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Transcript
Welcome back! Last episode, we saw our company earn the right to privateer in the Caribbean, reinvigorating the colony with hopes of plunder, and fulfilling the Elizabethan dream. Privateering, they thought, could help them recruit new settlers, pay their debts, and protect Protestantism from the Spanish menace.
This week, they work to realize all their hopes.
Introduction
First things first, though, they had to decide how to proceed financially, and in February 1636, the company decided to create a new joint stock company to raise the money they needed to pay debts and ongoing expenses. People who funded the new joint stock would split all profits for the next 9 years, and only after that would anyone receive a return on the first round of investments. Furthermore, no one could invest in the new joint stock until they’d paid everything they’d promised up to that point. Even though his offer to take over the company was rejected, Brooke paid much more than anyone else. He also took leadership of the new joint stock.
With financial hopes pinned on privateering, they also lightened the economic burden on their colonists, and they prepared to send the first group of women to the colony. They now allowed the settlers to keep the profits from everything they’d grown in the past year, mostly tobacco which they were trying to sell in the Netherlands, and then lowered rents and promised to divide up lands with certainty of tenure, potentially even inheritable leases. But, they would only do that for settlers who were fit to remain on the island, and who had paid off their debts to the company magazine. Each plantation would also be expected to produce a set amount of cotton and tobacco, which would be bought by the company at fixed prices, and part of that money would go to paying the for the public works and officials. They’d also keep going to the mainland to get things like flax and dette, but the right to cultivate those would be reserved to company agents.
And, they started preparing to privateer. Warwick owned a fleet of privateering ships which hadn’t been able to do anything since 1630, and in addition to sending those out under captains like Axe, Camock and Elfrith, the company announced it would give letters authorizing privateering to any ship’s captain in exchange for a third of the plunder. This was a great deal for both sides, because it meant profit with no investment for the company, and it let the captains in on the ability to privateer – something they would never get any other way. They drafted their privateering commissions, and for once insisted that the Earl of Holland actually read them before signing them. William Rudyerd was one of the captains who signed up, bringing him back into the Providence Island venture. Whether or not to allow him to go was a topic of some debate, especially given accusations that he had sold company goods and wasted gunpowder, but Pym and his brother successfully defended him, and he was not only returned to the Island, but given some authority to quash whatever rebellion still remained, and settlers were ordered to treat him nicely.
They also started to discuss the possibility of some investors moving to Providence Island to help restore order and unity to the colony. The details hadn’t been worked out, but Nathaniel Rich announced his intention to go. He was Warwick’s cousin, and deputy company governor, so he had both an interest in privateering, and the authority to make a difference.
So, the new governor, Hunt set out in a small fleet including the Blessing, captained by William Rous, and the Expectation. He took a batch of letters with instructions to the settlers, mostly trying to reign in the most provocative and factional behavior in the colony. In response to renewed complaints that Sherrard had been imprisoned, they instructed that he be freed and encouraged to resume his ministry, and forbade the island’s government from disrupting any ministerial functions of any minister in the future. They didn’t want the minister dictating how the government ran, but they also didn’t want the government to control religious life. They apologized to Sherrard for his treatment, but also urged him to be more considerate concerning denial of the sacrament in the future. It was a big deal, and he should at the very least warn people and giving them a chance to repent before excommunicating them. They urged him to be a model of holiness, meekness and peacefulness, if for no other reason than to silence the people who opposed him, and they recommended that he consult privately with Hunt before denying the sacrament to anyone. They also instructed Hunt to keep the peace with the military presence on the island, and not to exercise his authority over them. They said Bell’s treatment of the soldiers and sailors had already driven too many of them from the Island, so Hunt needed to be deferential. Implicitly, they would rather offend the island’s civilians than its military, who were more important. And to further evidence that viewpoint, they ordered colonists to start planting corn and cassava for an additional 5-600 people.
