By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The degradation of the Africans initially was founded on a set of ad hoc ideas based on the Genesis story that Ham had seen his father Noah naked and drunk and had mocked him. For this God cursed not Ham but his son Canaan. Even though this came to be dubbed as the “Curse of Ham”, it seems that it was the medieval Arabs who initially shifted the curse from Canaan to Ham.

Whereby in a recent article, Michael Taylor author of the upcoming "How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery" pointed out that we still have much to learn about the true history of slavery in America.

Historian David Richardson has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more captured Africans to the Americas, with estimates of the total number of enslaved African transported by European traders at 12 million.

This said a Spanish-led invasion of present-day South Carolina from Florida in 1526 already included enslaved Africans. Later, these same Africans rebelled and together with American Indians destroyed for all intents and purposes the Spanish capacity to sustain their would-be colony. Almost 100 years before the Jamestown barter and sale of enslaved Africans, fiercely resistant Africans together with Indian tribes crippled a European colonial misadventure.

Thus while at the start of the seventeenth century, the English had not established a permanent settlement in the Americas, following the above incident this was soon to change.

The settlers landed, said a U.S. national marking the arrival of the invaders on the 13th of May 1607, more than a century after the arrival in Virginia marking a rung climbed by London and its progeny en route to global supremacy. Battle-hardened by internal and external conflicts, the invaders said the woman who called herself Mrs. Roger Pryor did well to observe that the Indians were not friends, adding ironically that but for the massacre of 1622, referring to an attempt to extirpate the settlement, much might have been said in praise of the Indian.1 In an exemplar of understatement, the late historian Carl Bridenbaugh opined that the initial invaders “failed completely to gauge the depth of the resentment of the English intrusion on the part of Powhatan … and their fellow [indigenous] kings.”2 Yet another salutation to the invaders marked their arrival on 24 April 1607, more than a decade before Plymouth Rock, welcoming John Smith, a leader, as “the real founder and preserver of the Anglo-Saxon in America.” This battle-scarred freebooter previously had fought alongside the Dutch against the Spaniards and then, in a turnabout reflective of Perfidious Albion, fought against an erstwhile English ally, Ottoman Turks, who were to fade as London was rising.3 It was likely that Smith observed the mandate imposed on settlers, especially men, that they should be fitted with a suit of armor, a musket, a bandolier for deadly projectiles, twenty pounds of powder, and sixty pounds of shot.4 Apparently, the invaders did not expect to be greeted with sweets and flowers by indigenous.

The native population had been battling Europeans for about a century along the Atlantic seaboard before this latest invasion, absorbing blows and dishing out a few, but in the long term, these bruising encounters made them more susceptible to conquest.5 Even before the mass invasion of the North American mainland in 1607, Charles Leigh arrived on the northern coast of South America and sought to construct a “settlement among the Indians,” who, in a self-serving fashion, he found to be “anxious for instruction,” necessitating “able preachers to be sent to them” and, more martially, “the King’s protection for emigrants to this colony,” soon to be besieged.6

Of course, it was not all smooth sailing for the latest invaders: the first colony on the shores of New England, for example, was a French settlement in 1604 that faded into history, not least because of a stonily cold welcome by the original inhabitants.7 “Hostile Indians” were the culprits, according to one study.8

Contributing to the seething cauldron of hostility was yet another group. “The first recorded Africans in British [sic] North America were brought to Virginia aboard a Dutch ship” in 1619 was the pronouncement that has become common wisdom, though readers may recall the Africans brought to the mainland as early as 1526 or even those who escaped the clutches of Sir Francis Drake decades later. No matter. Nevertheless, it is instructive to note that the 1619 Africans were taken from a Portuguese ship, which had sailed from Luanda bound for Vera Cruz,9 all important sites of contestation before this important date.

In the years preceding 1619, it is true that more and more Europeans were descending upon Africa, seeking free labor for settlements. In 1603 Andreas J. Ulsheimer was met in West Africa, he said, “by several thousand Blacks who intended to drive our people back and defeat them.” His startled band shouted the equivalent of a peace offering at the feisty combatants, “but they paid as little attention,” as “the besieged Turks in Canisca [Kanisza] paid to the mass held by the Capuchin monk who wanted thereby to exorcise and immobilize the guns of the Turks so that they could no longer shoot at the Christians with them. For just as the Turks took the monk away from his altar, which he had wanted to erect in front of the fortress, and shot him and his altar to rubble, so these savage Moors seized our general, together with the captain and the boy, ignoring their peace offer, and decapitated them. They also hollowed out the heads and even before we had marched away, drank out of them … after this the Blacks imagined they had totally killed and defeated us and therefore ran towards us, screaming atrociously and loudly.”10

Quite appropriately, an account of the earthshaking founding of Jamestown, rendered as the guns of war were blazing during the First World War, pointed to similarly bloodcurdling predicates to 1607: the “revolt of the Protestants in Scotland, 1565,” the same year as St. Augustine was founded. The mutual “hatred” between Walter Raleigh and Madrid, which drove his settlement in the 1580s; the foundation of Quebec by French Catholics in 1605, all this and more, said Conway Whittle Sams, motivated the “departure from London, December 19, 1606.” Still, this analyst was quick to stress a point that was to yield under the necessities of forming viable settler colonialism in the name of “whiteness.” Virginia, he said, “did not tolerate the Catholics and was founded with the intention of prohibiting them from coming to this country.”11

Another analyst, looking back from the vantage point of 1933, found that Spain was overstretched as early as the mid-sixteenth century, creating an opening for England; besides, said Henry Wilkinson, Madrid’s “financing was from Lombardy, since, in their religious frenzy, Spain had extruded not only the Moors but the Jews also,” a policy inimical to viable colonialism. Yet by the 1560s, he says, Africans “greatly outnumbered the Spaniards” in the colonies, creating inherent instability and numerous arbitrage opportunities for the enslaved to exploit.12 London’s ability to create Pan-Europeanism in settlements served to forestall what had debilitated Madrid.

Furthermore, and similarly important from its inception, London’s settler project involved class collaboration, that is, the distinguishing feature of republicans who shouted bizarrely in the midst of mass enslavement and genocide that “All Men Are Created Equal.” Jamestown was born with a mixture of the dispossessed and middle class that characterized Roanoke, with more financial heft marking those who invaded the land they called Virginia. One of the earliest pioneers, Sir Richard Grenville, born in 1540, gained military experience fighting in the Hungarian Army, but by 1571 he was a parliamentarian. He conducted the first colony to Virginia in 1585, which failed, then by 1588 he was embroiled in the battle against the Armada, but two years later fell in battle against the forces of Madrid. He was followed by those like Sir Thomas Smythe, born in 1558. In 1589 Walter Raleigh had assigned his interests in the settlement to him. He was also the first governor of the East India Company in 1600 and knighted in 1603, then was sent to Russia as an envoy. He was a member of the First Council of Virginia in 1606, continuing until 1609 and by 1614 was back in London lobbying self-interestedly for his North American settlement, as well as India. Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of  Southampton was born in 1573 and was a friend and patron of Shakespeare. In 1601, he was tried and found guilty for the role he played in what was termed the Essex Revolt in Ireland, yet another attempt to erode London’s hegemony there. By 1609, he too was part of His Majesty’s Council for Virginia. George Sandys was born in 1577, and as had become the trait of those of his class, traveled widely in Europe, Asia, and Africa, all the latter being the coming hunting ground for free labor. He joined the Virginia Company in 1621 and was treasurer of this presumed profit-making enterprise. Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, was born in 1587, invested in commerce in West Africa, and became a member of the Council for Virginia by the pivotal year of 1619. George Calvert, born in 1580, as many future residents of North America, was profoundly interested in London’s colonial policy; he was a shareholder in the East India Company and also the New England Company. By 1621, he was involved in an attempt to implant a colony in Newfoundland. By 1623, he was designated as Lord Baltimore, the same name as one of North America’s leading cities. His rights were inherited by his son under whose direction Maryland was settled in the seventeenth century.13

