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Transcript
Welcome back, last episode, we discussed the final descent of the Providence Island project into irrecoverable failure, and this week, we’ll discuss the last couple years of the colony’s existence. I’d intended to finish this in just one episode, but there’s just so much that happens that I had to split it in two. But, that’s ok, because I’m going to need a couple weeks to get the English Civil War episodes all organized and written anyway, so this is just fewer weeks with no episodes!
Introduction
By 1639, Providence Island had begun its final collapse. Investors and colonists were still trying to make the settlement work, but the colony simply wasn’t recovering from its problems. Bad luck and bad decisions had siphoned money away from the colony, even though privateering was bringing in a huge amount of money. In the face of increasing scrutiny, decreasing meeting attendance and increased domestic distractions, meeting notes and company letters were getting increasingly rushed, and decreasingly frequent.
And on the island, life was tenser than ever. Civilians lived in constant fear of Spanish attack, with 25 alarms over the course of 9 months. Some months, they had more than one alarm a week. It was just a state of constant worry, combined with resentment, disgust, irritation.
Sherrard stopped administering the sacrament to anyone, because his choices were between administering the sacraments to obviously and unrepentantly sinful captains, or administering the sacrament only to the people he felt were sufficiently Godly … which effectively meant exclusively to his own chosen congregation. This is actually an interesting contrast to New England. In New England, denial of the sacrament outside of ministers’ congregations was standard, and people didn’t really think twice about ministers using that to enforce congregational conformity. People had to enter a covenant with their minister, and membership could be revoked quickly and easily. On Providence Island, that idea was so outlandish that even Sherrard didn’t feel he could go that far. The Company had made its feelings clear regarding denial of the sacrament – it wasn’t a weapon. So, to avoid administering it to people who were unGodly, while avoiding using it in a way that looked provocative, he just refrained altogether.
But, Sherrard was still Sherrard. He was perfectly happy to assert his factional sympathies in other ways. In February, he held a day of Thanksgiving for the return of a runaway servant who had nearly died. The boy had escaped in a boat with a group of servants and slaves, but a storm had marooned them on an island with no fresh water. He was the last survivor, and had stayed alive by drinking turtle blood, eating seabird eggs, and collecting whatever rain he could in the turtle shells. Dutch sailors had found him, nursed him to health, and then returned him to the English. It was truly an event worthy of thanks, and Butler acknowledged this, but he was also troubled by the fact that Sherrard was so apathetic about the fate of the privateers. Axe, who was by now Butler’s closest confidante, had very nearly died just a couple months before, and Sherrard had shown no interest whatsoever. And, he refused to officially pray for Butler. The contrast with his reaction to the servant’s story couldn’t have been more obvious. Butler tried to remain positive about Sherrard, and he appreciated that Sherrard simply withheld the sacrament rather than using it as a factional weapon, but he noticed.
And, Butler was also frustrated by how dedicated civilian councilors were to undermining the Council of War. They openly celebrated privateering failures, and just would not cooperate on even the most basic of endeavors. To be fair, you can see where the civilians were coming from. But, also to be fair, Butler was trying to implement company orders, and civilian antagonism pushed him toward the privateers’ side by default.
Back in England, investors tried to deal with the acute issues of slave revolt and sacrament denial. They also appreciated Sherrard’s restraint, but at the same time, sacrament denial wasn’t ideal. So, they tried to recruit a minister who would administer to the people Sherrard disapproved of.
And with regards to the slave revolt issue, they couldn’t afford to remove all slaves from the island because of the expenses surrounding Woodcock’s death, so they told the colonists that they were just going to leave the situation up to the governor and council, except they would make a couple of rule changes. Now, anyone who left the island would have their slaves confiscated without compensation, rather than being able to sell them for what they’d paid for them. These slaves would work on the public projects. They also encouraged them to sell the slaves in New England, Virginia or the Caribbean, but fundamentally left that up to Butler’s discretion.
And, they found a solution to William Rous’s imprisonment. They gave him money to bribe his jailers and escape.
And, at this point, Bell was demanding payment of 500 pounds per year, in exchange for his testimony in the company’s admiralty suits. But, the investors refused. The tactic irritated them, and even if they paid Bell, there was no guarantee that they’d end up winning the suit.
And, at this point yet another privateering ship was seized by Algerian pirates, its crew enslaved, and its prizes taken far beyond the company’s reach.
And, most importantly of all, they continued trying to recruit colonists for Providence Island, and their continued attempts to recruit New Englanders provoked conflict with both John Endicott and John Winthrop, who started exchanging increasingly agitated letters with Lord Saye.
