a euphemistic name for privateering voyages against the Spaniards. There is an everpresent zeal for the promotion of true religion. But we soon learn that these excellent motives were stronger in the council than among the settlers. The fortunes of the successive ministers-all at first sight apparently "painful" and virtuous sent out from London, proves but too well that the puritanical "adventurers" did not succeed in making a puri tanical colony-at any rate, not one in which Puritan zeal was the governing force. There are many complaints-such as that brought against "Capn. Wil. Rudyerd," a kinsman, it may be, of Sir Benjamin-who is accused of "drunkenness, swearing, and ill carriage towards the Governor. The example of the first minister sent out Mr Lewis Morgan-can have done little to amend the morals of Captain Rudyerd. It is curious to note, by the way, how often this name of Morgan meets us in the early history of our West Indies. There were many who bore it besides the famous Sir Henry; and we may even ask, with no prospect, indeed, of a satisfactory answer, whether it was not rather the minister than the buccaneer who gave his name to Morgan's Rock. The council did not accept Mr Lewis without hesitation, and regret that an older and graver man could not be found. Yet he seemed of good promise, and £20 were given him as a free gift to buy books and other necessaries. Never were £20

spent to less purpose. Mr Lewis Morgan had not been many months in the island before stories began to reach the council, all tending to show that he was by no means of a godly spirit, and was wanting in respect for authorities. Letters, too, came from him stuffed with bitter expressions, and containing manifest proofs of a "seditious and malignant spirit." In short, Mr Morgan is recalled, receives £5 in discharge of all claims on making his submission, and disappears. There was work in abundance for such men lying close ahead in England; and Mr Lewis Morgan may have beaten the drum ecclesiastic in the Civil War-may even have died for the liberties of "God's chosen people" in some breach or on some battlefield, if he did not attain to the gallows, towards which he appears to have had a marked tendency.

Yet

Mr Rous succeeded-a family man, to whom a grant of land was assigned for his support; a more promising person. Mr Rous also would not do. His parishioners did not find him sufficiently Puritan. They accused him of frivolity, of "insufficiency," of not being "able to pray extemporary,' and declared that he "would soldierlike beat his men." These charges of the aggrieved parishioners appear to have been unfounded. The worst that an impartial witness, who deposed before the council, could allege, was that Mr Rous taught him songs called catches, "the meaning of which word he [the witness] understood not."

"The

one

of creatures, as the nightingale and the like." These catches were sung by Mr Rous and Mr Sherland and the witness, but not on the Sabbath. We hear casual mention of other ministers, and not a little of Mr Sherherd, of whose zeal there can be no question; for he excommunicated several of his parishioners, and refused to give them the communion on the ground that they were living in open sin. Yet even Mr Sherherd failed, and towards the end the council was constrained to recognise that the greed of the planters made the work of forwarding the cause of religion clean and clear impossible. It was in all ways cruelly disappointed in its tenants, of whom it had to record the severe judgment that they were worse than the Israelites for murmuring and ingratitude.

The simple fact which it would have been wise in the company to recognise sooner, was that the effort to make Old Providence a home of Puritan industry was hopeless from the beginning. It was too glaringly contrary to the nature of things. The island was of no value at all, except as a depot and "strength "strength" for smugglers and privateers. There soon ensued what might have been foreseen-what perhaps was foreseen by some promoters of the settlement, who very probably did not speak with complete candour to the mild Rudyerd and the puritanical Pym. Those of the settlers who had gone to lead

of

the venture hopeless, and insisted on coming away. None remained save those who could not escape-the so-called “ servants," or apprentices, who were very little better than white slaves and those who meant to lead a life of "privateering." Slavery, black and white, plays its part in the brief troubled history of the colony. Negro slaves were introduced, though apparently not without protest from some of the planters, who held what the council describes as "the groundless opinion that Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state servitude during their strangeness from Christianity." There is notice of a revolt of the blacks which was suppressed. The company thought that it might be accounted for by the fact that they were not kept sufficiently hard at work. The worthy gentlemen who met at Brooke or Warwick House, or in Mr Pym's lodgings, were copious in urging industry, and in impressing on their officers the beauty of the apostles' rule, that those who will not work shall not eat. The white slaves-for that is the true name for the articled servants-play a great part in the early history of the plantations both on the mainland and in the West Indies. To entice or kidnap young people away and consign them to slavery in the plantations became, as the seventeenth century wore on, a very common crime. It was regularly pursued as a trade by a class of offenders, whose cant name was

"the spirits." One of the not too numerous acts of disinterested virtue to be put to the credit of the first Lord Shaftesbury is that he did exert himself with good effect to suppress these scoundrels.

