Willoughbyland
England’s Lost Colony
Matthew Parker (Hutchinson, 288pp. £16.99, Oldie price £14.99)
COLONIAL HISTORY is full of cautionary tales, but few are as stark — or indeed as unheralded — as that of Willoughbyland, the subject of Matthew Parker’s extraordinary saga. Why is it unheralded? Because Willoughbyland lasted a mere sixteen years before it became the Dutch colony of Suriname, which even today, as John Gimlette reminded readers in the Spectator, remains one of the most ‘obscure and exotic’ countries on earth.
The genesis of Willoughbyland, said Catherine Nixey in the Times, lay in Sir Walter Raleigh’s specious description of El Dorado, the golden city situated deep in the ‘Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana’. This mirage allured not only Shakespeare and Milton, but also an unscrupulous Cromwellian turncoat called Lord Willoughby. In 1651, frustrated in his attempts to govern the recalcitrant planters of Barbados, he founded the settlement and invoked El Dorado as an enticement. Oppressed by civil and religious turmoil at home — to say nothing of the English climate — enough suckers took the bait.
Willoughby’s prospectus was not entirely false. The land was fertile, the natives friendly (particularly their women), and jungle fevers no worse than pestilence at home. And with Willoughby absent much of the time some sort of a commonwealth was established in which, surprisingly, Jews, non-conformists and other refugees flourished. But it was too good to last. In 1663 slavery was introduced and with it came cruelty, decadence and fear.
A witness to this degradation was the poet and dramatist Aphra Behn, sent out from London as a spy. Horrified by what she saw, Behn wrote
Oronooko, a lurid account of the sufferings endured on a plantation by a saintly Ghanaian prince. ‘In doing so,’ said Catherine Nixey, ‘she pipped Harriet Beecher Stowe to the post by 150 years. Her contribution to the abolitionist movement can scarcely be exaggerated.’
In 1666 Lord Willoughby drowned during an expedition against the French, following which Willoughbyland was ceded to the Dutch in return for an unpromising slab of North America called New Amsterdam. Parker has done us a great favour, said Dan Jones in the Sunday Times. Though his account might seem like little more than a footnote to the history of colonialism, it is in fact ‘a tantalising microcosm — a parable even — for empire’s decay from hope into misery. Paradise lost indeed.’