Captain Willis


the Chancellor and Fellows of Cambridge Universjty quoted
the passage from Demosthenes that the sayings of ptinces re-
tain the authority of laws with their subjects. It is wrong to
assume that Captain Willis was a low adventurer asid an out-
sider. He was in my judgment one of the Puritans of the
Earl of Warwick who had been active in his earlier days in
the Somers Isles, Bahamas, Providence-Mosquitia, also in. the
Lesser Antilles where he had been more or less connected
with Captain Hawley of Barbadoes and Roger Glover of
Kitts-Nevis. Many of the Puritans emigrated in whole fam-
ilies, and he was very likely a close relative of that Willis who
was his contemporary and the first governor of Connecticut,
and one of the numerous Willis family in and around Fenny
Compton in Warwickshire. Nor is it possible to deny that he
may have been a son or nephew of that Captain James Willis
who was ransomed from Spanish captivity off the coast of
Venezuela by Sir Anthony Sherley a few weeks before he
joined Captain William Parker off Jamaica in 1597 and both
went to the Bay and tried their luck at Truxillo, Puerto
Caballos and the Golfo Dulce.
 In 1642 Bacalar was taken by Diego el Mulato, Lucifer,
with a fleet of shallow draft. In 1648 it was again taken by
pirates who carried off the women to Cayo Muger, now
Mauger Caye, where these women were held prisoners until
taken away by the Spanish captain, Bartolome Palomino,
with severe reprisals. On May 29, 1652 the pirates returned
and completely destroyed Bacalar, cruelly depriving Captain
Palomino of his life. After the capture of Providence-Mos-
quitia Captain W. A. Blewfield began to trade with the Dutch
colony of New Amsterdank ,now New York, where he re-
ceived financial backing. As commander of the privateer
frigate "La Garza," he captured two Spanish prizes in the
Caribbean laden with sugar, tobacco, wood, and wine after
a '-vere contest and brought them to New Amsterdam on
May 29, 1644. The Dutch manuscripts in the New York
State Archives give us the rfames of the shareholders of the
"La Garza" and tell of the shares varying in value from 1100