s
were many; there the climate prevented profits from crude gang labor in
farming, and slaves were few.

The nature and causes of the contrast will appear from comparing the
careers of two Puritan colonies launched at the same time but separated by
some thirty degrees of north latitude. The one was planted on the island
of Old Providence lying off the coast of Nicaragua, the other was on the
shores of Massachusetts bay. The founders of Old Providence were a score of
Puritan dignitaries, including the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and
John Pym, incorporated into the Westminster Company in 1630 with a
combined purpose of erecting a Puritanic haven and gaining profits for
the investors. The soil of the island was known to be fertile, the nearby
Spanish Main would yield booty to privateers, and a Puritan government
would maintain orthodoxy. These enticements were laid before John Winthrop
and his companions; and when they proved steadfast in the choice of New
England, several hundred others of their general sort embraced the tropical
Providence alternative. Equipped as it was with all the apparatus of a "New
England Canaan," the founders anticipated a far greater career than seemed
likely of achievement in Massachusetts. Prosperity came at once in the form
of good crops and rich prizes taken at sea. Some of the latter contained
cargoes of negro slaves, as was of course expected, who were distributed
among the settlers to aid in raising tobacco; and when a certain Samuel
Rishworth undertook to spread ideas of liberty among them he was officially
admonished that religion had no concern with negro slavery and that
his indiscretions must stop. Slaves were imported so rapidly that the
outnumbered whites became apprehensive of rebellion. In the hope of
promoting the importation of white labor, so greatly preferable from the
public point of view, heavy impositions were laid upon the employment
of negroes, but with no avail. The apprehension of evils was promptly
justified. A number of the blacks escaped to the mountains where they dwelt
as maroons; and in 1638 a concerted uprising proved so formidable that the
suppression of it strained every resource of the government and the white
inhabitants. Three years afterward the weakened settlement was captured
by a Spanish fleet; and this was the end of the one Puritan colony in the
tropics.[1]

[Footnote 1: A.P. Newton, _The Colonizing Activities of the English
Puritans_ (New Ha