Dispatches: Reflections on the Atlantic World, volume 2

D i s p a t c h e s

From Margins to Centre

Afro-Descendant Conquistadors of the Americas: How Conquistadors of African Heritage Challenge Stereotypes of the Spanish Conquest Page 1 Mixed-Race Children of the Atlantic World Page 8

From Great Men to Middlemen: A Survey of Historiographical Approaches on Cultural Brokers in the North American Fur Trade Page 15

Cores and Peripheries

The Columbian Exchange: Sheep, Cattle, and Colonial Growth in the Americas Page 19

Agency and Interest: The Role of African Middlemen in the Atlantic Slave Trade Page 29 (Un)seen Traders of the Atlantic World Page 36

On the Atlantic

Newfoundland Lost: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage in the Early Atlantic World Page 43

Under the Banner of the Jolly Roger: Pirate Flags of the Atlantic World Page 50

Spectres of the Atlantic

Decolonizing the Curriculum: A comparative review of Canada Revisited: A Social and Political History of Canada to 1911 and Nelson Socials 9 Page 55

The Woman King (2022): A Review Page 61 “This Place is their Legacy”: Uncovering the Dark History of the Plantation Wedding Industry Page 66

Decolonizing the Pope’s Museum: The Repatriation of Indigenous Artifacts in the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum Page 72

About the MAIH program at TWU

The Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities (MAIH) program at Trinity Western University includes studies in three disciplinary tracks—English, History, or Philosophy. Students complete thirty semester hours in either general humanities or they concentrate their studies in one of the three disciplines. Students satisfy their degree requirements by taking three core courses, disciplinary course electives and, in most cases, a final assignment. HIST 692 is one of the course electives in the History stream.

Editor

Robynne Rogers Healey

Designer/ Art Director

Tammy Chomiak

Writers

Andrew Dick Heather Lam

Janina Ritzen Pulfer

Brian Thomson

Karolina Zyra

From The Editor

References for each article and uncaptioned images are located at the end of the magazine. There you will find endnotes that correspond to each of the section.

Find endnotes with this button.

ENDNOTES

Endnotes Page 76

Cover image A Ship Sailing on the Sea During Sunset, pexels.com

E D I T O R I A L

Welcome to our digital magazine project! This project is a summative, collaborative undertaking of the students in the Fall 2022 course History 692 – (Re)Conceiving the Atlantic World. This is a graduate history course that is part of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities (MAIH) program at Trinity Western University. Atlantic history studies the interconnections between the geographic spaces around the Atlantic Ocean. It considers the Atlantic world as a unit of analysis. Historians generally periodize this world as beginning in the fifteenth century with the first interactions between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous Americans and ending in the nineteenth century with western Atlantic independence movements, the end of the transatlantic slave trade, and the industrial revolution. Atlantic history explores the complex social, political, and economic interactions between the peoples of the Atlantic world over that time. While analyzed as a geographic unit, it was not an isolated one; as students here have learned, Atlantic history is best approached as a slice of world history.

This magazine is organized into four thematic sections—From Margins to Centre; Cores and Peripheries; On the Atlantic; and Spectres of the Atlantic. Each section contains articles that explore an area of Atlantic history related to the theme. Each of the authors have approached their topics from a perspective informed by their areas of particular interest based on the section’s theme. Articles in the first section, From Margins to Centre, seek to recentre marginalized voices and stories, placing the focus on those whose contributions to Atlantic history have often been considered insignificant. Explorations of conquistadors of colour, mixed-race children, and the historiography of cultural brokers in North America offer insights into more complex understandings of the Atlantic world. Those familiar with Atlantic history will be aware of the importance of understanding the multiple ways that Cores and Peripheries interacted, often in unexpected ways. As can be seen in case studies from the Columbian exchange, an analysis of African middlemen in the slave trade, and an investigation of the smugglers who ran contraband goods, historical actors and events on the peripheries of empires were often as significant as those at their core in shaping the Atlantic world. Articles in On the Atlantic engage topics related to the impact of the ocean itself. Tempestuous weather in the North Atlantic presented a considerable obstacle to early colonial enterprises, and ships crossing the Atlantic used flags to signal their imperial connections or their piratical intentions. The final section of the magazine reflects on ways that the Atlantic past remains present. Spectres of the Atlantic echo around us today in high school textbooks, in popular culture, and in museums that house cultural artifacts. The echoes of the Atlantic world remind us of the silences inherent in the production of history and the stories we still need to tell. As MichelRolph Trouillot said in his seminal 1995 work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, “We now know that narratives are made of silences, not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production. We also know that the present is itself no clearer than the past” (152–53). Despite the magazine’s limitations, we hope that you will encounter new histories in these pages and see familiar stories in a different light.

This project would not have been possible without the collective efforts of a wonderful group of graduate students who willingly ventured into this learning experience. A project like this requires extensive research, thoughtful engagement, and clear communication. It also requires multiple revisions. Balancing a heavy load of class work, research, writing, and revisions with full- or part-time employment requires commitment to excellence. The dedication of these students to practicing the historical craft has been inspiring. Thank you to Janina Ritzen Pulfer for standardizing our headshots. A special note of gratitude must go to Tammy Chomiak for sharing her talents and skills in design to create this final product at a very busy and stressful time of year.

Robynne Rogers Healey, PhD (she/her) Professor of History robynne.healey@twu.ca

Robynne Rogers Healey

Robynne Rogers Healey, PhD is chair and professor of history and the co-director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada. She is associate editor (history) of the Brill Press series Research Perspectives in Quaker Studies. Her publications include From Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community Among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 (2006), Quaker Studies: An Overview, the Current State of the Field (2018, with C. Wess Daniels and Jon R. Kershner), Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690–1830 (2021), Gender and Quakerism in Transition, 1800–1820 (in press 2023) and many articles and chapters in the field of transatlantic Quaker history. She teaches graduate-level and senior-level courses in the fields of Atlantic history, gender, war and peace, and history of the family.

Brian Thomson

Brian Thomson, B.A. (UBC) is completing his graduate degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Trinity Western University. His interests cover medieval and early modern history and philosophy of science, religion, and literature. For his major research essay studies the reception of Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory among the English Puritans.

Karolina Zyra

Karolina Zyra, a former Trinity Western University graduate of 2013 (B.A.) and 2014 (B.Ed.), is now in the second year of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities program. She is also a full-time secondary school teacher at Langley Secondary School, teaching Social Studies, Philosophy, Asian Studies, and Leadership. She looks forward to continuing her studies, focusing on gender history, specifically the lives of women in the Medieval period.

Heather Lam

Heather Lam, BA is completing her graduate degree at Trinity Western University's Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities program. In addition to Atlantic history, her areas of interest include Classical Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Currently, Heather is currently working on her major research essay which focuses on a group of entrepreneurial West African slave-holding women known as the signares.

Janina Ritzen Pulfer

Janina Ritzen Pulfer, BA is currently enrolled in the TWU MAIH program. Her area of study currently focuses on propaganda of the family in the Soviet Union. Future areas of interest include Stalinist society and culture, Soviet workplace propaganda, the Soviet secret police, and counterculture civilian life within the USSR. Janina has a history of photography which has provided inspiration for these fields, as well as an appreciation for photos as primary source material.

Andrew Dick

Andrew Dick, BA is in the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is a full-time project manager at Genesis Restorations Ltd.. His specialization is in the history of religion and migration, and early modern history. He has completed his major essay focused on the effects of migration on religious praxis and theology.

compass-map-sailing-ships from Pixabay.com

R O M M A R G I N S T O C E N T R E

Afro-Descendant Conquistadors of the Americas: How Conquistadors of African Heritage Challenge Stereotypes of the Spanish Conquest

Conquistadors in the Americas have traditionally been portrayed as white men with goatees, wearing breastplates and kettle hats. African and Indigenous peoples on the continent, in contrast, have often been portrayed solely as victims of white Spaniards. Yet, recent scholarship has complicated this portrait, unearthing the more active role of African and Indigenous persons in the conquest of the Americas.1 A survey of three conquistadors of colour— Esteban de Dorantes, a Moorish slave who took a leading role in expeditions to North America; Juan Garrido, a free West African conqueror serving Spain in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica; and Juan Beltrán de Magaña, an Afro-Indigenous warrior whose war efforts against the Mapuche in Chile were renowned among the colonists— reveals that some men of African heritage have historically played significantly active roles in the exploration, conquests, and border conflicts of North, Central, and South America in service of Spain. The cases of Esteban, Garrido, and Beltrán put more colour into a whitewashed history, revealing the agency of a minority of Africans who advanced their social prestige through colonial contributions during the early Spanish Atlantic.

A white conquistador. Jacques Reich, Portrait drawing of Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto, 1791, illustration, in Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. 2, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887), 152. Wikimedia Commons.

Recent studies of non-white accounts of the conquest suggest that accounts by white conquistadors may be exaggerated. In his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, historian Matthew Restall says the trope of great conquistadors partly derived from self-promoting documents known as probanzas de merito (“proofs of merit”), wherein conquistadors wrote to the king about their service in order to receive rewards from the crown.2 For example, the sixteenth-century probanzas of Juan de Alvarado (1562), Rodrigo de Quiroga (1560), and

Pedro Martin de Villarreal (1573) start with the claimant’s testimony, followed by requests and eyewitness testimonies.3 This means readers should take conquistadors’ accounts of themselves critically for they would likely be disposed towards portraying themselves favourably. It is also known conquistadors were dependent on Indigenous and African goodwill. As an Indigenous aristocrat, interpreter, and encomendero once noted to Gonzalo Pizzaro in 1547 that conquistadors needed the support of Indigenous peoples, free Africans, and slaves for colonization, and in 1553, a viceroy claimed that Indigenous and black inhabitants outnumbered colonists in New Spain.4 We know that Indigenous people assisted conquistadors from Indigenous requests for compensation from the Spaniards for aiding, sheltering, and feeding them in their wars against the Mexica.5 At least in the early stages of Spanish colonization in the Americas during the first half of the sixteenth century, the popular image of an all-powerful white minority easily ruling over a powerless majority of persons of colour cannot be considered accurate. Though traditional histories pass them over as mere subjects of white oppression, the success of conquest sometimes hinged on Africans and Indigenous persons who actively contributed to Spanish dominance in the Americas.

Esteban de Dorantes, a black Moor from Azamor in Morocco, was an indispensable interpreter-guide in the first Spanish exploration of northernmost New Spain (contemporary northern Mexico, the Gulf Coast of the United States, and the Southwestern United States). According to Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of the expedition, Pánfilo de Narváez set sail on June 17, 1527, after Charles V granted him the right to own the lands from Rio Grande to Florida.6 This region encompasses the modern-day Gulf Coast of the United

A drawing of a black conquistador who may be Juan Garrido himself with Hernán Cortés. Depiction of a black soldier in Hernán Cortés’ entourage in the Codex Duran, 16th century, illustration, Wikimedia Commons.

States and the states of Florida, Texas, and New Mexico. They intended to sail first to Havana, Cuba, but after desertions and a shipwreck on the island in 1527, the fleet was blown off course and washed up in Florida in April 1528.7 They wandered as castaways for nine years until they were found in 1536. Over that time, Narváez’s expedition, which started out with six-hundred men, dwindled to only four: Esteban, his master Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Cabeza de Vaca, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado.8 Lost in a land neither Europeans nor Africans had seen, the castaways had to learn to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive. These nine years transformed Esteban’s identity. He began his exile as an Arabic speaker and Christian slave; by its end he had become an explorer who served Spanish interests and a healer of an Amerindian tradition. The evolution in his identify ambiguates the stereotype of the conquistador as a white warrior.9

By learning the language, culture, and geography of Indigenous peoples, Esteban became an interpreter-guide, important skills to aid in the Spanish conquest.10 Spaniards did not rely on white conquistadors alone to do all the work of colonization, they also relied on the help of particular Indigenous nations to conquer other Indigenous nations.11 This required acculturation and learning multiple languages to communicate with the various nations. When the four survivors were hosted by the Han people, who firmly believed these foreigners were extraordinary, Esteban and the others were forced to become medicinemen.12 This earned Esteban status not only with the Han but also with the Concho, who gifted him a gourd rattle believed to have healing powers.13 Though some argue Esteban was not an official interpreter,14 he had enough cultural rapport to build relationships with the Han, Concho, and Opanta. According to his fellow castaway Cabeza de Vaca, the Spaniards made Esteban act as a mediator between them and the Opanta, learning of paths and settlements in the surrounding area through the slave’s frequent conversations.15 The Spaniards used Esteban’s skills as an interpreter to their advantage by gaining knowledge of the territories lying north of Mexico, which would be useful for future colonizers. By the time the four explorers encountered the Spanish slave ship that rescued them, Esteban was wellequipped to guide its captain and fifty Indigenous allies to find any surviving Spaniards.16

In 1539, three years after his rescue, Esteban was chosen to assist the Coronado expedition in exploring modern-day Arizona and New Mexico. Though he was still a slave, Kevin Young argues that Esteban occupied a “new hybrid identity,” serving as a missionary, explorer, and diplomatic representative.17 His new master, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado the Viceroy of New Spain, tasked Esteban to guide the Franciscan Fray Marcos of Nice in his searching for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola located in present-day New Mexico.18 Fray Marcos wrote that he sent Esteban ahead with over three-hundred men.19 The Spanish explorers’ trust in Esteban shows they valued his ability to interact with local Indigenous nations. The only time he failed at this was fatal. Esteban’s contingent entered the settlement of Cibola without permission, thinking they would be well-received; they were not and Esteban was killed along with many of his contingent.20 A writer for the Coronado expedition opined that the interpreter-guide failed because he coveted the glory of discovering Cibola, a place believed to be abundant with gold and silver.21 Whether Esteban served Spain for glory, fear of his masters, or hope for his freedom remains a mystery, but he was evidently useful to conquistadors. Though a slave, Esteban exhibited a degree of agency when he was entrusted by white Spaniards to penetrate Indigenous territories, leading hundreds on a scouting mission to a location that would be later colonized by Spain.

Juan Garrido in Hernán Cortés’ army in Codex Azcatitlan, Le conquistador noir Juan Garrido représenté dans le codex Azcatitlan, c. 1501 and 1600, illustration, Wikimedia Commons.

Juan Garrido, a West African conquistador, freely chose to join the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. Born around 1480, Garrido represented a common type of black conquistador that arrived to the Americas in the first decades of the conquest.22 Based on Ricardo Alegría’s and Peter Gerhard’s studies, Restall believes Garrido was born in West Africa and, either as a slave or a freeman, travelled to Lisbon where he was baptized as a Catholic before he moved to Seville.23 He walked in Spanish cities in a time when awareness of the American continent was still new in the Spanish imagination. Though uncertainty exists regarding whether he was a slave or free, Garrido always emphasized that he alone decided to serve Spain as a conquistador. On September 27, 1538, Garrido presented his probanza to the mayor of Mexico City. “[B]eing free and emancipated,” he said, “I worked very well and served his majesty with my person and at my expense.”24 For some, it may be surprising that a black man, who was part of a demographic enslaved by colonists during this time, would so voluntarily invest in conquest.

Garrido’s probanza listed several of his accomplishments. He participated in the conquests of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guadalupe, and Dominica against the Caribs; later he explored Florida and Mexico; and he fought in Tlaxcala and Tenochtitlan.25 Five witnesses confirmed he fought in Tenochtitlan with Hernán Cortés in 1521.26 Alegría says Garrido went on an expedition to Michoacán and Zacatula, where he led slaves in a goldmine.27 As Gerhard adds, Garrido owned both black and Indigenous slaves, showing that at least during this time, a conquistador’s blackness did not rescind his status as a potential slave-owner.28 Besides his military successes, Garrido’s probanza also outlined his virtues as a citizen. At a time when maize was the major staple food in New Spain, he claimed he was the first to sow wheat to see if it would be a productive crop. This improved local agriculture.29

These feats suggest that a few Africans willingly contributed to the Spanish conquest. Early sixteenth-century Africans who served Spaniards were not only slaves, but also voluntary colonists themselves and unarmed or armed auxiliaries.30 Witnesses confirmed that Garrido’s services were voluntary and that he never asked for rewards before his probanza, despite being a poor, hard worker who struggled to provide for his wife and children.31 His race and wealth did not obstruct his probanza to the king. Based on new evidence, David Sánchez argues Juan Garrido returned to Spain with Hernán Cortés to verify the status of his probanza and also sold his Indigenous slave.32 Garrido’s case shows that though some Africans were victims of colonial slavery, others were slave-owning conquistadors who actively participated in colonization with Spaniards.

In the far-flung corner of Chile, Juan Beltrán de Magaña began his celebrated career as an AfroIndigenous conquistador. Beltrán’s probanza said he came to the Americas in 1543.33 Restall argues Beltrán was unusual for a non-white conquistador; most sought a station in the colonies after their conquests in Mesoamerica or the Andes, but he permanently pursued warfare in the fringes.34 Beltrán wanted to fight as an end in itself, not merely as a means to prosperity. He fought Gonzalo Pizarro in the battle of Jaquijahuana of 1548 in Peru, after which he travelled to serve the governor of Chile.35 Beltrán then helped to explore, conquer, and settle the cities of Concepción, Confines, Imperial, Rica, and Valdivia.36 Following the governor’s death in a Mapuche uprising, Beltrán said he fought like a good soldier without taking anything for himself.37 Once again, this third case of a non-white conquistador showcases the openness of the early Spanish Atlantic world, where Spanish colonists accepted the voluntary participation of some Africans who wanted advance their prestige.

In 1536, Beltrán applied for his probanza. In return for his services, he requested a salary and a corregimiento—a large encomienda owned by authorized officials with a fixed pension and a fee proportional to the worker labour time—in either the outlying areas of Cuzco, La Paz, or La Plata.38 An appeal to the king of Spain from an Afro-Indigenous person was a bold move, even as a captain who served in a colony, since persons of African heritage were still expected to either voluntarily fight to the death for Spain or serve in positions under their white superiors as “gatekeepers” of fringe settlements away from the Spanish headquarters.39 Though valuable to the marginal colonies, Beltrán did not have the same rights as a white conquistador in the more central regions.

A battle between Spaniard conquistadors and Mapuches during the Arauco War, 1646,

However, his Afro-Indigenous heritage did not bar Beltrán from leadership, riches, and fame. The king honoured his service, even though he was not granted a corregimiento. In 1620, almost two hundred years after arriving in the Americas, Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa’s history of the Americas said Beltrán’s probanza granted him the title of infantry captain, an encomienda of five-hundred Indigenous subjects, and two leagues of land where he built his fort close to Villarica.40 Vásquez also painted a lionizing portrait of Beltrán, writing that his acts were worthy of a “whole book.”41 He extolled the “valiant Captain Juan Beltrán Mulatto, son of a black man, and an Indian woman, [as being] worthy of eternal memory for Great acts.”42 His mixed race was a sign of honour; for how could a non-Spaniard fight for Spain if not for his noble character? He was humble, obedient, and loyal to the Spaniards when they needed help, but fearsome to his enemies. When he died in battle, Espinosa portrayed him as a legend.43 His reputation demonstrates how an Afro-Indigenous person’s conquests advanced his personal ambitions by serving a white colonial system of prestige in the margins of empire.

The lives of Esteban, Garrido, and Beltrán challenge the narrative that the Spanish conquest was wholly an effort of white men; whether slave or free, persons of colour actively participated in American colonization. Esteban’s ambiguous identity as a slave, representative, and interpreter-guide was critical for the survival of Spaniards during the exploration of North America. In Mesoamerica, Juan Garrido’s voluntary participation as a conquistador and freedom to pursue ambitious projects demonstrate that some Africans in the Americas had autonomy in their destinies. Lastly, Beltrán’s character and battles on the edges of the empire were celebrated among the colonists.

