The Sons of the Sea Beggars & the Daughters of Eden

Throughout the 1600s, most new arrivals to the Caribbean emanated from the old world’s long-oppressed peasant and laboring classes. Among them were prisoners of war, condemned criminals, penniless vagrants, unwanted orphans, and the destitute poor. A majority of these individuals were transported against their will as an expendable labor force, destined to carry out the backbreaking tasks of carving out the rudiments of colonial infrastructure (the building of forts, wharfs, warehouses, roads, etc.), and the converting of raw land for plantations and settlements. Conspicuous among this group were thousands of downtrodden Irish Catholics, who found themselves shipped off to England’s developing agricultural colonies to live and toil alongside enslaved Africans and Native-American captives. Others, however, came of their own volition, willingly signing on as indentured servants and journeymen in the hopes of escaping rural famine or the pestilence that plagued Europe’s overcrowded urban centers. Most came with high expectations, but only limited skills and resources. Few would survive the experience.

What was to become of these hapless emigrants, the maimed and malcontent, the rogues and ruffians, the youthful dreamers and hopeful poor? How were they to find a place amidst the simmering colonial-era milieu once their terms of servitude had come to an end?

As a new era dawned over the emerging micro colonies of the Lesser Antilles, the enticing mirage of a newfound Eden rapidly receded from the western horizon, revealing only blood-stained coasts and scarified landscapes shrouded in dust and woodsmoke. For those without wealth or domain, the choices were few; a retreat back to the old world was almost never an actionable response. And so, the path forward most-often came down to one of only two unsatisfactory options: succumb to a short and retched existence in the clutches of blind authority, or join in with the rugged outliers who lurked in the shadowy fringes of the region, on islands like Isla Vaca, the Turks and Caicos, Tortuga, the towering rock pinnacle called Saba, or the windswept and desolate isles of Anguilla and the Virgins archipelago – all colonial-era backwaters long-claimed by Spain yet largely ignored, where timbering and the harvesting of guaiacum, salt, copal, and ancient deposits of baleen, along with fishing, hunting, and the curing of wild meats, offered a hardscrabble existence beyond the margins of imperial desires.

Indeed, it was in places like these, the flyspeck no-man’s-lands with little tillable soil and few negotiable commodities, that the heirs to the Sea Beggar’s legacy, joined by an ever-increasing rabble of disenfranchised outcasts and their fugitive peers (the Maroons), carved out a niche for themselves. But, while the harvesting of natural resources and the planting of meager provision crops might well have sustained them, freebooting was their true vocation. And so, while the womenfolk tended to hearth and home, the men set out on the seas in search of opportunity. It was a dangerous profession, but it offered a life of unfettered freedom and the prospect of vast rewards.