In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just occupied the Falkland Islands, fails to locate the archipelago on his world map. Eventually, his mother comes to the rescue and discovers it ‘hidden under a crumb of fruitcake’. If general awareness of the Falklands before 1982 was somewhat limited, as Townsend slyly implied, it pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the all-but-forgotten former British territory of Providence. This is a place I have to confess to never having heard of before picking up The Island that Disappeared.
My ignorance is one thing and, according to Tom Feiling, common enough. But he also maintains that it receives not a single mention at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich either, which, given what we learn in these pages, is extraordinary. For Providence, one of a cluster of three islands lying 500 miles north of Colombia and 70 miles off the Miskito coast of Nicaragua, was among Britain’s first colonies.
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Settled a decade after the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts and by passengers travelling on its sister ship the Seaflower, it was deemed to have far superior prospects than its chilly and disease-ridden New England forerunner. A more temperate climate was not the only thing in its favour either. Its backers were again devout Puritans, though unlike the ‘middling sorts’ and lower gentry behind the Massachusetts Bay colony, this scheme was sponsored by grandees: men like Lord Brooke and Lord Saye, whose virulently anti-popish Protestant faith and political ambitions would ultimately lead them and other prominent members of the Providence Island Company to take up arms against the king in the English civil war.
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