But, though the investors maintained a commitment to the colony, distractions were starting to pop up. The Earl of Warwick, in particular, had shifted his attention to his new colony of Trinidad and Tobago. And, within England, the King was preparing for war against the Scots, something which the Providence Island investors strongly opposed.
They actually ended up lucking into a new minister, though, when a storm forced a ship carrying a man named Nicholas Leverton to land on Providence Island. Leverton was an Oxford educated minister with a somewhat tarnished reputation, who had never taken religion seriously, and who had only gotten into the ministry because it was easy to combine with his more frivolous activities while studying at the university. Plus, with the shortage of ministers in England, he had a guaranteed job afterwards, so that was cool. He’d spent time in Barbados under Warwick’s patronage, and had been one of the settlers lured over to Tobago. But, in Tobago his group had faced Indian attack and other difficulties, which is why they’d left, and that’s when they’d gotten caught up in the storm. When they landed, Leverton found a group of people wanting to worship according to the English Book of Common Prayer, which Sherrard had abandoned when he declared his congregation’s independence, so he set up shop and started ministering, even before the company knew about him. An excited Butler asked him to administer the sacraments, and he agreed, and Butler even went over to hear him preach one Sunday.
It couldn’t have been more perfect. Leverton, who wasn’t particularly religious, could minister to the unGodly captains, while Sherrard would be free to administer the sacraments to his congregation without being challenged by the captains …
Just kidding. Nope. Sherrard met Leverton and convinced the new minister to join his side. Leverton suddenly became an avowed nonconformist, Sherrard’s clone in virtually every religious or policy dispute. Why, how, I’ll leave it up to you to speculate, we simply don’t have the documentation to say with certainty, but they were back to square one.
And square one was a rapidly deteriorating relationship between Sherrard and Butler. By now, the two were deliberately trying to provoke and offend each other. They were at the point of bickering over the books the company had sent to Providence Island with Morgan, Butler spent Easter morning with the two Dominican friars, and Sherrard devoted more and more sermon time to irritating the governor.
But, Butler went off privateering shortly after Easter. It was a good way to put the issues aside for the next few months, hopefully let everyone cool off, and Butler had wanted to go privateering anyway.
And while he was away, Leverton and Sherrard grew even closer, and led the civilians in stronger and stronger agitation. Rhetoric grew more inflammatory, they weren’t administering the sacraments, and the privateers just kept doing their thing. Butler returned in mid-September, having had one of the worst privateering voyages of all time. He’d had ships taken by the Spanish, their crews imprisoned, the rest getting lost, and the whole group nearly starving. No loot, all loss, near death, and absolutely no acknowledgment of his return by Sherrard or the civilians. And then, a week after Butler’s return, Sherrard announced that he would only administer the sacraments to those who entered into his covenant, New England-style. You could either do exactly what Sherrard said, or you could have no sacraments whatsoever. Your kids wouldn’t be baptized, you wouldn’t get communion, nothing. And then the next week, he made the same announcement. This was the last step in the total division of the colony, and what was worse, Sherrard didn’t even abide by his own rules. He let Hunt receive the sacraments, even though Hunt had never belonged to Sherrard’s covenant or congregation. He went to a Dutch Church on the island instead. But, he was one of the civilians’ allies, so Sherrard made an exception. It wasn’t just a split of the island, it was a hypocritical split.
And THAT was Butler’s last straw. He had tried, and tried, and tried to overlook Sherrard’s behavior and reunite the island, but after coming back from a near-fatal voyage, his only welcome was Sherrard telling him that he, and he perhaps more than anyone else on the island, was unwelcome at Church. So, he stopped going. And he started writing negatively about Sherrard for the first time ever. He tried briefly on November 5, a day of Thanksgiving for the anniversary of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot, to reconcile, inviting Sherrard, his wife and the civilians to dine with him, but it wasn’t enough. By the end of the year, he’d stopped going completely.
And he, Axe, and a small group of people turned their attention to a potential silver mine on a nearby island, which they’d found a few months before, and which the company wanted them to develop.
In February, the flames were fanned yet again, when Hunt left Providence Island without permission, sailing to the Moskito Coast and sending his ship back without him. When Butler accused Hunt of intending to sail to New England without permission, the civilian councilors publicly accused Butler of persecution. Butler was at his wits’ end, and wrote to the company that he was their martyr. Every attack he’d sustained had stemmed from his efforts to implement company instructions, and the opposing faction prided themselves in tormenting governors. His administration of justice was declared persecution from the pulpit, and Sherrard used his sermons to censure those he disagreed with. Sherrard was wilder and wilder, angrier and angrier, and was now even abusively yelling at members of his own congregation during Sunday services. Butler said he needed real power, and if the company didn’t trust him enough to give him real power, they needed to choose someone they did trust. And if they didn’t want to give him real power, he wanted permission to leave Providence Island.
