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Privateering and slavery
Faction fighting crippled Providence Island, but the company insisted on maintaining control from London. The company also sent fewer servants than promised, while insisting colonists experiment with a huge variety of commodities. But, Governor Bell had an idea. Slaves could be a cheap way to make up the labor deficit.
Transcript
Well, welcome back. It’s been a while! Thanks for your patience. And, today is the first anniversary of the day this podcast started! So, that’s exciting.
Going back a couple weeks, we ended the last episode with the Reverend Lewis Morgan sending to England a petition stating colonists’ grievances, and the company responding by entertaining some of the ideas, but ordering the governor to send Lewis Morgan, the minister and ringleader, back to England. The investors were already far more in debt than they expected to be, but in anticipation of massive economic returns, they’d splurged and put together a second group of colonists even bigger than the first, sailing on the Charity.
Introduction
Thomas Barrington and Lord Saye and Sele were the two people who took the lead in recruiting the Charity’s colonists, which included three new ministers – Hope Sherrard, a Cambridge-educated minister from Kent, Arthur Rous, Pym’s brother in law, and Mr. Dietloff, a refugee from the Palatinate whose first name is unknown. Apart from them, the most noteworthy people the Charity brought were Henry Halhead, and Samuel Rishworth. Rishworth was actually related by marriage to Anne Hutchinson, and was from the same area of Lincolnshire as she was, but we don’t know much else about him. Halhead, though, was mayor of his Essex Oxfordshire town of Banbury, and a long-term business associate of Saye. As mayor, he was known for driving the rogues and vagabonds out of town, and fining people for being disorderly, and giving that money to the poor. In an economically struggling, cloth-producing town which was one of the most Puritan in England, this made him very popular. Banbury was definitely troubled, though. A few years before, its citizens had clashed severely with Irish Catholic troops which the king had billeted there, and those clashes had culminated in a massive fire, allegedly set by the soldiers, and Halhead was one of the citizens who lost the most in that fire. The next year, there were two riots, and emigration was looking like a good option. Lots of people from the region went to New England, but Saye had convinced Halhead to go a different route. He was in his 50s, and moved his family to Providence Island to take over civilian leadership of the colony along with Rishworth and Edward Gates. Gates had actually been one of Morgan’s petitioners, but his other actions had indicated such dedication to the project that he was not only made a leader, he was also the only settler to receive new servants on the Charity. Rishworth and Elfrith were made responsible for collecting debts owed to the company, and they would settle the Eastern part of the island, with Ditloff as their minister, while Sherrard preached at New Westminster, with Rous as his subordinate.
Now, again the voyage wasn’t exactly smooth. Rishworth and Halhead were forced to wait so long in Plymouth that the company had to give them 16 pounds to tide them over. And, Arthur Rous asked to borrow some of that money from Halhead to help tide him over while they waited for the Charity. Halhead agreed and ended up spending a day with Rous and his family. This was Halhead’s first hint that things on Providence Island might not be as pious as he thought. He discovered that Rous couldn’t even pray without reading lines from a prayer book, and non-rehearsed prayer was one of the cornerstones of Puritan belief. To make things worse, Rous beat his servants as harshly as a soldier would. Halhead confided to Ditloff that he didn’t think Rous was good enough to be a minister, and Ditloff said he agreed.
At sea, the Charity’s captain was even harsher than the Seaflower’s had been. Illness ran rampant, but the doctor wasn’t allowed to treat passengers, and the captain cut provisions in half so he could sell the rest in the Caribbean. He also took on bad water when he could easily have bought good water. When Halhead protested this treatment, he was shackled to the bilbowes. And, Rous supported this. Halhead also heard Ditloff and Rous singing profane songs on the Sabbath, and when he chastised them, Ditloff simply claimed he didn’t understand the words. Halhead was skeptical of the explanation, but let it go and simply hoped the two men would repent.
When they reached the island, they brought its population to 300. But, they found a settlement which would affirmed all of Halhead’s deepest concerns. Conflict hadn’t exactly died down since the petition was sent to England.
Rudyerd and Morgan were still fighting. The current reason was that Rudyerd said that Morgan hadn’t returned some of the books that he’d lent him. The dispute had rapidly descended into bitter insults about class and status. And then, Morgan refused Rudyerd the sacrament. Rudyerd had ultimately gotten all but two of his books back, but the bickering was incessant. And, Rudyerd was widely disliked. He drank too much, swore, defied Bell, and was totally out of control. But the company backed him, not only because they needed him, but because his brother, Benjamin, was one of the investors. Benjamin explained his brother’s grievances, laying the blame on Bell, and saying Rudyerd was under-valued on the island. So, the company took Rudyerd’s side against Bell.