Brian Thomson MAIH (History stream)

1646, in Tabula Geographica Regni Chile, by Alfonso de Ovalle, Wikimedia Commons.

Mixed-Race Children of the Atlantic World ENDNOTES

One of the most unique aspects of the Atlantic world was the intimate relationships forged between individuals from opposite ends of the earth. These connections would have been virtually impossible without the seventeenth century’s advances in maritime travel. Yet, children born from these unions posed an even greater challenge than their parents as a new generation’s acceptance into society would force Europeans to rethink their definitions of political and kinship networks. Consequently, a child of mixed heritage who was neither fully European, African, or Indigenous found themselves caught between two worlds and left struggling to find their place within communities which worked hard to exclude them. However, with the Atlantic world being a space of opportunity, one which allowed society’s peripheral figures to become central ones, some children took advantage of the fleeting moments of possibility and climbed the social ladder. Still, many mixed-race children were ceaselessly confronted by significant amounts of discrimination by Europeans justifying their harmful actions using theories of race and cultural superiority to keep their kinship ties pure.

Nevertheless, the existence of bi-racial children within the historical narrative serves as a testament to the agency individuals could wield despite facing tremendous amounts of racism. Thus, this article offers insights into how individuals in interracial relationships and the mixed-race children who were a product of those relationships navigated the harsh realities of the Atlantic world and its mounting racism. More importantly, this article highlights the ways these individuals’ autonomy and resilience called for the reconsideration of the racial ideals and legal policies which sought to restrict their inclusion into society.

David Martin, Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Eliza beth Murray. 1778. Painting. Scone Palace, Scotland, Wikimedia Commons.

Interracial Relationships

To understand the impact mixed-race children had on society, it is important to understand Europe's attitude towards their interracial parents. Port cities provided a particularly active space for mixed-race relationships as people and goods from all over the Atlantic world were constantly moving through them.1 Within these centres of commerce situated along coastlines, like Jamaica or New England, people from all walks of life and nationalities perpetually interacted with one another. As Atlantic historians Ida Altman and David Wheat argued, port cities were “the crucible[s] in which the modern world was formed.”2 Furthermore, because these dense urban settlements were governed by colonial authorities located far across the ocean, making it difficult to enforce institutional structures, there were immense possibilities for individuals to reinvent themselves. For those reasons, it was inevitable that European men alongside African and Indigenous women would enter into relationships which offered both parties access to resources and opportunities.3 However, simply because the eighteenth-century Atlantic world provided the ideal environment for creating interracial relationships, did not mean that these connections were widely accepted throughout the Atlantic world.

From the Christian standpoint at the time, interracial relationships represented an attack on what they considered their society’s upstanding virtue. For instance, outside the boundaries of marriage, many white men participated in the practice of concubinage when they lived across the Atlantic Ocean within imperial colonies. However, this activity was seen as a great sin to Christians because it was a union unsanctioned by the Church.4 As well, through their companionship to French men, mulatto5 women could, at times, use prostitution as a way to free their mixed-race children.6 Therefore, to combat what was considered as the immorality of concubinage and the potential increase in a free mulatto population, metropole governments often encouraged single European women to voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and legally marry single European men.7

Cabrerra, Miguel. Pintura de Casta, 5. De español y mulatamorisca. 1763. https://alcolonial.wordpress. com/2012/12/09/pintura-de-castas-miguel-cabrera-imagenes/. Fair use.

From a political perspective, many colonial policymakers feared that too much interaction between races would give rise to a larger and stronger free black and mulatto population. A population which could one day rise up and overpower colonial European authorities. Most significantly, free blacks and mulattos could challenge the established racial order Europeans had placed on the Atlantic world.8 This issue, especially, created confusion regarding the treatment of this new demographic of individuals,9 and the children produced by these relationships. Consequently, some colonial governments responded by strictly forbidding mixed-race relationships, including the rare case of an African or mulatto man engaging in a relationship with a European woman; these unions were met with resistance as a nonwhite man should not “meddle with any white women.”10 Therefore, using the biblical Old Testament as justification, in the words of a French chronicler, “it was forbidden to yoke to the plough two animals of different species.”11 This was the case in French Louisiana12 and the southern British colonies of North America13 where colonial authorities legitimized their rejection of interracial relationships.

Nonetheless, in some cases, interracial relationships were permitted. For example, through their assimilative approach to colonization, the French empire understood the practical benefits to having settlers form connections with Indigenous women. An early example can be found in 1627 when Cardinal Richelieu allowed members of the Company of New France to engage in unions he believed would lead the “Savages” to Catholicism, allow them to “be considered natural Frenchmen,” and live in France when they wished. As well, the Indigenous people would be allowed to “acquire property, with the rights of inheritance and bequests, just as if they had been born Frenchmen, without being required to make any declaration or to become naturalized.”14 Furthermore, through the instruction of French missionaries and nuns, Indigenous women would in turn be able to offer social stability to French settlers living far away from their homeland15 as they could “easily adopt” French manners, language, and religion.16 Thus, such relationships were reciprocal in nature as both sides offered one another assistance.

Similarly, in the British colony of Bermuda in 1660, a European sailor named John Davis was allowed to marry a coloured slave named Penelope Strange and later secure her freedom after settling the contractual terms of their relationship with her slave owner in Bermuda. Likewise in Maryland, during the 1740s, a European woman named Elizabeth Graves was called to court on account of her marriage to a mulatto named Daniel Pearl. After fighting with the authorities, the couple was able to secure their freedom and live undisturbed within the British colony.17

Thus, interracial relationships did exist even where they were ostensibly forbidden; however, because many of their narratives went undocumented, their existence has been difficult to trace.18 Nevertheless, the increase in the mulatto population during the middle of the eighteenth century19 serves as an indicator to historians that such relationships were ongoing, and that there was plenty of mixed-race children within the Atlantic world. Moreover, with intimacy being an essential aspect of humanity, when racial boundaries were crossed during these personal moments of human contact, participants understood that at times race was a fluid category with limits which could be adapted or supplanted.20 Even so, laws in European colonies in the Atlantic world often defined a person’s worth, status, and legal rights by their race, leaving mixed-race children, like their parents, vulnerable to society’s judgement and legal policies. In particular, colonial laws based on race dictated the status of mixed-race children.21

François De Troy, Portrait of a Mulatto Aristocrat in Armour. 1680-1730. Oil on canvas, Wikimedia Commons.

Mixed-Race Children

In the words of Atlantic historian, Joyce Chaplin, “perhaps more than any other set of ideas, race was Atlantic.”22 Thus, like their interracial parents, mixed-race children were greeted by with mixed feelings of acceptance and rejection by Europeans as well as their own. Those who viewed interracial relationships as immoral accused these children of being a result of an “unfortunate commerce of impurity” between white men and black women, or as the “criminal coupling of men and women” which produced a “different species,” one that posed a more significant threat to the colonies, as they represented “a fruit… of Nature’s monsters,...a third species of men called mulattoes, who [were] neither whites nor Negroes but retain[ed] all the…worst in the ones and the other.” These moralists feared that if nothing was done to stop the growth of this population, this “third species of men” would soon become more numerous than the whites and “in the course of time attempt to overthrow the colonies and be the cause of their total ruin.”23 Such were the opinions of authors like Françoise de L’Alouëte who complained that such a “strange and unbalanced conjunction [of] troubles and soils…[produced] a vile and obscure generation…of no use” to the French empire.24 However, it was not only Europeans who expressed concern about mixed-race children in an attempt to reinforce the notion that these children did not have a place in society. In 1735, South Carolina Gazette, a newspaper run by a British white colonist named Thomas Whitemarsh reported that mixed-race children were not always accepted by Africans as their partial “whiteness” did not make them better or merit a higher social standing within Western colonies than them.25

For that reason, mixed-race children did not have many opportunities beyond their slave status. As British will executor Joseph Clay lamented, in American colonies, “these young Folks are… unfortunately situated in [a] Country [where] their descent places them in the most disadvantageous situation, as… they gain no rank.” Moreover, “White Persons do not commonly associate with them on a footing of equality.” Thus, many “of their own Colour…being Slaves,...naturally, fall in with them…[and] future Prospects [are]...neglected by the most respectable Class of Society.” Consequently, Clay advised that mixed-race children should “be sent to Europe” to be cared for by relatives or wards so that they might “be made useful Members of Society” as America was most certainly not going to offer these children a better future.26 For example, in Guadeloupe, a 1680 edict stipulated that mulattoes would inherit their mother’s status and be kept in bondage for the rest of their lives thereby indefinitely linking them to their African heritage.27 In other words, a mixedrace child’s enslavement meant that they were eternally trapped within the requirements of human commodification which saw a person’s body as an object created purposely to generate capital for the slave trade.28 Hence, mulattoes commonly performed manual labour in the fields or served as house servants and concubines29 because within the West Indies, these children represented a labour force to be exploited because of their race. Also, as the products of publicly condemned illegal relationships, this further gave cause for their oppression.30

Through extensive primary source research, historians have discovered that it was quite common for mulatto children to travel back to Europe in the hopes of attaining an education and a better future. Records show that the number of migrating children reached the thousands as they sought a more productive future with assistance from familial connections living, for instance, in Britain.31 This migration from the margins of empire to its centres affected colonial governments as large numbers of mulattoes arriving in Europe necessitated laws dealing with a mixed-race individual’s social status.32 For example, to legitimize placing a mulatto’s status at the same level as an African’s, British governments needed to create a clear demarcation between whites and mulattoes.33 As well, new migrants had to reckon with a much more aggressive public who felt strongly against their existence within the metropoles than they would have experienced in the Americas.34 For example, mixed-race children often relied on private education from a small number of teachers who did not discriminate against race because majority of schools prohibited students of colour from attending.35 Thus, mulatto children were extremely vulnerable to the harsh realities of unjust racial ideologies in Europe.

Another important issue was a mixed-race child’s inheritance. In eighty percent of the cases, European fathers were unwilling to support their children’s endeavours out of fear of the potential financial disaster associated with such a risky investment since supporting a mixedrace child could financially draining and threaten to bring down the entire family network.36 However, evidence shows that some children did receive a portion of their family’s wealth. For instance, within Jamaica’s probate records which contain over 2,000 wills written between the years of 1773 and 1815, 122 bequests were written to mixed-race children either already living in Britain or soon-to-be living in Britain.37 As well, for those children accepted into the family network,38 the relatives who took them in were typically tremendously wealthy and politically well-connected. Hence, they were able to offer the children a more promising future39 through their links to high society, into which some mixed-race children were able to integrate themselves. For example, Stephen Lushington, a member of Parliament for Canterbury, commended Britain’s racial tolerance in his proclamation to England’s Parliament that “a gentleman of colour had held a high civil office; and another [had] enjoyed military rank, and become connected, by marriage, with the family of a member of the [House of Lords].”40 However, observations like Lushington’s caused two opposite reactions. The first was the realization that these individuals were capable of contributing significantly to the political and social changes of the nation. Second, it sparked a fear within Europe’s upper classes as elites began to believe that mixed-race populations were threatening their rightful claims of authority41 as well as the general public who were threatened by the mulattoes’ presence Thus, by the early nineteenth century, mixed-race children had entered the aristocracy leveraging their kinship connections and their British education, transforming themselves into a demographic capable of achieving what had previously been impossible given their lives’ origins.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Atlantic racial ideals were pushed to their limits as interracial couples and their mixed-race children fundamentally destabilized imperial frameworks. As the presence of these bi-racial families increased in number and became further established within American and European society, colonial authorities felt pressured to address this growing population. Consequently, historians have come to understand that the impact mixed-race individuals had on the Atlantic world was complex. By acknowledging interracial families, European governments were forced to reevaluate their interpretations of kinship and race which were constantly being subverted by the existence of the interracial demographic. Most frequently, interracial relationships and mixed-race children were cast in a negative light. Despite the prevalence of laws and social practices throughout the Atlantic world intended to restrict mixed-race children, they asserted their agency. Whether it be African and Indigenous women marrying white men, or their children migrating to Europe for a better education, the narratives of mixed-race people living within the Atlantic bears witness to their bravery and resilience in the face of severe discrimination. On the larger scale, their stories serve as a reminder that the invisible boundaries of Atlantic world were continually being crossed and rewritten by figures moving from the peripheries of the society to the centres of it by advocating for their rights as human beings.

Lam MAIH (History stream)

Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, From Spaniard and Return Backwards, Hold Yourself Suspended in Midair. 1760. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons.

Heather

From Great Men to Middlemen: A Survey of Historiographical Approaches on Cultural Brokers in the North American Fur Trade

The historical “great men” trope is one that has transcended the field of history and entered our cultural consciousness. Historical works by and about men “beating the odds,” overcoming unsurmountable adversities, and changing the historical trajectories of entire nations has spread this myth of the “great man.” Much of this image is situated in the field of “exploration history,” a history which speaks to a process which, beyond simply the discovery of something previously unknown, “usually encouraged some form of occupation, conquest, or control” and was done by men who were “no mere adventurers or renegade travelers, [but] were the forgers of links, the spinners of webs… not just between cultures and peoples but between whole ecosystems and environments.”1 Historian Dane Kennedy speaks about the issue of “great men” in “exploration history,” writing that:

explorers wrote about their own observations and experiences, giving their chronicles an autobiographical character… [so] it was their adventures and ordeals that drove their narratives. Invariably, they cast themselves as the heroes of their own tales…Just as explorers’ own narratives were inherently autobiographical, those narratives of expeditions written by historians and others generally adopted a biographical approach.2

The “exploration” approach in the history of the Atlantic world, as portrayed in the chronicles of the “great men” described by Kennedy, simplifies the complex processes of various systems and people groups working with and against each other into a single variable. For example, in topics such as the fur trade, there is a greater narrative that encompasses more people and communities who served as cultural brokers essential to the trade. In looking at the history of the fur trade in the Great Lakes area of North America, many scholars such as Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer S.H. Brown, writing in the 1980s, as well as more recent scholars such as Richard White and Michael A. McDonnell have recentered the narrative to focus more on the role of Indigenous people who served as cultural brokers and made trade between communities possible, rather than on individual European “explorers.”

Despite being excluded in “exploration” history narrative, Indigenous cultural brokers played a central role in shaping the fur trade. Métis Fur Trade Post. Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada Accessed November 30, 2022. https://indigenouspeoplesatlasofcanada.ca/article/fur-trade/, Fair Use.

Recentering and narrative of the fur trade from “exploration” history to one that highlights Indigenous involvement makes space for the inclusion of the cultural brokers who made the trade possible. Richard, John. Indians Bartering. Fur Trade — Trade De Fourrures. The Begbie Contest Society - La Société du Concours Begbie. Accessed November 26, 2022. http:// www.begbiecontestsociety.org/furtrade.htm, Fair Use.

Before analyzing scholarship that shifts the focus of the fur trade to one that envelopes both European and Indigenous perspectives, it is worth evaluating earlier sources such as The Fur Trade in Canada written by Harold Innis, a professor of political economy, in the 1930s. Although he refers to Indigenous nations as middlemen throughout the book, such as when he writes that “wars with intervening Indian middlemen… became increasingly expensive,”3 Innis centers his story on the importance of geography, more specifically the role of the beaver, in shaping the fur trade. He begins his introduction with the statement: “the history of Canada has been profoundly influenced by the habits of an animal” and that “it is impossible to understand the characteristic developments of the trade or of Canadian history without some knowledge of its life and habits.”4 While it may be true that the habitat and behavior patterns of the beaver shaped how the fur trade was carried out, a focus on this aspect of the trade ignores the communities who would have hunted, treated, and negotiated the trade of its fur.

On the other hand, van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties as well as Brown’s Strangers in Blood, speak to the experiences of Indigenous women as cultural brokers. Historian and anthropologist Bruce M. White praises the work of both these scholars as important in understanding the role of women in the fur trade, writing that “the major work on the differing roles of men and women in the fur trade has come … from the research of women historians and anthropologists.”5 Van Kirk does this by highlighting the vital importance of bringing attention to women’s involvement in the trade, contending that “the role played by women as actors upon the fur-trade stage is essential to a full understanding of the complexities of what was an unusual society in early Western Canada.”6 She specifies later that many Indigenous women were active agents, occupying “an influential position as ‘women in between’ two groups of men [Indigenous and European], a situation which could be manipulated to advantage.”7 Brown makes a similar point, arguing that the British working

Historians Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer S.H. Brown highlight the role of Indigenous women as cultural brokers, again challenging “exploration” narratives that ignored their contributions. Miller, Alfred Jacob. The Trapper's Bride. Marriage à La Façon Du Pays. Wikipedia, November 15, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_%C3%A0_la_fa%C3%A7on_du_pays. Fair use

for the Hudson’s Bay Company saw “the contributions that Indian women could make to the profits and expansion of the fur trade as guides, interpreters and intermediaries.”8 Van Kirk’s and Brown’s scholarship sheds light on the role that women played as cultural brokers in the fur trade and has contributed to the breakdown of the more autobiographical “great man” exploration approach described by Kennedy. Additionally, historians such as Susan SleeperSmith have continued this study of Indigenous women in the fur trade; for example, SleeperSmith situates these women in the context of Catholic kinship networks, claiming that “they relied on their Catholicism to maintain relative autonomy in relation to their husbands” and “used Catholicism to resist and reshape indigenous societal constraints,”9 further illustrating their agency in this world.

More recent works have also broken down the “great men” trope. For example, Richard White looks at “the middle ground,” described as “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.”10 According to White, it is only by looking at the history of Indigenous and European relations through this lens that the narrative can shift from one that focuses only on the European metropole to one that also considers what was happening in the peripheries. In fact, in The Middle Ground, White writes that his “book is ‘new Indian history’ because it places Indian peoples at the center of the scene and seeks to understand the reasons for their actions.”11 In a similar manner, McDonnell’s Masters of Empire also grounds the history of events such as the fur trade from the lens of imperial history to that of the Indigenous communities living in the Great Lakes area. Like White, McDonnell argues that “the primary story of this era and this region has to be a Native-driven story.”12 In the study of cultural brokers, this shift in focus is essential; while cultural brokers may have been ignored or seen simply as historical side characters in the “great men” myth, when historians shift the focus to Indigenous actors, they make room to speak about the cultural brokers, the men and women whose work was the foundation of the fur trade.

The portrayal of cultural brokers in fur trade history has undergone significant transformation. The story has moved from explorer narratives, which emphasized “great men,” to a perspective that acknowledged Indigenous women’s agency and their place in the trade, to a narrative that centers peripheries and provides a more inclusive and holistic perspective on the trade overall. Van Kirk, Brown, White and McDonnell have done important work in shedding light on the people who used their agency in the in-between spaces and whose work did more to shape the landscape of the fur trade than a few “great men.”

Karolina Zyra MAIH (History stream)

R E S A N D P E R

I P H E R I E S

The Columbian Exchange: Sheep, Cattle, and Colonial Growth in the Americas

INTRODUCTION

The Columbian exchange refers to the widespread transfer of flora and fauna, precious metals, people, diseases, commodities, technologies, and ideas between the Americas (New World) and Africa and Europe (Old World) beginning in the late fifteenth century. European settlers in the Americas participated in the Columbian exchange by transporting goods from the Old World that they used to establish farms and support their families. Studies of the global transfer of plants, animals, and people often privilege the first arrivals, with less attention paid to later arrivals. The impact of biological transfers should be regarded over a long period rather than as singular or short-term events.1 For example, the development of the Wardian case2 (a type of terrarium) allowed settlers to move live plants (such as the coffee plant) across the Atlantic that would have a significant impact on agriculture in the Americas.3 Increased agricultural productivity came at the cost of increased ecological vulnerability; simply put, the effects of the Columbian exchange were not isolated to the portions of the world directly participating in this exchange.4

An examination of animals that were part of the Columbian exchange reveals the complicated impact that the cores and peripheries of the Atlantic world had on each other. Many of the early domestic animals of the Americas were first transported to Hispaniola, where Spanish colonists tended to them; they subsequently spread to the rest of the Americas through both trade networks and by escaping from existing flocks and becoming feral.5 Domesticated farm animals were not transported to the Americas without consequence, as they too had to adapt to their new environments.6 These case studies of cattle and sheep, two animals that were part of the Columbian exchange, demonstrate both the merging of cultures as well as the long term impact of the colonial experiment in the Americas.

