To the English explorers who first set foot there, it was paradise, a Garden of Eden full of nature’s wonders. In this vast area of forest along the banks of the River Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America, the soil was said to be ‘luxuriant’, the trees and flowers in a state of ‘eternal spring’ and the blissfully warm air fragrant with the scents of oranges, lemons, figs, nutmeg and ‘noble aromaticks’.
Teeming with ‘beasts, fish, reptiles, insects and vegetables of wonderful shape and colour’, it cried out to be settled. Tobacco and cotton — potential cash crops — flourished. And, as if that wasn’t inducement enough, the ‘lascivious’ local women went around bare-breasted and loin-clothed — ‘all nakedly exposed to every wanton eye’.
What adventurous, red-blooded Englishman of the mid-17th century could resist? Particularly as England had been devastated by a decade of civil war. Royalists and Roundheads had fought pitched battles on English soil and plague-ridden towns were besieged for months on end....
Paradise poisoned: The extraordinary tale of the English lord who created Utopia in a tropical idyll - only to see it destroyed by greed and violence
Lord Willoughby founded Willoughbyland in modern day Suriname in 1650s
First went there after being driven out of England in dispute with the crown
It became a 600-strong colony with land holdings 60 miles along the river
But generous lands created rich land-owners and in-fighting led to demise
By Tony Rennell for the Daily Mail
8 October 2015
Daily Mail
To the English explorers who first set foot there, it was paradise, a Garden of Eden full of nature’s wonders. In this vast area of forest along the banks of the River Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America, the soil was said to be ‘luxuriant’, the trees and flowers in a state of ‘eternal spring’ and the blissfully warm air fragrant with the scents of oranges, lemons, figs, nutmeg and ‘noble aromaticks’.
Teeming with ‘beasts, fish, reptiles, insects and vegetables of wonderful shape and colour’, it cried out to be settled. Tobacco and cotton — potential cash crops — flourished. And, as if that wasn’t inducement enough, the ‘lascivious’ local women went around bare-breasted and loin-clothed — ‘all nakedly exposed to every wanton eye’.
What adventurous, red-blooded Englishman of the mid-17th century could resist? Particularly as England had been devastated by a decade of civil war. Royalists and Roundheads had fought pitched battles on English soil and plague-ridden towns were besieged for months on end.
The bodies of 80,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilian men, women and children — the victims of disease and hunger — were rotting in the ground, out of a total population of barely a million-and-a-half.
To the English explorers who first set foot there, it was paradise, a Garden of Eden full of nature’s wonders on the banks of the River Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America
King Charles I was dead, his head sliced off, and his place eventually taken by the dour Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Taxes soared, as did inflation and unemployment. To add to the misery, the weather was so cold the Thames froze over.
To dispossessed Cavaliers, the dangers of a three-month transatlantic sea-crossing to an unknown land promising milk and honey were worth chancing in the hope of a new life. They travelled thousands of miles through storm-tossed seas in leaky boats with no guarantee of safe passage.
They anchored off a wild and remote coastline in the knowledge that, once ashore, there was no going back. They would survive or perish. Yet hundreds of brave souls risked all. And such were the origins of the long-forgotten British colony known as Willoughbyland — now resurrected from the mists of time in a fascinating new book by historian Matthew Parker.
Its founder and inspiration, Lord Willoughby, was a wily English aristocrat who managed — he was far from alone in this — to fight for both camps in the Civil War.
He initially took sides against the king and was a passionate Parliamentarian. But then he fell out with the Leveller political movement of radicals and agitators who hijacked the cause. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London before jumping bail and fleeing to Holland, where he became as ardent a Royalist as he had been a Parliamentarian.
All the while he had kept his options open by making sure he had a refuge in the West Indies — the ‘Caribee Islands’, as they were known — should everything go wrong at home. Quietly, he bought a share in the ownership of sugar-rich Barbados.
Explorer Sir Walter Raleigh described it as ‘the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld’
When his English estates were seized by the State, he set sail for his island haven. ‘All is gone at home,’ he wrote to his wife. It was time for Plan B.