And, he wasn’t the only one who wanted out. A group of colonists drew up yet another petition threatening to leave, citing among other grievances Sherrard’s refusal to administer the sacrament to them, and Butler encouraged them to write their petition. They asked Butler to present it on their behalf in England, and he agreed. Their petition supported everything he’d been saying, and quite frankly, it was an excuse to leave the colony. He asked the Council to sign the permission for his departure, but in one last act of spite, the ones in Sherrard’s faction refused, so Butler’s leaving the Island would technically be going against company directions. But, he left anyway, and he left Andrew Carter in charge. That in itself was an act of spite, because not only was he overriding instructions that the council choose his replacement, Butler had selected the man who was most hostile to the Island’s civilian population. Sherrard’s faction had accused him of oppression, well, now they could experience the real thing.
Butler arrived in England to find the company’s attention solidly and permanently diverted elsewhere, though. The king had briefly imprisoned Saye and Brooke for refusing to sign his oath, and after that, he’d been forced to call a Parliament. This was the opportunity that Providence Island members in particular had been waiting for for over a decade. Warwick was trying to get the colony sold to the Dutch so they could recoup a little of their debt and stop spending time on such a disastrous affair, but again to no avail.
And at the same time, Axe and James Riskinner brought five ships loaded with treasure to England. The investors were desperate not to let the cargo be embezzled by the sailors or lost in admiralty limbo, so they focused all their attention on trying to get it back. In the chaos, Butler’s petition was pretty much ignored, as was the fact that he had left his post with no real permission or warning.
And back on the Island, Carter was definitely showing the civilians what tyranny was, and I’d like to think that Butler had never expected him to be as extreme a tyrant as he was. He drank, he caroused, he abused his servants, and he banished and imprisoned civilians without cause or trial, while ignoring even the worst transgressions by the military faction. He dispossessed and banished a gentleman named Robert Robins with no legal basis, and sentenced him to hard labor aboard a privateering ship under captain William Jackson. Robins was treated predictably terribly on the ship, and then cheated of his rightful share of the voyage’s proceeds, and then he was dumped back on Providence Island where he found his property had been confiscated. Robins asked for permission to return to England, and Carter agreed, so the destitute man tried sailing back with another privateer, but that privateer met up with Jackson, and Robins ended up on his ship yet again. It took Robins months to get to England, and he even ended up in an Irish prison for a while. He tried to get compensation from the company, and depicted the colony as being completely devoid of law.
And then, a few weeks after Carter took control, a small fleet of ships appeared in New Westminster’s harbor. The colonists ignored them, so many ships were coming and going, and they’d had so many false alarms … but when the ships were still there the next morning, they raised the alarm. But before the officers could react, and in fact before most of them were fully dressed, the ships had fired on Ft. Warwick. It turns out, they were in fact Spanish ships, with a combined 1000 troops on board – 600 Portuguese, 200 Black Creoles, and 200 Spanish.
Their ships’ artillery couldn’t damage the fort, though, and English return fire soon forced them to withdraw. Then, they sailed south to the area protected by Black Rock Fort, and meanwhile the English hurried their women to Ft. Warwick.
Hunt prepared to defend Black Rock, and shot off his cannons … five times. Carter had only stocked the fort with five cannonballs, and he’d left it under-stocked in other weapons and ammunition, too. And when the cannonfire stopped, the Spanish knew it was safe to approach the beach. At this point, their only barrier to taking the island was a layer of slippery rocks between the beach and the fort, and as they were trying to cross that, Carter led a force of 100 civilians and 17 officers to meet them. As hundreds of Spanish troops shouted insults and shot off their guns, Carter started to duck and retreat, and as he did, the Spanish crossed the rocky barrier and started rushing the fort.
Carter ordered Hunt to spike the guns and retreat to Warwick, where they’d all die together. But, reinforcements arrived just in time, and the reinforcements demanded that the fort stand its ground. Carter argued, but they insisted, and they won the debate. They shot at the approaching troops while their slaves threw rocks, and before long most of the Spanish officers were dead. The leaderless soldiers panicked and ran back to the beach, shouting requests for quarter, but the English, who may or may not have known what they were saying, kept shooting until they’d killed most of them, too. The only ones who survived were those who fled into the hills.
And those were mostly low-ranking soldiers who were just trying to survive the conflict, so when the English found them and offered them quarter, they happily surrendered. The battle was over, the slaves had fought loyally, and only two Englishmen had been killed, one runaway and one miscreant, so no loss in colonist eyes. The only thing that had really been damaged was Carter’s reputation, and his cowardice became one of the overwhelming themes in accounts of the battle. Sherrard even said that the reinforcements had found Carter hiding in the kitchen eating the food stored there. I think we can write that off as embellishment, but that’s how he was seen.
But then things took a turn for the darker. After the soldiers who had surrendered reached New Westminster, Carter had every single one executed. Most were hanged, but some were killed in other ways. Carter personally cut off the expedition leader’s arm and watched him bleed to death. When the man asked why he’d been singled out for such a death, Carter responded that he’d seen him kill one of his slaves with a rock during the battle.
The colonists held a day of Thanksgiving for their victory, and burned all the Spanish religious artifacts while the Indians watched, to show them how worthless Catholicism was, but immediately after that, Sherrard and the civilians moved to oust Carter.
They confronted him, saying they had the right to appoint their replacement governor, and that they chose Lane, not Carter, the tyrant, coward and murderer of prisoners. In response, Carter privately armed some of the “ruder sort” of the Island, and had them seize Lane, Sherrard and Leverton. Then, he sent them back to England. But he didn’t send them to the Company. No, he sent them directly to Archbishop Laud, with a letter telling him that they were Puritan separatists. This would immediately disqualify Sherrard and Leverton from further clerical work, and could open the others up to punishment, too.
Now, unfortunately for Laud, but fortunately for our colonists, Laud had been imprisoned by the time they reached England. They ended up in Company hands after all, and the company was fundamentally sympathetic to their point of view. In fact, they kind of got a hero’s welcome when they reached London. The company affirmed that they were supposed to have the right to choose their replacement governor, but they did say they should have backed down so that the island wouldn’t be left without a minister. They were horrified both by Carter’s cowardice, and even more by his shooting of soldiers who had surrendered under promise of quarter, so they ordered him and his closest associates to return to England. A handful were allowed to relocate to Warwick’s Trinidad, but that was it.
And, they allowed the colonists to return to Providence Island, something both Lane and Leverton were eager to do. Sherrard, on the other hand, was fed up with the whole project and just wanted to stay in England, so they got the House of Lords to find him a place to preach in England. He never quite fit in with a congregation, though, and after a couple years, each congregation would petition to have him replaced, and the Lords would find him somewhere else to preach. Sandwich, Warwickshire, Sandwich again, and then finally Cornwall, where he died shortly afterward.
Halhead also stayed in England, preferring to stay in England and oppose the enclosures. He was disenchanted with Parliament before the first shots of the War were even fired, writing in his book that though Parliament had attacked enclosures in the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, by 1643 they’d begun to support the practice because it had enriched them. They were enclosers. He died not long after finishing his book, after being disappointed by every group he’d once considered ideological allies.
But however it had happened, the colony was now free of its most problematic residents. Both the harshest of the captains and the most argumentative of the civilians were gone, and at this point, the company also decided to make all concessions regarding private property, local political representation, and civilian control of the island. And, this helped them finally succeed in recruiting a few hundred New Englanders to go to Providence Island. New England also had its own bitter divisions, the Antinomian Controversy, the debate between the magistrates and the deputies, and in addition it was experiencing economic strain because of the slowing down of immigration as the king called a Parliament. Plus, quite frankly, New England was cold, and moving to a tropical island sounded kind of nice.
These colonists had already been considering setting up a new colony in Florida, but going to Providence Island was a great alternative, because their transportation would be paid by the company, and there, the foundations of a colony had already been built. The remaining New Englanders showed firm contempt of those who had decided to relocate, dismissing them as people who were weak in both mind and body, and who were seeking liberty and license, choosing to go to a place where all men were preachers, and no hearers of the Word. The people who now prepared to go included future fifth monarchist Thomas Venner, as well as Thomas Lechford.
And it was from this group that they selected Carter’s replacement, John Humfrey. They’d send an interim who would do nothing more than maintain the status quo and turn away potentially troublesome colonists. And when Humfrey arrived, he’d use Providence Island as nothing more than a base to colonize the mainland, as had so often been suggested in the past. He’d also help sell the majority of Providence Island’s slaves in other Caribbean colonies. In fact, this process would begin even before he arrived, with 1000 slaves sold primarily in St. Kitts, though a handful were bought by William Pierce. There had already been rumors of a second slave revolt, and to minimize the threat they would get rid of any which they didn’t specifically know were loyal.
So, in 1641, the first contingent of Humfrey’s men sailed for Providence Island on Pierce’s Desire. A few weeks later, they arrived in St. Kitts, but there, they had a decision to make. When they told the island’s residents that they were Providence-bound, the locals told them about rumors that a Spanish fleet had been seen off the coast of Providence Island. Should they continue to their destination, or turn back?