The more important conflict, though, revolved around Captain Elfrith. Elfrith, if I didn’t mention it before, was one of the Earl of Warwick’s leading privateers. He had been the man who captained the Treasurer, bringing the first Africans to Virginia. And, he was the one captaining the Treasurer when it was taking privateering supplies to Virginia instead of badly-needed food and fishing equipment. He was the one who implemented Warwick’s reckless privateering strategies which had caused the Virginia Company’s problems. And, as Virginia turned more hostile to his activities, he started to focus more on Bermuda, led by Warwick, and where his son-in-law Philip Bell was governor.
So, given that background, it’s not exactly surprising that in April of 1632, as the Charity was departing from England, Elfrith had moved to push Providence Island toward privateering, even before its fortifications were complete. When peace with Spain had been solidified, the King had withdrawn Providence Island’s letters of mark, so privateering was no longer legal. But without asking permission, Elfrith had sailed to Cape Gracias a Dios, on the Central American mainland. And there, he’d attacked a Spanish frigate. Not one carrying anything of value, just an act of provocation. And then he left his own pinnace when he sailed off in the frigate. Then, he invited another privateer, Diego el Mulato, a notorious, Cuban-born privateer who had turned against the Spanish, and then sailed with the even more famous Dutch privateer, Piet Heyn, to hang out at Providence Island. This was dangerous both because it would show an outsider Providence Island’s weakness, and because it could invite yet-more Spanish reprisals before Providence Island’s fortifications were complete. If the Spanish took the island, they’d most likely kill every Englishman there, even without the privateering connection.
There was only one benefit to this insane course of action, and that was that if the Spanish learned of the English settlement, they’d attack, and if they attacked, the Providence Island company could apply for letters of reprisal, which would legalize privateering. So Elfrith was jeopardizing the entire venture in the hopes of plundering Spanish ships. Bell was by-and-large loyal to his father in law, but he cared about the safety of the colony, so he told Elfrith to write a letter explaining his conduct to the company. Elfrith complied, and along with his explanation, he sent the most precise map of the Caribbean the investors had ever seen. He said he’d been compiling it for years, and kept it for his own use, but now felt the company could use it. Other sailors had died because of how bad the average English map was. Plus, his map showed the only stretch of Central American coastline not occupied by the Spanish – the Moskito Coast and Trujillo Bay, not too far from Providence Island. This, Elfrith argued, was the benefit of his rash actions, and this is why the company couldn’t afford to lose him. And, he noted, were still places he hadn’t explored, too. He asked for forgiveness, and that he be allowed to function as an admiral free of civilian constraint. And, the argument was compelling. The investors let Elfrith off with barely a slap on the wrist, simply him that he had sole authority in his role as admiral, but he was not to do anything without the explicit instruction of the governor and council. Then, they made him captain of a new fort, sent him some more servants, and hinted that there may be privateering in the future. So, on the whole, Elfrith had been rewarded for his reckless endangerment of the entire venture, and Bell’s authority had been undermined.
The new colonists immediately found themselves pulled into existing power struggles on the island, and they brought their own shipboard disputes. The first thing Ditloff did when he took his place as minister was to refuse Halhead the sacrament, saying Halhead was a hypocrite, because he’d said that John Wells, one of the ship’s crew, was a carnal man who would sometimes swear, but that on a separate occasion, when Wells’s friends were around, he’d called him a religious and honest man. And, he alleged that Halhead had borrowed an apothecary rock without returning it. I mean, it’s one of those things that’s so mind bendingly absurd that you know there had to be some extreme hostility behind it. And when Hope Sherrard intervened, Ditloff told him to mind his own business and demanded an independent congregation. The company actually had to get involved in this dispute, and backed Sherrard’s analysis of the situation, and refused Ditloff an independent congregation, at which point Ditloff left the island never to return.
