austere, moralizing man in the frock coat or the bawdy, fatalistic villain he has just condemned to the gibbet? The people of Penzance knew whose side they were on. Had I asked them what they thought of the real pirates of the Caribbean—the region’s cocaine traffickers—I suspect that most of them would have shown themselves to be more Puritan than they’d care to admit. But perhaps not: per head of population, the people of the Southwest are the biggest consumers of illegal drugs in the U.K., so perhaps they regard their drug smugglers as freedom fighters.
Turning history into a dressing-up box is all very well, but it can easily become a cover for indifference to the past. Perhaps it is precisely because the Atlantic world was created for Britain’s benefit that the British show so little interest in the modern Caribbean. It is too difficult for them, too bound up with the discomfort that they feel about the imperial mission their ancestors set for themselves.
The problem, it seems to me, is not postcolonial domination, but postcolonial neglect. After their former colonies won their independence, the British dropped them like hot potatoes. There is still a Commonwealth to remind them of the old club, but there seems to be little interest in the communities of the old empire, and those that were once on its margins, in places like Providence, San Andrés, and the Miskito Coast, have been entirely forgotten.
In a grizzly sort of way, Britain’s postcolonial discomfort has been eased by what has become of the Caribbean over the last thirty years. The failure of the state to tackle poverty and inequality, the end of farming and the drift to the cities, the normalization of mass unemployment and economic migration—the region’s governments are wrestling with no end of problems. Tourism and remittances from relatives living in western countries seem to be the only things keeping their economies afloat. Without viable alternatives, many of the region’s young people are drawn into the cocaine trade, which has defied all attempts to stamp it out, weathered all recessions, and continues to offer good money to the daring.
On a recent trip to Jamaica, David Cameron acknowledged that the U.K. had neglected its relationship with the region, and promised an extra £400 million in aid. Although he made a point of ducking questions about the campaign to have Britain pay reparations for the harm caused by the slave trade, films like 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained show that there is more, rather than less, interest in the legacy of slavery today.
The time I spent on Providence led me to think about what the U.K. might do to acknowledge its legacy. In the Internet age, an island as small as Providence should be prosperous. If the island were better known, it would be well placed to realize its potential as a destination for ecotourists, hikers, and divers. But its young people also crave educational opportunities, scholarships, and apprenticeships, and Britain has the resources and opportunities they need.
Aside from helping Providence to navigate a course through the challenges of the twenty-first century, the U.K. would do well to reassess its relations with the wider Caribbean. Recovery and recuperation from its imperial venture is ongoing and will take a lot longer than most people think. All of the bigger islands are bedeviled by corruption, drugs, and murder. Are the island’s shocking murder rates the result of poverty, the drug trade, or part of the legacy of slavery? In fact, most of the murders committed in the Caribbean have little to do with drugs per se, nor is poverty what causes Caribbean men to pull triggers. Rather, their poverty only further undermines the fragile self-esteem of honor-bound men. I would venture that the murderousness that marks the Caribbean today has its roots in the honor codes of Elizabethan England, which were carried across the Atlantic by its adventurers, pirates, and plantation owners. For as long as the church held sway, the piratical element was held at bay. But God and the respect for authority He tends to bring with him are conspicuous by their absence in the modern Caribbean.
The legacy of the English Puritans, gentlemen officers, common soldiers, and pirates who came ashore almost four hundred years ago goes far beyond the role they played in establishing the slave trade. That their legacy is so little discussed is a shame because the Puritans and pirates that set the stage for the drama on Providence also had a huge impact on the British. With their cardboard cutlasses, their penchant for naming and shaming, booming trade in contraband, and perennial suspicion of mainland Europe, the England of the 1630s doesn’t seem so distant after all.
References
INTRODUCTION
The National Archives’ currency converter can be accessed at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/results.asp. Francis Turner’s article ‘Money and Exchange Rates in 1632’ can be found at http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html. Pirate Money can be found at http://pirates.hegewisch.net/money.html. To calculate the present-day purchasing power of Dutch guilders, I used http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/calculate2.php.
CHAPTER 1—BUILDING NEW WESTMINSTER
1. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 1, p. 7. Note that Sorsby’s book is an unpublished, undated manuscript, with page numbers that revert to 1 at the beginning of each chapter, hence the unorthodox page references.
2. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 26.
3. Robert Edward Lee Strider, Robert Greville, Lord Brooke (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 18.
4. William Harrison, cited in Arthur Finlay Scott, Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age (New York: Apollo Editions, 1975), p. 35. Taprobane was most likely either in Sri Lanka or Sumatra. According to Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, the island’s inhabitants had a single giant foot, which they used to protect themselves from the sun.
5. Conrad Russell, “Parliament and the King’s Finances,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: MacMillan, 1973), p. 95.
6. Cyril Hamshere, The British in the Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 27. According to Wikipedia, the brothers ‘John and Samuel Jeaffreson [sic]’ also invested in St. Kitts; the latter was ‘the 3xgreat-grandfather of Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States.’
7. Nicholas J. Allen, ‘Business and Treason: The Broughton Plotters,’ Cake and Cockhorse, Banbury Historical Society, vol. 16, no. 5 (2005): p. 166.
8. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 18.
9. Ibid., p. 209.
10. Descriptions of Charles are from sources cited in Scott, Every One a Witne
ss, pp. 1, 7.
11. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 231.
12. See Pamela Neville-Sington and David Sington, Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers Have Changed the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 90. See too Karl Offen, ‘Puritan Bioprospecting in Central America and the West Indies,’ Itinerario, vol. XXXV, no. 1 (2011), p. 36.
13. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 61.
14. Ibid., p. 26.
15. S. L. Caiger, British Honduras Past and Present (London: Allen and Unwin, 1951), p. 27, cited in Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 6.
