Puritans in Nicaragua

From Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution by Thomas P. Slaughter. A wealth of overlooked or forgotten detail. It is so easy to view the past's slide into the present as inevitable and ignore that at the time, the future was unknown and uncertain.

Slaughter is discussing 17th century emigration to New England by Puritans from East Anglia. Fourteen thousand emigrated in the decade following 1630. He then has this footnote revealing a little known and long forgotten eddy in history.

After the 1630s, immigration to New England fell precipitously, with only seven thousand arriving between 1640 and 1700. This meant that the region would be populated principally by descendants of that first wave. Even during the 1630s, though, 70 percent of British immigrants settled in the Chesapeake Bay region and West indies, including Puritans, who founded the colony of Providence Island off the coast of Nicaragua, which lasted only a decade.

Years ago I read Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s by Angus Calder. He recast much of what I knew of American history to the perspective of the British. From an American point of view, it is all about the Puritans in New England and the planters in Virginia. From the British perspective it was always about the sugar islands in the Caribbean. The colonies to the north weren't much more than a nuisance and distraction; of uncertain economic viability.

From a traditional American point of view it is reasonably incomprehensible that there might be Puritans in the Caribbean. Understanding where the locus of economic viability was located makes it more understandable, even if that particular colony did not survive. And you have to wonder - what were the details. Did those Puritans just die out, did they leave, did they end up merging with the local population? What a neat little footnote.