But before Hunt even reached Providence Island, the first problems with privateering emerged, problems which will sound very familiar if you listened to some of the earliest episodes of this podcast. The captains had been ordered to take the colonists to Providence Island, after which they could go off privateering. But, before reaching the West Indies, the captain of the Expectation died, and Giles Merch took control of the ship. Instead of obeying his orders, he took the Expectation to a Dutch settlement, where he traded the supplies he was carrying, supplies intended for the colonists, for slaves. Then, he carried the slaves to another island, where he sold them and pocketed the cash. I can only imagine how frustrating that would be for the colony-bound passengers. They were wholly dependent on and subservient to the captains, and the captains showed no desire to actually get them to their destination. In the moment, they couldn’t have had any idea of how much longer they’d be spending at sea. When the Expectation re-encountered Rous’s Blessing, they planned to attack the Spanish town of Santa Marta. At this point, Hunt demanded that the settlers be dropped off at Providence Island, they agreed, mostly because the colony was on their way anyway, so they might as well. Rous and Merch agreed on a rendezvouz place and time, where they’d meet to plan their attack after dropping off the settlers. But, Merch ran late, and Rous decided to attack the town himself. And, he was unsuccessful. The Spanish beat him, and took him and his crew captive. As a captive, he met a young English Dominican who was traveling with the Spanish. The man’s name was Thomas Gage, and he and Rous formed at least something of an affinity for each other. Gage had grown dissilusioned with the Spanish, and he’s actually someone we’ll meet again, but not as a Catholic. He’ll become an associate of Cromwell and one of the more ardent puritans in England. But, Rous had been captured, and was sent to prison in Seville for the forseeable future.
On Providence, Hunt took his position as governor, and contrary to his orders, he neither showed Bell respect, nor did he coddle the captains. He allowed any and all judicial proceedings against Bell, not even reigning in the most merciless ones, and tried to force Bell to show the letters which had been sent to him privately. When the soldiers decided to steal Bell’s property, and remove the servants and slaves from his service, Hunt did nothing to protect him, and at that point, Bell sold his remaining possessions and sailed for England the next day. Bell may not have been liked, but he had been a mediating presence on the Island, and without him, factional clashes grew even more vitriolic. Hunt, who was fundamentally one of Brooke’s proteges, so more civilian-inclined, was appalled by the military behavior and took the civilians’ side. Elfrith in particular found himself in a position of such weakness that he was even attacked by some of the other captains, including Axe, who said he’d messed up the colony’s forts.
And, at this point in time, the Island thwarted its second Spanish attack.
Bell returned to England thoroughly disgusted with Providence Island. He told the investors that it was a better fortress than a colony, and in many ways his experiences there mirrored those of Governor Harvey in Virginia. The company saw the problems, and criticized Hunt for allowing attacks on Bell which were simply indirect attacks on the company, and for allowing discord to prevail when they’d ordered him to sew the seeds of peace. They said it was very clear that public justice had been used to settle private differences, and even worse, against someone who the company had specifically chosen as its representatives.
Within the company, conflict began to grow between Pym and Brooke. Pym now refused to continue serving as treasurer, saying that because the new joint stock was under Brooke’s control, he was no longer needed. He wanted an extra share in the company to compensate for the cost and expense in having run the company’s affairs in the past. The company refused, didn’t replace Pym, and had Jessop take over his old responsibilities.
Nathaniel Rich died at this point, deflating company plans to send investors to restore peace to the island. And, a plague outbreak indefinitely postponed the recruitment of additional soldiers and settlers. And, they had to discuss what to do about William Rous. Should they pay the money to get him out of the Spanish prison? To what extent were investors responsible for rescuing privateers who got captured? I mean, capture was a definite threat associated with privateering, and Rous’s actions had been irresponsibly risky. They were already in debt. How much more money should they borrow to rescue the reckless? They couldn’t agree, and put off decision.
In Providence Island, conflicts between the interests of settlers and privateers continued to cause problems. The company tried to get privateers to transport colonists and supplies to the Island, thinking it was a logical solution to transport cost problems. Privateers were getting the opportunity for plunder, the least they could do is cut down on company costs by transporting passengers. But, the privateers resented this. Passengers needed food, and transporting them would distract from the mission of privateering. Plus, ships’ crews would sail for free with the possibility of getting prizes, but they would demand wages if they were expected to transport people. So, they resented, de-prioritized and even refused to do this, leaving the company to continue bearing the burden of transportation, even though many of the people being transported were soldiers who were necessitated in large part by the privateers.
