Island That Disappeared

Tom Feiling

Description

The creation myth of the US begins with the puritans of the Mayflower who went on to build the most powerful nation on earth. This is the story of the passengers aboard its sister ship, the Seaflower, who in 1630 founded a rival colony on an isolated Caribbean island called Providence. Their crops failed, slaves revolted, and as crisis loomed the settlers turned to piracy. After the colony was wiped out by the Spanish Providence was forgotten in England, but the drama was re-played by those who settled the island 100 years later, now providing a fascinating microcosm of the Atlantic story.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Travel writing
• History of the Americas
• History of religions
• Colombia

Informations

• Publié par: Explore Books
• Date de parution: 04 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911184058
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T HE I SLAND THAT D ISAPPEARED
T HE I SLAND THAT D ISAPPEARED
O LD P ROVIDENCE AND THE M AKING OF THE W ESTERN W ORLD
T OM F EILING
First published in 2017 by
EXPLORE BOOKS
www.exploretravelwriting.com email: [e-mail]
Copyright 2017 Tom Feiling
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Tom Feiling to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBNs: 978-1-911184-04-1 (paperback) 978-1-911184-05-8 (ePub) 978-1-911184-06-5 (mobi)
Typeset by Josh Bryson Maps by Simonetta Giori Cover design by Dan Mogford Cover image of Lord Saye and Sele (detail from), National Portrait Gallery, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain Distributed by Turnaround Publisher Services, UK
C ONTENTS
Introduction
Maps of the Western Caribbean Providence Island
P ART O NE
1. Building New Westminster
2. Educating Essex
3. The Seaflower
4. Cake, Ale and Painful Preaching: A Banbury Tale
5. The First Voyage to the Miskito Coast
6. The Pride of the Righteous
7. The Africans, During their strangeness from Christianity
8. A nest of thieves and pirates
9. Raw potatoes and turtle meat
10. The Last Days of their Lordships Isle
P ART T WO
11. Little more than the summit of a hill
12. The Western Design
13. The Rise of Port Royal and the Recapture of Providence
14. Henry Morgan, Admiral of the Brethren
P ART T HREE
15. Mariners, Castaways and Renegades
16. The Last Englishman
17. A sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart
18. How the Light Came In
P ART F OUR
19. Modern Times
20. Maybe they don t know what is an island
21. Still a little behind time
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index
I NTRODUCTION
What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the watery maze Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own? - Bermudas , Andrew Marvell, 1654
Now that bird is maybe two hundred years old, Hawkins - they lives for ever mostly; and if anybody s seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself. She s sailed with England, the great Cap n England, the pirate. She s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, the Surinam, and Providence and Portobello. - Long John Silver, talking of his parrot, Captain Flint, in Robert Louis Stevenson s Treasure Island , 1883
This book began with a conversation I had with my editor at Penguin, a few weeks after publication of my last book, Short Walks from Bogot : Journeys in the New Colombia . In the course of my research, I had travelled the length and breadth of Colombia, and spoken to a lot of Colombians about their country s history, politics and culture. How about writing something similar about the UK? she suggested. She received a lot of pitches from British writers proposing to write books about far-flung parts of the world, but few of them seemed interested in reporting on the state of their own country. This suited me fine; after spending several years in far-flung places, I was keen to know more about my own country. In the spring of 2012, I bought a camper van, and spent the next six months travelling around the country, navigating by a self-imposed rule that I would avoid all towns and cities, and stick to B roads, guided only by a compass. I wanted to stop thinking about the land in terms of A to B and attune myself to the natural boundaries of cliffs, rivers and hills.
I didn t know what I was looking for. I ploughed through several books that purported to capture the essence of England (and even one or two that claimed to do the same for the other home nations). I started with Kate Fox s Watching the English , which I read on Brighton Beach; graduated to The English by Jeremy Paxman and Peter Ackroyd s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination ; and by the time I had finished George Orwell s The Lion and the Unicorn I was at the Kyle of Tongue in the furthest reaches of Scotland where the van was being rocked on its axles by a storm coming in from the North Atlantic. I had strayed a long way off the beaten track.
