The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne
Greek and Arab maritime science, connecting the outskirts of Europe to the Atlantic world and in the process shaping Europe’s global vision. Portugal pioneered the oceanic sailing ship, building large vessels for Asian trade and, not coincidentally, made advances in naval warfare as well.100 Meanwhile, at this juncture, though similarly facing the sea, England lagged behind Iberian mariners and many of their works on navigation were translations from Spanish and Portuguese. 101
Europeans were seeking the source of the famed gold of Guinea, from which the English coin of the same name was minted, and when by 1482 Lisbon erected its largest castle in Africa, São Jorge de Mina, it was not just slaves but gold that was contemplated.102 Indeed, the gold trade in Africa proved more valuable to Lisbon than the slave trade until about 1650, revealingly, when this latter odious commerce took off under London’s aegis.103
This imposing edifice—this castle—complemented what was seen as their first outpost, south of the Sahara: El Mina in 1469. A Portuguese explorer had arrived farther south in the Kongo (Congo) by 1483.104 The resultant conversion of the African elite there to Catholicism did not save the Congolese from mass enslavement but most likely facilitated it as this vast land became one of the first victims of the new epoch featuring “race” replacing religion as a marker.105
In some ways, the smaller Portugal, despite its grand pretensions, was to serve as an advance guard for England. London allied with Lisbon early on as a counterweight to a rising Madrid. As was the pattern, this was reflected in marital patterns as the fabled “Henry the Navigator” of Portugal had an English mother (this too undergirded the coming “whiteness” project). Feeding into this project as well was Lisbon’s heavy reliance on “New Christians” in Africa, which was eroding religion as an axis of society and propelling the rising identity that was “race.”106
Despite this early reliance on Lisbon, London, according to scholar Andrew Lambert, “carefully obscured Portuguese input,” though even such pioneers as Walter Raleigh worked closely with Iberian seafarers. The Dutch too exploited Portuguese expertise, then in turn were plucked by Englishmen. On the other hand, the advent of movable type printing gave the English access to the intellectual and cultural riches of sea-power precursors.107
Thus, in the prelude to 1492, enslavement was an established fact in Europe and Europeans had been enslaving Africans—and others—for decades. With 1492, this heinous process was extended to the Americas and deepened in Africa. However, the Spanish, the first movers, and taking religious seriously, made the fateful decision (admittedly under pressure) to develop a Free Negro population in the Americas, not even taking the precaution of depriving them of arms. Like an adroit chess grandmaster, London countered eventually by seeking to tighten the enslavement noose around the necks of Africans, while incorporating other Europeans into the favored category of “whiteness,” or Pan-Europeanism—up to and including, admittedly with bumpiness, the persecuted Jewish minority—which proved to be the winning ticket in the valuable sweepstakes of settler colonialism.
CHAPTER 2
Apocalypse Nearer
Upon arriving in the Americas in October 1492, Columbus compared the palm trees he saw to those of “Guinea,” West Africa, a land where he had sojourned earlier. “I have travelled to Guinea,” he confessed, though his experience there put him on guard, as he set out to enslave Tainos, Arawaks, and the indigenes of the Americas. “When men have been brought from Guinea to Portugal to learn the language,” he said a few weeks after landing in the “New World,” Lisbon was traduced when “they returned and the Portuguese thought that they could make use of them in their own country, because of the good treatment and the gifts they gave them,” but “when they got to land they … [dis]appeared.”1 Early on Columbus rounded up about 1,200 indigenous prisoners-of-war and selected five hundred for sale in Spain. This was not an extraordinary event in that it was the Crown that had enslaved the entire population of Malaga in 1487 and sold enslaved Muslims throughout the Mediterranean. Still, the Americas’ main crop seemed to be the enslaved.2
Columbus’s crew had been trained and disciplined in earlier voyages to Guinea, which hardly predisposed them to humanitarianism in the Caribbean. That is, there had been Castilian voyages to Guinea as early as 1453, but as these would-be conquistadors encountered stiff opposition there, they were impelled to sail westward, bulked up on the wealth of the Americas, and then returned post-1492 with a vengeance, as the zeal of the crusader was replaced, if not supplemented, by the zeal (and greed) of the merchant.3
Columbus, the Genoan, had a Portuguese spouse, a precursor of the Pan-Europeanism that was to take flight subsequently. Although the countries were neighbors, Portugal and Castile/Aragon often were at odds; as early as the thirteenth century they were jousting over the bounty that was the Canary Islands. Papal bulls backed one side, then the other, until the Treaty of Alcacovas in 1479 seemed to disfavor Lisbon.4 It was also in 1479 that Aragon and Castile united, and the resultant monarchy also controlled parts of what became Italy, all of 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