In short, these settlers were uniting across class and even religious lines. Witness the settlement in what was called Maryland where Catholics were playing a leading role in this overall Protestant concern in one of the most profound rebrandings in global history, that is, the consolidation of “whiteness.” This was a militarized “identity politics” that involved land, enslaved labor, and a passel of “rights” as combat pay for those willing to bludgeon indigenes and batter Africans. Thus, the land on which now sits the U.S. Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the surrounding streets, was controlled initially in 1670 by a prominent Catholic settler from Maryland. Unsurprisingly, two of the most venerable schools in the Republic’s headquarters are of Catholic origin: Georgetown and Catholic universities.14

Once more, it would be an error to ascribe this conciliatory Protestant approach to Catholics, at odds with the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, to the inherent progressivism of republicanism’s antecedents. This attitude would do little to explain the brutal ouster of indigenes from their land and the stocking of the same with enslaved Africans. Instead, this attitude is best understood as a response to the brutal logic of settler colonialism in an alien land with inhabitants not necessarily polite to invaders. It was an essential part of the transition from religion as an animation of society to “race.”

As the fortunes of some were rising, others were falling, and Raleigh was decidedly in the latter category. Despite the homage to him, that continues in the land he helped to settle in the 1580s, including major cities named in his honor, along with poisonous cigarettes, his fall was swift following Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603. Soon he was back in the Tower, charged with treasonous conspiracy and, as 1619 approached, executed. Born into a Devon gentry family, he earned his spurs by overseeing the heinous massacre of surrendered enemies in Ireland in 1580, practice for his coming role in settler colonialism in North America. He was a beneficiary of the massive expropriation of land in Munster, again, a dry run for similar events he helped to unleash across the Atlantic.15 Raleigh (and his half brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert) were motivated to form a settlement in the 1580s in North America in direct response to the massacre of Protestants in France, only to be executed himself.16 The bloody end of a man who could be termed a true Founding Father of the United States was anomalous, given the ascension of some who surrounded him.

As Raleigh’s collaborators were encroaching on the Atlantic seaboard, their presumed Spanish antagonists were marching on the future metropolis to be known as Los Angeles. On 27 November 1602 Father Antonio de las Ascension noticed a “multitude of Indians” in vessels who “looked like galley slaves,”  imbued “without the least fear”, which Spaniards then republicans would strive to instill in coming centuries.17

Farther west from today’s Southern California, Londoners had extended their tentacles tentatively into south Asia, what would become the crown jewel of the British Empire: India.18 When in July 1599 four Dutch vessels returned westward with spices, pepper, and cloves, circumventing overland routes and Arabs, the Levant Company was formed, and, opportunistically, within six weeks English merchants petitioned Queen Elizabeth and, all true to the pattern of tailing after Rotterdam/Amsterdam, the East India Company was established,19 an exemplar of what was to be called state-monopoly capitalism, in that it could easily be described as “Exxon with guns.”

London’s policy of fighting Madrid to the last Dutchman was to generate a handsome payoff,20 just as England sought to learn warfare from the then champion, Spain.21 Finally, in 1604 another slap was administered to Holland when London and Madrid inked their portentous “Articles of Peace, [I]ntercourse and Commerce, Concluded in the Names of the Highest and Mighty Kings, and Princes James by the Grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith … and Philip the Third, King of Spaine…. Treatie at London the eighteenth day of August….” The critical proviso compelled 

London not to supply the Dutch with “artillerie, gunpowder, bullets, saltpeter or any other munition or assistance for warre, the Hollanders, or other enemies of the King of Spaine.” There was to be no “conveying of any ships, merchandise, manufactures or any other things out of Holland and Zeeland into Spain.” If this pact had been signed in, say, 1581, it could have changed the course of history, but even if observed by Londoners, all not to be taken for granted, the Netherlands had gathered momentum insufficient for mere words to halt the nation’s climb upward.22

Still, the invasion of North America was a kind of joint enterprise in that Puritans, some of whom had spent time in  Holland arrived on the eastern seaboard after an earlier move from the Isles. Apparently the descriptor, “Puritan”, was an epithet initially used during a crisis in 1556 when clergy were deprived of their living if they refused to wear clerical garb; supposedly, these zealots wanted the English Reformation to resemble more closely Swiss understandings of apostolic practice, a Pan-European approach that disposed them toward accepting the newer identity that was “whiteness.” They also favored household Bible reading, prayer, psalm-singing, catechizing, and fasting. The Presbyterians who emerged from this petri dish of zealotry were positioned to impose their theocratic praxis, though (to be fair)  their fervor was likely exceeded by fellow religionists, for example, Congregationalists and New England Separatists, even Baptists and Quakers, all of whom proved to be early beneficiaries of settler colonialism.23

As events evolved, London’s formal withdrawal of aid to the Dutch contributed to Spain doing the same in Ireland, providing at least an opportunity for England to redirect funds from combating Irish dissidence to subduing North American indigenes.24

To complete the circuit, before 1620, just after Raleigh’s execution, there were more Englishmen in North Africa than North America,25 but this soon was to change, as Morocco was cast aside like a  soiled tissue.

As the long sixteenth century was lurching to a close, London was at a crossroads: bright new horizons replete with colonial and enslaving booty beckoned, which required manpower that preexisting religious bigotry compromised. This was true for Madrid and London both. By 1596, the former headquarters was considering mass conscription of all Christian men between the ages of eighteen and forty-four for a general militia 26, at a time when the Moriscos were on the verge of mass expulsion and soldiers and settlers were being hammered in Florida and what was to become New Mexico. That same year, Madrid was uneasy about the large number of foreigners residing nearby and launched an inventory to detail their provenance, mandating that no more foreigners should be allowed to reside there and that visitors must stay at inns owned by natives.27 This would have proved a wonderful opportunity to lay the foundation for “whiteness,” the most reliable partner for the new age of colonialism, but the rousting of Europeans was occurring simultaneously with fear of a plague that would decimate the ranks.28

Even the Ottomans knew better: a 1477 census for Constantinople and Galata revealed that the proportion of Muslim households to non-Muslim ones was 59 percent to 41 percent, yet by 1600 as Madrid was shooing away non-Spaniards, especially non-Catholics, the population in Galata had shifted in favor of foreigners.29

This dilemma should have been easily inferred in London; thus, in 1593, Louis Tinoco informed the English monarch that he desired to serve London, thanking her for his release from North African captivity. He was Portuguese, presumably Catholic, and desired to inform Queen Elizabeth about the many plots and designs against her reign then being concocted on the Iberian Peninsula,30 indicative of the value of transcending religious correctness. Yet during this same time, potential allies were being tormented on religious grounds:

“Persecution of Catholics begins to be great,” it  was said in the early 1590s, “and is likely to increase; many gentlemen and gentlewomen and others expect imprisonment daily.”31 “A most religious persecution is practiced here upon Catholics,” was the report from the Isles. “Old prisons will not hold them and new ones have to be built; that the torments they suffer are infinite and the manner of their deaths intolerable.”32 Essentially, London had the colonial wisdom to export Catholics and other presumed dissidents to settlements, where they were relabeled as “white,” with many soaring to fame, fortune, and prosperous careers as ingenuous propagandists for the purported liberty delivered by republicanism.