The problem with writing books - as well as with sightseeing - is that everyone wants to visit the best bits. The English think they have their history sewn up. There are thousands of newspaper columnists and TV producers who take it upon themselves to distil the essence of the national character, as revealed in a series of cherry-picked favourite episodes. They seem content to pore over a tide of books, films, and documentaries that largely rehash what we already know. In order of immediacy, the cherries are deemed to be the Second World War (reduced to a simple struggle of good over evil), the First World War (patriotic sacrifice), the Victorians (enterprise, industry and sexual repression), Elizabeth I (a secular Virgin Mother) and Henry VIII (the original macho brute).
A few weeks later, I parked up for the night outside a small, isolated church near Stokesay in Shropshire. I was too cut off from everything to know it, but that night, Danny Boyle was presenting his take on the meaning of Britain s history at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. While he was transmogrifying England s dark Satanic Mills to become the National Health Service, I was reading about the English Civil War in the van.
Somewhere beyond the church, there was a party going on; perhaps, I told myself, in a marquee erected on the lawn of a prosperous farmer s house, thrown by his son to celebrate the opening of the Games. By the time the church bell tolled midnight, he and his friends were in full song. I was too far away to make out the words, but they were clearly having trouble keeping up with the techno soundtrack. As the sound of their slurred and straining voices ebbed over the wheat fields, I found past and present melting into one another. The unseen marquee became a cave, the song a chant, and its singers Neanderthals back from a successful hunting trip.
That s what I want, I said to myself - something that connects the present to the distant past; a crack through which I might find something overlooked but essential about England s history. Why did I know so little about the Civil War, England s last and greatest domestic conflagration, I wondered? I had picked up the bare bones of the plot somewhere along the way: how the roundheads had fought the cavaliers, and Charles I ended up losing his head. But the hours I had spent watching history documentaries on BBC2 had given me next to no understanding of a war that had raged for over ten years, and killed 250,000 Britons. I suppose the religious dispute at the heart of the conflict can mean little to modern, secular Britain. The victory of Parliament is no longer the landmark it once was, and its Puritan champion, Oliver Cromwell, has been written off for the wanton slaughter he unleashed on the people of Wexford and Drogheda. Puritan has become a term of abuse, republican an anachronism. And then there is the little matter of regicide, a last resort that set royalist nerves on edge forever after. Yet the recession and austerity that precipitated the Civil War, the migrant crisis that coincided with it, and the religious fundamentalism that drove it suggested that the time was ripe for a fresh look.
As I read more about the Civil War, I was struck by mention of the Providence Island Company. It was not often mentioned, but among its members were most of the Puritan nobles who led Parliament into war against the king. I recognised the name from my time in Colombia. The congressman who represents the department of San Andr s and Providencia is the only native English-speaker in the chamber. Since the islands are 500 miles north of the mainland, most Colombians don t pay them much attention. Like them, I had wondered about tiny Providence, cut adrift 150 miles off the Miskito coast of Nicaragua, but not enough to visit.
Guided by an inkling that the island had something new and original to tell me about the UK, I trawled the internet, and ordered the only three books to have been written about the place. I discovered that the Providence Island Company s records had been lost for 250 years. Only in 1876 did the archivists at the Public Record Office realise that they had been mistakenly filed under New Providence, the first English settlement on the Bahamas. In fact, Old Providence predates both New Providence and Providence, Rhode Island.
No one I spoke to in London had even heard of the island. Yet it had once been hugely important to England, for it was the site of one of its first, and most ambitious colonies. The first settlers arrived on the Seaflower in 1631, ten years after its sister ship, the Mayflower , landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Unlike New England, the colony had a short life - it was wiped out by the Spanish in 1641 - but the more I read about it, and what followed it, the more convinced I became that I had hit upon a neat pr cis of the story of how Britain became a world power.
We live in an era of globalisation in which nations are becoming less important. But globalisation is not a new idea. Like Puritanism, it is a utopian project, and the post-national, post-racial ideal at its core is part of England s contribution to world culture. Arguably, globalisation began with Oliver Cromwell, the religious fundamentalist who led a Protestant crusade, killed the king, and laid the foundations for what would become the largest empire the world has ever known. For a time, Providence had been the Lord Protector s darling, and the beacon guiding God s c