Halhead also found himself in the middle of a more personal struggle, resenting military service. He saw people like Axe and Rudyerd as being too similar to the officers who had antagonized Banbury. He defied their authority, infuriating Axe. Bell had no power over the conflict, not even to act as a mediator, and the ministers were completely unable to smooth the situation over. Ditloff was locked in his own struggles, Rous died within a few months, but even when he was alive, he quickly lost respect when people saw how brutally he treated his servants, and Sherrard was devout, but uncompromising on a level that rivaled Bell. He was fully prepared to deny the sacrament to anyone who wasn’t acceptably Christian, and that dinged the colony’s military leaders particularly badly. They formed a faction against him, and the same sorts of people who had rallied around Morgan started to cling to him, sharing their complaints from the most trivial, to the most fundamental. Like Ditloff, he created an independent congregation, and like Morgan he became yet another center of conflict. Elfrith was also bickering with everyone at this point, so a fed-up governor Bell expelled both his minister and his father in law from the council. In response, Sherrard condemned him as a source of arbitrary power, though he had no real power at all.
In the midst of this faction fighting, there was another minister on the island. Henry Roote had been intrigued by the Providence Island Company’s mission to found a Puritan society, but told the investors he needed to visit the island before committing to moving there. The company paid for him to spend a few weeks there so he could decide. And, his analysis isn’t surprising. He said Bell and the military men had strayed too far from the Puritan ideal, and that he wouldn’t go to the island unless there was some level of self government there. Rishworth and Sherrard gave their wholehearted endorsement of Roote’s analysis and proposed changes.
By 1633, the island was in such chaos that the company decreed that any individual councilor could punish the most common crimes, like swearing, drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking with predetermined sentences and the testimony of just a couple reputable witnesses. Appeal to the full council would be on a double or nothing basis. And, they put more responsibilities on Bell, in fact, more responsibilities than any governor could handle, and without giving him more tangible power. He was pretty much supposed to monitor and correct the behavior of every person on the island. Bell was such a rule oriented person that he was actually happy to do this, and in fact did it so well that it wasn’t long before the company was telling him to ease up and follow their instructions less closely. So for Bell, his goal was to maintain order, he had no power, and his instructions were a moving target. He was given an impossible job. And, he wasn’t compensated for his service. He kept asking for compensation and power, and he was never given them. It seems to me that the fundamental problem that Bell was facing is that the Providence Island company didn’t know exactly how they wanted to govern the colony. They didn’t know exactly what instructions to give him.
There’s a lot to say about the faction fighting on Providence Island. First is that it was a universal experience in new colonies. All traditional power structures were gone, people had differing ideas and expectations, and reduced ability to govern meant reduced ability to arbitrate which meant reduced ability to minimize conflict before the smallest thing became a major controversy. The Providence Island investors studied former failures carefully, and in many cases they’d participated in them, but they’d seen Virginia and Bermuda’s faction fighting and decided the solution was to keep all power in their own, faction-less hands. In reality, that made things worse, because there was no chance of immediate arbitration or mediation to nip conflicts in the bud. And, there was no ability to respond quickly to criminal activities. And, then the company found itself faced with the decision of whether to anger the people whose skills it needed most or to uphold the rules and governmental structures that it had set to preserve order within the colony. Halhead and Rishworth in particular had experience in English local government, but they weren’t really given a way to use their skills. It was such a bad situation that Rishworth wrote home that he couldn’t see good in any of the settlers when he first arrived on the island, and only after a year did he write saying he’d underestimated some of the more honorable company. Still, he emphasized that the disorderly society was disturbing. It may be ironic, but one of these future Parliamentary leaders’ biggest mistake was eliminating self-government.
The other thing about this faction fighting, though, is that if we flash forward to the, spoiler alert, Parliamentary victory during the English Civil War, the winning side was extremely divided. All of the colonists and investors we’re discussing would support Parliament, but even before the war started, if we look at New World colonization we can see these ideological divisions. Puritans formed a united front against the king in England, and only after the war do we really see the dramatic divisions, but looking at the differences between Puritan New World Colonies, and within those colonies, we can get a better feel for the enduring ideological divisions among Puritans and Parliamentarians.
