The Dawning of the Apocalypse. Gerald Horne
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 indigenes on the North American mainland, before being massacred in response by the would-be captives, 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