1920 marks a watershed moment in American history, as the United States transitioned for the first time to having a majority of individuals living in urban rather than rural areas.7 This shift into what has been dubbed by some writers as the “age of agricultural ignorance”8 is the culmination of hundreds of years of the Columbian exchange, as goods, people, and ideas moved around the Atlantic world. The “wilderness” Europeans encountered in the Americas was not true wilderness; Indigenous peoples maintained and changed their landscapes to suit their needs.9 Settlers then found themselves in a unique situation in which they attempted to apply Old World techniques to farming and living in the New World. The movement of animals reflects this. Despite the settlers’ resistence to change their traditional farming practices, both Indigenous and settler societies needed to explore “the tradeable potential of many organic products and their place within the sphere of competition, emulation, negotiation, performance and communication.”10 The people of the Atlantic world can be regarded as gardeners: they managed their own lives within a specific vision or time restraint and made no pretence about altering anything. Rather, settlers functioned as ecological craftspeople, using the tools and knowledge at their disposal at the time to manipulate their environment.

CATTLE

Cattle ranching quickly became a popular venture in the Americas, offering settlers wealth and food stability. As one of the more popular animals of the Columbian exchange, the cattle trade came to dominate the Atlantic coast of the Americas for both personal use and economic leverage.

In the spring and early summer of 1733, the first settlers of the new colony of Georgia were gifted several cattle by their neighbours north of Savannah to help them through the difficult first year. Unfortunately, the animals quickly ran off into the woods. There the escaped cattle found large numbers of feral cattle which had already successfully colonized the region when the settlers arrived, surviving on wild grasses and pond water.11 Wild Carolina “black cattle” and domesticated Spanish cattle had adapted successfully to the environment of southeastern North America. They were durable, with horns for protection against predators, and had the ability to multiply quickly, merging to form a new hybrid variety of cattle.12 William Cronon, an environmental historian, contends that cattle were “integral elements in a complex system of environmental and cultural relationships.”13 New methods of cattle farming had to be implemented for this type of terrain, a practice aided by changing social environments.

Criollo Cattle with Man next to Two Cows. 1900. The History Trust of South Australia, Wikimedia Commons.

As with all farming practices, both animal and farmer were tasked with adapting to the new landscape. Georgia cattle could survive relatively well through the winters. The savannah grasses were tender enough to supply feed in the late fall/early spring, and in the heart of winter Spanish moss provided sufficient nourishment.14 By 1739, the Georgia cattle herd had grown to “one thousand head or more,” but colonists failed to contain them adequately, leading to large losses as cattle consistently joined feral herds in the forests.15 The settlers tried again to keep a large herd, this time with the help of African handlers, skilled in rounding up the herd each evening and returning it to the village.16 Many of these handlers were from Senegambia, and they were sought after as ranch hands due to their experience herding cattle on open plains. Evidence suggests that the lasso and the saddle horn were inventions of African cattle handlers.17 The growth of Georgia’s plantation economy also saw a rise in the number of cattle for both labour and food supply, and by the late 1760s colonists were distinguishing between cattle that were “ranging freely,” “tame,” and “gentle.”18

By the 1770s, the colony of Georgia was not only feeding its population through cattle farming, but, like its neighbour South Carolina, was exporting barrels of beef (over a thousand barrels in 1772), as well as live cattle to the West Indies and other destinations.19 In 1772, over fifty thousand pounds of tanned hides were recorded in the Savannah customs house.20 During this time, when surplus production was easily achieved, the colonists had little incentive to breed their cattle for specific attributes, as was happening in the Caribbean. Combined with parasitic blood diseases (babesiosis and anaplasmosis), which often killed purebred cattle imported from northern Europe, these factors discouraged southern livestock producers from undertaking breeding programs to improve their herds.21

Livestock became an important measure of personal property in the emergent Atlantic economy, especially for those colonists who did not have a large allotment of land or slaves. Livestock could also be purchased, sold, or willed to another party. As of 1755, cattle owners in Georgia were required to register their brands in a Book of Marks and Brands in Savannah, making it easier to determine the legal repercussions of damage to farmland by escaped cattle, and by 1759 “Toll Masters” were implemented by another statute to regulate cattle transactions.22 Further statues aimed to regulate false branding convictions, butchering and

Cattle and Agricultural Laborer in Pasture. 1953. Habersham County, Georgia, Wikimedia Commons.

hide businesses, and basic livestock handling rules for slaves.23 Cattle were able to provide a stable economy for the burgeoning colonies, providing not only non-liquid assets for colonists, but a consistent export economy bringing wealth back to the colony and colonists.

When diseases are under control, a cattle herd can double in four to six years.24 This is the case of cattle history on Prince Edward Island (PEI), where live cattle became the main agricultural export in the first decades after PEI became part of the British Empire. Part of the British Empire due to the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Indigenous peoples were forced off the land, and the island was primarily taken over by European agriculturalists.25 Existing forest was transformed into pasture by strategic burning to clear land, and a few cattle were brought to the island. In the first decades of British settlement on the island, cattle were turned loose to fend for themselves.26 Although the loss of these cattle to black bears was “very considerable,” cattle numbers continued to grow due to their access to grazing opportunities.27 Samuel Holland, a British survey-general of the northern district of North America encouraged settlers to continue their cattle endeavors, writing “great quantities of cattle may be raised” on the island, and that PEI was “one of the finest grass countries I have met with.”28 In part this was due to the large swaths of marsh hay that grew around the island, leading to an instant monopolization of cattle feed which did not need to be imported.29

Toppan, Carpenter, Casilear et al. Georgia 10 dollars 1854. 1854. Bank of Milledgeville, Georgia, Wikimedia Commons.

Cattle Grazing – Georgia. 1905. Department of Agriculture. Forest Service, Wikimedia Commons.

PEI settlers did find an export economy and shipped live cattle by boat from a local port to St. Johns, Newfoundland. This led to a growth in cattle acting as economic leverage on the island, as cattle became exchangeable for goods such as tobacco, cloth, sugar, buttons, and nails.30 Tenants working on farms and freeholders of small means could raise a few cattle for themselves in order to pay rent, settle debts, or grow hay and grasses to sell to cattle owners for the purpose of fattening their livestock before shipment to Newfoundland, where fatter cattle fetched a higher price.31 The scale of exports fluctuated, between a low of 114 cattle in 1809, and a high of 932 cattle in 1815.32 These exports were significant, as cattle were bred and shipped within one North American colony to another. This isolated local colonists from transatlantic shipments of barrelled beef and provided a great step towards colonial selfsufficiency.

Cattle in Yards on a Farm at Virginia. C. 1925. The History Trust of South Australia, Wikimedia Commons.

At the height of PEI’s cattle operations, the island’s population grew from around seven thousand in 1800 to just under fifty thousand in 1841.33 These new settlers drove the island’s primary export away from beef cattle, as they desired other livestock that could enhance farming plots and provide milk, such as pigs, sheep, and milking cows.34 Infrastructure and new farm animals began to damage cattle hay plots around the island. With such a large growth in population, the colony’s agriculture and focus shifted to potatoes, which ultimately became more economical to feed the colony’s expanded population.35 Ultimately, the cattle

industry that had contributed to PEI’s economic development in the late eighteenth century declined as frontier conditions gave way to settler societies.

Cattle were a significant contribution to the Columbian exchange the American colonies. Since they were transported across the Atlantic, cattle have undergone a genetic split from their European ancestors making them relatively immune to a recent outbreak of BSE (mad cow disease) in 1980.36 In the Americas, cattle have flourished and remain an integral part of farm life and agricultural production.

SHEEP

The sheep is a versatile animal, offering wool, meat, and milk. Selective breeding for woolly sheep began around 6000 BC, with efforts to produce a white-fleeced sheep beginning around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia. By the Bronze Age sheep similar to contemporary species were widespread throughout Western Asia where they had been introduced through trade networks to North Africa and Europe.37 Due to the cooler, damp climate of northern Europe, the wool trade flourished there during the Middle Ages. The wool trade was also important in southern Europe and the Spanish developed specialty breeds like the Merino.38 When they began travelling to the Americas, the Spanish brought along woolly sheep. This history was recorded in an 1887 edition of the Scientific American: at the time Spaniards first visited South America there were no animals in the country which exactly corresponded to the sheep of Europe, but they found in Peru, and in the regions of the Andes, several species of animals to which they gave the name of native sheep Carneros de le tierra but which the aborigines called the llama the alpaca, the guanaco and the vicuna.39

Frank P. Bennett, Sheep breeding and wool growing in Virginia. 1894, Wikimedia Commons.

The llama and the alpaca, native to the Americas and domesticated prior to Spanish arrival, were “said to be so resigned to their state of domesticity that they are scarcely able to take care of themselves or live in a wild state.”40 The sheep transported by the Spanish were not as easily domesticated. European sheep took advantage of their new landscape and often fled to the wilderness, becoming feral and adapting to mountainous terrain. Those sheep that were successfully contained seemed unable to breed. Unbeknownst to Spanish colonists, sheep are very sensitive to heat, humidity, and changes in their familiar surroundings, leading male sheep to become sterile for around one year after transport from temperate to warmer climates.41 The stress on the animal’s nervous system often resulted in poor fertility for the rest of its life.42 The combination of these events resulted in a sheep population that did not grow until the late sixteenth century.

English settlers also transported sheep to the early American colonies where they experienced greater success due to the cooler climate. Woolen garments provided adequate warmth in cold rain and weather, and wool-bearing sheep offered a relatively sustainable resource. Similarly, ewes could be milked, and rams provided meat, all of which made the sheep desirable for colonial settlement. In 1651, Edward Johnson noted in Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior that at least fifteen percent of all domestic animals in the New England colony were sheep.43 Sheep in New England and other British colonies spread rapidly. Although not every family in New England personally owned sheep, all of them owned at least some wool clothing, if not raw wool for personal use. Cloth, cloth furnishings, and wool clothing accounted for a large proportion of a household’s wealth.44 Over time, the economic assets of the region became directly influenced by the manufacture of woolens. Sheep and sheep products became a crucial contributor to colonial life and economic growth.

Frank P. Bennett, Sheep breeding and wool growing in Virginia. 1894, Wikimedia Commons.

Development of the Hampshire Down, 1792-1879. From Bowie, G. G. S. “New Sheep for Old-Changes in Sheep Farming in Hampshire, 17921879.” The Agricultural History Review 35, no. 1 (1987): 19, Fair use.

John Wrightson, Sheep, breeds, and management. 1893, Wikimedia Commons.

Sheep are relatively low maintenance and generally provide a high return. They have less of an impact on pasture lands than other herding animals; their small hooves and lighter body weight minimize damage to sod, especially in damp spring weather.45 Similarly, sheep can also draw nutrients from late season grasses for longer periods than larger foragers such as cows or horses. Following the model often employed in England, Massachusetts colonists provided common lands for sheep grazing from March through November.46The importance of sheep as an economic asset to Massachusetts is evident in the 1645 General Court proclamation:

all ye towns in general and every one in particular within the jurisdiction, seriously to weigh the premises and accordingly that you will carefully endeavor the preservation and increase of such sheep as ye already have, as also to procure more…those such as have an opportunity to write to their friends in England…and advise them to bring as many sheep as conveniently they can [are encouraged to do so].47

In 1645, the average cost of a yearling was forty shillings (roughly $443 in 2022 dollars)48; this decreased to five shillings (roughly $5 in 2022 dollars) by 1660.49 Sheep increasingly became more affordable and dependable as an agricultural commodity, a highly appealing prospect for poor farmers. A farmer could develop his wealth in livestock with the small purchase of one ewe. Once this ewe was impregnated, gestation was five months, less than half the gestation for cows, and a ewe is likely to produce two offspring.50 Lambs reach sexual maturity in as little as five to six months and are capable of breeding in their first year of life. Theoretically one’s flock could reproduce rapidly each year.51 Aside from numerical increase, farmers could sell wool, as the average wool yield from a single sheep at this time was four pounds per year,52 offering an alternative income and domestic production of woollen products. Sheep production expanded, serving the needs of citizens and building the foundation of a highly profitable industry, problematic for the British government who had grown comfortable exporting of woolen products to the colonies.

by Samuel G. Heiskell, Wikimedia Commons.

Colonists also used sheep to repair ‘poor land’: when flocked on smaller areas, they easily consumed weed, brambles, and ‘mangy grasses.’53 The high nitrogen content in their manure also revitalized the soil on lands that had been over farmed. This was documented by Sarah Knight in 1704 in Fairfield Connecticut: “they have an abundance of sheep whose very dung brings them great gain…they let out their sheep at so much as they agree upon for a night; the highest bidder always carries them, and they [the sheep] will sufficiently dung a large quantity of land before morning.”54

Spring lambing was a great “social leveler” of colonial society, as both men and women worked equally to ensure the health and wellness of their herds. Women were heavily involved in the lambing process, tasked with caring for the pregnant ewes, which were separated and observed until labour in a “barth” built near the family home.55 Once lambs were born, women also milked the sheep, mixing sheep milk with cow milk for drinking, or to create a rich butter or cheese.56 Once lambs were weaned, all the sheep could be returned to their usual pasture.

Sheep provided benefits that impacted every level of colonial society in the Americas, providing colonists with clothing, food, and improved quality of life. Successful sheep husbandry in the early American colonies such as Connecticut and Massachusetts is a testament to the impact of the Columbian exchange on the peripheries of empire in the Atlantic world.

CONCLUSION

The Columbian exchange brought changes to the natural landscape of the New World. Case studies of cattle and sheep, two “Old World” animals that were transported to the Americas, reveals that they transformed the lives of settlers as much as they altered their new habitat. Once they were successfully established in the Americas, these animals contributed to the survival of colonists and, eventually, to the independence of communities on the periphery from the metropoles that had encouraged their settlement. For settlers in the early Atlantic world, the frontier required daily adaptation. These settlers could not have imagined the long-term impact of introducing new animals to a foreign landscape, and it remains essential that modern historians consider this reality.

Ritzen Pulfer MAIH (History stream)

Janina

ing in Virginia. 1894, Wikimedia Commons.

Agency and Interest: The Role of African Middlemen in the Atlantic Slave Trade

Many myths surround the events, processes, and trajectories of the Atlantic slave trade. Some myths portray Africans as having no agency or control, as victims of Europeans who came to African shores, enslaved millions of people, and sent them to the colonies across the Atlantic. Other myths allow for African agency in selling slaves to the Europeans, but the question remains why Africans would sell their own people on such a scale? However, as is always the case in history, lived experience is far more complicated than these myths allow. Over twelve and a half million African slaves were trafficked across the Atlantic from 1525 until the middle of the nineteenth century, though the largest number were sold from 1670 onward. Although the European traders did have influence in the economic and power structures of the West African kingdoms, they did not have control over the agency of the African traders and middlemen. The Atlantic slave trade developed out of two established trade networks: an existing trade network with the Europeans for exports such as gold and ivory, and the trans-Saharan trade network. During the early modern period, African middlemen not only benefited from this trade but also controlled it. As well, competing interests in the trade would lead these African middlemen to go to war over controlling the coastal kingdoms and ports: where the slaves of the interior would be sold to West African middlemen, and held until they could be traded to the Europeans. In this way, African middlemen freely played a major role in the export of African slaves.

François Auguste Biard, The Slave Trace, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

The trans-Saharan trade network was the foremost trade network in West Africa until the seventeenth century. The trans-Saharan trade was oriented towards the interior of the continent, leaving the West African coast on the periphery of that trade. Interior kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, stood between the coastal kingdoms and the North African caliphates, and Europe beyond the Mediterranean. Gold, salt, and slaves traversed this network and were essential exports to the development of the coastal kingdoms.1 However, the interior kingdoms experienced periods of unrest, and their leaders were no longer able to secure the trade routes. Portuguese explorations in the early fifteenth century around the coast of West Africa offered new prospects, and the insecurity of the trans-Saharan trade encouraged coastal kingdoms to take advantage of those new trade opportunities. Atlantic routes bypassed the difficult caravan routes across the Sahara, and placed the peripheral coastal kingdoms as the intermediaries between the interior kingdoms and the Europeans. Trans-Saharan trade continued to be important to the interior African kingdoms, but new trade routes to the coast became increasingly easier.

West African kingdoms had long participated in the trans-Saharan slave trade. This network of slave exports had been established in Antiquity, and during its peak between the tenth and nineteenth centuries, historians estimate that an average of six to seven thousand enslaved people were transported north every year.2 Domestically, the need for slaves was already growing in the late fifteenth century as city-states came to understand the benefits of slave labour in bringing costs down, while increasing the production of goods and services. As well, a slave labour force released farmers to become full-time soldiers, thereby increasing the military power of these formerly peripheral kingdoms.3

Thomas Starling, West Africa Coasts, Wikimedia Commons.

As the Europeans arrived on the coast of West Africa, they began to set up trade networks through a system of forts and factories that competed with one another for trade with the African kingdoms. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, grain, gold, and ivory dominated the West African export market, as Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Brandenburgers, Swedes, and British trading companies all competed for mercantilist monopolies in these regions. This network grew rapidly, establishing its value to Africans in the region and to the Europeans who traded there. At first European demand for slaves was very low, and the trade remained mostly based in ivory and gold. The demand for slaves was initially internal. It was not until the colonization of the Americas and the development of plantations in the western Atlantic that the external demand for African slave labour would grow exponentially. In this way, the Atlantic slave trade developed out of two pre-existing trade networks to serve the expanding demand for labour across the Atlantic basin.

Why would Africans sell their own people on such a scale? Historian John K. Thornton claims that “the Atlantic slave trade rests on a giant paradox… [that] the slave trade was bad for Africa …. Yet at the same time, it is equally easy to see that this same trade, bad as it was at a regional level, was controlled by the political and economic middlemen of Africa, and not by their European trading partners.”4 Thornton claims that African middlemen’s power and agency over the trade created a paradox with the catastrophic effects of selling their own

people. However, this paradoxical interpretation of the events does not adequately reveal the communal identity of the individual kingdoms in relation to that of their neighbours. Africans did not identify as a nation of singularly defined African people. Rather, identity lay within their individual community and ethnic group, whether that was Fon, Yoruba,

Boukary Koutou's Mossi Cavalry Returning with Captives from a Raid, Édouard Riou (18331900), Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Dahomean, Kongolese, etc. In this sense, Africans did not sell Africans. Yoruba were selling Dahomean; Fon were selling Asanti. Each group were generally not selling their own people; they were selling foreigners, prisoners of war, and outsiders to their communities. As historian Basil Davidson notes, by custom and moral law, slaves were only taken from foreign states and enemies of the state.5 African kings, much like their European counterparts, were concerned with protecting their own citizens. With increased demand for slaves, it also became permissible to sell criminals into slavery. Criminals, who previously would have had varying sentences, became capitalist products of convenience, and selling them into slavery was a simple way to be rid of them. The West African kingdoms had a long tradition of enslaving prisoners of war, including inhabitants of captured villages. For many of these kingdoms, the slave trade, both internal and external, was a by-product of their tribal and state warfare, and some African kingdoms such as, Oyo, Dahomey, Benin, Ashanti were especially involved in warfare and enslaving prisoners of war.

