In the beginning, however, St. Kitts faced many of the same problems which had plagued Virginia in its early years – there was always a scarcity of food and supplies and the ever-present danger of attack from the Caribs or from Spanish America. An overproduction of tobacco soon forced down the prices the colonists were able to get on London markets. The island even went through a starving time in 1630-31, but the government was maintained “in the face of resistance and a rising of 1500 persons.”
In 1625, John Powell, employed by the Anglo-Dutch firm of Courteen Bros., which had been carrying on an extensive trade with Brazil, stopped at Barbados. Impressed by its natural beauty and its fertile soil, Powell took possession of the island in the name of “James, King of England.” Back home, Powell convinced the Courteens that Barbados should be colonized immediately. In 1627, Courteen & Associates was organized to develop that island, and later that year about 80 persons, led by Powell’s brother Henry, were settled on the west coat of Barbados. They began to cultivate tobacco on five company-owned plantations, and despite complaints that the people were “slaves of the merchants,” the colony did well. Immigration continued at a rapid rate, and within two years there were about 1,600 settlers on the island, producing impressive amounts of tobacco and dyewoods, every pound of which was shipped to England.
Within a few more years most of the arable land was under cultivation, and soon emigration began to neighboring islands. Settlers from St. Kitts occupied Nevis about 1628, Antigua and Monteserrat about 1635, and Anguilla and Barbuda soon after. People from Barbados extended to Tobago, Trinidad, as far south as the coast of Surinam and as far north as Jamaica; soon they even reached the North American mainland, particularly the Carolinas, which had meanwhile been established as English colonies.
About the same time when Barbados and St. Kitts were being settled, some Puritan leaders in England had become interested in developing the West Indies as a haven for their fellow-Puritans. In 1629, a company was organized “to plant the true sincere Religion and worship of God” in some of the unoccupied Caribbean islands. A year later, this Providence Company was granted permission to settle colonies within a vast area from Spanish Hispaniola to the coast of Venezuela. Just before that time, England had seized the islands of Catalina and San Andres off the Nicaraguan coast, and renamed them Providence and Henrietta.
In 1631, about ninety settlers from Bermuda began settlement on Providence Island and on Tortuga. The Providence Island Company made moderate progress for a few years, and by 1626 had a respectable population of more than five hundred Englishman, mostly Puritans, and some ninety black slaves. But in contrast to Puritan New England, these two Caribbean colonies were anything but Holy Experiments; in fact, they became bases primarily for privateers and even outright pirates, a haven for the outlaws of many nations, and something of an international scandal. Such activities could not long be tolerated by Spain; though the English managed to fight off one Spanish attack in 1635, six years later they surrendered to a powerful invasion fleet. Several years later, Tortuga became the property of France.
The Bermuda Islands had come to English attention as early as 1609, the year when Governor Gates of Virginia was wrecked there with his ship under the command of Sir George Somers. Since these islands were uninhabited, the English took possession of them in the name of their king, and the survivors of the wreck stayed there for more than a year. After his return to England, Somers and a number of Virginia Company investors organized the Somers Island Company to colonize the Bermudas. Two years later, however, the new Virginia charter placed these islands, now called Virginiola, under the jurisdiction of that colony. By that time houses had been built, fortifications erected, tobacco and other crops planted, and the Bermudas had a population of more than six hundred.
The Virginia Company, however, was too involved in other projects to pay much attention to the proper development of Bermuda, and in 1615 the island was finally sold for £2,000 to “the Governor and Company of the City of London for the Plantation of the Somers Islands.” For the next seventy years, the new Bermuda Company owned and governed the islands, the longest period of any company’s control of an English colony.