Yet, militant Protestants could argue  that they were overly suspicious with good reason, constantly in peril, as was said then, because of the “designs of Jesuits and traitors.” These reprobates “draw men and women, by conscience into treasons and are so secretly entertained that without severe punishment they would remain, as a concealed infection in the entrails of the kingdom” for “these traitors have come in disguise as soldiers, mariners, merchants, or escaped prisoners.”33 The problem was not just Ireland either, for “the stirs are great in Scotland” too, the result of a “combination between a great part of the nobility to call persons out of Spain to change the State and religion established.”34

Catholics, it was thought, should have thanked their presumed Creator for the benevolence of Protestants who, rather than reenacting St. Bartholomew 1572, dispatched them to rough-hewn settlements instead.

The overall climate in the Isles was affected by immeasurably and ineffably by a wider crisis of an already tempestuous era.35 Famine, climate change, war, and calamity were the calling cards of the 1590s and the immediate period following.36 This was not wholly new. A serious freeze in the fourteenth century had an overpowering impact on Europe.37 By 1597, Morocco, London’s partner, was hit with the plague, then became bogged down in a guerrilla conflict with those in the Songhay Empire who refused to accept the verdict of history and surrender.38 North Africa as a whole may have benefited from Spain’s expulsion of Moriscos in the early seventeenth century in that it provided skills, language proficiency, and the like, but the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees could also be destabilizing, stressing the overall environment.39 Spain, which had expelled Sephardim, then Muslims, was a master of the self-inflicted wound but was convinced that the expulsion of the latter would remove a potential Ottoman and Moroccan ally,40 not to mention a force that could ally with London.41

It is unclear if the “Gunpowder Plot” in London in 1605, which was thought to be one of the final credible attempts of Catholicism to unseat Protestants, was masterminded in Madrid. Certainly, there were those who thought so. The accused, Guy Fawkes, was said by detractors to be “no native Englishman” but Flemish (he was likely born in York), but he allegedly had left England in 1593 and enlisted as a soldier of fortune in the Spanish military in the Netherlands. Reputedly he was “present at the taking of Calais by Archduke Albert in the year 1596.”

His alleged terrorism, seeking to assassinate the monarch and destroy the House of Lords, was thought to be of foreign origin. A chronicler in 1850, perhaps anticipating Sigmund Freud, noted that it was “his unhappy lot to be deprived of being one of the final credible attempts of Catholicism to unseat Protestants, was masterminded in Madrid. Certainly, there were those who thought so. The accused, Guy Fawkes, was said by detractors to be “no native Englishman” but Flemish (he was likely born in York), but he allegedly had left England in 1593 and enlisted as a soldier of fortune in the Spanish military in the Netherlands. Reputedly he was “present at the taking of Calais by Archduke Albert in the year 1596.” His alleged terrorism, seeking to assassinate the monarch and destroy the House of Lords, was thought to be of foreign origin. A chronicler in 1850, perhaps anticipating Sigmund Freud, noted that it was “his unhappy lot to be deprived of  paternal care and guidance in the days of his boyhood,” but, alas, only in his mid-thirties, he was caught and executed.42

Still, the specter of St. Bartholomew’s continued to haunt London, for it was also in 1605 that a rumor was spread that the “Papists are arming a massacre like that of Paris intended and the houses marked,” with “several Catholics implicated.”43 Yet, as the situation evolved, Protestants and Catholics rebranded as “white” united to massacre North American indigenes jointly, while enslaving Africans on an escalated basis.

In the prelude to the expansion of settler colonialism in North America in the early seventeenth century, the Edict of Nantes of 1598 granted, at least on paper, civil equality between Huguenots and Catholics, a kind of repudiation of 1572 and the St. Bartholomew’s massacre. This could stanch the flow of Protestants across the Channel, which had been strengthening London which, in any case, had an advantage in not being compelled to maintain a large standing army to defend its sea-bound frontiers, allowing manpower to be exported overseas.44 Yet, even as the republicans in the mid-nineteenth century were on the verge of seizing a grand swathe of Mexican territory, this religious cleavage still haunted. St. Bartholomew was revived, as noted specifically by a writer who suggested nervously that there was little to “fear”  from Catholic Mexico, for at this point, there was little reason to be concerned if Catholics were offended. Yet despite this official posturing, St. Bartholomew almost two hundred years later was called the “greatest bloodstain of the ensanguined sixteenth century,” with the writer adding knowingly that “of all wars, religious wars are the worst, and of all religious wars of which we have any knowledge, those which were waged in France during the last half of the sixteenth century were the most atrocious.” The writer did not acknowledge that the tactic reportedly used to entrap the Huguenots, employing “fraud and deception” to lure them to talks, then slaughtering them simultaneously in major cities, had been and would be a primary tactic deployed against North American indigenes, continuing confirmation that religious extremism had transmuted into colonial expropriation, soaked in racism.45 Even a Cherokee writer, part of a group in the process of being subjected to a sweeping ethnic cleansing in North America in the 1830s, was stunned to find in Mexico that “bigoted Spaniards and priests once called all the heretic strangers, English, and Americans, by the name of Judeos or Jews.”46 Meanwhile, despite bumpiness, this besieged grouping was adding sinew to the muscle of republicans about to be wielded decisively against that very same Mexico.

