Providence Island Colony

There was a sister ship to the Mayflower, which left England for the New World ten years after the Pilgrim Fathers....the Seaflower:

"England’s...most devout puritans believed that the empire would rise not in New England, but on the Caribbean coast of Central America. In 1635, Central America looked the more promising location. The Miskito coast was a verdant savannah, and the Providence Island Company thought it well suited to the cultivation of mulberry bushes and grapevines. Demand for silk and wine was strong in England, and the company was keen to meet it, instead of having to rely on imports from Catholic Europe."

"Providence was...[seen] as an ideal base from which to build the vast plantations that the company envisaged on the Miskito coast....The puritan grandees of the Providence Island Company...hoped to mount a military campaign that would sever Mexico from the South American colonies, thereby splitting the Spanish Empire in two and paving the way for the creation of an English-speaking, Protestant empire in Central America."

"the colony became dependent on privateers, both for the loot they brought back from their raids on the Spanish Main and for the defense they provided against a Spanish attack. For a time, these privateers – licensed pirates – terrorized the sea-lanes that ran between the ports of Spanish America."

"For a time, the name of Providence was feared throughout the Caribbean, but in May 1641, a fleet of Spanish ships stormed the island and shipped the settlers – puritan and pirate alike – back to Cartagena in chains."

 

Providence Island Was 'Anglo-America’s First True Slave Society'

"after the Pequot War of 1637 [in New England], Puritans shipped captured Pequots to bondage in a small Puritan community on the coast of Nicaragua called Providence Island. There they were called 'cannibal negros' to distinguish them from the native Moskitos, with whom the Puritans wished to maintain good relations."