But Barbados proved no safer, with the rivalries that had split England following him there. Parliament in London declared Barbadian exiles like him traitors and thieves, and sent out a battle fleet to subdue them.
Willoughby prepared to resist — while at the same time initiating Plan C by sending a ship with 40 men to explore the Suriname River on the mainland of South America, 700 miles away.
He knew of its reputation from the tales left by the Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh half a century earlier. Raleigh described it as ‘the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld’, and Willoughby’s advance party were not disappointed.
Suriname was indeed promising: the air pure, the water drinkable and the local inhabitants friendly, not the ‘man-eaters’ they had feared. Trees were felled, cabins built. A start was made. More settlers came.
And when the Parliamentarians finally took control of Barbados and ousted Willoughby in 1652, he joined the settlers there with 300 like-minded people, families among them, keen to make a fresh start.
The area — modern-day Surinam, bordered by French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south — was a natural wonderland, home to countless species of birds, fish, frogs and snakes. There were weird new creatures such as anteaters, sloths and armadillos. On the downside, the biggest mosquitoes and ants in the world were daunting, and the humid heat was exhausting.
But the pioneers knuckled down, fighting off dengue fever and cholera, 30ft anacondas and small but deadly vipers, scorpions and vampire bats (not forgetting the electric eels in the river) to survive the worst the jungle could throw at them.
A new English colony was taking shape, with every hope of lasting prosperity and peace for its growing number of inhabitants.
Willoughby didn’t stay long. After two months spent establishing his own plantation, he went back to England, where, traitor or not, a man of his background (and fluid principles) still wielded considerable clout given the confused political machinations of the time.
He devoted the next dozen years to lobbying Westminster, Whitehall and the law courts, trying to recover his English estates and to get legal confirmation of his ownership and governorship of Willoughbyland.
At the same time, he sought to populate his far-flung domain. Like a modern-day market trader, he touted its virtues to the public with a cut-price deal. Just £5 a head for a passage out there on one of his ships, he offered. Children under ten half price; infants free.
On arrival, every adult would be given 50 acres of land free, plus another 30 for each child and 20 per servant in his employ. And for those without the cash, there was a special offer. As long as they were ‘of good report’, they could travel free in return for four years’ tied service, after which they would get 30 acres and £10.
His appeal was directed not just at those hardy souls who could work the land but white-collar professionals, such as schoolmasters, doctors and surveyors, in a reflection of his desire to build a properly functioning community.
There was no shortage of takers. For those struggling to survive in post-war England, where times remained hard and the government had degenerated into dictatorial military rule, all this seemed irresistibly attractive.
Pretty soon Willoughbyland was a flourishing 600-strong colony, with land holdings stretching 60 miles along the Suriname river.
Nor was it subsistence living, scratching a pittance from the earth. Cotton was growing; so too were tobacco (its quality better than Virginia’s) and sugar cane (more abundant than in Barbados). Business thrived.
In the absence of Willoughby as governor, a near-unique form of semi-democratic government emerged among the expatriate English settlers. With no one officially in charge, the colonists organised themselves into a six-man council and an elected, 21-man parliamentary assembly.
The area — modern-day Suriname, bordered by French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south — was a natural wonderland
There was a small militia for protection, to keep law and order, all established by common consent rather than imposed from on high.
Even more extraordinary, politics were banished. Royalists were in the majority but put aside their differences with Roundheads and lived in a harmony that sharply contrasted with the bloody vendettas and back-stabbing that characterised Britain under Cromwell and then (after 1660) the restored monarch, Charles II.
There was also freedom of worship. Even Jews could participate fully in society and were allowed to build a synagogue — in startling contrast to the way they were mistreated in anti-Semitic Europe.
For three years, this spirit of equality, tolerance and optimism ruled in Willoughbyland, making it even more of a paradise compared with the rest of the world.
Sadly, it didn’t last. As the number of colonists swelled to 4,000 and ships queued in the harbour to export the colony’s natural resources, the commercial demands of the outside world thrust their way into Willoughbyland’s almost utopian existence.