On the other hand, the much smaller Netherlands showed that even a continental, non-island power, albeit with a formidable port, Rotterdam, could advance significantly. As the English were settling into Virginia, the Dutch had reached what is now New York City.47 Like a number of Englishmen, Henry Hudson had cultivated ties with the Muscovy Company, which was followed by the Turkey Company in 1581, the Morocco Company in 1585, the Guinea Company in the instrumental year of 1588, then the East India Company after that. The ubiquitous Dutch were encroaching on Russia, which was yet another reason for England to turn to the Americas. In any case, Hudson did not live to witness how he was lionized in what became New York, including a leading transportation artery bearing his name.48

It was not only the celebrated Hudson who was seen as farsighted. As early as 1604, a “license” was allocated to Sir Edward Michelborne “and his associates to discover the passage into Cathay, China, Japan, Corea [Korea], and Cambaya and to trade there.”49 A few years later, yet another license was granted to Richard Penkevell “to discover the passage into China, Cathay, the Moluccas and other regions of the East Indies for 76 years.”50

This obsession with China continued into the twentieth century, and quite possibly Beijing’s current rise may complicate the continued hegemony of the North Atlantic–dominated world created in the sixteenth century.51 Frenchmen, scrambling to keep pace, staked their claim in what is now Canada,52 but in the long run, Russia’s expansion east and south may have been the most significant territorial advance of this complicated epoch.53 Eventually, gold and silver from what was called Guinea were transported to London, easing a currency shortage. Eventually, the enslaved Africans who were part of this commerce, along with the weapons that served to ensnare them, were part of a different kind of triangular trade: metals, arms, slaves. By 1609, new muskets were brought to Virginia and, along with religious proselytizing, served to subjugate indigenes.54

London was claiming more land too, spurred by a booming arms trade, albeit not in North America. Unsuccessful rebellions in what is now Ulster forfeited this factious province, in the wake of the failed revolt of the Earls of Tyrconnell and Tyrone, leading London to create a kind of settler colonialism there that was to ignite major problems for generations to come and mimic what was about to unwind on a massive scale across the Atlantic.55 For it was in 1601 that official London was buzzing about the “traitor Tyrone who pretends to fight for the Pope’s sovereignty” and who intended to “arrive in England with 8,000 men” ready to wreak havoc.56

Across the Atlantic, Spain continued to endure unsettling events that did not bode well for their version of colonialism. By 1598, the rebellious Guale continued to be punished in Florida; when a slave was allocated to a hospital, it was unclear if this was a response to how this facility needed bolstering in the face of the revolt.57 Reports continued to percolate about unrest among the Guale, and the not unrelated hardships experienced by settlers in St. Augustine,58 suggesting more draconian exertion would be needed, but who could pass the religious test upon arrival and why go to underdeveloped Florida, as opposed to another settlement with more accouterments? When twenty enslaved  Africans arrived on the peninsula to stock a local hacienda in mid-1599, officialdom did not evince openly any concern about their loyalties, history notwithstanding.59

Settlers and their leaders should have been thinking more strategically. By early 1600, Spaniards were frantically seeking to enslave indigenes, as settlers reeled from a series of deaths, and fires, at the hands of furious Ais, Surruque, and other natives of the peninsula. This was occurring as anxieties arose about incursions by Englishmen.60 Soon, about eight Africans escaped from St. Augustine and sought refuge among the Surruque in today’s Cape Canaveral area, then headed farther south to the encampment of the  Ais near today’s Vero Beach, where they married women of this indigenous group as they engineered one of the earliest and most successful examples of self-liberating Africans, Africans freeing themselves, on the mainland.61 Unsurprisingly, by 1601, there was yet another revolt of the indigenes to be confronted by settlers.62

By 1602 twenty more enslaved Africans arrived on the peninsula to bolster fortifications, which were certain to be challenged.63 A few months later, a group of enslaved were captured, snatched from invading Englishmen.64 This group may have been part of a group that had been captured from an English pirate and whose presence was traced back to Drake years earlier when he and his crew sacked St. Augustine, bringing along Africans from Santo Domingo. Despite these Africans having witnessed turmoil of all sorts, perhaps unwisely a Spanish official begged permission to retain at least one of them.65 Doubtlessly, Spaniards in the region would have desired to read an earlier English dispatch, which had heard “from Havannah that the Earl of Cumberland has left 300 men in garrison in Porto Rico,” and besides, had “given liberty to the slaves who remain with the English and means to send more forces which put these parts in fear of his return.”66

Thus, by early 1603, a royal proclamation mandated improved treatment for the enslaved and putting them to good use, dueling dual directives.67 But the walls were slowly closing in on Spaniards in Florida, which the more astute would have realized. For in addition to rebelling indigenes and sullen Africans, in the prelude to the hinge year that was 1607 and the arrival of Londoners due north, reports continued to arrive about Englishmen in Florida waters. In the late summer of 1603, yet another shipwreck of a Spanish vessel occurred in the Keys, just as two English ships arrived in the Bahama Channel and as two other non-Spanish vessels were spotted suspiciously near Havana.68

Admittedly, Madrid was distracted, seeking to contain a massive region stretching from Tierra del Fuego to the outer reaches of North America. By March 1603, Sebastian Vizcaino, a Spaniard, was in California and had detected a vein of metal, the likes of which would captivate republicans by 1849.69

By the spring of 1604, official St. Augustine cried out for more soldiers. The fort was in deplorable shape, and, dangerously, all the artillerymen were non-Spaniards. Havana had just exiled two soldiers there and they were sent back promptly since they were viewed as yet another liability in a land replete with them. The enslaved continued to be a matter of concern too.70 Matters had hardly improved in 1605 as the time arrived for a stiffer challenge: the mass arrival of Englishmen and their comrades due north. Settlers were aging and dying, yet there was a clamor for more enslaved Africans, which could provide a unique challenge all its own, especially since soldiers were, as ever, displeased with their plight.71

In a particular report, Governor Pedro de Ibarra neglected, unpredictably, to detail the most resolute challenge to settlement: unwelcoming indigenes. By 1606, one settler, Maria de Junco, was lamenting the death of her spouse, Juan Ramirez, captured by Ais, quartered and then, she claimed, roasted and eaten with his skull deployed as a gourd for sipping drinks.72

Though non-Spaniards in St. Augustine were presumably religiously correct, meaning Roman Catholic, the authorities went to some length to detail their nationalities, which by the summer of 1607 were referenced as Flemish, German, and Portuguese.73 Intermarriage among Europeans, Africans, and Natives took place regularly,74 which was not the case among the eventually victorious republicans, who were supposedly far more progressive than their royalist competitors. African children continued to be born in Florida, further calling into question the official date of African arrivals on the mainland in 1619.75

As late as 1837, when the annexation to the United States of the former Spanish and Mexican colony that was Texas was at issue, even opponents of this transformative maneuver were unsettled by the specter of religious conformity. As liberal republican William Channing put it, under Mexican rule “settlers were to adopt the Catholic faith … as the condition of settlement.”76 Yet, this religious sectarianism aside, Mexico enjoyed what has been described as a “Black Indian President” almost two hundred years ago,77 whereas, in the presumably more farsighted Republic, a similar occurrence did not arrive until the twenty-first century. Indeed, though natives like the Cherokees in the Republic sought vainly to “assimilate” to dominant norms, up to and including religious conversion and holding Africans in bondage, they were still ethnically cleansed, expelled,  expropriated 78, just as Mexico’s “Black Indian President” was assuming office. And even though the Republic’s vaunted Constitution promised freedom of religion, an essential aspect of reconciling Protestants and Catholics, thereby assisting settler colonialism and circumventing a replay of St. Bartholomew 1572, arguably the racist virus unleashed by genocide against indigenes and the enslaving of Africans created conditions that helped to compromise the rudimentary Republic pledge of religious liberty as well.79