One myth that arose out of the Atlantic slave trade is that the warring and raiding kingdoms traded slaves for guns and then used those guns to acquire more slaves, building up the arsenal and power of the warring kingdoms. According to the myth, this gun-slave cycle in which Europeans held a monopoly on gunpowder gave the Europeans power over the Africans and led to the destabilization of the region through a fierce competition for more guns with which to obtain more slaves. This ignores the fact that most of these kingdoms made very little use of European guns and gunpowder, preferring their traditional weapons in war.6 Moreover, European trade was marginal within the overall economies of West Africa’s kingdoms, and thus cannot be considered solely responsible for the destabilization of West Africa that would occur through the warfare that wracked the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 Therefore, this theory exaggerates European pressure and control in West Africa’s slave economy.

One of the items most commonly traded for slaves was cowrie shells. West Africans began using cowries as currency as early as the fourteenth century. They were small, durable, portable, and significantly, they were difficult to counterfeit. One account of the relation between slaves and cowrie shells claimed that without banks to stockpile capital, Africans wealthy in cowries “were compelled to buy more slaves.”8 Thus, cowries became a very desirable import into West African kingdoms. Europeans, in turn, seeking to meet the demand for cowries, significantly increased their cowry imports from cowrie exporters in India and East Africa.9 In this way, Europeans provided trading opportunities that reorientated the trade away from the interior and towards the coasts.

A collection of cowries, Wellcome Collection gallery (201803-30), Public Doman, Wikimedia Commons.

As European demand in the colonies grew for slaves, so did the power and agency of African slave traders and middlemen. With the exception of Portuguese-controlled Angola, African kingdoms controlled the trade on their own terms. The African middlemen built up their wealth through their control of the ports, as all trade had to go through the middlemen. Interior kingdoms conducting warfare and slave raids marched their slaves to the coastal kingdoms and traded with the coastal kingdoms for European goods. The delivery and trade of slaves from the interior, through the coastal ports, and onto European slave ships was wholly an African business. European trading company records show very little evidence of direct enslavement. Instead, these records show that slaves were purchased from African middlemen who were actively supported by their kingdoms.10 Coastal African kingdoms often functioned both as commercial sellers and tax agents, as slaves from other kingdoms were sold through their ports.

European accounts of factories and trading posts also indicate African control of the slave trade. European trading companies had to pay rent to African rulers for the land on which they built their factories and trading posts. And for centuries Europeans remained confined to the forts and port cities. However, when other kingdoms waged war against a port for control, Europeans found themselves at the mercy of the prevailing side. This was the case with the French factory at Oudiah, which experienced a series of attacks and raids from Dahomey in the 1720s. The French were unable to withstand the African forces. The French director wrote that he believed the Europeans had been allowed to build their forts along the coast so that European traders could be raided more easily.11 It was nearly impossible for Europeans to force their trade interests when African Kingdoms, such as Dahomey waged war against the coastal kingdoms. Contemporaneous to these events, the Portuguese factory experienced similar troubles in Ouidah and the director was forced to explain the Portuguese capitulation to Dahomean demands to the crown. Faced with Dahomey’s armies outside the fort, the director considered himself to be in an impossible position, believing that the King of Dahomey had the power to force his demands on the Portuguese traders.12 Events like these demonstrate that European factories had very little military capacity with which to defend their interests over the interests of African kingdoms in the slave economy in West Africa.

Europeans were also powerless along the coast of West Africa to force African participation in the Atlantic slave trade. The kingdoms that traded had the power to stop at any time. Certain African kingdoms never participated in the slave trade, or only joined for short periods. The Kingdom of Benin traded with the Europeans throughout the early modern period, but only traded slaves from the early 1500s until 1550 and between 1715 and 1735. When Benin wanted to trade slaves again in 1715, Europeans were not prepared to purchase them. Other coastal regions, such as the Grain Coast and the coast from southern Cameroon to Gabon, exported very few slaves. They participated more in the export of other commodities such as melegueta pepper or ivory. Interestingly, the Kingdom of Orungu was a net importer of slaves, and only really attempted to become an exporter of slaves toward the end of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century. African Kingdoms were very much in control of their own participation in the Atlantic slave trade.

Another way African middlemen displayed their agency in the trade with Europeans was to leverage the competition between Europeans. A major port in the Fante Confederacy was

Annamaboe (in modern-day Ghana). The Fante had allowed the Dutch to build a fort on their land first; later, they permitted the British to build a fort as well. In the early eighteenth century, the British held the monopoly to trade in Annamaboe. European trade was run through African officers in the port known as caboceers. John Corrantee, the most important caboceer in Annamaboe at the time, was famous for his ability to maximize the competition between the British and the French.13 Corrantee oversaw one of the highest points of the slave trade in Annamaboe, mainly due to his ability to keep the trade routes to the interior open and safe from raiding. In order to keep the routes open, they had a large standing militia. The Europeans needed these militias to keep the routes open to make their voyages as successful and efficient as possible. Knowledgeable of this, the caboceers in Annamaboe had the Europeans arm their militias as a cost of keeping the trade open.14

Corrantee also did not accept the European notion of monopoly. French and British diplomats and traders courted his favour in order to be able to trade successfully in Annamaboe. Corrantee used this to his benefit, growing the rivalry to his advantage. The British paid tribute to Annamaboe for the continuation of their monopoly on that trade. However, Corrantee interpreted this tribute as a customary duty that all Europeans had to pay in order to trade there, and he allowed the French to denigrate the monopoly. To court Corrantee’s favour, the French toured one of his sons around France to show they were superior to the British. The British heard this and attempted to tour another of Corrantee’s sons around London. However, they lost his son to kidnapping and had to buy him back out of slavery. When both sons returned to Annamaboe, Corrantee used them as messengers to their respective hosts to keep both the British and the French coming to his ports. This kept the demand for slaves high and also elevated prices. Both the British and the French eventually offered to build forts in his town and showered his sons with gifts in hopes of swaying Corrantee’s opinion. Corrantee’s skill in playing the two empires off one another allowed him to grow the slave economy in Annamaboe and establish the port as the primary state in the Fante Confederacy.15

The significance of controlling the coastal ports led many West African kingdoms to wage war against coastal kingdoms. Maintaining power over ports meant that a kingdom and its slaving elite became the middlemen who controlled the trade through that port. For centuries, European interests were generally confined to trading forts, and trade could only be conducted at the will of their African landlords. One of the only major methods that

Mathias (1719-1804), Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Europeans could influence the trade was through supporting claimants for succussion who might be favourable to Europeans, or to support neighbouring states in their wars against the kingdom that controlled the port. Even if this worked, however, the result for Europeans was only a more favourable trading partner, not more power. The new middleman was in control of the port and the trade with the Europeans, not the other way around.

For competing African kingdoms and empires, a change in control of the ports could be disastrous for several reasons. For the ruling power that lost control of the port and the kingdoms that relied on good trading relations and access to the ports, a new ruling entity might deny further access to the port. In the early eighteenth century, the Oyo Empire, Dahomey, and others traded through the coastal kingdoms of Ouidah and Allada. When the two tried to tighten their control of the slave trade and establish monopolies where all slaves had to be sold through the middlemen, Dahomey responded by conquering Allada in both 1724 and 1727. This change of middlemen was disastrous for Oyo and other interior kingdoms. Dahomey had little interest in allowing other kingdoms to trade through the ports. Therefore, Oyo sent its own armies to conquer Dahomey, making it a tribute state in 1730. The Kingdom of Dahomey would free themselves from tributary status in 1823 under the rule of King Ghezo and would regain total control of their port at Oudiah. War for control of the ports was common through the early modern period as different kingdoms sought to control their interests in the Atlantic slave trade.

African middlemen played a significant role in controlling the slave trade. Europeans had no control over the availability of slaves for market, and they were far from their regions of power, making it difficult to impose European interests in these trades. As Europeans colonized the Americas, their need for slave labour grew exponentially. West Africa had an existing slave trade network and an existing trade network with the Europeans. When the European demand for slaves increased, West African slave traders looked to the coast as an opportunity to build their wealth. To believe Africans were naïve trade participants is to discredit the adept diplomatic skill of African middlemen, such as Corrantee. African middlemen linked the slave-producing exporters in the interior with the slave-importing Europeans and were, thus, free participants, controlling African participation in the Atlantic economy.

Dick MAIH (History stream)

Andrew

Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

(Un)seen Traders of the Atlantic World

ENDNOTES

Throughout history, smugglers have been cast as mysterious, self-interested, and dangerous characters whose unlawful activities have simultaneously exasperated monarchies and transformed global markets. Known as one of the earliest existing professions, by the eighteenth century, smugglers were moving vast quantities of illegal merchandise across the Atlantic Ocean to satisfy the growing demands of European consumers. Consequently, not only did smuggling quickly become a prolific industry, but a smuggler whose actions often went unseen within the peripheries of society soon became a figure whose actions became central to the formation of the early modern economy.

Unfortunately for historians, smugglers rarely kept diaries or any personal documents which might identify them and their profession. The only documents historians do have mention those unlucky individuals who were caught. Therefore, the lack of written sources hinders historians from conducting a comprehensive analysis of a seemingly numerically driven subject. Nevertheless, this does not mean analysis is impossible, but an alternative approach is required. Rather than offering a quantifiable assessment of smuggling in the Atlantic world, this article focuses on a qualitative assessment of the impact of smuggling on society. The article begins with an examination of the rise of the consumer mindset and the widespread desire for luxury goods, which prompted the growth of the black market. Then, it moves on to explore how the Atlantic world’s geographical characteristics enabled smugglers to successfully carry out their business undetected. Finally, it considers the nature of the work and the extensive participation of individuals from around the Atlantic world.

Cigarette smuggling with a book. Photograph. Wikimedia Commons.

The Rise of Smuggling

The long eighteenth century is generally acknowledged as the “golden age” of smuggling as illegal commodities entered Europe at a startling rate.1 For example, a 1745 British parliamentary inquiry estimated that around three million pounds of illegal tea were being smuggled annually into the country, a number that later increased to six and even seven million pounds during the 1780s.2 Alcohol was another heavily smuggled item with around 2.5 million gallons of Geneva gin being slipped into Britain yearly by 1777.3 Other goods favoured by smugglers included coffee, chocolate, sugar, soap, wool, and other items in high demand. However, consumables were not the only commodities smuggled; human cargo was also illegally transported as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade reached with peak during the eighteenth century with tens-of-thousands of slaves crossing the ocean unlawfully in order to satisfy the colossal demand for their labour.4 Thus, according to a report, approximately 45% of the goods entering and exiting Europe from France and England were contraband.5

Where smugglers differed from legal traders was in their evasion of all import taxes as this allowed their profits to be greater and consumers to favour their black-market goods over legitimate merchants whose prices for goods were higher in order to compensate for hefty tariffs. In some cases, the profit on illegal goods could be as high as 100 to 500%, depending on the market.6 Therefore, running contraband goods—a tremendously profitable career if one was not caught—soon became a popular one within the Atlantic. However, because a smuggler’s earnings came partially out of a government’s coffers and was essentially theft, their actions were detested by administrative authorities who often handed out serious punishments to those caught. For example, Lieutenant Commander John Gedge remarked that smuggling was a “notorious threat [which] alienat[ed] and distract[ed] [one’s] spirit from the state.”7 Similarly, Reverend Robert Hardy expressed his aversion to the act stating, “of all the occupations, I look upon smuggling to be the most pernicious. It introduces habits of Art and Deception and Concealment; it leads to the way of Lying, and Cheating, and Pilfering, and Fraud; it breaks up the course of honest and useful labour; it excites a fondness for spirituous liquors and makes men sots and drunkards; it lays the foundation of bad health, of painful and fatal diseases, and of premature death.”8 As well, merchants who competed with smugglers took a dim view of the trade in bargain luxury goods. British shopkeeper Thomas Turner lamented that “the too frequent use of spurious liquors and the exorbitant practice of tea drinking…corrupted the morals of people of almost all ranks.”9 Thus, those who did not benefit from the exchange of contraband found its practice immoral, dishonest, and disastrous.

Consequently, hefty punishments were meted out to those who were caught. These could include being whipped, hanged, sentenced to perform unpaid labour for any length of time, or even have their vessel and goods confiscated and sold at public auctions.10 For instance, in 1784, the smuggler John Shelly was publicly hanged for carrying 350 pounds of tea; William Hewlings and Josiah Oliver shared a similar fate for transporting 400 pounds of raw coffee. Public punishments were intended to remind smugglers and those thinking of smuggling of the potential consequences of working within the black market.11 Yet, the profitability of smuggling was so great, that even terrible forms public discipline could not dissuade individuals from smuggling as it was one of the few professions that could provide an individual and their family with a living. It was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when new parliamentary acts such as William Pitt’s 1784 Communication

Act and 1808 abolition acts forced smuggling rates to drop.12 By then, smuggling had already taken hold of the Atlantic world, becoming one of the largest enterprises of the early modern period even persisting today.

The Life of Luxury Smugglers could never have enjoyed such success and profitability without consumers to purchase the goods they trafficked. The development of advanced maritime technology resulted in new shipping routes connecting Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This enabled the movement of people and luxury goods such as tobacco, chocolate, and tea around the globe,13 which once introduced into Europe, immediately became popular among the elite classes who could afford them, but remained out of reach to the working classes. Then, as they arrived into Europe more frequently and at a higher volume, luxury goods became cheaper and more affordable to lower classes which created the space for smugglers to make a profit on society’s growing appetite for opulence. This hunger was further reinforced by the newfound rights of individuals to consume and enjoy excess.14 Consider chocolate, one of the most sought-after luxuries in Europe. Originating from the Americas, Spanish physician Manuel Navas de Carrera described the Atlantic world’s addiction to chocolate: “aficionados…would sooner go naked than give up drinking chocolate two or three times a day.”15 The preoccupation with luxury goods such as chocolate, tobacco, and alcohol radically changed the way commodities were imported into Europe as smugglers exploited consumer fixation in order to make a quick, substantive profit. Therefore, the consumer revolution fundamentally altered how all social classes wanted their lives filled goods that had previously been unavailable.

Alexander Hogg, Group of smugglers throwing stones down the Lady Holt Well, 1795, Wellcome Images, Wikimedia Commons.

William Clark, Shipping Sugar. Etching. 1823. London, Wikimedia Commons.

The Ideal Environment

Smugglers in the Atlantic world were able to take advantage of a number of geographical features that contributed to their success. First, the vastness of the ocean gave smugglers space to slip past government officials who were unable to patrol its every corner.16 Second, experienced seafarers were easily able to outsmart any policing and find alternative sea routes which would allow them to work uninterrupted.17 As well, there was the elusive nature of smuggling. While a nation’s borders suggest the extent of a state’s power, busy port cities within these boundaries, which were centres of Atlantic commerce, did not pose much of an obstacle to a stealthy smuggler who used the hustle and bustle to disguise the entry and exit of illegal contraband.18 Moreover, smugglers could claim distress due to bad weather or a damaged ship, allowing them to legally dock their ships in port until it was deemed safe to set sail. Meanwhile, goods could be unloaded secretly without notice from border officers.19

Furthermore, many sailors took advantage of the seclusion offered by natural landscapes to conduct their business. Caves, tunnels, and hidden coves along coastlines were ideal for smugglers to quietly dock their ships and unload their illegal goods.20 As well, swamps and mud banks allowed smugglers to travel farther inland to deliver their goods since larger vessels could not navigate shallower bodies of water.21 Thus, smugglers could avoid docking in ports and arousing suspicion, which might lead to their arrest. To locate these hidden spots, governments would set up look-out points, remote cottages, and customs offices in the hopes of catching the smugglers.22 However, government outposts were no match for well-seasoned smugglers who knew exactly how to bypass checkpoints and slip past the security measures in place. Thus, the Atlantic world almost seemed to be designed for the exchange of contraband through the many geographic features that played perfectly into the hands of smugglers and allowed for the industry’s flourishing.

Scott Robinson,

2, 2014. geograph. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3868318. Fair use.

Smugglers Cove. Photograph. March

Abundant Association

Profitability, the demand for goods, and the relative ease of evading enforcement resulted in the rapid expansion of smuggling throughout the Atlantic world. Soon, people from all walks of life and ethnicities joined the elusive life of smuggling.23 In particular, the profession was especially attractive to individuals from the lower classes wanting to provide for their families; historical accounts show that women also participated as smugglers.24 For example, in his personal account, George Lipscomb described an encounter with “several females, whose appearance was so grotesque and extraordinary, that [he] could not imagine, in what manner they had contrived to alter their natural shapes so completely; till, upon enquiry, [he] found that they were smugglers of spirituous liquors; which they were…conveying…by means of bladders fastened under their petticoats, and, indeed they were so heavily laden, that it was with great difficulty they waddled along.”25

Therefore, smugglers’ networks extended far beyond the sea and ports as they enjoyed the support and collaborative efforts of local traders, businessmen, and most importantly, corrupt nobles, clergy, and officials. These extensive connections across the Atlantic

complicated governments’ efforts to catch, punish, and prevent smuggling from persisting.26 As well, with an empire’s colonies located far away from their metropolitan centres, bribable officials turned a blind eye to the exchange of illegal commodities, making it almost impossible to control colonial smuggling from the metropole.27 Also, abbeys and churches proved to be secure and perfectly unsuspecting hiding spots for illegal items. For example, the parish priest of Saint-Vaast in Normandy was found to have stored 492 pounds of illegal tobacco in his presbytery.28 Consequently, it seemed that everyone wanted to profit on or benefit from a deal in trafficked goods as smuggling was an industry which accepted members regardless of class or race.29 By establishing strong networks that linked individuals who transcended societal boundaries to make a living in an unforgiving world, smuggling became firmly cemented in the Atlantic world.30

Vasily Khydyakov, Skirmish with Finnish Smugglers, May 10, 1853. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov gallery, Moscow. https:// arthive.com/artists/1853~Vasily_Grigorievich_Khudyakov/works/26226~Skirmish_with_Finnish_smugglers, Fair use.

Smugglers vs. Sovereign

Finally, because smugglers contravened government regulations and monarchical decrees to import goods illegally, leading powers equated this defiance with stealing directly from the monarch or government’s purse which cheated the state of its income. This violation of the law can be illustrated through the example of tobacco, one of the most sought-after Atlantic world commodities. Originating from the Americas, and first imported to England in 1565 by Sir John Hawkins,31 when the commodity’s popularity rose sharply in 1685, the British government suddenly raised the tariffs on tobacco to fund their military endeavours. This fueled the item’s entry into Britain.32 To combat the arrival of contraband, the government ordered the construction of large chimneys around the country in trading centres such as Falmouth, London, Liverpool, and Whitehaven. Named the King’s Pipe, these chimneys were used to burn all illegal tobacco. Furthermore, in addition to confiscating unlawfully imported tobacco, the chimneys were intended to be symbolic warnings and a deterrent against smuggling with “the volumes of dense Smoak which issue from [the] chimney”33 announcing to incoming smugglers and the British population that smuggling was criminal. So often did these chimneys run that the popular phrase “the king is having a smoke today” was created to celebrate the monarchy’s success against smuggling34 and its “attack from below.”35 Hence, buildings like the King’s Pipe not only represented both the government’s authority and the consequences of going against that authority,36 but also the manner in which state power handled ongoing rebellious behaviour and the priorities of the Atlantic world’s lower classes.

Smuggling achieved its “golden age” in the eighteenth century as the period created the perfect conditions to evade duties and taxes. By exploiting society’s obsession with luxury goods combined with the natural geographical features of the Atlantic, involvement in the black market became an irresistible profession which offered individuals a profit which outweighed any repercussions. Therefore, despite state powers attempting to mete out the industry, in the end, smuggling became deeply entrenched in the early modern economy as the bravery and fearlessness smugglers demonstrated was strong enough to withstand any obstacle.

MAIH (History stream)

Heather Lam

Matthews,

N T H E A T L A N T I C

Jan Moser, Body of Water during Sunset, pexels.com.