Discontented planters, mutinous slaves, unsatisfactory ministers, and drunken officials did not exhaust the list of the company's troubles with its people. Captain Bell, the first governor, was in most ways a commendable man. He earned the approval of the council by a proclamation against "mixed dancing and other vanities." He was firm with Lieutenant Rous, "who struck Forman in the governor's presence." Yet Captain Bell had his own vanities, being, as one gathers, some what disposed to magnify his office. The council had to rebuke him tartly for talking of some "supposed privilege which you call prerogative as annexed to your place. Neither like

we the word." A year or so later rebuke grew into scolding, when the council had to write, "For the word absolute power we do utterly dislike the language, and therefore would not have it once named." Captain Bell must have lost touch with Puritan circles in London during his residence in the Somers Islands, else he would have known better than to use such terms as prerogative and absolute power to Pym, Brooke, Say and Sele, in "the dead vast and middle" of the long cessation of Parliaments. No words he could have used could well have sounded worse in those ears. We can afford to take Cap

tain Bell's slip less seriously, and note with amusement, and also with some instruction in perennial human nature, how easily the most Puritan of governors could use these words—when it was to his own advantage. But the errors of Captain Bell were trifling. The council was more grievously vexed by the actions of certain others among the men employed by it. There, for instance, was Captain Punt, one of the skippers employed to take out settlers and bring back such produce as Providence afforded. Sad complaints were made, and as it seems with too much truth, of the brutality of Punt, who ill-treated his passengers and beat his sailors.

Of produce from Providence there were many hopes, but small fruition. In fact, the company had not been long in existence before it found itself called upon to take part in expeditions out of the island. At the very beginning it extended its field of operations by asking the king to enlarge its limit to the northward, so that it could take in Tortuga. This was the Tortuga on the north coast of San Domingo, one of the various keys and islands of the West Indies, christened by the Spanish name of the turtle. The possession of this place was most convenient to a company trading to the Mosquito coast. Their vessels could run out to Tortuga, take in fresh water, and then enter the Caribbean Sea by the Mona passage between San Domingo and Cuba. In fact, in days when а merchant skipper thought he did very well if he

made three and a half knots an hour on an average, when scurvy was a terrible enemy, vessels small and crews large, some half-way house of call was indispensable. It was for this reason that the Portuguese, the Dutch, and we have successively occupied St Helena-no very desirable place in itself, but priceless as a relief in the long East India voyage. The Providence Company endeavoured to rechristen the Tortuga, Association, and there are various notices of efforts to make a settlement, of officers appointed, and of ships sent. This part of the company's enterprise was the first to come to entire grief. In 1636 a Spanish expedition from San Domingo stamped out the colony of Association. The island fell back into the power of Spain, and so remained till it became the headquarters of the buccaneeers, and the Brothers of the coast. Our disaster was attributed to the cowardice of the governor Wormeley. This act of what our ancesters thought aggression brought on a state of open war between the company and the Spaniards.

Meanwhile events had been taking place around Providence which tended to the same result. In the first days of the settlement one of the hired vessels of the company, the Seaflower, had been attacked by a Spanish frigate, when on her way home, and a passenger, one Mr Essex, together with two others, had been killed. The company did not as yet make reprisals, but it soon began to prepare for opening trade

VOL. CLXV.-NO. MIII.

a

with the natives, and for establishing factories on the mainland. In April 1633 instructions were issued to Captain Sussex Camock to make settlement. One Hilton, or in lieu of him Richard Lane, was ordered to make a voyage of discovery of trade into Darien, and for the purpose of renewing friendship with the natives, who are understood to be "favourers of the English nation, and especially of Don Francisco Draco (whose name they seem to honour)." This belief in the enduring popularity of Drake among the natives of Darien was a well-established tradition of ours. What foundation, if any, it had in fact is very obscure. The native tribes fought fiercely against him in his last expedition, and had a large share in the defeat of Baskerville's attempt to march to Panama. In all probability it was a pure delusion of ours. Drake had no dealings with the natives of the isthmus, except during his expedition in the Swan and the Pasha. Whatever impression he made cannot but have been obliterated by time, and still more by the excesses of inferior adventurers, French, Dutch, and English, who had haunted the coast. If the Providence Company could have succeeded in carrying out all its plans, and in enforcing all its orders, there would have been no need to draw on the supposed popularity of Drake's name. Its explorers were strictly ordered to labour to possess all natives with the natural goodness of the English nation, to refrain from all bois3 L