Greed undermined its founding principles. To keep the rapidly expanding plantations in full production, slaves from Africa were shipped in, with all the cruel horrors that accompanied that pernicious system.
In author Matthew Parker’s words, that ‘ruined everything’.
Willoughbyland had been a dream destination where anyone who wanted it could make a new start in life, and prosper. But not, it quickly became apparent, if you were black and had been snatched or sold from your African homeland.
Thousands were suddenly arriving — if they didn’t die along the way, that is, in the hulks they were shipped in as the transatlantic slave trade boomed, funded by the patronage of the avaricious Charles II and his family.
As the slaves were set to work in the fields, freeing their new owners from the rigours of labour, the hard-working planters took to drunken and decadent lifestyles and began in-fighting.
Old political differences resurfaced. Ex-Roundheads and Royalists butted heads again as the friction left behind in England returned.
Where for a brief spell there had been harmony there was now discord, exemplified in 1664 when Lord Willoughby finally came to take charge of the colony named after him.
He had flattered Charles II enough to be appointed governor of the Caribbean islands. As a bonus he was finally granted the royal seal of approval he needed to run Willoughbyland, his private fiefdom, in return for an annual payment of 2,000lb of tobacco to the king.
He landed there with great pomp and took up residence like a king at Parham Hill, his family’s now palatial estate. A few weeks later he was holding a church service on the estate when John Allin, a planter with a grievance and a propensity for ‘swearing, cursing and drunkenness’, crept in and sidled up to him.
In the belief that Willoughby’s very existence as governor and overlord was an infringement of his personal liberties, Allin lashed out with a cutlass hidden behind his back.
The first blow shattered Willoughby’s skull so that, according to a witness, ‘his brains were seen to beat’. Willoughby raised his hand in self-defence and a second blow severed two fingers. Allin then tried to stab himself to death but failed. He was seized and arrested but later managed to poison himself on his way to prison.
A bizarre ritual followed. For the crime of suicide, his naked carcass was dragged to the public pillory, ‘where a barbecue was erected, his Members were cut off, and flung in his face and his Bowels burnt’. Then his head was cut off and his body quartered and dry-roasted ‘after the Indian manner’.
Willoughby, amazingly, recovered and not long after left the colony for good. On his departure for Barbados, chaos broke out — as if Allin’s assassination attempt and the savagery meted out to his corpse had been omens of ill will.
Historian Matthew Parker says the English came to paradise and left behind hell
Feuds, ‘strange jealousies’ and ‘great discontents’ possessed the planters. Some 200 left the colony, disillusioned — as indeed Allin had been — that their way of life was under threat.
The dream of peace and goodwill was over. Willoughbyland’s days were numbered.
International events finally killed it off. Back in Europe, Britain was by now at war with nearby Holland, its deadly commercial rival. The Dutch cast envious eyes on British possessions in the West Indies.
So too did the French, Britain’s traditional enemy. Fighting broke out in the Caribbean as the powers tried to wrest possessions from each other.
From Barbados, Willoughby led a fleet against the French in the summer of 1666. But his ship foundered in a hurricane, and in the chaos and terror of the tempest, he was tossed into the ocean and drowned.
Six months later, the Dutch descended on Willoughbyland and seized the fort there. The planters — demoralised anyway and also badly hit by an epidemic that cost hundreds of lives — surrendered.
The following year, in a peace treaty negotiated after the Dutch sailed up the Thames and threatened London, Willoughbyland was formally handed over to Holland.
There was, however, a bizarre quid pro quo. In return, Britain argued for the legal right to a Dutch settlement in North America it had already seized, New Amsterdam — and changed its name to New York.
In South America, the Dutch ruthlessly exploited their new possession, bringing in thousands more slaves and expanding sugar production. A century later, the French writer Voltaire described Suriname as the cruellest place in the world, famous for ‘its heights of planter opulence and its depths of slave misery’.
Lord Willoughby’s vision of a golden land lay in pieces. As Matthew Parker concludes wistfully in his thought-provoking book: ‘The English had come to paradise, to a heaven, and left behind a hell.’