Newfoundland Lost: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage in the Early Atlantic World ENDNOTES

Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 voyage to North America was the first formal attempt to establish an English colony in the western Atlantic. While it failed, it marked the beginnings of the Elizabethanera project for an English Atlantic world—a quest for geopolitical power, commercial prosperity, and Protestant zeal to rival Catholic Spain.1 A well-educated aristocrat, Gilbert believed he could fulfill English colonial aspirations by founding a Protestant colony near the hypothetical Northwest Passage and the established cod fisheries of Newfoundland.2 Such a location could allow England to exploit a potentially lucrative trading route to Asian markets placed next to a highly nutritious and exchangeable food source valuable for sea voyages. These imperial aspirations were no match for the reality of the transatlantic crossing in the late sixteenth century. The inexperienced fleet was unprepared for Atlantic storms, supply shortages, and poor discipline, all of which proved fatal to the mission.

When Gilbert proposed that he could find a Northwest Passage to Cathay (modern-day northern China) and the East Indies, the English were more than eight decades behind Spain and Portugal in the imperial colonization of the Americas. Since the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Catholic powers had been bound to respect Alexander VI’s and Julius II’s papal bulls, which legitimized control over discovered territories in the western hemisphere to Spain and the eastern hemisphere to Portugal.3 Excommunicated in 1570,4 Protestant Queen Elizabeth refused to recognize the validity of such Catholic claims, opening an opportunity for Gilbert’s ambitions of claiming Protestant colonial possessions in the Atlantic as the Iberian Catholics had done. In 1576, ten years after he first proposed a voyage to explore an alternate passage to Asia to the queen, Gilbert published the pamphlet A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Pasage to Cataia in which he offered evidence for the existence and

Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailing the Atlantic on the Squirrel. The Last Moments of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1880, illustration, in Cassell’s History of the United States, vol. 1, by Edmund Ollier (London, Paris, and New York: Cassell Petter A. Galpin, 1880), 12. Internet Archive.

economic potential of a northwest passage.5 Gilbert had been working on the Discourse for a number of years. During that time, English explorer Martin Frobisher who was financed by London merchants also declared his determination to find a northwest passage.6 Gilbert’s pamphlet, published the same year that Frobisher sailed west and explored the northern coast of modern Labrador and Frobisher Bay, may have stimulated public interest in English Atlantic exploration and colonization.7 The exploitation of this hypothetical passage would be a first step towards greater English wealth and power while challenging Spain’s exclusive control over the Americas.8 Typical of Protestant advisors in Elizabeth’s court who called for “Protestant solidarity” during the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule, an ongoing conflict since 1566, Gilbert argued England needed to act more determinedly in the world stage and not slack behind in evangelism as Spain aggressively imposed Catholicism on its possessions and threatened the Anglican Church.9

Once Gilbert had set his sights on Newfoundland as the chosen location to establish a Protestant English colony, the most immediate goal was to seize the supply of codfish in Newfoundland. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Spanish, Basque, French, Breton, Portuguese, and English ships fished in transitory, seasonal settlements near the coast of Newfoundland.10 The long-lasting, transportable, and nutritious qualities of dried cod made it an ideal food source for shipping as navigation increased following wars and the rise of global trade.11 As England experienced an economic depression due to a loss of Iberian and French markets and the imposition of fishing fees in Iceland, English fishermen frequented Newfoundland more often.12 Newfoundland’s cosmopolitan and rich fishing grounds were not claimed exclusively by any European power. Here was England’s opportunity to establish its first colony in the western Atlantic. Gilbert thus proposed capturing French, Spanish, and Portuguese ships to give the English control over the supply of codfish, a resource valued for its economic importance in the Atlantic market and its nutritional value for ships crossing the North Atlantic.13 For Gilbert, access and control of the cod fishing grounds was an economic necessity; a consistent source of codfish ensured a reliable supply of financial and food resources from which to launch a Protestant English empire.

In order to justify England’s colonization of Newfoundland, the cartographer John Dee, the queen’s trusted advisor and a supporter of Gilbert, concocted legal claims of discovery over North America based on historical precedent. Drawing from scholarship that sees cartography as “discourses of knowledge and power,” Nate Probasco argues that Dee’s 1580 map illustrated empty space ripe for colonization specifically to persuade Queen Elizabeth of the value of Gilbert’s proposed expedition.14 Dee placed Indigenous peoples in the background; their sovereignties were nonexistent in his mind. Dee marked the reverse side of the map, “A briefe Remembrance of Sondrye foreyne Regions, discovered, inhabited, and partlie Conquered by the Subjects of this Brytish Monarchie. And so lawfull Tytle... for the dewe Clayme, and just recovery of the same disclosed.”15 Renaissance historian William Sherman notes some subjects that appeared on the map: Madoc of Welsh folklore, King Arthur, St. Brendan of Irish legend, John and Sebastian Cabot, the Boroughs, and Martin Frobisher.16 In other words, Dee’s map declared that parts of North America belonged to England long before England existed. Those who would accompany Gilbert on his colonizing expedition shared Dee’s opinions. Edward Hayes, a captain of a ship accompanying Gilbert on his 1583 voyage, proudly declared the French explorers of North America were

“usurpers,” since John and Sebastian Cabot, who served England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, discovered and annexed the lands from Florida to Newfoundland before France.”17 For Dee, Gilbert, and some of Gilbert’s crew, the English mission to colonize Newfoundland was an expedition to reclaim England’s realms.

The queen was persuaded by Gilbert’s justifications for colonization, and on June 1578 she granted him a patent to “discover” and claim two-hundred leagues of land where Christians were absent from any point in North America within the next six.18 The intent was to avoid conflict with the Catholic powers while founding a Protestant stronghold. Moreover, some in the crew had hopes of evangelizing the Indigenous population to the Protestant cause. Hayes was particularly zealous for their conversion, which he believed should be a sincere effort lest the crew incur God’s wrath.19 The fleet brought musical instruments, Morris dancers, a hobby horse, and clothing accessories to win them over.20 Gilbert was to implement Anglicanism and rule as a lord, paying one-fifth of the bullion to the Crown.21 His feudal rights over an immense piece of land would guarantee the first step towards a Protestant empire.

The spot commemorating Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s imperial ambitions in contemporary Canada, Sir Humphrey Gilbert plaque, St. John’s, Newfoundland, 2007, photograph, Wikimedia Commons.

As determined as Gilbert and his supporters were, establishing a colony in Newfoundland was a risky enterprise. Gilbert depended on propaganda to attract potential volunteers, who were often poorly chosen or unprepared for a transatlantic crossing. One did not simply sail into the North Atlantic. A royal navy with which to build or defend an empire did not exist yet. English privateers were capable seamen, and in 1577 Dee proposed to the queen that she create a royal navy that would draw English privateers to its service.22 Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages, a 1582 compilation of travel accounts to North America, indicates the ways that propaganda promoted exploration to the English public.23 Hakluyt recounts the story of a Portuguese man who claimed that a captain from Terceira Island in search of the Northwest Passage found a “great entrance” without any ice at 58 degrees of latitude.24 This entrance appeared to continue southwards, likely towards a southern sea.25 Stories like these suggested that Gilbert’s expedition would be much easier than it was.

Gilbert’s 1583 expedition attracted were mostly middle-ranking workers seeking better opportunities than they had at home.26 The 260 men who signed on included shipwrights, masons, carpenters, smiths, miners, and refiners.27 Significantly, these men were settlers, not mariners. They were woefully unprepared for the journey that lay ahead of them. Unprofessional and even rebellious behavior in a fleet was a real risk, something with which Gilbert was well acquainted. In 1578, after receiving a charter to colonize unclaimed lands in North America, Gilbert had set sail, one presumes bound for North America. That expedition failed because of bad winds and division among the crew about the planned route.28 Five years later, Gilbert tried again with a new fleet and a new crew.

A ship built in the late sixteenth century during Elizabeth’s reign. Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Ships, illustration, 1911, in E. Keble Chatterton, The Romance of the Ship: The Story of Her Origin and Evolution (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1911), 83, Internet Archive.

The integrity of the crew was first tested by the Atlantic weather. Gilbert’s five-vessel fleet set sail in June 11, 1583—one year before the expiration of his patent.29 Comprising the fleet were the Delight as Admiral and second-largest ship; the Raleigh, the largest; the Golden Hind, owned and captained by Hayes; the Swallow; and the Squirrel, the lightest frigate with Gilbert onboard.30 Aiming to sail at 43 or 44 degrees of latitude with southerly winds and avoiding sailing past 47 degrees, they were confident they could resupply in Newfoundland by August.31 However, June is the most unpredictable month for storms and also marks the start of Atlantic hurricane season.32 A storm hit the fleet on the night of its departure and pushed them to 48 degrees of latitude by June 13. After the storm, the Raleigh returned to England due to an unspecified disease. These events were discouraging for the fleet.33 Then the Golden Hind was also thrown off course from the intended latitude by a west-northwest wind and then a west-southwest one, taking them close to 41 degrees and then 51 degrees from June 15 to 28.34 Atlantic winds consistently altered the fleet’s direction.

Furthermore, the fleet encountered fog, rain, and bad wind, losing sight of each other for more than a week.35 Although they had agreed on using light and gunshot signals for such occasions, they were unable to communicate.36 Without sight of the sun or stars, they could not have used astronomical, geometrical, and mathematical calculations for oceanic navigation to find a ship’s longitude and latitude, so they must have only relied on the estimation of location with speed—a practice known as dead reckoning—which was imprecise.37 Most ships made it safely. Hakluyt noted in Hayes’ account of the expedition that the fleet’s provisions were “fit” for the transatlantic journey before reaching Newfoundland, which took seven weeks.38 The fleet was able to reunite on August 3, but not without signs of disorder.39

Though three ships were well-provisioned, the Swallow’s supplies had dwindled, corrupting the crew’s goals from imperial consolidation to piracy. After Gilbert gathered English and foreign merchants for a ceremony in Saint John, he declared his right to tax ships and own the surrounding lands in the name of the queen.40 Despite this show of regal authority, some of his men acted like thugs. As Atlantic historian Bernard Bailyn argues, the world across the ocean during the early phases of European colonization in the Americas was characterized by ambiguous boundaries and violent anarchy.41 This behaviour was exhibited when the Swallow ran low on supplies and raided a “Newlander” ship off the coast, torturing its owner for his goods.42 Based on the expedition’s legal claims over Newfoundland, they should have treated the fisherman as an English subject, but scarcity remade the crew into pirates. Hayes also noted a conspiracy in the crew to seize the ships for themselves, while others stole ships from fishermen in the area. Some of the crew hid in the forest, hoping to catch a ship to return home.43 Though Hayes did not provide more details on the reasons why the men tried to run away, it is fair to conclude that the paucity of provisions caused by the long voyage in the North Atlantic had catalyzed a propensity for insubordination in an already ill-prepared crew. Such unforeseen circumstances altered their high-minded aspirations from those focused on empire to those focused on banditry.

Short of provisions and personnel from desertions and disease, the fleet continued to sail in unknown waters in search of supplies, resulting in the shipwreck of the Delight. In his study of Newfoundland shipwrecks, Rainer Baehre says they were often connected to highly speculative ventures to North America.44 One of these ventures was Gilbert’s fleet,

which was reduced to three ships when the Swallow was sent home with sick men. The remaining ships sought to gather beef and pork in the only place they could: Sable Island.45 As Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle state in A Dune Adrift, Sable Island experiences fog, rain, hurricanes, and storms most of the year, making the sandy bank treacherously invisible due to its relatively low height and treeless surface.46 Furthermore, it effectively has its own anti-clockwise gyre, as the north-easterly Gulf Stream flows on its south side and the southwesterly Labrador Current on its north.47 During the night, the fleet was easily drawn to its treacherous waters. Richard Clarke, master of the Delight, claimed he was forced by Gilbert to follow a mistaken direction.48 By Thursday morning, August 29, 1583, a south-easterly gale, rain, and fog drove them to the shoals.49 The Delight sunk violently, losing all its provisions and a hundred men.50 The fleet was reduced to two ships and a greatly diminished crew as a result of the Raleigh’s and Swallow’s return to England, desertions, disease, and the shipwreck.51

After the demoralizing loss of the Delight, Gilbert’s imperial mission became a meaningless enterprise; merely two dreadfully undersupplied ships remained. Hayes described how the crew of the Golden Hind voiced their grievances to Gilbert as winter approached: “they made signes of their distresse, pointing to their mouthes, and to their clothes thinne and ragged.”52 Gilbert was exasperated too; he physically assaulted a boy for failing to fetch some notes from the shipwreck that recorded information about the location of a possible silver mine on the Newfoundland coast.53 This mine could have been his colony’s source of silver for the queen, but now it was lost, further turning his dream of empire into a nightmare. Though he tried to lift the crew’s spirits by promising a recompense of “10000 pounds” from the queen for their troubles, Hayes indicates that most of the crew distrusted him.54 On their return journey, they again encountered strong winds, tides, and storms, leading to the sinking of the Squirrel on September 9, 1538 and Gilbert’s drowning.55 Unceremoniously, only the Golden Hind arrived back to England. Exhausted and asking for money to go home, the crew resented wasting months without rewards while working in dangerous conditions with poor food.56 This rather pitiful ending only serves to illustrate how grand imperial visions could come to nothing in the face of the weather.

Gilbert’s dream of an English Protestant empire enriched by Atlantic cod and the Northwest passage was ruined by the Atlantic’s unruly weather, which diminished their supplies, breaking his crew’s discipline and ultimately its determination. Like the early phases of English colonization, the voyage began high-mindedly, focused on countering the hegemony of Catholic Spain. However, the North Atlantic gave the English a rude awakening: winds, storms, and tides caused dearth, piracy, desertion, disease, and shipwrecks. Late sixteenthcentury England remained unprepared to face the vast unknown westwards of English shores.

Brian Thomson MAIH (History stream)

An artistic rendition of the Squirrel’s wreck on the Atlantic. Death of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, illustration, 1874, in J. Hamilton Fyfe, British Enterprise beyond the Seas; or, the Planting of our Colonies (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1874), 23, Internet Archive.

Under the Banner of the Jolly Roger: Pirate Flags of the Atlantic World ENDNOTES

Emerging in the mid-twentieth century, vexillology (the study of flags) has continued to gain popularity among both artists and historians. Flags are useful tools for individual and cultural communication: through merely visual elements the viewer gains an understanding of all necessary information associated with that image. Consider the Jolly Roger, the name given to the flags that identified pirate ships on the Atlantic. Popular culture has largely romanticized pirates and the culture they created. The successful Pirates of the Caribbean enterprise, including movies, toys, and all manner of branded paraphernalia, portrays multiple flags, many of which are associated with Jack Sparrow, the embodiment of liberated, post-modern subjectivity. As one author writes, Sparrow is “ruled by his desires and completely at odds with the staid worlds of work and civilization.”1 How we interpret historical pirates today is often a reflection of these images and cultural insignia. But what exactly were historical pirate flags, and what do they represent? An historical analysis of pirate flags expands our understanding of seafaring on the Atlantic.

Sea robbery has been in practice for as long as people have travelled and traded on the seas. While exact dates differ from one historian to another, the “golden age of piracy” is dated roughly between 1650 and 1730.2 Even during periods of peace between the Atlantic imperial nations, privateers continued to rob ships, often limiting their list of enemies to those traditional of their mother country.3 On the open waters of the Atlantic, ships efficiently identified each other through flags. The history of flags used by pirate ships is difficult to determine. Like much else about their lives, pirates left very little recorded evidence due to their predominantly felonious activities. What pirate wanted to keep a diary to incriminate themselves? Pirate flags that have survived are often synthesized recreations made by different historical artists. Unfortunately, these recreations were often used for decoration and were subject to artists’ creativity, rather than detailed historic renditions.4 Therefore, the term “Jolly Roger” has come to embrace various pirate flag designs.

Today, the Jolly Roger bears no legal meaning, but remains a cultural icon of piracy.5 Flags have played a unique role through history of communicating individuals’ means through symbols, offering a leveling of languages and cultures. According to the European laws of war, plain white flags signify non-hostility.6 Plain red flags signal the opposite— intense hostility, or oriflammes, declaring an army’s intention to execute all enemies captured, and it is believed that the Jolly Roger originated from this.7 Traditionally during land conflicts, armies would approach each other with flags representing their allegiance to a ruling power and goals of the battle. After one side raised a plain red flag and indicated that it would deny “quarter” (refusal to spare captured lives), the other army would usually reciprocate with a similar red flag. Raising the white flag of non-hostility signalled surrender. On sea, pirates also raised red flags or banners to signify their intent to attack, and quickly the unfurling of red flags by an unidentified vessel at sea became a sign of a pirate attack.8 Over time, these red flags were enhanced with other imagery, particularly recognizable symbols of death. The skull image was taken from ship captains who used it as a marginal sign in their logs to indicate crew deaths.9 In this case, the plain red flag with white skull charges could be regarded as the most terrifying.10

While a red background symbolized bloodshed and warfare, on the open seas white charges are more easily distinguished against darker colours. This leads historians to suggest contrast as pirates’ reason for transitioning to the current “traditional” black background with a white skull and crossbones Jolly Roger.11 This Jolly Roger was well used, with approximately 2500 men sailing under it.12 A functional symbol, the black and white Jolly Roger offered a visual foreshadowing for anyone who considered resisting a pirate attack, as well as to symbolize pirates’ lack of concern for their own mortality.13 The flag was intended to strike terror into the hearts of their target, but with interlocking symbols of death, violence, and limited time, also pointed to meaningful elements of the seaman’s experience.14 A pirate was considered already a condemned man, and their choice of flag represented both their intent to terrorize, and their disregard for the strategies of state terrorism mobilized against them.15 Pirates were considered hostis humanis generis, a common enemy against all mankind.16 The explicit rejection of the nation state was a major part of pirates’ foundation for community. If a pirate sailed under the Jolly Roger, they had a connection to a larger social order based on this principal. The vast waters of the Atlantic provided no rules or stark geographical boundaries, allowing pirates the freedom to determine (or change) their own social hierarchies and core values.

Anneli Karlsson, A Typical Pirate Flag, Photograph, 2009, Wikimedia Commons.

Top Flag: “Jolly Roger pirate flag of Bartholomew Roberts, as described in the Boston Gazette,” August 22, 1790, Wikimedia Commons.

Remaining Flags: Charles Johnson, “Flag of Bartholomew Roberts,” A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, 1724, Wikimedia Commons

Bartholomew Roberts was a Welsh pirate and, based on surviving records, is considered the most successful pirate of the golden age of piracy. He is also one of the most artistic, creating multiple renditions of the Jolly Roger for use aboard his ships. Creativity was not limited amongst other pirates, including Captain James Mission, a French-born pirate who had large dreams of creating the pirate’s republic of “Libertalia.” This led to Mission’s “amazing and unique” pirate flag of a white background with the motto “for God and liberty” embroidered upon it.17

The design, while initially criticized by his newly elected boatswain Marhew Tondu, “brought down a full blast of eloquence from Caraccioli, the new lieutenant, who objected that ‘they were no pirated but men who were resolved to affect the Liberties which God and Nature gave them.’”18 While each group of pirates may have created a different “Jolly Roger”, it is likely many victims of pirates’ endeavors encountered similar fates.

Oliver Touzeau, Flag of Libertalia, April 12, 2017. Flags of the World, Fair use.

The Jolly Roger continued as a cultural symbol into sea conflicts long after the golden age of pirates ended. In 1942, the British Royal Navy submarine NS Talisman returned to port after a successful war patrol of 26,213 sea miles, with the crew proudly displaying the Jolly Roger to record their success against the enemy.19 Around the popular skull and crossbones are other charges indicating a tally of sunken enemy ships. As the Jolly Roger continues to leave its mark on popular culture through media, cinema, and paraphernalia, this flag points to tales truly as old as the seas.

