The Island that Disappeared
Page 44
CHAPTER 5—THE FIRST VOYAGE TO THE MISKITO COAST
1. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 40.
2. Elfrith’s early career is described in Stanley Pargellis and Ruth Lapham Butler, ‘Daniell Ellffryth’s Guide to the Caribbean 1631,’ The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 1, no. 3 (1944): pp. 273–316. I have rendered Elfrith’s words into contemporary English spelling.
3. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Daniel Elfrith.
4. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 94.
5. 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.
6. Karl Offen, ‘Puritan Bioprospecting in Central America and the West Indies,’ Itinerario, vol. XXXV, no. 1 (2011): p. 35.
7. My description of Miskito life is taken from Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras 1600–1914 (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1989), pp. 24–5.
8. Offen, ‘Puritan Bioprospecting in Central America and the West Indies,’ p. 29.
9. Ibid., p. 33.
10. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 104.
11. Ibid., p. 280.
12. See vol. I of John Masefield (ed.), Dampier’s Voyages, cited in Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 42.
13. Games, ‘The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes,’ pp. 1–21.
14. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 2, p. 28.
15. Michael Olien, ‘The Miskito Kings and the Line of Succession,’ Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 39, no. 201 (1983).
CHAPTER 6—THE PRIDE OF THE RIGHTEOUS
1. These details of a service are from a description of services in Virginia, and are taken from Babette M. Levy, ‘Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,’ in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 70, part 1 (1960): pp. 97–8.
2. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 192.
3. Ibid., p. 235.
4. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 154. Also Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, pp. 241–2.
5. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 2, p. 19.
6. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 257.
7. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 136.
8. Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 225.
9. References to Henry Roote are from Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, pp. 237, 131.
10. Karl Offen, ‘Puritan Bioprospecting in Central America and the West Indies,’ Itinerario, vol. XXXV, no. 1 (2011): p. 34. Also Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 90.
11. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 22.
12. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies,’ The Historical Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 1989, p. 29.
13. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 26.
14. Ibid., pp. 25–6.
15. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, p. 77.
16. In the Chesapeake, there was a slow transition from indentured servitude to slavery spanning some six decades. On Barbados, the planters switched with alacrity to slavery as they transferred their agricultural production to sugar in the 1640s. Providence provides a different model. The colony on Providence distinguished itself from all other contemporary English Atlantic colonies in its rapid commitment to slavery and in its simultaneous use of numbers of enslaved American Indians and English indentured servants. 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).
CHAPTER 7—THE AFRICANS, ‘DURING THEIR STRANGENESS FROM CHRISTIANITY’
1. Francisco Biafara’s account is from David Wheat, ‘A Spanish Caribbean Captivity Narrative: African Sailors and Puritan Slavers, 1635,’ in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives From the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, eds. Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett), 2009.
2. Isseke is in Ihiala LGA, Anambra State, in the Niger delta. It is the closest possible origin of Olaudah based on the linguistic and ethnographic evidence he left in his memoir. See http://www.nairaland.com/870908/igbo-1700s/4.
3. A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa, by John Matthews, was printed for B. White and Son in 1788. Cited in Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 266.
4. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 100.
5. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 171.
6. 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.
7. P. W. Thomas, ‘Court and Country Under Charles I,’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: MacMillan 1973), p. 180.
8. Games, ‘The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes,’ pp. 1–21.
CHAPTER 8—‘A NEST OF THIEVES AND PIRATES’
1. This account of the Spanish attack is taken from A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans: The Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle With Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), pp. 196–7; and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 198. Their accounts differ; Newton says that the fleet was commanded by the governor of Cartagena, Nicolas de Judice. Also see the Wikipedia entry for Francisco de Murga, a governor of Cartagena.
2. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 2, pp. 37, 39.
3. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, 1993, p. 199.
4. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 1.
5. Karen Kupperman, ‘Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island Through the Western Design,’ The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 45, no. 1 (1988): pp. 70–99.
6. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, p. 198.
7. W. Frank Craven, ‘The Earl of Warwick: A Speculator in Piracy,’ The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (1930): p. 459.
8. Ibid., p. 460.
9. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, pp. 4–6.
10. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, p. 105.
11. Dudley Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–84 (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1977), p. 27. See also Lucía Méndez González, La Visión de Inglaterra sobre América a través de Fray Thomas Gage, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (UMSNH), and the Wikipedia entry for the biography of Thomas Gage.
12. W. Frank Craven, ‘The Earl of Warwick,’ p. 469.
13. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 3.
14. 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.
15. British Library Add. MS 6385B, p. 106. This is the decipherment of Add. MS 10615, which is a collection of letters from William Jessop to the islanders. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 76.
16. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 76.
17. See the entry for Daniel Elfrith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Neither his authority nor his land was restored to Elfrith until the company intervened to defend him and Bell from their enemies in March 1637. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 14.
18. This is from Samuel Axe’s letter to the company of March 1639. See Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 109.
19. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 270.
20. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 21.
21. According to Gregory King’s Tables of 1688, there were one hundred sixty Temporal Lords in England, who each made an average of £3,200 a year. King’s tables were published in Gregory King, Two Tracts, ed. G. E. Barnett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936). Cited in Arthur Finlay Scott, Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age (New York, Apollo Editions, 1975), p. 160.
CHAPTER 9—‘RAW POTATOES AND TURTLE MEAT’
1. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 204.
2. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘A Puritan Colony in the Tropics,’ in Settlements in the Americas: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ralph Bennett (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), p. 242. Unless indicated otherwise, all the following quotes from Nathaniel Butler’s diary are taken from Sam Cuming, A Short History of Providence and San Andres 1629–1901 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 2015).
3. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 259.
4. 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.
5. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 3, p. 17.
6. Games, ‘The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes,’ pp. 1–21.
7. See Guy Dixon, ‘Samuel Rishworth of Providence Island: Councillor, and Abolitionist,’ Journal of the Society of Genealogists, vol. 30, no. 11 (2012).
8. Games, ‘The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes,’ pp. 1–21.
9. Loren C. Turnage, Island Heritage: A Baptist View of the History of San Andres and Providencia (Historical Commission of the Colombia Baptist Mission, 1977), p. 12.
10. Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,’ Past and Present, no. 109 (1985): p. 73.
11. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 278.
12. James J. Parsons, San Andrés and Providencia (Oakland, CA: University of California, 1956), pp. 33–4.
13. Jeremy Gibson and David Fiennes, ‘Henry Halhead and Providence Island,’ Cake and Cockhorse (Banbury Historical Society, 1978).
14. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 2, p. 26.
15. Gibson and Fiennes, ‘Henry Halhead and Providence Island.’
16. According to William Jackson, who visited the islands during his cruise around the Caribbean sometime after 1641. Karl Offen, ‘Puritan Bioprospecting in Central America and the West Indies,’ Itinerario, vol. XXXV, no. 1 (2011): fn p. 69.
CHAPTER 10—THE LAST DAYS OF THEIR LORDSHIPS’ ISLE
1. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Puritans, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 3, p. 38.
2. Ibid., p. 26.
3. Ibid., p. 31.
4. Unless stated otherwise, my description of the attack of 1640 is taken from this letter, dated 17 June 1640, and cited in 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.
5. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 31. Also Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 289.
6. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 33.
7. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 291.
8. Ibid., p. 294.
9. See http://doverhistorian.com/2013/12/03/hope-sherrard-of-sandwich. Also A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), p. 306.
10. Tristram Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 25.
11. Ibid., p. 43.
12. The Member of Parliament was Sir Thomas Peyton. Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand, p. 45.
13. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies,’ The Historical Journal, vol. 32, no. 1 (1989): p. 31.
14. Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand, p. 46.
15. Ibid., p. 50.
16. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 175.
17. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 3, p. 29.
18. Ibid., pp. 40–1. Also Karen Kupperman, ‘Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization From Providence Island Through the Western Design,’ The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 45, no. 1 (1988): pp. 70–99.
19. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘A Puritan Colony in the Tropics,’ in Settlements in the Americas: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ralph Bennett (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), p. 250.
20. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 265.
21. Ibid., p. 323.
22. My account of the Spanish attack is taken from Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 4, pp. 4–14, and Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, pp. 336–9. An account of what happened after the Spanish retook the island can be found in Donald Rowland, ‘Spanish Occupation of the Island of Old Providence 1641-1670,’ Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 15 (1935): p. 298.
23. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, pp. 340–3.
CHAPTER 11—‘LITTLE MORE THAN A SUMMIT OF A HILL’
1. Tristram Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 83.
2. Ibid., p. 85.
3. Taken from Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson (1639–41), cited in Arthur Finlay Scott, Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age (New York: Apollo Editions, 1975), p. 272.
4. Broughton Castle official brochure.
5. Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand, p. 139.
6. Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 64, 74.
7. Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand, p. 151.
8. Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,’ Past and Present, no. 109 (1985): pp. 55–99.
9. The words are those of the Puritan soldier and Leveller Edward Sexby; cited in Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand, p. 171.
10. Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 98.
11. Scott, Every One a Witness, p. 252.
12. William Sorsby, Old Providence Island: Pu rita ns, Pirates and Spaniards 1630–1670, ch. 5, p. 3
13. Ibid., ch. 5, p. 1.
14. Ibid., ch. 6, p. 1.
15. Donald Rowlandson, ‘Spanish Occupation of Old Providence, or Santa Catalina 1641-70,’ Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 3 (1935): p. 303.
16. Sorsby, Old Providence Island, ch. 5, p. 5.
17. The firsthand descriptions of William Jackson’s voyage that follow are taken from A Brief Journal, or a succinct and true relation of the most remarkable passages observed in that voyage undertaken by Captain William Jackson to the Western Indies or continent of America (1642), Sloane MSS 793 or 894, pp. 2–30.
/> 18. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 345–6. Certain Inducements to Well Minded People was likely written by one of the Providence Island Company’s former shareholders, but there is no way of knowing, since all that remains of the scheme is a single, ragged pamphlet, and its title page is missing.
CHAPTER 12—THE WESTERN DESIGN
1. Tristram Hunt, The English Civil War at First Hand (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 228.
2. Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 126.
3. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 141.
4. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 135.
5. Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 74.
6. Clarence Henry Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1910), p. 89. Also Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 351.
7. Kupperman, ‘Errand to the Indies,’ pp. 70–99.
8. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, p. 153; and Dudley Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–84 (London, Martin Secker & Warburg, 1977), p. 15.
9. Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way, p. 159.
10. Ibid., pp. 66–7.
11. Ibid., p. 158.
12. Ibid., pp. 67–8.
13. Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641, p. 353.
14. Kupperman, ‘Errand to the Indies,’ pp. 70–99.
15. To put things in perspective, Providence covers 24 square miles, and Bermuda just 20 square miles, while Barbados has an area of 166 square miles, which makes it a little bigger than the Isle of Wight, which covers 146 square miles. Jamaica’s area is 4,243 square miles, while Cuba’s is 44,000 square miles. See Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, p. 121, and Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way, p. 15.