Willoughbyland: England’s Lost Colony by Matthew Parker is published by Hutchinson at £16.99. © Matthew Parker 2015. To buy a copy for £13.59 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Discount until October 10, p&p is free.
Teeming with ‘beasts, fish, reptiles, insects and vegetables of wonderful shape and colour’, it cried out to be settled. Tobacco and cotton — potential cash crops — flourished. And, as if that wasn’t inducement enough, the ‘lascivious’ local women went around bare-breasted and loin-clothed — ‘all nakedly exposed to every wanton eye’.
What adventurous, red-blooded Englishman of the mid-17th century could resist? Particularly as England had been devastated by a decade of civil war. Royalists and Roundheads had fought pitched battles on English soil and plague-ridden towns were besieged for months on end....
Paradise poisoned: The extraordinary tale of the English lord who created Utopia in a tropical idyll - only to see it destroyed by greed and violence
Lord Willoughby founded Willoughbyland in modern day Suriname in 1650s
First went there after being driven out of England in dispute with the crown
It became a 600-strong colony with land holdings 60 miles along the river
But generous lands created rich land-owners and in-fighting led to demise
By Tony Rennell for the Daily Mail
8 October 2015
Daily Mail
To the English explorers who first set foot there, it was paradise, a Garden of Eden full of nature’s wonders. In this vast area of forest along the banks of the River Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America, the soil was said to be ‘luxuriant’, the trees and flowers in a state of ‘eternal spring’ and the blissfully warm air fragrant with the scents of oranges, lemons, figs, nutmeg and ‘noble aromaticks’.
Teeming with ‘beasts, fish, reptiles, insects and vegetables of wonderful shape and colour’, it cried out to be settled. Tobacco and cotton — potential cash crops — flourished. And, as if that wasn’t inducement enough, the ‘lascivious’ local women went around bare-breasted and loin-clothed — ‘all nakedly exposed to every wanton eye’.
What adventurous, red-blooded Englishman of the mid-17th century could resist? Particularly as England had been devastated by a decade of civil war. Royalists and Roundheads had fought pitched battles on English soil and plague-ridden towns were besieged for months on end.
The bodies of 80,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilian men, women and children — the victims of disease and hunger — were rotting in the ground, out of a total population of barely a million-and-a-half.
To the English explorers who first set foot there, it was paradise, a Garden of Eden full of nature’s wonders on the banks of the River Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America
King Charles I was dead, his head sliced off, and his place eventually taken by the dour Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Taxes soared, as did inflation and unemployment. To add to the misery, the weather was so cold the Thames froze over.
To dispossessed Cavaliers, the dangers of a three-month transatlantic sea-crossing to an unknown land promising milk and honey were worth chancing in the hope of a new life. They travelled thousands of miles through storm-tossed seas in leaky boats with no guarantee of safe passage.
They anchored off a wild and remote coastline in the knowledge that, once ashore, there was no going back. They would survive or perish. Yet hundreds of brave souls risked all. And such were the origins of the long-forgotten British colony known as Willoughbyland — now resurrected from the mists of time in a fascinating new book by historian Matthew Parker.
Its founder and inspiration, Lord Willoughby, was a wily English aristocrat who managed — he was far from alone in this — to fight for both camps in the Civil War.
He initially took sides against the king and was a passionate Parliamentarian. But then he fell out with the Leveller political movement of radicals and agitators who hijacked the cause. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London before jumping bail and fleeing to Holland, where he became as ardent a Royalist as he had been a Parliamentarian.
All the while he had kept his options open by making sure he had a refuge in the West Indies — the ‘Caribee Islands’, as they were known — should everything go wrong at home. Quietly, he bought a share in the ownership of sugar-rich Barbados.
Explorer Sir Walter Raleigh described it as ‘the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld’
When his English estates were seized by the State, he set sail for his island haven. ‘All is gone at home,’ he wrote to his wife. It was time for Plan B.
But Barbados proved no safer, with the rivalries that had split England following him there. Parliament in London declared Barbadian exiles like him traitors and thieves, and sent out a battle fleet to subdue them.