16. In the 1680s, Sir Hans Sloane described how Bahaman fishermen would catch up to one hundred monk seals a night. By 1880, they were practically extinct, although a few survive to this day in the Triangle Reefs in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico. Despite being prey for hungry men for the past five hundred years, they remain quite tame. See Sir Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (London: 1707).
17. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, p. 32.
18. Cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 245.
19. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, p. 86.
CHAPTER 2—EDUCATING ESSEX
1. The description is of the Verney household in Claydon, Buckinghamshire. Taken from Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Seventeenth Century, and cited in Arthur Finlay Scott, Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age (New York: Apollo Editions, 1975), p. 52.
2. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 163.
3. Ibid., p. 207.
4. Oliver Cromwell is said to have died of English malaria, which he contracted during his early life in East Anglia. See Karen Kupperman, ‘The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,’ The American Historical Review, vol. 87, no. 5 (1982): pp. 1262–89.
5. Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 39.
6. He said this in 1636. Ibid., p. 246.
7. The quote is from 1622. Ibid., p. 160.
8. Ibid., p. 39.
9. Ibid., p. 169.
10. Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery,’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: MacMillan, 1973), p. 147.
11. Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 165.
12. Ibid., p. 225.
13. Cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 199.
14. Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 124.
15. Ibid., p. 81.
16. From the Harleian Miscellany, cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 177.
17. This remark was made in 1607. Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 149.
18. ‘Dark parishes’ is a term used in Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, 1979.
19. Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 152.
20. Ibid., p. 130.
21. Ibid., p. 95.
22. Cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 229.
23. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 48.
24. Ibid., pp. 82–3.
25. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 162. Also Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, pp. 90, 104.
26. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 179.
27. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, p. 215.
28. This is the victualing typical of an eighteenth-century ship. The details are taken from N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World, cited in Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 48. I have also used the Puritan William Bradford’s description of conditions aboard the Seaflower‘s sister ship, the Mayflower, cited in Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: a Story of Courage, Community and War (London: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 23.
CHAPTER 3—THE SEAFLOWER
1. Between the foundation of Virginia in 1607 and 1700; Carville Earle, ‘Pioneers of Providence: The Anglo-American Experience 1492–1792,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 8, no. 3: pp. 478–99.
2. Figures are for England and Wales in 1600. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, ‘Motionless History,’ Social Science History, vol. 1, no. 2 (1977): pp. 115–36.
3. William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders,’ Guardian, 4 March 2015.
4. Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War (London: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 27.
5. Cited in Arthur Finlay Scott, Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age (New York: Apollo Editions, 1975), p. 34. In 1635, London had a population of somewhere between three hundred and three hundred fifty thousand; see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 14.
6. Cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 15.
7. Cited in Ibid., p. 201.
8. Good health was believed to be dependent on keeping a balance between the body’s four ‘humours’: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.
9. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,’ American Historical Review, vol. 87 (1982): p. 1266. The Thomas Morton quote is from the Wikipedia entry for Thomas Morton.
10. Carville Earle, ‘Pioneers of Providence: The Anglo-American Experience 1492–1792,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 8, no. 3, p. 479.
11. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 2, p. 14.
12. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, p. 96.
13. Kupperman, ‘The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,’ pp. 1262–89.
14. Nothing came of the bushes or the silk. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 24.
15. The Wikipedia entry for the history of syphilis.
16. Ladurie, ‘Motionless History,’ pp. 115–36.
17. The quote is from John Robinson’s ‘Observations,’ cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 110.
18. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 28.
19. Ibid., p. 194.
20. Ibid., p. 33.
21. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, p. 96.
22. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 233.
23. Karl Offen, ‘Puritan Bioprospecting in Central America and the West Indies,’ Itinerario, vol. XXXV, no. 1 (2011): p. 25.
24. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 36.
25. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 17. Also Kupperman, Providence Island 1630-1641, pp. 36–7.
26. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 93.
27. Alison Games, ‘“The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes”: The Atlantic Context of Local Resistance on Providence Island, 1630–41,’ Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, vol. 19, no. 3 (1998): pp. 1–21.
28. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, pp. 157–8.
29. According to John Woodall, who described its symptoms in 1617 and went on to become surgeon general of the East India Company. See Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 139.
30. Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 62. The attribution of scurvy to a deficiency of vitamin C wouldn’t be made for well over a hundred years. Although a Scottish naval surgeon, James Lind, proved that scurvy could be treated with citrus fruit in experiments he described in his 1753 book A Treatise of the Scurvy, his advice would not be implemented by the Royal Navy for several decades.
31. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, pp. 158, 211.
32. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atl
antic World, p. 92.
33. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 86.
CHAPTER 4—CAKE, ALE, AND PAINFUL PREACHING: A BANBURY TALE
1. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 2, p. 21.
2. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 10.
3. Arthur Finlay Scott, Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age. New York: Apollo Editions, 1975, p. 160.
4. Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion: A New Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 57.
5. Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 270.
6. ‘The Local Influence and Family Connections of the First Viscount Saye and Sele,’ Cake and Cockhorse, Banbury Historical Society, 1977.
7. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 148.
8. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 19, 46. The order was initially enforced only for those bound for New England, but it would likely have been applied to anyone sailing to Providence as well.
9. All references to Rishworth are from Guy Dixon, ‘Samuel Rishworth of Providence Island: Councillor, and Abolitionist,’ Journal of the Society of Genealogists, vol. 30, no. 11, 2012.
10. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, p. 234.
11. Complaints were made against Captain Punt, and the following March, the Court of the Company cross-examined the crew of the Charity. Punt was eventually dismissed, but without fine or punishment. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 15.
12. From Fox’s North-West Fox, or Fox from the North West Passage, 1635, cited in Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 283.