ABSTRACT
Early-modern people constantly put their trust in others and in nature. Anyone who was involved in Atlantic enterprises necessarily had to trust people all around the ocean, many of whom he or she had never met and never would meet. Trust was required, but no one was easy about it. Planters in Virginia were convinced that English merchants sold their good tobacco at a high price and then told them that it was trash and had actually sold poorly. Investors in the puritan colony of Providence Island in the seventeenth-century Caribbean were caught up short by the behavior of Capt. Europeans tended to reject the kind of fatalism represented by Diego el Mulato. They believed in Providence, the idea that all events could be read for signs of God's intent, and every happening had meaning in the grand scheme. Fate, Oliver Cromwell declared, was a "paganish" concept.