Willoughby prepared to resist — while at the same time initiating Plan C by sending a ship with 40 men to explore the Suriname River on the mainland of South America, 700 miles away.
He knew of its reputation from the tales left by the Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh half a century earlier. Raleigh described it as ‘the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld’, and Willoughby’s advance party were not disappointed.
Suriname was indeed promising: the air pure, the water drinkable and the local inhabitants friendly, not the ‘man-eaters’ they had feared. Trees were felled, cabins built. A start was made. More settlers came.
And when the Parliamentarians finally took control of Barbados and ousted Willoughby in 1652, he joined the settlers there with 300 like-minded people, families among them, keen to make a fresh start.
The area — modern-day Surinam, bordered by French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south — was a natural wonderland, home to countless species of birds, fish, frogs and snakes. There were weird new creatures such as anteaters, sloths and armadillos. On the downside, the biggest mosquitoes and ants in the world were daunting, and the humid heat was exhausting.
But the pioneers knuckled down, fighting off dengue fever and cholera, 30ft anacondas and small but deadly vipers, scorpions and vampire bats (not forgetting the electric eels in the river) to survive the worst the jungle could throw at them.
A new English colony was taking shape, with every hope of lasting prosperity and peace for its growing number of inhabitants.
Willoughby didn’t stay long. After two months spent establishing his own plantation, he went back to England, where, traitor or not, a man of his background (and fluid principles) still wielded considerable clout given the confused political machinations of the time.
He devoted the next dozen years to lobbying Westminster, Whitehall and the law courts, trying to recover his English estates and to get legal confirmation of his ownership and governorship of Willoughbyland.
At the same time, he sought to populate his far-flung domain. Like a modern-day market trader, he touted its virtues to the public with a cut-price deal. Just £5 a head for a passage out there on one of his ships, he offered. Children under ten half price; infants free.
On arrival, every adult would be given 50 acres of land free, plus another 30 for each child and 20 per servant in his employ. And for those without the cash, there was a special offer. As long as they were ‘of good report’, they could travel free in return for four years’ tied service, after which they would get 30 acres and £10.
His appeal was directed not just at those hardy souls who could work the land but white-collar professionals, such as schoolmasters, doctors and surveyors, in a reflection of his desire to build a properly functioning community.
There was no shortage of takers. For those struggling to survive in post-war England, where times remained hard and the government had degenerated into dictatorial military rule, all this seemed irresistibly attractive.
Pretty soon Willoughbyland was a flourishing 600-strong colony, with land holdings stretching 60 miles along the Suriname river.
Nor was it subsistence living, scratching a pittance from the earth. Cotton was growing; so too were tobacco (its quality better than Virginia’s) and sugar cane (more abundant than in Barbados). Business thrived.
In the absence of Willoughby as governor, a near-unique form of semi-democratic government emerged among the expatriate English settlers. With no one officially in charge, the colonists organised themselves into a six-man council and an elected, 21-man parliamentary assembly.
The area — modern-day Suriname, bordered by French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south — was a natural wonderland
There was a small militia for protection, to keep law and order, all established by common consent rather than imposed from on high.
Even more extraordinary, politics were banished. Royalists were in the majority but put aside their differences with Roundheads and lived in a harmony that sharply contrasted with the bloody vendettas and back-stabbing that characterised Britain under Cromwell and then (after 1660) the restored monarch, Charles II.
There was also freedom of worship. Even Jews could participate fully in society and were allowed to build a synagogue — in startling contrast to the way they were mistreated in anti-Semitic Europe.
For three years, this spirit of equality, tolerance and optimism ruled in Willoughbyland, making it even more of a paradise compared with the rest of the world.
Sadly, it didn’t last. As the number of colonists swelled to 4,000 and ships queued in the harbour to export the colony’s natural resources, the commercial demands of the outside world thrust their way into Willoughbyland’s almost utopian existence.
Greed undermined its founding principles. To keep the rapidly expanding plantations in full production, slaves from Africa were shipped in, with all the cruel horrors that accompanied that pernicious system.
In author Matthew Parker’s words, that ‘ruined everything’.
