The Providence Affair
Sitting off the eastern coast of Nicaragua lies an island that had already changed hands more than once. A group of Puritans had settled it in Cromwell’s time, only to be driven out by the Spaniards some years later. This island is rugged and rocky, with barrier reefs all around it and a harbour deep enough to hold several ships. The island is Old Providence, and attached to it on the westward side is a smaller island known as Santa Catalina. In Morgan’s time it lay in Spanish hands.
Stinging from the fiasco of Cartago, Mansfield wanted to take this island to repair his reputation. If he could build a heavily armed fortress there, its guns aimed at the Spanish as they sailed by, ‘the Peruvian trade with Spain could be ruined, the treasure ships taken with ease and the galleons from home with cargoes of provisions and clothing and other necessities plundered before they neared the shore.’1
It should have been an easy place to defend; its mountains made natural battlements and the narrow passes between them were perfect for ambushing invading forces. Indeed, entering the harbour would have been difficult as only one ship at a time could pass through the narrow, difficult channel before reaching the wider open water of the harbour. The high ridges around the harbour entrance would have made any invading ship trying to reach the anchorage open to ambush.
It was perfect for Mansfield. He had a vision of turning the island into a permanent base for the Brethren—a privateers’ haven. It was perfectly positioned for such a purpose, being close to the Spanish Main making it much easier for privateers from Jamaica to attack Spanish shipping. Jamaica lies more than 400 miles to the north of the island while to the south is Portobello, a ripe and juicy target only 300 miles away instead of the long 625 miles from Jamaica.
Mansfield was also motivated to take the island because he wanted to rebuild his stature with the Brethren. The Curaçao and Cartago failure weighed heavily on the old man and he knew that he had to do something to make amends. More than half of the fleet that set sail to attack Curaçao had left because of what had happened at Cartago. If he failed to take Old Providence—well, that just didn’t bear thinking about. With no more than half a dozen ships, Mansfield set sail.
The old fellow was resolved (as he tells me) never to see my face until he had done some service to His Majesty, and therefore with 200 men which were all were left him and about eighty of them French, he resolved to attempt the island of Providence, which was formerly English, and by the Spaniards’ whole armada taken from us in 1641, and ever since carefully garrisoned. In order to this he set sail, and being an excellent coaster, which is his chief if not only virtue, in the night he came within half a mile of it by an unusual passage among rocks, where they say ships never came, and in the morning early landed, marched four leagues, and surprised the Governor, who was taken prisoner. The soldiers got into the fort being about 200, but on conditions to be landed on the main they yielded twenty-seven pieces of ordnance, 100 double jars of powder, shot, and all things necessary were found, and the fort very strongly built; they acknowledge but very little plunder, only 150 negroes; they brought off 100, and left thirty-five men and Capt Hattsell keeper of the magazine; they say many of the guns have Queen Elizabeth’s arms engraven on them.2
With the island now in English hands, Mansfield was determined it should remain so. Leaving behind a small garrison Mansfield immediately set sail for Jamaica to get more reinforcements, which would ensure any Spanish invasion would be soundly repelled. But Mansfield was to be disappointed. In Jamaica, the rules regarding attacks by privateers on Spanish vessels and settlements still held, which meant that he could not raise the reinforcements he’d hoped for and that he knew the island needed. He had acted outside of Modyford’s original instructions, which had put the Jamaican governor in a difficult situation.
Has yet only reproved Mansfield for doing it without orders, and really he dare not go further than rebukes without His Majesty’s express orders, lest he should drive them from that allegiance which they make great profession of now more than ever. Neither would he without manifest imprudence but accept the tender of it in His Majesty’s behalf, and considering its good situation for favouring any design on the rich main, lying near the river which leads to the lake [Nicaragua], holds it his duty to reinforce that garrison, and to send down some able person to command it. Meantime they are increasing apace in ships and men, privateers daily coming in and submitting to the strictness of the commissions and instructions he puts on them for His Majesty’s service.3
Disgusted, Mansfield left Jamaica and headed for Tortuga to raise the men he needed to reinforce Old Providence. He knew that time was of the essence. Sadly, by this time, age had caught up with him and he died there.
