The Spanish finally appeared on the scene in 1641, when they took Providence for the first time. By then, according to their own records, there were 381 slaves – those who hadn’t managed to escape in the revolt of 1638. The new occupants also found 400 English residents: the men were expelled to Spain as prisoners, the women and children sent back to England. An English captain arrived just a few months after the seizure with goods commissioned by the colony years before, but he had to about-face – goods and all – when he found the Spanish occupying New Westminster. In 1655, the humiliation of losing Old Providence led the English to reclaim it, once they’d established their colony in Jamaica, from which it would be far easier to stock the island. And it was then, in that fleeting moment, that Henry Morgan appeared. All I knew about him was that he’d hidden treasure in the famous Morgan’s Cave, now promoted as a sightseeing attraction on all tours of San Andrés.

Pirates are anarchists by definition. The islands they dominated had their own laws and served as both recreational and strategic points for plotting their next assault. As is well known, pirates were offered commissions to perform tasks that would have reflected poorly on the armada of any empire, and monarchs used them to weaken enemy sailing routes. In Morgan’s key episodes, the British Empire was interested in curtailing the Spanish routes that ran to the east of Henrietta and Providence. Sir Henry Morgan was immortalised by his execution of a risky plan, which would become the first attack on a port rather than on another ship: the spectacular storming of Portobelo, in Panama, where Spanish galleons loaded the Peruvian viceroyalty’s gold and silver, mined by thousands of broken black ribs.

Like all others, this was an era of great chaos. Besides investing in the imperial plan, England was also founding the Commonwealth on the decapitated head of King Charles I. Oliver Cromwell ultimately consulted with Henry Morgan on key sites for bringing the Caribbean under English dominion: Maracaibo, Havana, Veracruz, Portobelo and Old Providence. Without Providence on the map, for example, Morgan wouldn’t have had a place to plan the coup of 1670. When he docked his ships on the island, none of the 450 emaciated Spaniards could bring themselves to resist the disembarkation and seizure of the fort. The people had gone years without food or ammunition, despite their desperate appeals to Cartagena. The British crown made their retreat from this part of the Caribbean only in 1774, when they lost their thirteen colonies in the American Revolution.