Privateering made repeated Spanish attack a near inevitability, meaning the colony needed an increased military presence. So now, the colony imported military officers from active fortifications on the Essex coast, and demanded military perfection from the civilians, with training twice a week until that was achieved. And, the civilians, servants and slaves would be expected to work on the fortifications again, without compensation, which the company again said was for the colonists’ safety, though that was now even less true than before. And, as this happened, the civilians started to withdraw into their own separate, closed society, separate from the rough, crass, libertine military. As part of Godly congregations in Puritan areas of England, they’d been dismayed by the political direction of their home country. Now, they were surrounded by swearing, drunkenness, lewd and outright violent behavior … Axe, for instance, slaughtered a group of Indians on the mainland, and was chastised for it by the company, and told that God would avenge their blood, but he still remained in the colony. They were subservient to people who were brutal and domineering and obviously more valued by the company. Even if they found a perfect commodity, it wasn’t going to get better, so they withdrew. They did what they were ordered to, but otherwise they formed a society within a society, grew their tobacco and kept to themselves. And, both they and the investors increasingly relied on slavery to make up for the ever-growing labor shortage.
But at this point, the civilians sent the company an ultimatum. The company hadn’t sent either the 500 settlers they’d promised, or new supplies, and worst of all, they were excluded from the mainland ventures, while the domineering, corrupt and unGodly captains were given the chance to get rich. So, they set a deadline, and said that if the company hadn’t sent the colonists a ship of supplies before the deadline, they would simply leave the island. They even sent Rishworth to England to speak for the colonists, authorizing him to speak as strongly as he needed to to be an effective advocate.
But, problems aside, the colony had more hope than it had in years. And, the company could look at other colonies and feel pretty decent by comparison. The Antinomian Controversy was raging in Massachusetts, and that alarmed the investors as much as anything in England. Not only was the persecution of Vane and Hutchinson borderline tyrannical, they worried the colony was moving toward “straightforward apostasy.” So the investors were sure they were on the right track. If it was between tyranny and chaos, they’d choose chaos. They just needed some time to sort out minor issues.
And though the investors remained justifiably optimistic at this point, the fact that there was a settler mutiny right after a significant round of concessions to the colonists makes it a decent time to look at Kupperman’s other two reasons Providence Island failed while North America survived. We already discussed civilian control over the military, but the other two that she isolated were private property and local government. When I said Providence Island failures showed a little bit of the future American ideological foundation, this was a significant part of what I was talking about.
Colonists came to America in large part because of the ability to own land, which they would likely never have in England. In the decade that Providence Island repeatedly tried and failed to recruit settlers, the lack of land was a big part of it. Thousands and thousands of people were pouring into the New England, and even the Chesapeake, even though life in the Chesapeake was so much harsher and more unpleasant than anywhere else in the New World, including Providence Island, and that’s because they could own land. Providence Island investors recognized the importance of land ownership, but they saw Providence Island as their private land, not land they needed to be distributing to their colonists. The Chesapeake had a big problem with vacant land, and the Providence Island Company was trying in its own way to achieve a unified society. And a big part of that was having a small, unified company issuing commands from London, in contrast to the unwieldly Virginia Company.
And, that’s a big part of the reason they never allowed local governance, but local governance proved to be the only way any colony could reduce resentment at having to work on and invest in public projects. Colonists resented contributing to even the most basic projects if they didn’t have local government, and when distant commands ordered them to work on stuff that wasn’t as straightforward in its benefits? That just proved to them that they were right about being forced to work on stuff that had nothing to do with them. But, almost immediately when the governance started to come from local, elected or at least partially elected bodies, people started to accept it. That’s a big reason that there was mutiny after mutiny among Providence Island’s citizens, and it’s kind of interesting to put the Revolutionary War into that context and perspective. Taxes and forced labor were fine if the orders came from a local government whose legitimacy they had agreed to, and only if they came from a local government whose legitimacy they had agreed to. It wasn’t even a question of ideology, at least not at first. It was a question of necessity because it emerged as the only power structure which enabled these fledgling societies to make sense. But it did become a massive part of the American ideology and identity, as did private property.