His death left a gap in the structure of the Brethren that needed to be filled. Morgan would be the one to take over from Mansfield as Admiral of the Brethren but this had not yet taken place. There was still the question of Old Providence. Modyford was no fool and he realized the island needed a strong garrison if it was to be held by the English. However, the only way he could raise a force to keep it was by asking for volunteers; none of the militia on Jamaica could be spared. The first volunteer to come forward was Thomas Whetstone, a privateer captain in his own right who had been Speaker of the House of Assembly for almost two years.4 Whetstone offered his ship and the command of the rest of the volunteers was given to Major Samuel Smith, an experienced army man. The rest of the volunteers numbered thirty-three and so this small force set off for Old Providence. Smith was to be the new English governor representing the King.
Jamaica would not hear from Smith and Whetstone for two years. In the meantime, Modyford was desperately trying to follow the ruling from London about keeping the peace with Spain, which meant curtailing the activities of the Brethren—an almost impossible task.
Not since March had Modyford given out any commissions to privateers to attack Spanish ships or settlements. The result of this had a profound effect on the security and prosperity of Port Royal and the rest of the island. Modyford did have the power5 to grant commissions but according to his letter to Lord Arlington dated 21 August 1666,6 he ‘was glad of this power, but resolved not to use it unless necessity drives me to it.’ And necessity did.
In Port Royal the Treaty of Madrid had not given the merchants the legal right to sell their goods to the Spanish, while the privateers could do as they chose. The traders who ran the slave trade complained there was no contract that gave them a fair advantage with the Spanish, while the planters were furious because many of their able-bodied men left the fields to become privateers and had largely gone to Tortuga.7
And when he saw how poor the fleets returning from Statia were, so that vessels were broken up and the men disposed of for the coast of Cuba to get a livelihood, and so be wholly alienated from us. Many stayed at the Windward Isles, having not enough to pay their engagements, and at Tortuga and among the French buccaneers.8
Finally, Modyford called a meeting of the council, where they agreed to start providing commissions against the Spanish to the privateers. This about-turn was largely, as Modyford wrote in his letter, because the guards at Port Royal, which before the treaty had been signed numbered as many as 600, were now around 135 as the men flocked to Tortuga for privateering commissions. Port Royal needed men who could fight and wanted to fight, and the only way to fill the place with those men, the council believed, was to grant commissions against the Spanish. Added to this were the rumours of war with France, so Modyford issued a declaration of his intent to grant commissions to privateers against the Spanish.
As the privateers poured in the change was palpable.
His Lordship cannot imagine what a universal change there was on the faces of men and things, ships repairing, great resort of workmen and labourers to Port Royal, many returning, many debtors released out of prison, and the ships from the Curaçao voyage, not daring to come in for fear of creditors, brought in and fitted out again, so that the regimental forces at Port Royal are near 400. Had it not been for that seasonable action, he could not have kept this place against French buccaneers, who would have ruined all the seaside plantations at least; whereas he now draws from them mainly, and lately David Marteen, the best man of Tortuga, that has two frigates at sea, has promised to bring in both.9
By Christmas of 1666, Modyford knew that Old Providence had been lost to the Spanish but he did not know the details until August 1668, when two men, virtual skeletons covered in sores and heavily scarred, sailed into Port Royal. They had been prisoners of the Spanish after being enslaved and kept in irons for almost two years. The two men were Major Samuel Smith, the man who was to have been the governor of Old Providence, and Captain Henry Wasey, the master of the Concord, a merchant vessel. Three more men of the ill-fated mission to establish a garrison on Old Providence arrived in Port Royal a few days later. The rest remained slaves of the Spanish, but the few survivors who arrived in Port Royal had a terrible story to tell.
When Mansfield had taken Old Providence after the surrender of the Spanish garrison, he’d ordered the prisoners, who also included the Spanish governor, Don Esteban del Campo, to be transported to the Spanish Main. The arrival of the ship in Portobello carrying the men from the Old Providence garrison and the ex-governor, Don Esteban, was the first thing that alerted the Spanish Main to the fall of the island.