Willoughbyland had been a dream destination where anyone who wanted it could make a new start in life, and prosper. But not, it quickly became apparent, if you were black and had been snatched or sold from your African homeland.
Thousands were suddenly arriving — if they didn’t die along the way, that is, in the hulks they were shipped in as the transatlantic slave trade boomed, funded by the patronage of the avaricious Charles II and his family.
As the slaves were set to work in the fields, freeing their new owners from the rigours of labour, the hard-working planters took to drunken and decadent lifestyles and began in-fighting.
Old political differences resurfaced. Ex-Roundheads and Royalists butted heads again as the friction left behind in England returned.
Where for a brief spell there had been harmony there was now discord, exemplified in 1664 when Lord Willoughby finally came to take charge of the colony named after him.
He had flattered Charles II enough to be appointed governor of the Caribbean islands. As a bonus he was finally granted the royal seal of approval he needed to run Willoughbyland, his private fiefdom, in return for an annual payment of 2,000lb of tobacco to the king.
He landed there with great pomp and took up residence like a king at Parham Hill, his family’s now palatial estate. A few weeks later he was holding a church service on the estate when John Allin, a planter with a grievance and a propensity for ‘swearing, cursing and drunkenness’, crept in and sidled up to him.
In the belief that Willoughby’s very existence as governor and overlord was an infringement of his personal liberties, Allin lashed out with a cutlass hidden behind his back.
The first blow shattered Willoughby’s skull so that, according to a witness, ‘his brains were seen to beat’. Willoughby raised his hand in self-defence and a second blow severed two fingers. Allin then tried to stab himself to death but failed. He was seized and arrested but later managed to poison himself on his way to prison.
A bizarre ritual followed. For the crime of suicide, his naked carcass was dragged to the public pillory, ‘where a barbecue was erected, his Members were cut off, and flung in his face and his Bowels burnt’. Then his head was cut off and his body quartered and dry-roasted ‘after the Indian manner’.
Willoughby, amazingly, recovered and not long after left the colony for good. On his departure for Barbados, chaos broke out — as if Allin’s assassination attempt and the savagery meted out to his corpse had been omens of ill will.
Historian Matthew Parker says the English came to paradise and left behind hell
Feuds, ‘strange jealousies’ and ‘great discontents’ possessed the planters. Some 200 left the colony, disillusioned — as indeed Allin had been — that their way of life was under threat.
The dream of peace and goodwill was over. Willoughbyland’s days were numbered.
International events finally killed it off. Back in Europe, Britain was by now at war with nearby Holland, its deadly commercial rival. The Dutch cast envious eyes on British possessions in the West Indies.
So too did the French, Britain’s traditional enemy. Fighting broke out in the Caribbean as the powers tried to wrest possessions from each other.
From Barbados, Willoughby led a fleet against the French in the summer of 1666. But his ship foundered in a hurricane, and in the chaos and terror of the tempest, he was tossed into the ocean and drowned.
Six months later, the Dutch descended on Willoughbyland and seized the fort there. The planters — demoralised anyway and also badly hit by an epidemic that cost hundreds of lives — surrendered.
The following year, in a peace treaty negotiated after the Dutch sailed up the Thames and threatened London, Willoughbyland was formally handed over to Holland.
There was, however, a bizarre quid pro quo. In return, Britain argued for the legal right to a Dutch settlement in North America it had already seized, New Amsterdam — and changed its name to New York.
In South America, the Dutch ruthlessly exploited their new possession, bringing in thousands more slaves and expanding sugar production. A century later, the French writer Voltaire described Suriname as the cruellest place in the world, famous for ‘its heights of planter opulence and its depths of slave misery’.
Lord Willoughby’s vision of a golden land lay in pieces. As Matthew Parker concludes wistfully in his thought-provoking book: ‘The English had come to paradise, to a heaven, and left behind a hell.’
Willoughbyland: England’s Lost Colony by Matthew Parker is published by Hutchinson at £16.99. © Matthew Parker 2015. To buy a copy for £13.59 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Discount until October 10, p&p is free.