This piece traces, through manuscript sources, the experience of English-speaking settlers and travellers in the greater Caribbean in the first hundred years of Anglophone presence in the region. It asks why there are so few overt references to English-speaking people expressing or reporting their fear of the climate, peoples or enemies or of the sense of the unknown, and concludes that this is because so many of the commentators were steeped in Protestant theology and therefore attributed all that befell them, for good or evil, to the Providence of God and a sign of his grace or of his wrath at their own wrongdoing.