Determined to take Old Providence back, the governor of Panama, Don Juan Pérez de Guzmán, quickly swung into action, ordering the militia at Portobello—along with the recently arrived Old Providence garrison who had sailed into Portobello under the flag of truce ordered by Mansfield—to be mobilized to take the island back. The man in charge of this Spanish mission to retake the island was the mayor of Portobello, Jose Sanchez Ximenez. In the harbour at Portobello were two large ships ideal for this expedition and one of them was the merchant vessel Concord, commanded by Captain Henry Wasey. The moment he’d heard of the capture of Old Providence, Sanchez had ordered the arrest of Captain Wasey.
That on 25 May 1666 he was seized with his said ship lying at anchor in Portobello, and put in irons on pretence of being a spy, although registered and licensed, and was forced to send to Panama for an attestation that the Spaniards manned his said ship and sailed her to Providence to retake said island.10
Clapped in irons, Wasey was marched from the ship to the city jail, where he was thrown into the dungeon to rot.11
The year was 1666 and the Spanish expedition to retake Old Providence, with more than 500 fighting men, set sail on 2 August. Against this attacking force Smith had a total of seventy-two men on the island, with only fifty-one fit enough to fight. They were doomed from the start but it was not the walkover that the numbers might imply. It took the Spanish three days of hard fighting to take the island. According to Major Smith’s deposition, he was, on ‘19 August 1666, by three Spanish vessels, a New England ketch taken from the English by the Spaniards, and an English ship, the Concord, thirty guns, of which Henry Wasey was commander, manned by Spaniards, summoned to surrender.’
Smith refused.
Whereupon the enemy landed, and after three days’ siege he was forced to surrender upon articles for good quarter, which the Spaniards did not in the least perform, for the English, about forty, were immediately made prisoners, and all, except Sir Thos Whetstone, this deponent, and Capt Stanley, who were commanders, forced to work in irons and chains at the Spaniards’ forts, with many stripes, and many are since dead through want and ill-usage. Said three commanders were sent to Panama, where they were cast into a dungeon and bound in irons for seventeen months. At length being released this deponent arrived at the Havannah, ‘his company being lost’, where he was clapped into gaol.12
Having betrayed the English by not accepting their surrender honourably, as they said they would, the Spanish sent the prisoners to Portobello. We know this from Captain Wasey, who said that he saw ‘prisoners taken in Providence made slaves in Portobello and thirteen more slaves in Cartagena’.13
In Europe, England and Spain were at peace but in Jamaica the peace meant nothing as Modyford referred to ‘the cruelty and false dealings of our neighbours’ in a letter to the Duke of Albemarle regarding the capture of Old Providence, which, he stated, was ‘a violation of the peace which they so much pretend to in these parts’.14
Hearing about the savagery with which the Spanish treated their English prisoners from Old Providence, especially after they’d agreed to an honourable surrender, the people of Jamaica demanded vengeance. It was a difficult story to hear. Once the English prisoners had laid down their weapons:
on condition of having a small barque to transport them to Jamaica. But when they had laid down their arms the Spaniards refused them the barque, and carried them slaves to Portobello, where they were chained to the ground in a dungeon 12 foot by 10, in which were thirty-three prisoners. They were forced to work in the water from five in the morning till seven at night, and at such a rate that the Spaniards confessed they made one of them do more work than any three negroes, yet when weak with want of victuals and sleep they were knocked down and beaten with cudgels, and four or five died. Having no clothes, their backs were blistered with the sun, their heads scorched, their necks, shoulders, and hands raw with carrying stones and mortar, their feet chopped, and their legs bruised and battered with the irons, and their corpses were noisome one to another. The daily abuses of their religion and their king, and the continual trouble they had with friars, would be tedious to mention.15
This news stoked hatred of the Spanish in Jamaica and the demand of retribution grew as news that the Spanish, buoyed by their success at Old Providence, were assembling a fleet to attack Jamaica. Something had to be done. The ‘something’ would fall on Morgan’s shoulders and it would be carried out in a spectacular way.