The islands of Old Providence and Santa Catalina -located 130 miles east of the coast of Nicaragua and around 8.5 square miles in size-have been a center of global trade and commerce since the establishment of an English colony in 1629...
moreThe islands of Old Providence and Santa Catalina -located 130 miles east of the coast of Nicaragua and around 8.5 square miles in size-have been a center of global trade and commerce since the establishment of an English colony in 1629 and are still occupied by the Native Raizal 1 descendants of the original colonists, African slaves, and members of a coterminous Maroon village 2 to this day. The Puritan venture capitalists of the Providence Island Company, whose shareholders also held stakes in the Virginia Company, financed the primary colonization of Old Providence and Santa Catalina and sent the first settlers to the Islands via the Seaflower, sister ship to the Mayflower -one year after the Company founded of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Virginia Company was one of the first to enter the American slave market, starting in 1619, when their ship the Treasurer, commanded by Daniel Elfrith 3 , docked in Virginia several days after the first African slaves arrived on the White Lion. navicular road in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, the population of Old Providence and Santa Catalina has grown from around 800 to close to 6,000 in 2024. Since 1629, the Raizal -a culturally 6 and linguistically 7 distinct peoples living on three small islands in the western Caribbean -Old Providence, Santa Catalina, and San Andrés-have been episodically under the administration of England, Spain, English & French pirates, and Colombia. The sociocultural evolution of Old Providence and Santa Catalina presents quite differently from many other colonial contexts in the Caribbean and what was to become the Eastern United States because there was -and continues to be-a clear bifurcation between transient, economicallyfocused, extractive stakeholders directly tied to state-level entities who came and went over the years, and permanent residents of varying backgrounds and their descendants who remained on the Islands through economic, military, and administrative transitions. Most residents are the direct descendants of the original English colonists (1629), enslaved Africans, and the members of a coterminous Maroon colony who also have ethnic ties to the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, French buccaneers, & English privateers, and Indigenous peoples from coastal mainlands and other parts of the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, Barbados, and Bermuda that have joined their ranks over the past 400 years through marriage and marronage. The original appearance of enslaved Africans on Old Providence is currently unknown. Philip Bell, when he assumed the governorship of the island in 1630, probably took enslaved Africans with him from his post in Bermuda (Kupperman 1993a:165). The English began settling on Bermuda, what they called the "Somers Islands," in 1609 (Bernhard 1985:58). The first African, a sole individual, arrived in Bermuda in 1616 along with an "Indian" (Lefroy 1882:84). The English who acquired the two men planned to use them as pearl divers on the reefs around the Islands (Kopelson 2013: 272-273). At the time, English merchants were not engaged in the transatlantic slave trade to any great extent, so to acquire enslaved laborers the English in the Caribbean decided to acquire captive Africans from passing Spanish or Portuguese ships. The Spanish slave trade was at its peak between 1581 and 1640 (Borucki et al. 2015:437), just when the English were first occupying Old Providence. Africans thus acquired by the English on the Islands were stolen at least three times: first from their homeland, second upon their initial sale, and finally when taken as prizes by English privateers. The Project's foundational hypothesis is that while the Raizal ultimately developed from an amalgam of peoples, the initial formation of their culture occurred soon after the English first settled the island (and maybe before), and that the nucleus of the culture was African. The term "Raizal" is "a neologism meaning a rooted person, a native" and is unique to Islands (Wade 2009:174). The cultural mixture has confounded outside observers seeking to understand the "proper" way to assign a racial label to the Islanders. When Jacob Dunham (1850:116) visited Old Providence and Santa Catalina in May 1817, he "found a motley group of English, Spanish, and Curracoa [Curaçao] natives of all colors." When E. G. Squier (1855:48, 53) was on the island forty years later, he found it difficult to determine whether "white, negro, or Indian blood predominated" because the inhabitants were "extremely variegated in color, but with