After the Mayflower, the ship that reached Plymouth Rock and led to the construction of the thirteen prosperous American colonies, the Seaflower set sail from the Bristol port in 1633. It was bound for Old Providence. According to Parsons, the English historian I’m reading, the British crown wanted this island – worthy of many other fantasies – as a strategic point for developing the economic project of the West. We’re talking about Western Design, the blueprint for modernity and globalised capitalism, which grew, with its fictions and its crises, out of a monarch’s desire to exploit the newly discovered continent by extracting raw materials. That enterprise passed through this place, through these very coordinates, object of countless ambitions then and now. This historical stage is of course subsequent to the presence of the Miskito, the indigenous sailing people from the westward coast, who came to extract cedar wood for their ships and hunt for turtles.

Henrietta, the first colonial name for San Andrés, wasn’t a benevolent place to settle or found a colony. Given its long beaches, few coves and flat waters bristling with coral reefs, it was virtually indefensible: easy terrain for any surprise disembarkation, or for shipwrecks. That’s why the mountainous Providence (its name Anglicised in this stage of its colonial history), with its streams and pronounced bays, captivated the colonisers’ attention. The sister island became home to the first 540 women, relatives of English Puritans – who brought no slaves with them, incidentally.

Providence was visited years later and frequented by the Dutch, who owned slave ships and were starring actors in the Caribbean slave trade. At one point, the Dutch crown wanted to buy the island and made an offer for seventy million pounds, but England declined, only to lose their dominion some time later. The first enslaved people began to arrive, reaching impossibly distant shores for an African man or woman at the time. Slavery wasn’t a fifteenth-century novelty or a European invention. Lord knows how long forced labour has been going on: the Arabs were buying African slaves a long time ago, and clans and tribes had been trading with their abducted enemies for ages. The novelty was erecting the massive colonial project of the newly constituted European empires at the tip-top of this system.

I keep scanning the pages, waiting for some mention of my own ancestors to leap out at me.

Fort Warwick was built when pirates started invading a couple of years after the first colony. Along with New Westminster, the centre of Old Providence, the fort project would be revisited many times throughout the long dispute between the English and the Spanish over Caribbean rule. There were logistical issues. A lot of people were needed to populate all those colonies; both goods and colonists had to be sent from Massachusetts by the British crown. A slow process, as it turned out.