Janina Ritzen Pulfer MAIH (History stream)

J. A. Hampton, SS Talisman Jolly Roger, 1942, Wikimedia Commons.

P E C T R E S O F T H E A T L A N T I C

Kevin Kobal, Rocks on Shore, pexels.com.

Decolonizing the Curriculum: A comparative review of Canada

ENDNOTES

Revisited: A Social and Political History of Canada to 1911 and Nelson

Socials 9

In 2019, the American History Association and Fairleigh Dickinson University conducted a study on the public’s perception of history. Among their many findings, scholars Peter Burkholder and Dana Shaffer found that their “respondents had consistent views on what history is [but]… those views often ran counter to those of practicing historians.”1 Burkholder and Shaffer’s conclusions raise important questions concerning what factors have shaped the public’s views on the discipline and what role high school history education plays in shaping these views. When looking at Canadian history curricula, are topics such as nation building, European-Indigenous relations and gender taught in a way that is consistent with the work of experts in the field?

Comparing Canadian Social Studies textbooks can help historians and educators answer these questions. Although published twenty-seven years apart, Canada Revisited: A Social and Political History of Canada to 1911 by Penney Clarke and Roberta McKay and Nelson Socials 9 by Brenda Ball, John Lyall and Tom Morton both cover a wide range of topics from the Social Studies 9 curriculum such as the initial contact between the European traders and Aboriginal communities and the role of women in the fur trade. Many historians, such as Richard White, Michael A. McDonnell, and Susan-Sleeper Smith have done valuable work in these areas but are the narratives presented in these textbooks consistent with their research?

Canada Revisited Textbook Cover, ThriftBooks. accessed November 6, 2022, https://www.thriftbooks.com/, Fair use.

Nelson Socials 9 Textbook Cover. Nelson Educators, 2022. https://school.nelson.com, Fair Use.

Textbook Canada Revisited Nelson Socials 9

Publishing Date 1992 2019

Key Themes

Power, Co-operation, Decision-making, and Conflict

Ideas and ideologies, Trade, technology and industrialization, Power and governance, and Land, water, and air

Years Covered No clear starting point1911 1750-1815

Consultation

Historical and Educational Consultants, Field Validators, Field Testers

Advisors, First Peoples Advisors, Classroom Reviewers

Indigenous- European Contact

Fur Trade

Presents contact through the lens of “exploration” history and European conquest

Describes the fur trade in terms of French dominance

Avoids “exploration” language by shifting the focus to Atlantic and global perspectives

Use more neutral language when speaking about the voyageurs and emphasize the role of both European and Indigenous traders

Kinship

Both texts include information on the role of Indigenous- European marriage in expanding trading relations but fail to mention the significance of Indigenous women and Catholic kinship networks

A helpful starting point for evaluating these texts is exploring the themes that drive their historical narratives. For example, the opening chapters of Canada Revisited employ the lens of “exploration” to describe life before and after Indigenous-European contact. The problematic nature of this term has been discussed by historian Dane Kennedy, who writes about the connotation of the word in the context of North American-Atlantic history, noting that “exploration is a concept and a practice that carries a particular set of cultural, social, and political valences, and they originate in the European historical experience.”2 In other words, by speaking in terms of exploration, the historical narrative in this textbook becomes centered on European colonization, rather than the agency of Indigenous communities. This is also made evident in the later content of that chapter, as the authors focus on topics such as European motivations to explore, the process of colonization, and the French control over the fur trade. The authors make generalized statements that focus on the European experience and suggest their dominance in this time period such as “in the Americas, the Europeans claimed the land and extended their control over the people.”3

Nelson Socials 9, on the other hand, avoids the use of the term “exploration” but instead uses guiding questions that focus on a more Atlantic and global perspective. For example, the opening chapters of the book ask, “how did trade bring people around the world into contact”4 or “how did empires and revolutions change different societies around the world?”5 In these chapters, the European perspective is addressed but it is not the central narrative; Asian, African, and Indigenous storylines are included throughout these chapters with equal attention. Again, to cite the work of Dane Kennedy, the use of the word “exploration would connote a combination of scientific and technological achievement, state power, and national prestige”6 and by avoiding this language, Nelson Socials 9 moves away from the narratives of European power, nation building, and progress which is more visible in Canada Revisited, showing their intention to de-colonize the curriculum.

The fur trade is another topic that is addressed in these texts. Here, the work of Richard White in The Middle Ground as well as Masters of Empire by Michael A. McDonnell becomes relevant, as they both speak to the ways that Indigenous communities, specifically the Odawa, use their agency in trade with the French. For example, White writes that “the fur trade was a constantly changing compromise, a conduit, between two local models of the exchange- the French and the Algonquian”7 while McDonnell adds that the history of this time period needs to “move on from an older story of [Indigenous] dependence… and

Canada Revisited reinforces “exploration” narratives that emphasize the dominance of Europeans and leaves Indigenous communities on the peripheries. Pierre Gaultier De Varennes, "Canada’s 90 Greatest Explorers: Going Beyond," Canadian Geographic, January 29, 2020, Fair Use.

begin to think about a history of the Anishinaabe Odawa… that emphasizes strength and expansion.”8 In other words, the fur trade was not controlled by the French but was a space in which Indigenous communities made use of their agency and alliances to benefit from this new trade relationship.

Both Canada Revisited and Nelson Socials 9 approach the fur trade from the framework of mutual benefit. For example, Clark and McKay speak about the “exchange of technology” in which “each group gave something of which they had more than they needed at that time”9 implying a mutually beneficial relationship. However, later in that chapter, the authors speak about the fur trade in terms of French dominance in statements such as “[the coureurs de bois]… did a great deal to extend French control (power) over an increasingly large amount of inland territory”10 and that they were “energetic and daring adventurers [who] became expert canoeists and shrewd businessmen.”11 Additionally, contrary to the work of McDonnell who sees the Odawa as the key players in the fur trade, Canada Revisited ignores this group and focuses instead on the Huron and the Iroquois confederacies. Nelson Socials 9 also speaks to the mutually beneficial relationship that stemmed from the fur trade; “First Peoples entered into trade alliances with European traders because they felt that there were benefits.”12 However, unlike Canada Revisited, the authors use more neutral language when speaking about the voyageurs, calling them “professional canoeists who transported furs for trade” and noting that they were both “Canadien and Métis.”13 In this way, the romanticized descriptions of French fur traders and the supposed upper hand of the French in this trade relation has been rejected in this later textbook.

This image by George Agnew Reid is included in both Canada Revisited and Nelson Socials 9, leading to the question: what might student glean about the fur trade from this depiction? George Agnew Reid, "The Fur Traders at Montréal. Fur Trade in Canada (Plain-Language Summary)," The Canadian Encyclopedia, January 15, 2020, Fair Use.

Finally, the textbooks explain kinship alliances in similar ways and with similar shortcomings. Scholars such as Susan Sleeper-Smith who specialize in this area insist that the role of women in the fur trade is vital in understanding this historical narrative. As Sleeper-Smith writes, “Indian women probably exerted more influence than men on the types of cloth that became the staple of the fur trade”14 and through their marriages to European men, Indigenous women “incorporated their French husbands into a society structured by native custom and tradition”15 helping them in their fur trade dealings. Catholicism also strengthened kinship networks as Sleeper-Smith claims. She writes that Indigenous women were at the heart of “the creation of Catholic kin networks,”16 illustrating how religious affiliations contributed additional kinship ties to those created through marriage or birth. In these ways, Indigenous women used both their trade savvy, marriages, and Catholicism to further their power within their own communities and in dealings with the French.

Both textbooks make references to Indigenous kinship networks but fail to explain their importance in the trade. For example, the authors of Canada Revisited state that “Native trading between bands was customarily done through family contacts. To become part of this family trading system, the French left young men to live with a band during the winter. These young men adapted easily to the Native way of living, often married Native women and became part of their bands.”17 Similarly, Ball, Lyall and Morton write in Nelson Socials 9 that “First peoples women played a vital role in the fur trade. Many French traders married First Peoples women, and their marriage helped to advance trade relations between the traders and First Peoples.”18 Yet, this is the only information students are offered on the role

Despite Susan Sleeper-Smith’s work on Catholic kinship networks and Indigenous women, Nelson Socials 9 makes no mention of this topic while Canada Revisited speaks only of European Ursuline nuns such as those depicted here. "Ursulines in Canada," The Canadian Encyclopedia, November 24, 2009, Fair Use.

of women in the fur trade, further ignoring the work of scholars who call for Indigenouscentered narratives and emphasize the importance of women in this space. Furthermore, neither book speaks to the way in which Catholicism was used in order to expand kinship networks. Canada Revisited describes the Jesuit presence but the only women it referred to in this section are the Ursuline nuns who were sent to North America from France.19 On the other hand, Nelson Socials 9 makes no mention of the Jesuits, let alone the Indigenous women who would have been members of Jesuit congregations. Both textbooks, almost completely ignore the power that women had within the fur trade; women are presented as wedding candidates for French traders wanting to enter into preestablished indigenous trade networks, rather than as agents at the center of the industry.

What has changed in the twenty-seven years between these two textbooks? Do these changes mean that a more accurate history of the fur trade is being portrayed, one that is grounded in the work of historians? Positive changes include the movement away from the rhetoric of exploration as well as romanticized and exaggerated portrayals of the French. Yet, when comparing the content of these textbooks to scholarship on the topics of trade, kinship, and women, it becomes clear that improvements need to be made. The work of scholars such as White, McDonnell, and Sleeper-Smith can serve as a foundation to fully decolonize high school history curricula. While their approaches may be more nuanced than the traditional model of nation building and progress, textbook writers ought not underestimate their young readers. Students can appreciate that communities rather than individual “explorers” can do more to shift cultural landscapes, that Eurocentric narratives fail to acknowledge the important work of Indigenous people, and that women can use their agency to gain influence in their communities. Most importantly, as the work of Burkholder and Shaffer illustrates, young people want to learn more about history. It therefore becomes vital for textbook authors to revise their books to fit in with the work of scholars rather than focusing on traditional narratives that have long been debunked.

Karolina Zyra MAIH (History stream)

The Woman King (2022): A Review

The Woman King (2022), IMDb, Fair use.

The Woman King opens with a gruesome raid on an Oyo Empire slavers' encampment by a company of strong and ferocious female warriors known as the Agojie. The Agojie successfully raid the camp, freeing the captives and killing most of the Oyo warriors. In this battle, we are introduced to the main character, General Nanisca, played by Viola Davis. She is a fierce warrior and steadfast leader who commands the respect of her people and her king, Ghezo. Released in North American theatres on September 16, 2022, the film grossed over $19 million USD at the box office on its opening weekend. Although it has generally received very positive reviews for its performance, story, and action choreography, The Woman King has also been criticized for its lack of historical accuracy. Reviewers have given it a “4/10 for how it deals with history,”1 claiming “it begins as portraiture and then surrenders to melodrama when faced with the challenges of translating history for the screen and constructing a coherent geopolitical thread.”2 However, how historically inaccurate is The Woman King? Has the film played as fast and loose with its source material as the reviewers claim or has it done well within the genre of historical fiction to adapt that history to the big screen? The film’s historicity ought to be evaluated on the historical points it attempts to convey within its genre: that is, in its portrayal of historical events, in its representation of dress, place, and culture for the period, and in its characterization of real people. The Woman King is not without its challenges to historicity, but overall creates a generally accurate representation of Dahomey, while bringing the viewer in for a grand epic.

Three parallel plotlines run throughout the film, covering major events in Dahomean history. The first is Dahomey’s fight to free itself of its vassalage under the Oyo Empire; the second plotline follows Dahomey’s attempt to change its economy from being dominated by the Atlantic slave trade to palm oil production; the third storyline follows the re-establishment of The Woman King, which according to the movie has fallen from tradition under the past monarchs, who have refrained from choosing a ruling counterpart.

The film is set in 1823 recounting the events that began King Ghezo’s war against Oyo. When the emissaries from Oyo come to take tribute, Ghezo sends his Agojie to deliver the head of the emissary to Oyo as his message that Dahomey will no longer pay its tributes and will be independent of the Oyo empire. Over the course of the film, Ghezo’s male and female armies struggle to free Dahomey through a series of battles that ultimately will end in a hard-fought victory for the Kingdom of Dahomey and the expulsion of the Portuguese slave traders from their shores. There is truth to this narrative, as Dahomey did engage in a war with Oyo freeing itself from tributary status in 1823. However, where the film gets this progression wrong is in the expulsion of the Brazilians and Portuguese from its coastal trade ports. King Ghezo’s rise to power was partially due to the backing of Francisco Félix de Sousa, a powerful Afro-Brazilian slave trader. Ghezo’s brother and the former ruler of Dahomey, King Adandozan, had owed money to de Sousa and chose to imprison him instead of repaying him. De Sousa escaped and from exile he sent money and gifts to Ghezo; Ghezo used those gifts to establish support for his own claim to the throne. Ghezo had a strong trading relationship with the Brazilian and Portuguese slave traders and did not drive them out of Dahomey. In fact, Ghezo would back a later faction that had the support of de Sousa’s representatives and some key Dahomean officials in order to prevent the Atlantic slave trade from ending during the 1850s.3 Although the slave traders were not expelled, Dahomey did exert its power in the slave trade by setting the terms of the trade and exerting its own interests. It was able to control its own ports rather than have that trade under the

control of the Oyo Empire. In this regard, The Woman King portrays the Dahomean struggle for power and independence mostly accurately, though in driving the anti-slavery message, the film makers sacrifice accuracy in order to portray the victory of Dahomey over slavery. In a concluding scene, the European ships are sent away as an enemy who has lost the war, leaving us to assume that Dahomey will not trade in slaves.

The depiction of the transition of Dahomey’s slave trade economy to one based on palm oil production and export is rather mixed when it comes to historical accuracy. In The Woman King, Nanisca urges Ghezo to end Dahomey’s slave trade with the Portuguese and to shift the economy into palm oil production instead, and after debate among the officials, Ghezo decides to do so. Ghezo did change the slave trade over into palm oil production, though not in 1823. The film does a good job of showing that Dahomey’s wealth is the result of the slave trade, but playing loose with the timelines and presenting Ghezo and the Agojie as altruistic for ending the slave trade is a stretch. Dahomey had gained regional power by conquering neighbouring states and doing slave raids. They had been a major player in the Atlantic slave trade for centuries. However, the slave trade was declining over Ghezo’s reign, and in 1852 Ghezo agreed to end it only after the British blockaded the slave ports to force the end of the slave trade. This forced them to try to transistion the economy to palm oil production as the main source of royal income.4 This agricultural labour came from Dahomey’s internal slave economy, but it never produced enough income for the royal court. Ghezo would oversee internal pressures from two factions over whether to resume the slave trade or invest more in palm oil production and would ultimately decide to resume the slave trade. The Woman King presents the events surrounding the slave trade during Ghezo’s reign more simply and altruistically than they occurred. The Agojie are presented as liberators of slaves rather than the slave raiders and slaveholders that they historically were at the time; they are more problematic and morally ambiguous than their portrayal in the film allows. However, it is true that in the 1850s, the Agojie would be on the side of the faction that did not want to resume the slave trade and favoured palm oil production. Historical fiction will always play with timelines of events. Therefore, this plotline is more mixed in terms of how well it adapts those historical events of Dahomey’s transitioning economy.

The third plotline, narrating the re-establishment of The Woman King, is much more in line with Dahomian traditions. Dahomey traditionally had a “kpojito,” a female reignmate second in rank only to the king. The woman who was chosen to become the kpojito was often central to the establishment of the king’s legitimacy. Oftentimes, in periods of succession, powerful women of the king’s household worked together with a prince to help him seize the throne. Nanisca, as an Agojie, would be considered one of the king’s wives, and thus the background information given by the king’s eunuch as to why Ghezo favours her is keeping with this tradition of the kpojito helping the king to take the throne and inform his legitimacy. As a fictional character, Nanisca was obviously not the real kopjito of Ghezo. To establish his legitimacy, the historical Ghezo selected Agontime as his kopjito as a symbol to connect his reign to his father’s and remove his still-living brother and predecessor, Adandozan, from the record. Agontime was a wife of Agonglo whom Adandozan sold into slavery in Brazil when he became king, as she had supported a rival prince in the succession struggle. Ghezo failing to kill his brother was a threat to his legitimacy, and so he sought to remove all records of Adandozan, and establish himself as the successor to their father Agonglo. The tradition of Dahomey recounts Ghezo finding and bringing Agontime back to

Dahomey though there is no clear evidence of this. The film’s decision to have Nanisca become the kpojito is legitmacy, while Nanisca is chosen for establishing Ghezo. It is a nuanced gesture to recognize how both of

Depiction of Dahomey in dress, place, and culture is where The Woman King shines. The outfits worn by the and the women wore cross straps to carry their weapons. As well they gave the Agojie matching binding style androgyny that does not take away from the historicity of the Agojie while adapting them for a wider audience. interpreted, and the seventeenth-century Castle of Good Hope in South Africa is used to situate the viewer Culturally, the ferocity and determination of the Agojie is acted out well, and the respect afforded them that 1823, the film does amazing work recreating the historical setting.

As a work of historical fiction, it is important to remember that The Woman King is not a documentary. Therefore, accuracy, how well historical events are adapted to the story, and how well the historical persons are represented at adapting the history. Historical fiction has space for artistic license in order to adapt a story to the silver screen. that is grand in scale and has immense depth of character. It is an inspiring epic of the same quality as the historical

NANISCA

Nanisca, played by Viola Davis, is a fictional character not based on any historical individual. Her character stands as a strong representation of the bravery and fierceness of the Agojie generals, although her antislavery stance is not consistent with those historical women. Although she is fictional, there was a female Agojie warrior, who is most likely Nanisca’s namesake. In 1889, a French Naval officer named Jean Bayol visited Dahomey and wrote an account of a female recruit named Nanisca who had yet to make her first kill. He wrote that a prisoner was brought before her bound and sitting in a basket. He stated, “[she] walked jauntily up to, swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk… She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.”1 Bayol would later claim to recognize her corpse after the second FrancoDahomean war in 1894. The real Nanisca’s life was much shorter than Viola Davis’s middle-aged general, only living through adolescence into early adulthood.

pressured Ghezo to end with growing domestic Ghezo resumed the Frederick Forbes, Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, leader of the Dahomey Amazons, drawn by Frederick Forbes in 1851, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

is in the spirit of the historical selection of Agontime as kpojito. Agontime was chosen to establish Ghezo’s these women are a major reason that Ghezo is on the throne.

the Agojie are well-designed to match historical accounts. Their wraps were designed with authentic prints, style tops. Although the Agojie actually fought topless, this is a creative interpretation of their famed audience. Furthermore, Dahomey itself is well depicted. The architecture of the royal palaces is faithfully in the slave port of Quidah. Even the currency of Dahomey is accurately produced as cowry shells. no Dahomean man may look at them is depicted as well. In terms of being transported to Dahomey in

Therefore, in evaluating its historical accuracy, the critical points of examination ought to be threefold: visual represented in their characterizations. In comparison with other films in the genre, Prince-Bythwood’s work is great screen. The Woman King takes advantage of this historical setting to create a story of female empowerment historical fiction films Saving Private Ryan and Master and Commander: Far Side of the World.

NAWI

Nawi’s character, played by Thuso Mbedu, is an indignant and strong-willed adolescent given to the Agojie to be trained after she refuses an arranged marriage. Nawi is also fictionalized. However, she, too, shares a namesake with a real historical Agojie warrior. Nawi was the name of the last surviving member of the Agojie who saw battle. She was found by a historian of Benin in the remote village of Kinta and was interviewed in 1978. She claimed to have fought against the French eighty two years prior in 1892. She died in 1979 well over one hundred years old.

