which meant being well positioned for the final push against Islamic rule on the Peninsula. As these opponents were subdued, those remaining were ordered to convert, inflaming sentiment in North Africa, which London was to leverage against the Peninsula in due time. Muslims of Portugal were also being quietly expelled.5
Simultaneously, there was an attempt by Lisbon to delimit the ability of Madrid to help London sail southward to Africa, indicating that as early as this pivotal moment, England was being eyed, though on the fringes of the continent and continental power.6 This was understandable since the Italian navigator John Cabot, under London’s aegis, in the late fifteenth century found himself off the coast of North America.7 Revealingly, as Cabot was preparing to sail from Bristol, rebellions were rocking Cornwall and did not cease simply because the seaman crossed the Atlantic and made landfall close to what is now called Cape Breton, near Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Soon Breton and Norman fishermen would be found in the same waters.8 Similarly, as the end of the fifteenth century approached, a trade that was growing in West Africa was often an offshoot of Anglo-Iberian commerce.9
As a Genoan and cosmopolitan, Columbus probably knew that those from his hometown, as well as Pisa—along with those of Provence and Catalonia—fetched leather, wool, and gold from the ports of North Africa. Trade in gold was also part of the mix, with the metal coming from deeper in Africa’s interior, Sudan, and the valley of the Senegal River, all providing a hint of the immense wealth—and talent—to be seized on this continent.10 As for talent, it is probable that there was an African pilot alongside Columbus during his 1492 voyage.11
Columbus, in any case, was well suited for this 1492 venture.12 Slavery was common in Genoa and Venice from about 1000 to 1350, and by the fifteenth century the enslaved were about 5 percent of Genoa’s population. Post-1453, slaves became more expensive in Genoa, given the disruptive capture of Constantinople, though sub-Saharan slaves were quite rare in Genoa during this pivotal century. Unsurprisingly, early on and writing from Hispaniola, Columbus pointed out that this island could export thousands of slaves annually, which would boost the market in Europe, as it drove down prices.13
So schooled, the Caribbean interlopers perceived that harsher methods would be needed to entrap these latest victims of exploitation. When Columbus’s band of outlaws routed Tainos in what has been billed as the “first major contest between Europeans and Native Americans,” their prevailing was vouchsafed with the use of what has been called “hand cannon.” Though advancement in the art and science of killing served to guarantee European conquest, Mayans in Yucatan shortly thereafter repulsed the enslavers in the face of cannon fire. Just in case, as early as 1501 an arms embargo was imposed upon indigenes that, despite leakiness in coming centuries, was generally effective.14
(Tellingly, there was an etymological similarity between pistol and the coin referred to as “pistole,” a Spanish gold piece, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.15 Appropriately so, given how “pistols” were deployed to extract wealth.)
Soon, Columbus’s brigands had rounded up 1,200 captives and selected 500 for sale in Spain. Although gold was a lure, as it was in West Africa, it was evident that for the conquistadors, slaves would soon become the main bounty of the region.16 “I took by force in the first island that I discovered some of these natives,” he boasted, adding crudely, “They have been very serviceable to us.” Perhaps averring to foul play in West Africa, he mentioned, “Nor are they black, as in Guinea.”17
It did not take long for the newly arrived exploiters to say of the Caribbean islands that “there is much gold in this land, but few slaves to get it out,” since a considerable number “hanged themselves because of the harsh treatment received in the mines from Christians.” Indigenes were also fleeing in all directions, attacking the invaders too,18 necessitating a shift to a newer labor force if the entire colonial project were to survive. For Iberians and other continental neighbors were discovering that escape by European slaves was made easier by the fact that slaves carried no special sign, wore no distinctive clothing, and besides were aided in rescue by fellow Christians,19 all of which contributed to the escalation of enslavement by epidermis, the hallmark of what befell Africans in the Americas. Early on in the Spanish colonies, the enslaved were purchased in the Balearic Islands—or Majorca (Mallorca)—and Sardinia, many of whom were either Moorish or Muslim converts or even those of partial Jewish ancestry. Over time, however. there was a shift to others, especially as the “Negro trade” became a large and regular source of income.20 For from about 700 to 1500, enslaved sub-Saharan Africans that flowed from south to north and west to east, ranged from 1,000 to 6,000 annually, rather small in comparison to the millions that were to be captured.21
Predictably, other potential victims of enslavement chose the path of homicide, not suicide. One of the early heroes of resistance was Hatuey, a Taino with roots in Hispaniola who fled to Cuba and waged war against the usurpers, but in early 1512 he was tied to a stake and burned alive. Earlier, indigenous comrades in Puerto Rico rebelled, perhaps seeking to forestall what had befallen their compatriots in St. Croix where Ponce de León captured indigenes with malign purposes in mind. For by the early 1520s in the vicinity, there was a thriving slave trade in indigenes.22 As early as 1513, Ponce de León traveled from Puerto Rico to Florida, planning to enslave indigenes, this after the Bahamas had been virtually depopulated as a result of the same impulse.23
Actually, the purported seeker of the “Fountain of Youth” had fought Moors in Granada before accompanying Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. He was as a result well positioned to fight Caribs, who were fighting invaders furiously to the point that there was a possibility that Puerto Rico would be abandoned. By 1514, King Ferdinand ordered three vessels, well armed and staffed, to sail from Sevilla to the Caribbean with the aim of reversing this seemingly dire fate. Ponce de León was put in charge. Yet by 1515, on what is now Guadeloupe, Caribs continued to rampage, leaving the would-be conquerors depressed, humbled, mortified.24
Ponce de León, supposedly in search of a youthful elixir, found its antipode in 1521 when he sought to form a colony in what is now Florida, and was attacked by combative indigenes and wounded mortally. The continuing attempt to create slaves to create wealth by compelling them to toil ignominiously in mines and on sugar plantations and cattle ranches was encountering a fierce reaction, engendering fiercer still violence and then a shift to enslaved African labor. As early as 1514, this cruel search for free labor had brought conquistadors to what is now South Carolina, where some were snared and deposited in Iberia.25 Yet, in the long run, both Spaniards and the indigenous weakened each other in repetitive rounds of battling, allowing both to be ousted eventually by London, then Washington.
Also wandering into today’s Carolinas was a Florentine seafarer in the pay of France. Giovanni da Verrazano, in what was becoming the parasitic norm for those who wished to weaken Spain, attacked the latter’s commerce in 1523 as he and his crew crossed the Atlantic in futile search of a route to Cathay. The next year he reached the vicinity of today’s Carolinas, then sailed northward for hundreds of miles. He spoke of seeing individuals whose “complexion … is black, not much different from that of the Ethiopians; their hair is black and thick,” who could have been escaped and once enslaved Africans or, alternatively,26 Africans who had crossed the Atlantic without European escorts, riding escalator-like currents.
SURELY AS EARLY AS 1503, enslaved Africans were arriving in the Caribbean, and as the Spaniards busily exterminated indigenes, they felt compelled to increase the number by 1511, as indigenous resistance mounted, with an assumption afloat that African labor was worth more effectively than that of the indigenous.27
As early as 1514, however, the rapid increase in the number of enslaved Africans in Santo Domingo already had become a source of nervousness besetting the colonizers.28 In 1521, Spaniards were heading northward from their base in Santo Domingo to seize and enslave
