Providence Island Company - Commercial Activity

Commercial Activity

At the start, the company had a twofold interest, to establish in an ideal commonwealth a God-fearing population, who were to support themselves with growing tobacco and cotton, and to harry Spanish shipping in the Spanish Main. The Company's regulations for the three islands, of Providence, Henrietta and Association, forbade card-playing and gaming, whoring, drunkenness and profanity. "A carefully chosen minister— a German Calvinist refugee from the Palatinate— was brought home in disgrace for singing catches on a Sunday," C.V. Wedgwood notes. "The Earl of Warwick and his friends were sincerely trying to create three nests of pirates with the behaviour and morals of a Calvinist theological seminary." The plantation system required African slaves, which involved the Company in the slave trade, but cotton and tobacco failed to be profitable and were replaced by sugar cane. The islands remained a base for privateering, however, under a tacit agreement from the King, whose foreign policy remained officially neutral with regard to Spain, but who agreed, provided that the Company foot any expenses. Prospects for Providence Island brightened at this, sufficiently for the projectors to capitalise the venture with an addition £100,000 in 1637.

The Providence Company provided support to the Parliamentarians in the build-up to the English Civil War.

From 1631 to 1635, the Company also planted an English colony on Tortuga (also called Association Island), off the coast of San Domingo.