KING GHEZO

King Ghezo, played by John Boyega, is depicted as a strong leader fighting to free his kingdom from the vassalage of the Oyo. His character has a unique rapport with General Nanisca as she offers him counsel, often in private. Ghezo is the only character based on a real historical figure. King Ghezo reigned from 1818 to 1858. He replaced his brother Adandozan in a struggle for succession that finally ended in a coup, in which he became King of Dahomey. In 1823, he also managed to free Dahomey of its tributary status with the Oyo Empire. He dealt with significant economic and political pressure during his reign. The British end the slave trade from Dahomey, and he gave in to their blockades, promising to end it in 1852. However, domestic pressures to resume the slave trade and complex struggles with neighbouring states for trade supremacy, slave trade in 1857. Ghezo was assassinated in 1859 and succeeded by his son Glele.

Andrew Dick MAIH (History stream)

Viola Davis (left) and Thuso Mbedu in The Woman King, The Hollywood Reporter, September 20, 2022, Fair use.

Photo by Ilze Kitshoff, Fair Use.

Place is their Legacy”: Uncovering the Dark History of the Plantation Wedding Industry ENDNOTES

In 2018, the usually unproblematic and beloved Hollywood couple, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, faced significant criticism regarding the location of their 2012 wedding celebration. The backlash started after Reynolds commented on his excitement over the premiere of the film Black Panther, a film celebrated by critics and fans for its Black representation. Fans called Reynolds a hypocrite for praising the black-centric film after he and his wife had chosen the infamous Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens, formerly a prosperous plantation site which utilized slave labor, as their wedding venue.1

The controversy over Lively and Reynolds’ poor choice of wedding venue has raised awareness of the problematic nature of plantation weddings as well as the plantation tourism industry in general. Media outlets such as The Washington Post and lifestyle magazines such as Town and Country have addressed the controversies. For example, in his article “Isn't it romantic? No, it isn’t,” journalist Michael Brice-Saddler speaks to the work of organizations such as Color of Change, writing that “those plantations are featured on WeddingWire, one of several popular wedding planning websites now working to disallow vendors from using language that glamorizes locales with a history of slavery. The effort comes after Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group, sent letters urging Pinterest and the Knot Worldwide… to cease promoting plantations entirely.”2 In a similar manner, in Town and Country, author Olivia Hosken writes that “a beautiful mansion and sprawling estate cannot

Despite being at the center of the Lively-Reynolds wedding controversy, Boone Hall remains an active plantation tourism and wedding site. Front Lawn Boone Hall Wedding Photo. Boone Hall Plantation. Wedding Wire, 2022. https://www.weddingwire.com/biz/boone-hall-plantation-mount pleasant/caefdaa95977e21f.html. Fair Use.

“This

be separated from a horrifying violent history” and that “these are monuments to American slavery, not a place to hold a celebration or a backdrop for beautiful photos.”3 Wedding photographers such as John R. Legg, who has photographed couples celebrating their nuptials at former plantations, observes that “at these sites, white guests, whether visiting for weddings or historical tours, do not want to be confronted with traumatic history.”4 He adds later that “many Americans are attracted to the narratives about the past focused on wealth, the history of great men who gained power through the labor and dispossession of others”5 and concludes by declaring his decision to no longer photograph weddings taking place at such sites.

Beyond the celebrity gossip and media outrage over the issue of plantation weddings, scholars exploring plantation tourism have asked: why is it problematic, historically-speaking, to treat the site of a former plantation as an aesthetically pleasing wedding venue? The first response to this question is the origin of these plantations. Using a Marxist perspective, historians Matthew Russell Cook, Candace Forbes Bright, Perry L. Carter, and E. Arnold Modlin draw attention to the fact that “the entire plantation was only possible through the labors of enslaved people.”6 Moreover, when the labor and death of these slaves is ignored, “the dead labor of the enslaved is being reanimated as a profit generating engine in the experience (event-based) economy.”7 Cook, Bright, Carter and Modlin see plantation tours and weddings as an extension of the exploitation of former days where the work of the slave is taken for granted and remains invisible. Their article includes interviews from various anonymous plantation owners who also speak in terms of the economics of running a plantation tourist and wedding location; for example, they quote “Plantation A” owner as saying that “weddings will always be my cash cow.”8 Comments such as this one indicate the financial rewards of using these sites as “amusement spaces”9 rather than recognizing them as locations of historical traumas.

Beyond the economics of plantation tourism and weddings are the ahistorical narratives of the rhetoric used to promote a plantation and its events. This language is based more on nostalgia and a romanticized view of the Old South rather than the historical realities of the people who worked and lived there, especially the Black slaves. Historian Melaine Harnay points out that “these plantations offer visitors a mythical representation of the Old South during the antebellum era, which is a glorified and whitewashed version of the period of slavery.”10 In other words, the traumas and historical injustices so integral to these

Many plantations utilize Gone-with-the-Wind-inspired imagery that

the

the Old South while ignoring the stories of slaves who worked there. Bettman Archive. Gone with the

Vivien Leigh Had a Nervous Breakdown Filming ‘Gone with the Wind.’ New York Post

depicts

nostalgia of

Wind Vivien Leigh in Costume.

, April 23, 2022, Fair Use.

spaces are either ignored or glossed over. Harnay calls this ahistorical and mythical approach the Lost Cause ideology. Looking at the history of plantations through this lens gives tourists and wedding parties the impression that they are in a place that was historically inhabited by “benevolent masters [who] lived in harmony with their happy, loyal slaves.”11 Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin also identify nostalgia as interfering with the presentation of accurate historical narratives, writing “the plantation has become a focal point not simply of national curiosity but of national nostalgia.”12 In other words, cloaked in Gone-with-the-Wind-inspired imagery of the wistful life of the Old South, the tragic history of Atlantic slavery is masked.

Many former plantations sites function today as tourist attractions and wedding venues. Three of them represent the full spectrum of ways the historical narrative of slavery is presented, both explicitly and implicitly: Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, as well as Whitney Plantation. On one side of this spectrum is Houmas House, which fails to provide any meaningful acknowledgement of the many slaves who labored there. Magnolia Plantation lays at the center of this scale, as they include a statement of acknowledgement regarding the tragic history of their site but continue using imagery and language which contradicts this recognition. Finally, Whitney Plantation is a plantation transformed into an education center, focusing solely on the history of slavery that occurred there. In exploring this sampling of sites, the historical themes of trauma and dead slave labour versus nostalgia and the myth of the benevolent masters of the Old South can be seen in varying degrees. Ultimately, there are “wrong ways” and “better ways” of running a former plantation site and the three presented here are illustrative of these approaches.

Houmas House is a former plantation site in Louisiana that hosts various plantation and garden tours, provides hotel accommodations and a variety of dining options and, of course, weddings. The plantation website states that “the mansion has been restored to the antebellum era, reflecting the opulence and wealth this sugarcane farm boasted in the 1880’s,”13 reflecting Harnay’s claims about nostalgia and the Old South. Regarding its history, Houmas House provides a lengthy history of the plantation, describing

Eye Wander Photo. Houmas House Wedding Reception. Houmas House Weddings. Eye Wander Photo, 2022. https://www.eyewanderphoto.com/portfolio/weddings/wedding-venues/houmas-house-weddings. Fair Use.

Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens

in detail its various owners, the importance of the Mississippi River and sugar crops, and the changes made to the house over the years. When it comes to accounting for the many slaves

whose labour made the plantation profitable, the writers of the Houmas House website offer one sentence: “The Houmas Estate had a frontage of thirty-five acres front on the Mississippi River, comprising the Donaldson, Clark and Conway tracts, and contained over twelve thousand acres of the finest quality of cultivable land, and a work force of over five hundred and fifty slaves, and was without exception, the finest property possessed by a single proprietor in America.”14 The website’s authors see the work of black slaves in the context of the wealth of the white plantation owners. The five hundred and fifty slaves who worked on the farm remain anonymous, faceless, and dehumanized while the roughly one dozen white owners are spoken about with detail. As Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin have claimed, in ignoring the Black slaves who worked at Houmas house, the site is being treated solely as an amusement space rather than a historical site that tells the Atlantic history of slaves in a way that is accurate and respectful. Even the way weddings are advertised makes clear that the owners of the site have no intention of speaking on the dark history of their location with phrases such as “a stunning setting for memorable weddings” and “ceremonies beneath the oak alley and with the Houmas Mansion as a backdrop, provide picture perfect moments.”15 Just as with the history portion of the website, the wedding information fails to disclose the problematic history of the plantation, again proving Harnay’s point that plantation tourism sites serve to provide visitors with a nostalgic rather than a historical experience.

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens

Like Houmas House, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens offer not only weddings but also social and holiday events. The phrases “Charleston's Most Visited Plantation”, “the oldest public tourist site in the Lowcountry” and “America’s Last Large-scale Romantic-style Garden” are prominent on their website.16

Turning to the wedding venue section of the webpage, viewers will see, amidst the many promotional photographs, a brief history of the site. It begins “the Drayton family ownership of Magnolia actually began with a wedding”17 and continues with the story of the nuptials of Ann Fox and Thomas Drayton who received Magnolia as their wedding present. In light of the scholarship mentioned above, particularly about plantation sites making visitors feel nostalgia for the days of the Old South, this is an interesting anecdote to use in promoting a wedding venue. When the website

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens Wedding Photo. Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. Wedding Wire, 2022. https://www.weddingwire.com/biz/magnolia-plantation-and-gardens charleston/7e4dbfbe16df8b1f.html. Fair Use.

writers claim that they are “thrilled you’ve decided to join your history to ours!”18 they are likely pointing to the history of the plantation owners, rather than the Black slaves that were forced to work there. Even so, while the connections to the Old South nostalgia are similar to those of Houmas House, Magnolia Plantation recognizes the legacy of the slaves of the site, albeit briefly:

Before Magnolia was a public garden, it was a rice plantation worked by enslaved laborers. These men, women, and children did the work that made the money that made the Drayton family rich … [and]without the forced labor of enslaved men, women, and children, the Drayton family could not have risen to prominence. Simply put, Magnolia owes its very existence to enslaved workers. Every visitor to Magnolia should remember, appreciate and honor the men, women, and children who lived and died in servitude here. This place is their legacy.19

While this acknowledgement is more than what Houmas House offers, for many historians or advocates of racial equality, these few sentences are not adequate in acknowledging the historical tragedy of slavery. Furthermore, the final statement that “this place is their legacy” ring hollow, especially when considering the actual business practices of the plantation which focus more on the entertainment of their visitors than portraying the plantation for what it was.

Cheburashka007, Inside Slavery Museum at Whitney Plantation, December 23, 2019, Wikimedia Commons.

Whitney Plantation

In stark contrast to both Houmas House and Magnolia Plantation, as well as many other existing plantation sites, Whitney Planation does not offer weddings, amusement tours, or other social events. As stated on their website, “Whitney Plantation is a 200acre former sugar plantation turned historic site dedicated to telling the history of slavery in the United States from the perspective of the enslaved Africans, African-Americans, and Creoles of Color who built America’s wealth.”20 While other plantation sites offer various wedding packages, Whitney Plantation offers a variety of exhibits, all intended to educate visitors on the history of slavery of this former plantation; these exhibits include “The History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” “Slavery in Louisiana,” and “Grass, Scrap, Burn: Life & Labor at Whitney Plantation After Slavery.”21 In addition to the education provided onsite, the website itself is rich in information regarding the plantation itself, the production of indigo and sugar cane, the Atlantic and Louisiana slave trades, as well as slave resistance. Furthermore, rather than host events such as weddings, Whitney hosts a virtual book club as well as seminars on topics such as “Climate and Race.”22 In general, Whitney Plantation appears intentional in creating a space that is focused on highlighting the history of the site, avoiding turning the plantation into an amusement space, and rejecting any ideas of nostalgia of the Old South.

Karolina Zyra MAIH (History stream)

Cheburashka007, Statue at the Field of Angels at Whitney Plantation, December 23, 2019, Wikimedia Commons.

Decolonizing the Pope’s Museum: The Repatriation of Indigenous Artifacts in the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum

ENDNOTES

On July 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the deaths and abuse of Indigenous children in Canadian residential schools.1 The apology follows after Métis and Inuit delegates, consisting of residential school survivors, elders, knowledge keepers, and youth, met with Francis in Rome on March 2022, demanding access to Vatican records and collections to assess the full weight of wrongs done against their communities.2 In particular, Indigenous representatives also wanted to see their cultural artifacts, many of which were acquired when the residential school system and de-indigenization were ongoing. Some of these items also harken back to the time of Atlantic empires, which dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their land based on the doctrine of discovery. Today, Indigenous scholars are preserving their cultural heritage by retracing the origins of these artifacts held in the Vatican for repatriation.

When the delegates visited the Ethnological Museum Anima Mundi to see the Vatican’s Indigenous artifacts, they were distraught. Cassidy Caron, President of the Métis National Council, spoke for the delegation when she stated the following: “We are shocked by the insensitive display of these Inuvialuit and Indigenous artifacts at the Vatican Museum in the context of ongoing revelations related to the abuse and deaths of thousands of Indigenous children at Canadian residential schools, more than 60 per cent of which were run by the Catholic Church.”3 The delegates witnessed their respective cultural items—an Inuvialuit kayak, a beluga or killer whale sculpture, a wooden mask for Potlatch ceremonies from the

The main courtyard of the Musei Vaticani, Rome. View on main courtyard of Vatican Museums in Vatican City, Rome 2011, photograph, Wikimedia Commons.

Haida Gwaii islands, a feathered headdresses, carved walrus tusks, and embroidered animal skins—unaccompanied by captions acknowledging their provenance.4 As Associated Press and Toronto Star reported, the process of repatriation may be slow since the Church sees many of these artifacts as gifts.5 However, Indigenous curators Michael Galban and Gloria Bell suspect the term “gifts” ignores the coercive power play that existed between the Church and Indigenous peoples when the artifacts were acquired.6

Canadian artifacts were displayed in the Vatican Missions Exposition in Rome of 1925 to promote missionary activity, according to missiologist Angelyn Dries.7 Due to the vast number of collections in the exposition—which displayed 100,000 artifacts from around the world—the Ethnological Museum was founded, retaining 40,000 artifacts as “gifts.” The museum currently holds 80,000 artifacts in total, dating from two million-year-old objects to present-day “gifts.”8 John Considine, a priest visiting the Exposition, described it as a “window” to the success of Catholicism around the world.9 The fact they were acquired when the Church and the Canadian government adopted a “programme of systematic cultural erasure,” as curator and professor Gerald McMaster describes, was unacknowledged.10 He adds, “museums, collectors, tourists, and even the church purchased, traded, and stole objects from Indigenous Canadians.”11 As Galban’s, Bell’s, and McMaster’s insights reveal, the ethical acquisition of many these items is suspect due to the unfair power dynamic between the Church and Indigenous peoples.

The line of demarcation drawn by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 and ratified by the Treaty of Tordesillas 1494. Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494, 2006, image, Wikimedia Commons.

For Indigenous scholars, the artifacts were glorified spoils of conquest that originated from the Church’s participation in the doctrine of discovery. The doctrine originates from Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 bull, which justified Spanish claims over some non-Christian territories, regardless of whether they were inhabited.12 In this light, it is no wonder Bell, a Métis scholar and expert in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit artifacts in early twentieth-century Italy, compares the Exposition to a Roman triumph.13 Though Canadian Archbishop David Bolen says the doctrine was rescinded with time, he agrees that a formal abrogation may be needed.14 As Shawnee-Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb argues, the doctrine normalized a language of colonial domination.15 Blake Watson also notes the language of discovery was employed in the American, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealander legal systems to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands.16

As Indigenous scholars are increasingly asserting “visual, cultural and intellectual sovereignties” over their heritage, the Church is slowly acknowledging its colonialist past and the artifacts’ cultural significance.17 Since 2010, for example, the Church repatriated mummies acquired in the 1925 exposition to Ecuador and Peru.18 Nevertheless, it took eighty-five years for the Holy See to realize that accepting human remains as gifts was an unconscionable act; especially for a Christian institution this reveals the extent of ignorance by which these objects were accepted. The National Catholic Reporter says the Holy See is now working

with Indigenous scholars and representatives to display their artifacts more respectfully.19 What may be considered respectful, however, may mean repatriation, not more informative displays. Will the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum heed the call for decolonization?

This magazine has illustrated the rich history of the world that existed on the Atlantic rim. In the context of reconciliation efforts, it must be noted that the cultural artifacts that reside in the pope’s museum are not isolated from the past—they may be ideologically linked to the doctrine of discovery promulgated by Alexander VI’s bull of 1493, an idea that inserted itself into the legal systems of Atlantic colonies, one of which is Canada. At the crux of the controversy is the official Catholic position that sees these artifacts as gifts, but without their proper acknowledgement, they seem little else but trophies for Indigenous scholars. Though the Vatican has shown signs that it is open to repatriation, efforts to work together to reach an agreement on every single of those items—such as where they belong or whether they should be repatriated—are still to be decided.

“The Catholic Church's mission was evangelical—to save people’s souls,” says McMaster, “but it is our mission—the mission of the delegations—to save our cultures.”20

Brian Thomson MAIH (History stream)

The number of Canadian Indian residential schools and residences from 1867–1998. Canadian Indian Residential Schools number of schools and residences according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, image, Wikimedia Commons.

N D N O T E S

Endnotes and Sources Consulted

From Margins to Centre

Afro-Descendant Conquistadors of the Americas: How Conquistadors of African Heritage Challenge Stereotypes of the Spanish Conquest

1. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Amber Brian, Bradley Benton, and Pablo García Loaeza, The Native Conquistador: Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Account of the Conquest of New Spain, Latin American Originals (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); Gabriel González Núñez, “The Story of a Shipwrecked Slave: The Role of Esteban as an Interpreter in the Early Exploration and Conquest of the Americas,” 1611: A Journal of Translation History 14, (2020): para. 1–34.

2. Restall, Seven Myths, 12–13; for examples of three probanzas, see José T. Medina, comp., Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de Chile, desde el Viaje de Magallanes hasta la Batalla de Maipo, 1518-1818: Valdivia y sus Compañeros, vol. 15 (Santiago: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1898), 5; 110–11; 472.

3. José T. Medina, comp., Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de Chile, desde el Viaje de Magallanes hasta la Batalla de Maipo, 1518-1818: Valdivia y sus Compañeros, vol. 15 (Santiago: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1898), 5; 110–11; 472.

4. James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, eds. and trans, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, Sixteenth Century, Cambridge Latin American Studies 22, ed. by Malcolm Deas Clifford T. Smith and John Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 155–56; 185–86; 187.

5. Lockhart and Otte, Letters and People, 163; 168; 187; Brian, Benton, and Loaeza, The Native Conquistador, 9; 10.

6. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, trans. and ed. by Cyclone Covey (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press 1983), 27.

7. Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, 25; 27; 29; 30–31; 32.

8. Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, 25; 91.

9. Richard A. Gordon, “Following Estevanico: The Influential Presence of an African Slave in Sixteenth-century New World Historiography,” Colonial Latin American Review 15, no. 2 (2006): 184.

10. González Núñez, “The Story of a Shipwrecked Slave,” para. 4.

11. See note 5.

12. Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, 63; 64.

13. Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, 89; 101–2; 106.

14. González Núñez, “The Story of a Shipwrecked Slave,” para. 31.

15. Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, 119–20.

16. Cabeza de Vaca, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, 124; 125–26.

17. Kevin Young, “Ambiguous Conquest in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic World: The Personal Journey of Esteban de Dorantes,” in African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change, ed. ’BioDun J. Ogundayo and Julius O. Adekunle (London: Lexington Books, 2019), 13.

18. Jerry R. Craddock, ed., “Fray Marcos de Niza, Relación (1539) Edition and Commentary,” Romance Philology 53, 1 (1999): 1v; 4r; 4v. DOI:http://www.jstor.org/stable/44741666. Carrock’s journal article translates Fray Marcos’ Relación in Spanish and organizes it in folios.

