Slaves of the World: Unite or Perish. Part One
The New York Times commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in North America, because the earliest bill of sale for negro slaves was in Virginia in 1619. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the custodian of Black History Month promoted it. Congress established the 400 Years of African-American History Commission. The NY Times 1619 Projectclaimed this represents the “nation’s birth year.. as the beginning of American slavery.”
Their Pulitzer Prize winning 100 page magazine spread lopped off a century of Spanish, French and English expeditions that brought Africans to Florida and Virginia. Not to mention the longhistory of slaves around the world, the Americas no exception.Slavery was fundamental to planet wide economies from gathering and hunting to plantation agriculture.
The first slaves were women for most tribes around the planet, the division of drudge labor never being equal among the sexes. Prisoners from raids and war were mostly women and young of both sexes, while adult men were killed or hobbled to die working in mines, kilns, forges, fields and forests as empires arose.
The Arawak and Taino, Caribbean island tribes were subject to slaving raids from the Carib, their more warlike neighbors the sea was named for. All were genocidally enslaved by the Spanish “discoverers” of the New World within a few decades of Christopher Columbus landing in 1492. These Spanish conquistadores had begun their pillaging in the Canary Islands a century before, enslaving and killing off the Guanche natives. African slaves and free negroes were on their ships and expeditions from Columbus on. As Indians perished, Africans were kidnapped and traded for guns and baubles to replace them as slaves.
Colonization of the New World by conquest required theft of native lands. European monarchs were awarded the “right” to those lands by the Doctrine of Discovery, a Papal Bull from the late 15th century. The Doctrine of Discovery was adopted by the newly formed United States in 1792, providing legal justification for theft of lands from the Indians. John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court ruled that the Doctrine of Discovery meant white settlers had the ‘exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or conquest’ in 1823. Settlers poured into coveted lands as Indians were eradicated,enslaved or repulsed. African and African-American slaves were brought in to work the cash crops European American settlers desired.
Even if we only consider Africans brought to North America in our nation’s slave history, this dates back at least to 1513 on Juan Ponce de Leon’s expedition. He heard about a new land to the west from the Lucayo Indians of the Bahamas as his ships wended their way north through that coral island chain. They called it Cautio. Caution would have been a more fit name. Natives on the mainland were hostile to their landing parties, having been preyed on by slavers before his official discovery.
The ship’s lookout spied the east coast of northern Florida during the feast of the flowers after Easter that year. Ponce De Leon named the new continent La Florida which stuck for the peninsular part of it. He sent his Taino guide from Puerto Rico and two African freemen, Juan Gonzalez Ponce de Leon and Juan Garrido to scout inland as barometers of barbarian temperament. The two Juans, while not slaves at the time, had been bought and sold from Africa in their past. We should credit them as the first to walk beyond the sandy shores of North America.
After they climbed over the oat grass crested sand dunes onto the coastal ridge, they entered a maze of scrub oak and pine savannah. Perhaps they crossed the ridge and descended inland through trackless territory, laced with mud mires and swamps. If they penetrated deeper into the interior where “crowded custard apple tangles grew fiercely on roots that became gnarled trunks”, their path would have been dark and cacaphonous with birds and cicadas.
These jungles were “edged with tall leather ferns and twisted vines, which no man could get through without axes or dynamite.” Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, wrote in her 1947 environmental classic, The Everglades:River of Grass.“‘Beyond grew the trackless sawgrass, which is not a grass, but a primordial sedge.”
African slaves were brought to Florida in 1527 in the ill fated expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez. Only four men returned out of 600 Spaniards, slaves and servants that set out to conquer and colonize La Florida. Their dreams of gold came to naught as the fierce Apalachee drove them to sea on desperate rafts. The survivors of a Gulf storm ended up naked on the beaches of what is now Texas. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andres Donates and the “negro Moor” Estebanico walked to Mexico from there with many adventures along the way.
Little Stephen was the first Negro slave to gain his freedom in North America, trading up into an indentured servant to a Karankawa tribe of that coast, along with the three surviving Spaniards. After several years the four survivors fled their servitude as a team of equals.
Little Stevie was the first self freed African on the continent, an original Maroon. Estebanico acted as the herald for their troupe of exotic healers as they walked from village to village towards the west and south for Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca performed Catholic rituals, the others chanted prayers, while a large wooden cross was dragged along. They healed what ailed most of the natives who flocked to see them on arrival in a new town. Cabeza de Vaca even raised one believer from the dead, although he was careful to avoid heretical claims when he wrote up his tale.
Each of the four wandering prophets had their gifts, and they worked their act all the way to “civilization.” The first traveling faith healing Christian gospel revival in the New World. These evangelists converted thousands of Indians to a crude Christianity, feasting and healing as they went. They were ferried across deserts and over mountain ranges by each tribe they blessed, most of whom walked with them to the next, all being feted by this tribe, who then led to the next, until they walked deep into New Spain.
The first Spaniards they met were on a slaving expedition from the province of New Galicia. They were almost taken captive because of their naked, sun darkened skin. Against the pilgrims’ fervent entreaties to these clothed Christians on horseback to let their native followers return to their homelands and spread the Good Word, the soldiers enslaved them all, including Little Stephen. Re-enslaved in his case. He spoke Spanish, but was a shade too dark to pass as “blanco.” Christians they might be, but Indians and Negroes were property until proven otherwise with proper documents.
Little Stephen remained a slave, when he led an expedition from Mexico City to find fabled Cibola, the seven cities of gold, legendarily founded by seven Spanish bishops who’d fled Spain after the Moors invaded in the 8th century. He told his new master he’d heard rumors of these Catholic cities during their long jaunt and sold Francisco Vázquez de Coronado on the quest. Little Stevie was sent on a scouting party with a priest and soldiers for Coronado’s exploration of the southwest region of North America.
Estebanico was the first hypersexualized AfricanAmerican male, said to attract native women from every tribe they traveled through. He was killed in New Mexico by Zuni arrows, either by a jealous husband or as a spy for the Spanish. Possibly he escaped with their collusion, since his death was not witnessed by Spaniards who waited at a distance. Word was sent back, your emissary was killed. Cibola was never found, although Coronado did see the Grand Canyon and many other marvels, while wreaking havoc among native villages in his militarized wake.
Let’s not overlook the French connection to African slaves in the first short lived colony in North America by European powers. Huegonot French settlers landed here in 1564 and built Fort Caroline in north Florida or south Georgia with the help of native warriors and African workers. Fifty African slaves were granted their liberty on arrival in celebration of a New World. These were the first African slaves freed by their owners in North America. The colony fell, Africans remained.
Sir Francis Drake released African slaves captured on the Spanish Main, when he attacked St. Augustine, Florida in May of 1586. Drake had confiscated American Indian and African slaves in his destruction of Santo Domingo and Cartagena earlier on that privateering expedition, along with galley slaves of Turks, French, German, other Europeans and Moors.
Drake also recruited escaped slaves from the Cimarrons of Panama and gained Indians as allies to ambush a Spanish caravan of stolen treasure from their conquest of the Inca empire. He transported 300 Indians, mostly women, 200 negroes, Turks and Moors out of the Caribbean to North America. Some replaced his dead sailors, others were left at St. Augustine and Roanoke. The Melungeons of North Carolina were thought to be African/ Indian descendants who took refuge in the Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina Virginia border, a maroon society that existed from 17th through the early 19th century.
A century of African presence in North America has been scissored out of popular awareness, because an historian found a bill of sale dated 1619.