a bloody process repeated in 1524,29 establishing a trend that was to continue in the early history of the resultant United States until 1865. It was precisely in the early 1520s that the Spaniards, with enslaved Africans in tow, built what amounted to the first settlement of colonizers in what is now the United States. Quite appropriately, given the subsequent history that unfolded on this territory, these Africans were also implicated in the uprising that destroyed this settlement, then fled into the embrace of indigenes.30 It was there that they bonded with the Guale in one of many unions of Africans and indigenes, a process that was to characterize northern Florida as a whole.31
It was understandable why the conquistadors would stray from the Caribbean northward since in December 1521 a major revolt of the enslaved rocked Hispaniola, reportedly executed by Jolof (or Wolof), who came from a powerful state that ruled parts of Senegal from 1350 to 1549; and by 1532 the shaken Europeans passed a law seeking to bar this ethnicity from the Americas.32 It was in 1521 that, quite appropriately, a sugar mill owned by Columbus’s greedy son was rocked by revolt. This was viewed worriedly as an attempt by the enslaved Africans and their indigenous comrades to seize control of the island, an eventuation that emerged finally by 1804. Arguably, this tumult motivated the move to the North American mainland, today’s South Carolina, a few years later.33
In Hispaniola the Wolof were blamed when in 1522 about twenty Spaniards were killed in the midst of five days of furious fighting.34 Still, the continuing resistance of indigenes and Africans repelled Madrid, creating an opening for London in the following century, which was then bequeathed to Washington. In a sense, the unrest in the Caribbean compelled Madrid to seek other sites of exploitation, dispersing their forces and perhaps weakening them overall. At the other end of the continent, in what is now Massachusetts, Miguel Corte-Real’s ill-fated 1502 expedition arrived.35 Less than two decades later, Europeans had reached Texas, inaugurating centuries of enhanced conflict.36
Stymied by the strength of the Ottomans in raiding the usual sites for slaves in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, the Western European invaders turned to West Africa. Indeed, it was in 1463 that an analyst warned, “The Turk, not content with what he has, is making eager preparation to subjugate the entire world, starting with Italy,” which could easily be interpreted as a threat to the Vatican itself.37 The Catholic Church provided “indulgences” to those so bold as to fight the Ottomans, while Turks figured as an object of terror to many a European state to the west.38
As the sixteenth century unwound, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, among others, all constructed sites in Africa where they traded for slaves and a range of goods.39 Driven by the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, gunpowder weapons were honed and then deployed promiscuously for conquest, which then stimulated the development of the modern state.40 While the invention of the cannon came earlier, in the thirteenth century, the so-called Military Revolution, a critically important factor in propelling colonialism, also arrived in the sixteenth century at a time of population increase and even what was thought to be overpopulation, which technological advances in the ability to kill brutally addressed.41
Yet, even as Spain began its vertiginous rise post-1492, there already were troubling openings that competitors, especially London, could well exploit. For 1492 also meant the final expulsion of Muslim rule from the Peninsula and their subsequent expulsion altogether and, as well, the acceleration of the Inquisition that proved to be catastrophic for the Jewish community. As early as 1501, those preparing to set sail for Hispaniola were instructed that “no Jews, Moors, reconciled heretics or recent converts from Mohammadanism [sic] … allowed.” This proved to be self-defeating, not least since it served to create an embittered class bent on revenge. Moreover, Spain deprived itself of the diaspora networks of the Jewish community that it had helped to create by periodic expulsions, in 1391, for example, paving the way for exploitation of Africa. “New Christians” or “Crypto-Jews” often comprised the very group most apt to control the capital needed to develop colonial trade.42
The foregoing notwithstanding, it is possible that Inquisitorial targets may have had an incentive to flee the Peninsula for the Americas, where the colonizers were desperately in need of forces to confront often rambunctious indigenes, creating “whiteness” by subterfuge in other words. Thus, despite the official ban on their presence, there were reports of Moors and Jews in the Caribbean as early as 1508; their exile to Africa has been noted already.43 Purportedly, there were at least six Jews accompanying Columbus in 1492, and they may have found less overt anti-Semitism upon arrival,44 not necessarily because colonialism was more enlightened than the metropole but because colonizers and settlers needed all the help they could get, including the disfavored back home. Supposedly, “New Christians”—or those who may have been Jewish originally—invested in Columbus’s initial voyage.45 On the other hand, Madrid may have placed itself at a disadvantage in the eventual competition with London by pursuing inquisitorial policies.
Given the Lisbon-London tie, England may have been the beneficiary when Portugal post-1492 allowed certain Jews to arrive—forking over a hefty fee, of course—with about 100,000 accepting this deal. However, some wound up against their will in São Tomé, where the attempt to establish slavery off the west coast of Africa, as we shall see, was thwarted by repetitive rebellions, with the crowning glory spearheaded by the heroic Amador.46 Nonetheless, this African dumping ground had the advantage for these forced exiles in that it was more conducive to being integrated into a cohesive Portuguese identity with their Christian counterparts than in the Peninsula itself. These “Christian” trespassers were more concerned about being overrun by malcontented Africans, 47 and had less fear of what befell their peers in Lisbon in 1506—bloodthirsty massacres of “New Christians.”48
It would have been understandable if this beset community decided that the anti-Semitism of London was tolerable compared to what they had endured to this point. Assuredly, it is now well known that “New Christians” of Portugal and their Sephardic relatives dispersed to Holland, England, France, and the Baltic region, playing a salient role in the colonization process that commenced in the early sixteenth century. In fact, the sugar they helped to capitalize propelled their fortunes and the new order generally.49
London was then lagging in comparison to its European peers; still, English vessels may have reached what became Newfoundland as early as the 1480s and areas to the south soon after but found that to claim the territory, boots on the ground were needed, which opened the door for expulsion of dissidents and the attracting of adventurers, all for the aim of settlement. And this in turn led to a newer identity: “whiteness.” Though the area south of what became Florida was the major site, not far from Newfoundland in what became Maine, a Portuguese freebooter—less than a decade after Columbus’s initial arrival in the hemisphere—abducted about four-dozen indigenes for trafficking purposes.50 Soon, Breton and Norman fishermen were found off the coast of Newfoundland, as the scavenger hunt was on.51 By 1521, the peripatetic Portuguese had landed at what is now Cape Breton, Canada, but as so often happened, were chased away.52
Enslavement had always been an exceedingly ugly process but seemed to reach new depths of decimation when combined with the untold wealth introduced by plundering the Americas. By January 1499, Vasco da Gama was sailing past Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa; it “belonged to the Moors,” meaning Muslims. And as casually as flicking dandruff from his shoulder, he observed, “As we passed before it” and “nearly upon it we fired off many bombards.” Africa was being targeted in part because it represented the path of least resistance for plunderers, as evidenced by a lucrative slave trade then emerging in Congo and the “bombards” aimed at Mozambique, south of Mogadishu.53 The fact that “degradados”—the degraded, the lumpen—were often exiled to Africa, including to da Gama’s vessel, facilitated the utilizing of degraded methods of subjugation.54 And these degraded elements with their degraded methods were essential