19. Craddock, “Fray Marcos de Niza, Relación (1539),” 3r; 4v; 5r.

20. Craddock, “Fray Marcos de Niza, Relación (1539),” 7r; 7v; 8r; 8v.

21. George P. Winship, ed., trans., and comp., The Journey of Coronado, 1540–1542, from the City of Mexico to the Grand Canon of the Colorado and the Buffalo Plains of Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska, as Told by Himself and His Followers (New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1904), 1–2; 6.

22. Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (2000): 175–76, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1008202

23. Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 177.

24. Martin de Castro, “Probanza de Juan Garrido – 1538, Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Audiencia de Mexico. Leg. 204,” 2r (my translation) in Ricardo E. Alegría, Juan Garrido: El Conquistador Negro en las Antillas, Florida, México y California c.1502–1540 (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 1990), 127–138. Alegría’s work provides Juan Garrido’s probanza¸ which he organizes in folios. Martin de Castro was the public scribe who recorded the probanza.

25. Castro, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 2.

26. Castro, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 4r; 5r; 6r; 7r; 8r; 9r. Look at the fourth question to find eyewitness testimony of Garrido’s participation in Tenochtitlan.

27. Alegría, Juan Garrido, 99.

28. Peter Gerhard, “A Black Conquistador in Mexico,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 58, no. 3 (1978): 452, DOI:https://doi.org/10.2307/2513959

29. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport; London: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 65–66; Castro, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 1r; fol. 3r; fol. 5r; fol. 7r. Look at the ninth question to find eyewitness testimony of Garrido growing wheat.

30. Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 172; 173; 175.

31. Castro, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 4v; 5r; 5v; 7r; 7v; 8v; 9r. Look at the tenth question for eyewitness testimony on Garrido’s social situation.

32. David Sánchez Sánchez, “Juan Garrido, El Negro Conquistador: Nuevos Datos Sobre Su Identidad,” Hipogrifo: Revista de Literatura y Cultura Del Siglo de Oro 8, 1 (2020): 274; 277, DOI:10.13035/H.2020.08.01.19.

33. Juan Hurtado, “Probanza de los méritos y servicios de Juan Beltrán de Magaña en la batalla de Xaquijaguana contra Gonzalo Pizarro y después en Chile con el gobernador Valdivia, conquistando y poblando aquel reino, especialmente la ciudad de la Concepción y otras. 19 de Julio de 1563,” in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de Chile, desde el viaje de Magallanes hasta la batalla de Maipo, 1518-1818: Valdivia y sus compañeros, 386–415, vol. 15, comp. José T. Medina (Santiago: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1898), 386. Juan Hurtado is the public Scribe who recorded Juan Beltrán’s probanza.

34. Restall, Seven Myths, 62; Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 196.

35. Hurtado, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 386.

36. Hurtado, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 386.

37. Hurtado, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 386.

38. Hurtado, “Probanza de Juan Garrido,” 387–88; Robert G. Keith, “Encomienda, Hacienda and Corregimiento in Spanish America: A Structural Analysis,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51, no. 3 (1971): 441, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-51.3.431

39. Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 194; Restall, Seven Myths, 62–63.

40. Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description of the West Indies (c.1620). trans. by Charles Upson Clark (Washington: Smithsonian, 1942), 1969.

41. Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 1969 (my translation).

42. Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 1968 (my translation).

43. Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 1968; 1969; Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 194.

Mixed-Race Children of the Atlantic World

1. Jessica Choppin Roney, “Introduction: Distinguishing Port Cities, 1500-1800,” Early American Studies 15, no. 4 (2017): 649, https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 90014819.

2. Ida Altman, and David Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), xxi.

3. Roney, “Introduction,” 655.

4. Emily A. Owens, “Promises: Sexual Labor in the Space Between Slavery and Freedom,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 58, no. 2 (2017): 190. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/26290899. Concubinage, a term that describes any long-term sexual relationship which takes place

outside the bounds of a legal marriage.

5. Winthrop D. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, no 2. (1962): 185, https://doi.org/10. 2307/1921922. Mulatto, a term to describe someone with a mixed ancestry made-up of European and African descent.

6. Guillaume Aubert, “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2004): 464, https://doi.org/10.2307/3491805.

7. Susan D. Amussen, and Allyson M. Poska, “Shifting the Frame: Trans-Imperial Approaches to Gender in the Atlantic World,” Early Modern Women 9, no.1 (2014): 7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26431280.

8. Aubert “The Blood of France,” 473.

9. A.B. Wilkinson, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America, (United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 2.

10. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro,” 193.

11. Lescarbot, History of New France, ed. and trans. Grant, I, 159, 183.

12. Jennifer Heuer, “The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration Franc,” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 520, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40646056.

13. Owens, “Promises,” 188.

14. M. Le Cardinal de Richelieu, le 29 Avril 1627, transcribed in Edits, ordonnances royaux, et arrêtes du Conseil d’Etat du Roi concernant le Canada, I (Quebec, 1854), 10.

15. Aubert, “Blood of France,” 452.

16. Extrait des avids de Mrs de Blénac et Patoulet,” CAOM, F3 248, fold. 686–87.

17. Wilkinson, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom, 163.

18. Wilkinson, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom, 163.

19. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro,” 195.

20. Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (United States: University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated, 2016), 16.

21. Daniel Livesay, “Privileging Kinship: Family and Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Early American Studies 14, no. 4 (2016): 687, https://www.jstor.org/stable/earlamerstud. 14.4.688.

22. Stephen R. Berry, and Laura Prieto, Crossings and Encounters (United States: University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 5.

23. Ordonnance du Gouvernment general des Iles-du Vent, 15 août 1711,” CAOM, F3, 222, fol.189.

24. François de L’Alouëte, Traité des Nobles et des vertus dont ils sont formés (Paris, 1577), 31.

25. South-Carolina Gazette, (Charleston), March 22, 1735.

26. Joseph Clay to John Wright, Savannah, Feb. 17, 1784, Letters of Joseph Clay, Merchant of Savannah, 17761793, (Georgia Historical Society, Collections VIII, 1913), 203-204.

27. Aubert, “The Blood of France,” 461.

28. Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021), 5.

29. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro,” 186.

30. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro,” 195.

31. Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (Durham, NC: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 2.

32. Berry and Prieto, Crossings and Encounters, 88.

33. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro,” 185.

34. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 351.

35. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 100.

36. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 348.

37. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 14.

38. Brooke N. Newman, Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 4.

39. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 3.

40. Stephen Lushington’s Speech, June 16, 1825, as quoted in T.C. Hansard, ed., The Parliamentary Debates, 2d

Ser. (London, 1826), XIII, 1177.

41. Berry and Prieto, Crossings and Encounters, 88.

42. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 352.

From Great Men to Middlemen: A Survey of Historiographical Approaches on Cultural Brokers in the North American Fur Trade

1. Stewart A. Weaver. Exploration: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=878594&site =eds-live&scope=site.

2. Dane Kennedy. Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). https://search-ebscohost-com.twu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=666791&site=edslive&scope=site, 4.

3. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 110).

4. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 2.

5. Bruce M White. “The Woman Who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade.” Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (January 1, 1999). https://search-ebscohost-com.twu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx ?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.483430&site=eds-live&scope=site, 113.

6. Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Chicago, IL: Watson Dwyer Publishing, 1980), 17.

7. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 73.

8. Jennifer S. H Brown. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 1980), 64.

9. Susan Sleeper-Smith. “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade.” Ethnohistory 47, no. 2 (May 1, 2000): https://search-ebscohost com.twu.idm.oclc.org/login. aspx?direct=true&db=edspmu&AN=edspmu.S1527547700202432&site=eds-live&scope=site, 426.

10. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. (Cambridge University Press, 2011). https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05965a& AN=alc.583914&site=eds-live&scope=site, xxvi.

11. White, The Middle Ground, xxvii.

12. Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lake Indians and the Making of America (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015), 15.

Cores and Peripheries

The Columbian Exchange: Sheep, Cattle, and Colonial Growth in the Americas

1. Stuart McCook, “The Neo-Columbian Exchange: The Second Conquest of the Greater Caribbean, 17201930,” special issue, Latin American Research Review 46 (2011): 21, https://doi.org/10.1353/lar.2011.0038.

2. A small portable greenhouse invented by Bagshaw Ward which could maintain reasonably constant temperature levels and humidity aboard ships.

3. McCook, “The Neo-Columbian Exchange,” 17.

4. Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (January 2010): 164, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.2.163.

5. Elizabeth J. Reitz, “The Spanish Colonial Experience and Domestic Animals,” Historical Archaeology 26, no. 1 (1992): 85, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03374163.

6. Reitz, The Spanish Colonial Experience,” 85.

7. Sterling Evans, “The ‘Age of Agricultural Ignorance’: Trends and Concerns for Agriculture Knee-Deep into the Twenty-First Century,” Agricultural History 93, no. 1 (2019): 5. https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2019.093.1.004.

8. Evans, “The ‘Age of Agricultural Ignorance,’” 5.

9. Joseph M. McCann, “Before 1492 the Making of the Pre-Columbian Landscape,” Ecological Restoration 17, no. 1-2 (1999): 16 https://doi.org/10.3368/er.17.1-2.15

10. Nicole Boivin, Dorian Q Fuller, and Alison Crowther, “Old World Globalization and the Columbian Exchange: Comparison and Contrast,” World Archaeology 44, no. 3 (2012): 453, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.20 12.729404.

11. At this time, feral cattle were populous across the Americas. Some of the wild cattle had come south across the Savannah, breaking off from the large herds of South Carolina, while the other domesticated cattle had moved north from the remnants of Spanish herds in Florida. In Mart A. Stewart, “‘Whether Wast, Deodand, or Stray’: Cattle, Culture, and the Environment in Early Georgia,” Agricultural History 65, no. 3 (1991): 5.

12. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 5. By 1750, some of these cattle evolved into the exceptionally hard breed of the Florida ‘scrub cattle’ which have survived to the present day (p. 6).

13. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 5.

14. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 6.

15. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 7.

16. Andrew Sluyter, “How Africans and Their Descendants Participated in Establishing Open-Range Cattle Ranching in the Americas,” Environment and History 21, no. 1 (January 2015): 86, https://doi.org/10.3197/0 96734015x14183179969782.

17. Sluyter, “How Africans and Their Descendants,” 86–7.

18. Sluyter, “How Africans and Their Descendants,” 87.

19. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 15.

20. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 15.

21. Tamara Miner Haygood, “Cows, Ticks, and Disease: A Medical Interpretation of the Southern Cattle Industry,” The Journal of Southern History 52, no. 4 (1986): 553, https://doi.org/10.2307/2209148.

22. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 23.

23. Stewart, “Whether Wast,” 24.

24. Reitz, The Spanish Colonial Experience,” 85.

25. Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum, “‘One of the Finest Grass Countries I Have Met with’: Prince Edward Island's Colonial-Era Cattle Trade,” Agricultural History 90, no. 2 (2016): 175, https://doi. org/10.3098/ah.2016.090.2.173.

26. It is worth noting that caribou disappeared off the island during this time.

27. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 177.

28. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 178.

29. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 178.

30. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 184. 31. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 184. 32. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 185. See figure p 186. 33. Bitterman and McCallum “One of the Finest Grass Countries,” 189. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. John R. Fisher, “Cattle Plagues Past and Present: The Mystery of Mad Cow Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 2 (1998): 224, https://doi.org/10.1177/002200949803300202. 37. IWTO, “History of Sheep,” International Wool Textile Organisation, August 9, 2022, https://iwto.org/sheep/ history-of-sheep/. 38. IWTO, “History of Sheep”. 39. “Native Sheep of South America.” Scientific American 57, no. 23 (1887): 353. 40. “Native Sheep of South America,” 353.

41. Reitz, The Spanish Colonial Experience,” 85. 42. Reitz, The Spanish Colonial Experience,” 85.

43. Susan M. Ouellette, “Divine Providence and Collective Endeavor: Sheep Production in Early Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly 69, no. 3 (1996): 356, https://doi.org/10.2307/366780.

44. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 356. 45. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 360. 46. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 361.

47. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 357.

48. Historical Currency Conversion, https://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp (accessed December 12, 2022).

49. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 369.

50. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 369.

51. M. Eugene Ensminger, Sheep & Goat Science (Danville, IL: Interstate Publishers, 2002), 34.

52. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 369.

53. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 365.

54. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 365.

55. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 371.

56. Ouellette, “Sheep Production,” 371.

Agency and Interest: The Role of African Middlemen in the Atlantic Slave Trade

1. Louise Daniel Hutchinson, Out of Africa: From West African Kingdoms to Colonization (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), 20.

2. J. D. Fage, A History of Africa (Routledge, 2001). 256. Some estimate that nearly 9 million slaves were transported across the trans-Saharan route.

3. Hutchinson, Out of Africa, 40.

4. John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 63.

5. Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), 40.

6. Thornton, A Cultural History, 67.

7. Ibid.

8. “Interview with Atchinou Kokou, Lom” quoted in Alessandra Brivio, “Tales of Cowries, Money and slaves” in African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, & Martin A. Klein (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 53.

9. Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. African Studies. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 114–24.

10. Thornton, A Cultural History, 64.

11. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage du Chevalier des Marachais en Guinée, isles voisines, et à Cayenne, fait en 1725, 1726, & 1727 (4 volumes, Amsterdam, 1731), 2: 192. Quoted in Thornton, A Cultural History, 62.

12. Arquivo do Estado de Bahia, 23, fol. 90, quoted in Thornton, A Cultural History, 64.

13. The Royal African: or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe. Comprehending a Distinct Account of His Country and Family; His Elder Brother's Voyage to France, and Reception there; the Manner in Which Himself Was Confided by His Father to the Captain Who Sold Him; His Condition While a Slave in Barbadoes; the True Cause of His Bring Redeemed; His Voyage from Thence; and Reception Here in England. Interspers'd Throughout with Several Historical Remarks on the Commerce of the European Nations, Whose Subjects Frequent the Coast of Guinea. To which is Prefixed a Letter from the Author to a Person of Distinction, in Reference to Some Natural Curiosities in Africa; as Well as Explaining the Motives which Induced Him to Compose These Memoirs. (London: W. Reeve, G. Woodfall, and J. Barnes, 1750). 25.

14. Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 39.

15. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, 62.

(Un)seen Traders of the Atlantic World

1. Gavin Daley, “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers’, 1810-1814,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 334, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140133.

2. Guy Chet, “Smuggling: Armed Commerce and the Severe Limits of State Enforcement and Persuasion,” in Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1865 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 70.

3. Chet, “Smuggling,” 71.

4. David Head, “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early

Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no.3 (2013): 438, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24487048.

5. Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 88.

6. Guy Chet, “Smuggling,” 71.

7. Lieutenant Commander John Gedge to collector and controller of customs at Dover, at sea, 17 July 1811, The National Archives (TNA): CUST 54/25.

8. Robert Hardy, Serious Cautions and Advice to All Concerned in Smuggling, (London, 1818).

9. David Vaisy, ed., The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765 (Oxford, 1985), 159, 280.

10. Jesse Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (United States: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 7.

11. Sam Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 4, no. 1 (2009): 58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23747381.

12. Daley, “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers’,” 334.

13. Jessica Choppin Roney, “Introduction: Distinguishing Port Cities, 1500–1800,” Early American Studies 15, no.4 (2017): 650, https://www.jstor.org/stable/9 0014819.

14. Alan L. Karras, Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (United States: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),141.

15. Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate, trans. Chamberlain, D4 [55]. “Aficionados”: Navas de Carrera, Dissertacion historica, 57.

16. Chet, “Smuggling,” 66.

17. Beverly Lemire, “Men of the World: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 2 (2015): 298, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/24702040.

18. Chet, “Smuggling,” 66.

19. David Head, “New Nations, New Connections: Spanish American Privateering from the United States and the Development of Atlantic Relation,” Early American Studies 11, no. 1 (2013): 169, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/23546708.

20. Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” 52.

21. Bram Hoonhout, “The Centrality of Smuggling,” in Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800 (University of Georgia Press, 2020), 10.

22. Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” 52.

23. Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” 60.

24. Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground, 93.

25. George Lipscomb, A Journey into Cornwall (Warwick, 1799), 277.

26. Chet, “Smuggling,” 68.

27. Karras, Smuggling, 8.

28. Kwass, Contraband, 97–98.

29. Kwass, Contraband, 93.

30. Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 7.

31. George K. Holmes, “Some Features of Tobacco History,” Agricultural History Society Papers 2 (1923): 389, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44215783.

32. Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” 53.

33. Petition to the Customs Board 22 June 1784, Customs and Exercise Museum Library [hereafter CEM] 25,000/11C.

34. Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” 59.

35. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 218.

36. Willis, “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe,” 60.

On the Atlantic

Newfoundland Lost: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage in the Early Atlantic World

1. Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, Reinterpreting History, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117–18.

2. Lyell Campbell, Sable Island Shipwrecks: Disaster and Survival at the North Atlantic Graveyard (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 2001), 1; 4; Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 39; 61–62; 61–62; 107; 123–24; George A. Rose, Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2007), 209.

3. James Peter Conlan, “‘[Who] Hath Covered the Naked with a Garment’: The Homespun Origins of the English Reformation,” Reformation 9, no. 1 (2004): 49; 61–62; Alexander VI, “The Colonization of the New World (Inter caetera), 1493,” in Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed., Robert S. Miola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 484.

4. Pius V, “The Excommunication of Elizabeth I (Regnans in excelsis), 1570,” in Early Modern Catholicism, 487.

5. David W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London: Hollis & Carter, 1958), 176; Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Over-Land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any Time within the Compasse of these 1600 Yeeres, vol. 7 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), 165; 185–86.

6. Richard Collinson, ed., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576–8, Reprinted from the First Edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages, with Selections from Manuscript Documents in the British Museum and State Paper Office (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867), 8–9; Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 2; Robert McGhee, The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher: An Elizabethan Adventure (Montreal and Kingson: McGill Queen's University Press with Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2001), 22; 23.

7. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage from the Collection of Richard Hakluyt (London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1886), 83; 85; McGhee, The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 58

8. David B. Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, vol. 1, no. 83 (Surrey: Hakluyt Society, 2010), 170.

9. Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises, 176–177; Nicholls, A Fleeting Empire, 27; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 139–140.

10. Andrew Nicholls, A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010), 25–26; 28; Rainer Baehre, ed., Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters off Newfoundland, 1583–1893 (Montreal and Kingston: Carleton University Press, 1999), 15–16.

11. Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 22–23.

12. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland,, 22–23.

13. Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises, 172.

14. Nate Probasco, “Cartography as a Tool of Colonization: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 Voyage to North America,” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2014): 426; 430–31; 433, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1086/677407

15. John Dee, Cotton MS Augustus I.i.1, quoted in William H. Sherman, “Putting the British Seas on the Map: John Dee’s Imperial Cartography,” Cartographica 35, no. 3-4 (1998): 4, DOI:https://doi.org/10.3138/H698K7R3-4072-2K73. The inscriptions were written on the reverse side of the map.

16. Cotton MS Augustus I.i.1, as quoted in Sherman, “Putting the British Seas on the Map,” 4.

17. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 36–37.

18. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 17–18; 19; 23.

19. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 38; 39.

20. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 37.

21. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 18; 21.

22. John Dee, “General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation [1577],” in John Dee: Essential Readings, comp. by Gerald Suster, Western Esoteric Masters Series (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2003), 51.

23. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Obsession, 39. Richard Hakluyt, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of All by Our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons: With Two Mappes Annexed Hereunto (London: Thomas Dawson for T. Woodcocke, 1850), 1.

24. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Obsession, 7.

25. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Obsession, 7.

26. Conlan, “[Who] Hath Covered the Naked with a Garment,’” 49; 61–62.

27. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, vol. 8, 47.

28. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 64; Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 41; Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 40.

29. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 46.

30. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 46–47; 47–48.

31. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 42; 45; 46.

32. