Pirates and puritans

In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just occupied the Falkland Islands, fails to locate the archipelago on his world map. Eventually, his mother comes to the rescue and discovers it ‘hidden under a crumb of fruitcake’. If general awareness of the Falklands before 1982 was somewhat limited, as Townsend slyly implied, it pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the all-but-forgotten former British territory of Providence. This is a place I have to confess to never having heard of before picking up The Island that Disappeared.

My ignorance is one thing and, according to Tom Feiling, common enough. But he also maintains that it receives not a single mention at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich either, which, given what we learn in these pages, is extraordinary. For Providence, one of a cluster of three islands lying 500 miles north of Colombia and 70 miles off the Miskito coast of Nicaragua, was among Britain’s first colonies.