But back to Providence Island, the economic situation was no better than the social and political one. On the Charity, the company had sent settlers instructions to experiment with a massive variety of plants and semi-industrial processes. They were told to move the cows and goats to a small, nearby island to protect valuable plants, and then plant castor oil, rhubarb, canary vines, medicinal vegetables, dye plants, cotton seeds, pomegranate slips, tobacco, guinea pepper, or grains of paradise, other fruits, plus explore the mainland for assorted types of silk grass, and gather samples of the two types of cotton that grew naturally on the island, even though the colonists had said they were useless. And, they should plant sugar cane for their own use, even though the colonists had said it couldn’t be grown industrially there. And it was up to Bell to ensure that colonists were doing the basic things to maximize tobacco quality, like curing the tobacco for up to a year if it was poor quality, and cutting off all smaller leaves. And in 1633, they sent colonists a whole slew of new commodities to experiment with, most notably madder, a versatile dye plant which was extremely valuable, but took three years to produce its first harvest. And, they were interested in wild potatoes called Mechoacan, and the company sent them a dry piece as a pattern to show them how to slice and sun dry the plants, pack them in dry casks and return them.
But here’s the thing, or at least one thing. With virtually none of these crops and commodities did they allow experienced people to show the colonists how to grow them, because those people didn’t fit within a model Puritan society. The exceptions early on are that they sent Richard Lane to help plant the madder, and the Bermudians came with knowledge of how to cultivate tobacco. Investors had the idea that seeds could just be put in the ground and they’d grow, and that’s simply not the way it works anywhere. It’s not the way it worked for North American corn, not the way it worked for early tobacco, and not the way it worked for the sugarcane which would later fuel the Caribbean economy. One of the reasons tobacco was so ubiquitous was that there were actually people around who could teach new colonists how to plant it. So even when prices were crashing, it was at least something people knew how to produce.
But, the investors didn’t understand that growing crops was a skill that required some knowledge and training. That alone could condemn the colony to failure. Add to that the fact that most of the suggested plants were labor intensive at the same time of year, and the fact that the investors were throwing idea after idea after idea at the colonists without giving them time to really experiment with any single one, and plenty of valuable ideas may have been overlooked simply because they didn’t grow effortlessly. Investors put a lot of time into finding the best seeds, but no thought at all into actually growing them. And, they didn’t want to divert any profits to license people to produce and market the commodities. It was only later that they realized they needed someone to teach the colonists how to process the mechoacan, and their solution was to order Bell to detain a gunner named Trippett until he showed them how to do it.
But, when tobacco had been sent to England, the company had sold its own share of the crop first, and the planters afterwards. This increased the value of their own tobacco, and reduced the value of colonists’ tobacco, simply because their share would be sold in a less competitive market, and the company could easily choose the best leaves for itself. And, Providence Island tobacco was worthless anyway. Bugs ate the buildings where they tried to cure the tobacco, so as it cured, it was covered in dust, ruining the taste, tobacco was rapidly becoming a worthless commodity anyway, because of just how much English colonies were producing, and the actual plants grown by colonists weren’t very good.
And, to make matters even worse, the company hadn’t sent as many servants as promised. This continued into 1633, when the investors twice promised and twice failed to send new servants to their colony. They said that because the colonists had been negligent in sending back valuable commodities, they couldn’t expect further investment in the form of servants. It’s the same old accusation, and with a familiar consequence. To compound the problem, some of the servants’ terms would be ending soon, not only leaving the island’s leaders without enough labor, but reneging on promises to the servants, themselves, who were supposed to get land leases and servants of their own on completion of their contracts. Though the company was demanding economic growth, they weren’t providing the labor necessary to achieve that. But, unlike Jamestown, Plymouth, Barbados or Bermuda, Providence Island settlers proposed a solution. Slaves. This was a new development. There were Africans in the colonies, not that many, but a few hundred. The Earl of Warwick owned quite a few of them, himself. A lot of them by this point were probably living slave-like lives, but English colonies as a whole had been very reluctant to adopt slavery. The Spanish had millions. The Dutch were in the trade. But the English had kept themselves at least somewhat distant from it. Indentured servitude, though that itself was often involuntary, was by far the preferred labor source. At the same time, when privateers ended up with slaves as part of their loot, they had to go somewhere … The status of Africans was increasingly in a grey zone, but colonies pushed the issue down the road, uncomfortably unsure of what to do about this weird new uncomfortable thing that was all around them. But now, powerless in a chaotic and dangerous environment, Philip Bell looked at slavery and thought, “that. That could be the solution to our problems.” And the company agreed, though with some stipulations. They only wanted 20-40, and only one per “family,” because runaway slaves would pose a serious security risk for the colony. They ordered Sussex Camock to buy some slaves from Dutch ships, for a good price, preferably in local commodities.