Astonishingly, despite the arrival of English settlers north of Florida by 1607, Madrid, because of the proliferating problems in St. Augustine, was considering reducing the military garrison and the settlement as a whole,80 which happened under duress more than two centuries later due to republican pressure. Frantically, Fray Alonso de Penaranda, a priest in good standing, reviewed the alleged accomplishments of St. Augustine, including religious conversions of indigenous, an ostensible basis for colonialism in the first place, but the very fact that abandonment of northern Florida was being contemplated just as Englishmen were arriving in the land they called Virginia was not a good sign for Madrid though good news for those who foresaw the eventual victory of London.81 By November 1608, the mandate was given to Cuba to monitor the English settlement to the north, but this was much too little, much too late.82

Yet, contradictorily, the authorities continued to inspect arriving vessels in the name of the Inquisition, making sure that no religiously suspect settlers arrived, and this was occurring as the Guale continued on the warpath, indicating that plans for abandoning St. Augustine were not altogether induced voluntarily.83 Thus, instructions from Madrid continued to detail how non-Spaniards should be handled, though flyspecking them was not necessarily an inducement for them to remain in the primitive settlement that was St. Augustine.84 This questioning of non-Spaniards extended to Cuba as if religious identity was insufficiently stable to encompass colonialism. By 1608, a Portuguese priest there, Vicente Ferreyra de Andrade, was sent back to Iberia and replaced.85

By 1609, the English settlement to the north was vulnerable and, possibly, could have been wiped out with adroit planning. But instead, of 120 soldiers due in St. Augustine, only sixty had arrived, though non-believing indigenes had just attacked recently converted natives; yet despite this ferment, the bright idea had arisen in Florida to launch an expedition targeting the alien settlement northward,86 though if history were the guide, this planned expedition would be wildly insufficient to attain ambitious goals. This proposal could hardly be taken seriously, in any case, since weeks later yet another settler, Geronimo de Torres, was denouncing the horrible conditions in St. Augustine and expressed the fervent desire to depart.87 It appeared that St. Augustine would be abandoned before Jamestown was wiped out by Spanish invaders, though orders continued to pour into Florida to keep a wary eye on the future Virginia.88

When the chief executive in St. Augustine began reporting on an increase in religious conversions of indigenes, it was unclear if this were just propaganda to ease calls for an abandonment of the settlement or an indication of a breakthrough (or evidence of indigenous distress pointing to imminent surrender). Besides,  Governor de Ibarra also pandered to Madrid by pledging to monitor what was happening northward, which may have simply been an attempt to evaluate upward his own faltering settlement as a counterweight to London.89 Still, by 1611, Madrid continued to exert pressure on Cuba to aid in the reconnaissance mission targeting the English settlement, but by then this seemed to be an example of words substituting for action.90

According to Herbert Eugene Bolton, the vanguard settler for the French was a fur trader interested in cutting deals with indigenes; for the Spanish, it was the conquistador and the mission; and for the English the  “backwoods settler,” with a rapacious interest in dislodging indigenes from the land, In retrospect, it is the latter that prevailed in North America. Madrid had laid claim to the bulk of two American continents, but its appetite exceeded its digestive ability in that Spain’s population was too small and much of it could not be allocated overseas given European challenges. Moreover, Bolton suggests that London’s bloodthirstiness exceeded that of Madrid, which also hindered the latter: “In the English colonies,” he said, “the only good Indians were dead Indians. In the Spanish colonies, it was thought worthwhile” to pursue a differing course,91 Las Casas notwithstanding. I would say that religious sectarianism and Inquisition mandates hampered the ability of Madrid to pursue what turned out to be the winning course executed by London, which was Pan-Europeanism and “whiteness,” broadening the base of settler colonialism, increasing the number of “backwoods settlers”, racializing and deeming inferior those not deemed to be “white” and moving aggressively on two fronts: seizing land and enslaving willy-nilly.

Nevertheless, a factor that served to place London on the path to preeminencearms manufacturing, continued to assert itself muscularly in the coming centuries. By the late eighteenth century, the gun trade was essential to the health of Birmingham, which paradoxically was dependent upon the African market, which absorbed defective weapons at a handsome profit. This facilitated war, instability, and prisoners of war, who then became enslaved to be shipped overseas for the enrichment of the British, then republicans. Those rousting Africans for enslavement also sold them for weapons that would be used to roust more Africans in a circle devoid of virtue. Gold too was part of London’s bargain, and goldsmiths became private bankers as an entire system of cruel exploitation came to rest upon the shoulders of a beleaguered and exploited continent.

According to historian Priya Satia, this “war boom … insulated arms makers from the commercial costs of abolition”  and had deep roots in that England organized the most significant ordnance complex in Europe. Founded in the 1400s, it had ramified ties with the emerging scientific establishment in London. By 1600, the leader of this entity was the Earl of Essex, comrade of Francis Bacon, a practitioner of empiricism and scientific praxis. This military complex, says Satia, fomented technological innovation, fueling the fabled Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Britain into global hegemony. War, she says, hastened the quest for methods to use coal to smelt metals, speeding innovation, contributing to the advent of the steam engine, puddling, copper sheathing, all ignited by war and produced by “contractor-industrialists.”

Unlike Britain, which regulated the proliferation of weapons domestically from the fourteenth century forward, with restrictions increasing in the fraught sixteenth century as unrest spread throughout the Isles, republicans with a continent to conquer and Africans to keep in line were not as restrained. Homicide rates in England were relatively stable from the 1400s to the end of the eighteenth century. And, even then, over time offenses were perpetrated against property, as opposed to persons, as, says Satia, “feudal values of honor and status gave way to  bourgeois values of money and market relationships.”

Colonialism and slavery, modernity in sum, emerged from the barrel of a gun. And, as with so much of what catapulted London, no small debt was owed to the Ottomans, which made muskets equal to, if not better than, the best Western Europe had to offer and spread their handiwork especially to their partners in the sixteenth century, which included England. Actually, the Ottomans shipped weapons and military materièl in exchange for spices in Aceh and elsewhere, including shipping to Ethiopians, with whom they shared a star-crossed tie, which did in a sense serve to preserve Addis’s sovereignty. Babur, the first Mughal emperor in South Asia, bought Turkish matchlocks as early as 1526, and Akbar, who followed him, was also interested in making these arms. But as events progressed, it was Englandonce the pupil, which became the teacher, that employed manufacturing techniques to make bicycles and automobiles, catapulting London further into the ionosphere. But then the cycle moved again, and the Republicans took the lead, especially when Eliphalet Remington, of the eastern seaboard of North America, mass-produced the typewriter after his arms business plummeted at the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War.92

Just as English elites parasitically allied with their Dutch peers, the same could be saidto a degree, about their relationship to other “allies,” including Sephardim fleeing Iberia for London.

Despite this community’s assistance, England’s propagandists were not above assailing this beset group, as late as 1661.93 As the pieces on the chessboard were shuffled in the seventeenth century, Perfidious Albion was not the only nation reconsidering bedrock ties. By June 1631, pirates from Algiers and armed troops of Turks stormed ashore in West Cork and seized almost the entire village, dragging scores of mostly women and children to slavery in North Africa in a replay of what was then befalling West Africa. Indeed, seafarers sailing southward from England to raid Africa at times found themselves enslaved in North Africa in a repetitive pattern that was not to cease fully until London had been fortified by the plunder from its own slave trade and pillaging of the Americas.94

Some Londoners, given repeated attempts to invade England via Ireland, and Cork’s uncertain allegiance to the monarch, may not have been altogether disappointed by this turn of events. Over the decades, Spain had sought an alliance with Ireland against England in league with others of Dutch, French, Flemish, and Scottish ancestry. Hugh O’Donnell was among the Irishmen whose lifelong quest involved the Spanish liberation of his homeland, a deep-seated dissidence that may have impelled London to ship ever more Dubliners to faraway settlements.95

Still, Republicans could boast about their retreat from the poison of St. Bartholomew night 1572. In 2018, the U.S. president, Donald J. Trump, was perplexed to find that there were no Protestants on the highest court in the land: all were either Catholic or Jewish. “You had all Protestants,” he remarked in a burst of bafflement, “and then in a few years none. Doesn’t that seem strange … you should be able to have the main religion in this country represented on the Supreme Court.”96

But in the citadel of the victor of the world the sixteenth century created, Washington, D.C., there are other catastrophic matters to consider beyond malignant racism. The question of climate must be contemplated when considering the profundity of the post-1492 era. Earlier centuries provide examples we ignore at our peril. As the climate changed in Europe, the failure of local crops ensued, escalating the ongoing trend of long-distance trade. This was a risky course to pursue, leading to spreading the risk by securing investors and delivering more funding and increasing the possibility of profit or, alternatively, expanding the circle of the vindictively furious if a loss resulted. This fury at times was unleashed on the unsuspecting in the Americas and Africa.97 That is, by the late 1500s, global temperatures dropped to new lows, and around 1600 they perhaps reached the coldest point in centuries or even millennia, though the period immediately preceding, beginning about 1300 was on average cooler than what had come before. Coincidentally, it was then that Spain endured an agricultural crisis that bled into finance, igniting a general crisis of confidence, empire-wide. High rates of mortality in Spain may have been restraining Madrid’s ability to confront London in North America. Colonized Florida did not benefit when the late sixteenth century witnessed a spectacular increase in hurricane activity. In Europe generally, the height of European men fell at the same time, yet another sign of crisis. In Russia, the continent’s giant, the crisis meant a third of the population perished and the country lapsed into a murderous civil war, accompanied by famine. Simultaneously, in England, one freezing winter followed another, while exceedingly wet summers meant the ruination of crops.98

 

1.  Mrs. Roger Pryor, The Birth of the Nation: Jamestown, 1607 (London: Macmillan, 1907), 10, 83.

2.  Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544–1609 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 20. See also William Wallace Tooker, “The Mystery of the Name Pamunkey,” Springfield, Massachusetts, 1895, Huntington Library. John Garland Pollard, The Pamunkey Indians of Virginia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), New-York Historical Society. At the latter site, see also Frank G. Speck, The Nantichoke and Conoy Indians (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1927).

3.  Mrs. A. A. Blow, “An Address Delivered before the Daughters of the American Revolution at their Congress Held in Washington, D.C., April 1905,” Huntington Library. At the same site see also Robert Lee Taylor, “Some Notes on the First Recorded Visit of White Men to the Site of the Present city of Richmond, Virginia, Saturday and Sunday, May 23 and 24, 1607, a Paper Read at a Meeting of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities … June 10, 1899 …” Richmond, 1899.

4.  David Childs, IInvading America: The English Assault on the New World 1497-1630, 2012, 149.

5.  James Axtell, Imagining the Other: First Encounters in North America (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1991), Massachusetts Historical Society.

6.  Captain Charles Leigh to Council, July 2, 1604, in Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I, 1603–1610 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 127.

7.  Tercentenary of the Landing of the Popham Colony at the Mouth of the Kennebec River (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1907), Massachusetts Historical Society. At the same site, see also Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges. Speech of John Wingate Thornton … at the Fort Popham Celebration … August 29, 1862 (Boston: Balch, 1863).

8.  Alfred A. Cave, “Why Was the Sagadahoc Colony Abandoned? An Evaluation of the Evidence,” New England Quarterly 68, no. 4 (December 1995): 625–40, 625. See also Michael J. Puglisi, “Reading Between the   Lines: Early English Accounts of the New England Indians,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 24, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 1–18.

9.  The Angola to Virginia Connection: 1619–1999 (Williamsburg, VA: Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, 1999), University of Virginia, Charlottesville. See also Virginia Bernard, A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 169: Bermuda, says the author, was “the first English colony to import Africans as laborers. Virginia was the second.”

10.  Andreas Jonas Ulsheimer, “Voyage, 1603–1604,” in Adam Jones, ed., German Sources for West African History, 1599–1699 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, Verlag, 1983), 18–43, 21, 23.

11.  Conway Whittle Sams, The Conquest of  Virginia: The Forest Primeval … (New York: Putnam, 1916). Cf. William Stevens Perry, “The Connection of the Church of England with Early American Discovery and Colonization,” Portland, Maine, 1863, Massachusetts Historical Society.

12.  Henry Wilkinson, The Adventures of Bermuda (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 3, 5.

13.  Biographies in Thomas Fortune Ryan, The London Company of Virginia: A Brief Account of its Transactions in Colonizing Virginia (New York: London, 1908), Huntington Library [no page numbers]. At the same site, see also “A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia … published [at the] Direction of the Councell of Virginia,” London, 1610 and An Apologie of the Earle  of Essex, Against those Which Jealously and Maliciously Tax Him to be the Hinderer of the Peace and Quiet of His Country (London: Bradocke, 1603).

14.  Margaret Brent Downing, “The Development of the Catholic Church in the District of Columbia from Colonial Times Until the Present,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 15 (1912): 23–53, 29.

15.  Anna Beer, Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Raleigh (New York: Oneworld, 2019).

16.  Edward Graham Daves, “Raleigh’s New Fort in Virginia, 1585,” 1893.

17.  Report of Father Antonio de la Ascension, November 27, 1602, in David Kipen, ed., Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters,  1542 to 2018 (New York: Modern Library), 425. See also Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

18.  William Golant, The Long Afternoon: British India, 1601–1947 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975). K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Routledge, 1999) and Femme Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline (Zutphen: Walburg, 2003).

19.  Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Epic Voyage of Thomas Dallam and His Extraordinary Musical Instrument to Constantinople in 1599 and His Time in the Palace and Harem of the Ottoman Sultan (Norwich, UK: Propolis,  2017), 167. See also Rupali Mishra, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics and the Birth of the East India Company (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

20.  A Briefe Relation of What is Happened Since the Last of August 1598 by Coming of the Spanish Campe into the Dukedome of Cleue: and the Bordering Free Countries, which with Most Odious and Barbarous Crueltie they take as Enemies … and the King of Spaine … Faithfully Translated out of the Dutch (London: Wolfe, 1599).

21.  Bernardino de Mendoza, Theorique and Practise of Warre. Written to Don Philip, Prince Castil, by Don Bernardino de Mendoza. Translated out of the Castilian Tongue into Englishe, trans. by Sir Edwarde Hoby Knight (Middleburg: Schilders, 1597), Huntington  Library. At the same site, see also An Admonition Published by the General States of the Netherlandish United Provinces … Touching His Now Intended Proceedings Against the Spaniards and Their Adherents (London: Dight, 1602).

22.  See “Articles of Peace, Entercourse and Commerce, Concluded in the Names of the Most High and Mighty Kings and Prines … by the Grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith & Philip the Third, King of Spain…. and Albertus and Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archdukes of Burgundie…. in a treatie at Lodon the 18[th] Day of August after the Old Stile in the Yeere of Our Lord God, 1604. Translated out of Latine into English,” 1604.

23.  Michael P. Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

24.  David Finnegan, Éamonn Ó Ciardha, and Marie-Claire Peters, eds., The Flight of the Earls: Imeacht na nIarlaí (Derry: Guildhall, 2010). See also William Allen, An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland Concerning the Present Warres Made for the Execution of His Holiness … by the Highe and Mightie Kinge Catholike of Spain (Antwerp: A. Coninncs, 1588).

25.  Daniel Vitkus, ed., Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captive Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 2.

26.  His Catholic Majesty to Diego de Orellana  de Chaves, September 10, 1596, Letters of King Philip II, Brigham Young University.

27.  Secretary Pedro Zapara to Diego de Orellana de Chaves, 24 October 1596, Letters of King Philip II.

28.  Secretary Juan Gallo de Andrade to Diego de Orellana Chaves, 12 February 1597, Letters of King Philip II.

29.  Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Epic Voyage of Thomas Dallam, 83.

30.  Louis Tinoco to Queen Elizabeth, December 1593, in Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1591–1594 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 395.

31.  Report, May 1, 1591, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers … 1591–1594, 35.

32.  Report, June 20, 1591, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers… 1591–1594, 60.

33.  Report, October 18, 1591, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers… 1591–1594, 114.

34.  Report, February 12, 1593, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers … 1591–1594, 314.

35.  Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown, Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640: Turning the World Upside Down (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

36.  Peter Clark, ed., The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985).

37.  Frank Welsh, The Battle for Christendom: The Council of Constance and the Dawn of Modern Europe (New York: Overlook, 2008), 27.

38.  Stephen Charles Cory, Reviving the Islamic Caliphate in Early Modern Morocco (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 198.

39.  Mercedes Garcia Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, eds., The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Cf. Three Miseries of Barbary: Plague, Famine, Civill Wars, with a Relation of the Death of Mahamet the Late Emperor: And a Briefe Report of the Now Present Wars between the Three Brothers (London: Gosson, 1607).

40.  Newes from Spain, The King of Spaines Edict for the Expulsion & Banishment of More than Nine Hundred Thousand Moores out of His Kingdome, Which Conspired and Plotted to Bring the Kingdome of Spaine under the Cover … of the Turks and Saracens, 1611, Huntington Library. At the same site, see also The Ottoman of Lazaro Soranzo … Mahomet the  Third, Great Emperour of the Turkes …, trans. Abraham Hartwell (London: Windet, 1603).

41.  See e.g. Robert Ashley, Almansor, the Learned and Victorious King that Conquered Spain, His Life and Death (London: Parker, 1627) and The Ottoman of Lazaro Soranzo.

42.  The Fawkes’s of York in the Sixteenth Century Including Notices of the Early History of Guye Fawkes: The Gunpowder Plot Conspirator (Westminster: Nichols, 1850), Huntington Library. At the same site, see also A Brief History of the Life of Mary Queen of Scots and the Occasions that Brought Her and Thomas Duke of Norfolk to their Tragical Ends. Shewing the Hopes the Papists then Had of a Popish Successor in England; and their Plots to Accomplish them… From the Papers of a Secretary of Sir Francis Walsingham (London: Cockerill, 1681).

43.  John Lambe to Dr. Neile, February 26, 1605, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers … 1603–1610, 200.

44.  W. J. Eccles, The French in North America, 1500–1783, 13, 14. See also The History of the Famous Edict of Nantes Containing an Account of all the Persecutions that Have Been Built in France … (London, 1694), Huntington Library. See also “Quatercentenary Celebration of the Promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, April 13, 1598” (New York: Huguenot Society of America, 2002), Massachusetts Historical Society.

45.  C. C. H., The Massacre at St. Bartholomew and the French Revolution (Boston: Medium, 1848), Huntington Library. At the same site, see also William Gammell, The Huguenots and the Edict of Nantes: A Paper Read Before the Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, RI: Providence, 1886) and The King’s Edict and Declaration upon the Former Edicts of Pacification (London: Man, 1599).

46.  Cherokee Phoenix & Indian Advocate, 28 May 1831.

47.  Barbara and Henri van der Zee, A Sweet and  Alien Land: The Story of Dutch New York (New York: Viking, 1978). See also Peter Mancall, Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson, A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (New York: Basic, 2009). See also G. M. Asher, Henry Hudson the Navigator: The Original Documents in Which His Career Is Recorded, Collected, Partly Translated and Annotated (New York: Franklin, 1963).

48.  John Meredith Read, Jr., A Historical Inquiry Concerning Henry Hudson, His Friends, Relatives and Early Life, His Connection with the Muscovy Company and Discovery of Delaware Bay (Albany, NY: Munsell, 1866), 9, 14, 58, 129, 130.

49.  License, June 1604, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers… 1603–1610, 121.

50.  License, January 9, 1607, in Green, ed., Calendar  of State Papers… 1603–1610, 344.

51.  Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World (London: Allen Lane, 2009).

52.  Alan Gordon, The Hero, and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010); Ramsay Cook, ed., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). See also Declaration to the Queen, January 1598 in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1601–1603 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 1, 16: On May 3, 1588, “we granted a patent to merchants of Exeter, London and Barnstaple for 10 years of the sole traffic to the river of Venaga, and  all along the coast of Guinea to the River of Gambia, which term is now about to expire.” Not unconnected was a report soon thereafter, encased in the same volume, 306: Report, August 24, 1599: “License to John Evelyn and others for 10 years, of the sole making of saltpeter and gunpowder.”

53.  Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

54.  Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2018), 267–68.

55.  Bolivar Christian, The Scotch Irish Settlers in the Valley of Virginia: Alumni Address at Washington College, Lexington … (Richmond: Macfarlane and Ferguson, 1860).

56.  Report, 1601, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers … 1601–1603, 566. See also A Discoverie Occasioned Upon the Late Defeat, Given to the Arch-Rebels Tyronne and ODonell by the Right Honourable the Lord Mountjoy, Lord Deputie of Ireland, the 24 of December 1601, Being Christmas Eave… By Raph Byrchesha (London: ML, 1602) and The Arraignment, Arraignment, Tryal and Condemnation of Robert Earl of Essex and Henry Earl of Southampton at Westminster the 19th of February 1600 … for Rebelliously Conspiring and Endeavoring the Subversion of the Government by Confederacy with Try-Owen that Popish Traytor and His Complices … (London: Basset, 1679).

57.  Royal Cedula-Madrid to Governor Gonzalo Mendez de Canzo, November 9, 1598, AGI 86-5-19, Santo Domingo 2528, John Stetson Collection.

58.  Report by Fray Francisco de Pareja, October 12, 1599, AGI 54-5-20, Santo Domingo 235, John Stetson Collection.

59.  Report, June 1, 1599, AGI 54-5-14. Santo Domingo 229, John Stetson Collection.

60.  Report by Gonzalo Mendez de Canzo, February 28, 1600, AGI 54-5-9/32, Santo Domingo 224, John Stetson Collection.

61.  Article by Susan Parker, February 7, 1999, vertical file on “Africans, First Spanish Period,” St. Augustine Historical Society-Florida.

62.  Report, November 27, 1601, AGI 54-5-9, Santo Domingo 224, John Stetson Collection.

63.  Report, January 23, 1602, AAGI 54-5-14, Santo Domingo 229, John Stetson Collection.

64.  Report, May 22, 1602, AGI 54-5-9, Santo Domingo 224, John Stetson Collection.

65.  Report, May 22, 1602, Volume 5, Woodbury Lowery Papers.

66.  Giles Van Harwick to Peter Artson, November 19–20, 1598, in Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers … 1598–1601, 119.

67.  Royal Cedula-Valladolid to Pedro de Ibarra, February 10, 1603, AGI 86-5-19, Santo Domingo 2528, John B. Stetson Collection.

68.  Pedro de Valdes to Madrid, September 22, 1603, AGI 54-1-16, Santo Domingo 100, John Stetson Collection.

69.  Report to His Catholic Majesty, March 26, 1603, Carton 33, Herbert Bolton Papers, University of California, Berkeley.

70.  Governor Pedro de Ibarra to Madrid, April 12, 1604, AGI 54-5-9/49, Santo Domingo

224, John Stetson Collection.

71.  Governor Pedro de Ibarra to Madrid, December 26, 1605, AGI 54–5-9/65, Santo Domingo 224, John Stetson Collection.

72.  Report from Maria de Junco, 1606, AGI 53-2-9, John Stetson Collection.

73.  Report, August 1, 1607, AGI 54-5-9, John Stetson Collection.

74.  Proposal by Kathleen Deegan, “Indians and Blacks in Colonial St. Augustine,” 1985–1986, vertical file on, ”Africans-First Spanish Period,” St. Augustine Historical Society.

75.  Jacqueline Fretwell, St. Augustine Historical Society, to Isaiah Williams, April 14, 1989, vertical file on “Blacks-Miscellaneous,” St. Augustine Historical Society: “The first Negro child born in St. Augustine was Agustin, legitimate son of Agustin and Francisca, slaves … baptized Sunday August 20, 1606”: note that it is likely there were earlier Negro births on the peninsula before this date.

76.  William Channing, A Letter on the Annexation of Texas to the United States (London: Green, 1837), Missouri Historical Society-St. Louis.

77.  Theodore G. Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero: Mexico’s First Indian President (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

78.  Theda Perdue, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: St. Martin’s, 2016) and Theda Perdue, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Viking, 2007).

79.  See e.g. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant  Crusade, 1800–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

80. Report, November 6, 1607, AGI 54-5-9/79, John B. Stetson Collection.

81.  Fray Alsonso de Penaranda to Madrid, January 1608, AGI 54-5-9/82, John Stetson Collection.

82.  Royal Cedula to Bishop of Cuba, November 8, 1608, AGI 87-5-2, Tomo V, Mexico 1065, John Stetson Collection.

83.  Governor Pedro de Ibarra, August 22, 1608, AGI 54-5-9/96, John Stetson Collection.

84.  Royal Cedula to Governor de Ibarra, November 8, 1608, AGI 87-5-2, Tomo V, Mexico 1065, John Stetson Collection.

85.  Royal Cedula to Bishop of Cuba, November 8, 1608, AGI 87-5-2, Tomo V, Mexico 1065, John Stetson Collection.

86.  Governor de Ibarra to Madrid, January 6, 1609, AGI 54-5-9/98, John B. Stetson Collection.

87.  Geronimo de Torres to Fray Geronimo Santiago, April 1609, AGI 53-2-10, John Stetson Collection.

88.  Directives, June 19, 1609 and October 20, 1609, AGI 2-5-3/16, John Stetson Collection.

89.  Report by Governor Pedro de Ibarra, November 28, 1609, AGI 54-3-6, John B. Stetson Collection.

90.  Royal Cedula-Madrid to Governor of Cuba, Gaspar Ruiz de Pereda, March 30, 1611, John B. Stetson Collection.

91.  Herbert Eugene Bolton, “The Mission as a  Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies,” American Historical Review 23, no. 1 (October 1917): 42–61, 43, 45, 52, 61. See also Mary Ross, ed., Writings and Cartography of Herbert Eugene Bolton Reprinted from New Spain and the West (1932), Huntington Library.

92. Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, 2018, 193, 213, 220, 229, 237, 254, 262, 285, 371, 379.

93.  See e.g. A Petition Against the Jewes Presented to the Kings Majestie and the Parliament Together with Several Reasons Proving the East India Trade, the Turkey Trade … May all be Driven Without Transporting Gold or Silver out of England … (London: Violet, 1661): “The Jewes are so hated by the Turks … these Jewes are the greatest blasphemers of Christ of any people in the world, so that if they be  permitted to continue amongst us they will bring the wrath of God upon us … [they] are either by birth, Portugals or Spaniards … the Jewes in all countries they come into are generally counterfeiters of money and adulterers of all manner of merchandise.”

94.  Des Ekin, The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates (Dublin: O’Brien, 2006).

95.  Des Ekin, The Last Armada: Queen Elizabeth, Juan del Aguila, and Hugh O’Neill: The Story of the 100 Day Spanish Invasion (New York: Pegasus, 2015), 13, 38, 287, 336, 340. Brian Mac Cuarta, S.J., ed., Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700: Colonization and Its Consequences (Dublin: Four Courts, 2011). See also A Watch Worde for Warre … Rumors Amongst Us and the Suspected Coming of the Spanyard Against Us. Wherein We May Learned how to Prepare Ourselves to Repell the Enemie and to Behave Ourselves … (Cambridge: Legal, 1596)

96.  Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump under Fire (New York: Holt, 2019), 235.

See also Abigail Pogrebin, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (New York: Broadway, 2005), 118, 220: The late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke mentioned that the financier and former U.S. envoy to France, Felix Rohatyn, observed that “French articles about him always referred to him as Jewish, where American articles never mention

See also Abigail Pogrebin, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (New York: Broadway, 2005), 118, 220: The late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke mentioned that the financier and former U.S. envoy to France, Felix Rohatyn, observed that “French articles about him always referred to him as Jewish, where American articles never mention

it.” My interpretation of this duality is that in the United States the construction of “whiteness” has subsumed being Jewish to a greater degree than in France.

97.  Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

98. Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 3, 21, 22, 23, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 132, 236. 99.  Robert Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End, 1993).

 

For updates click homepage here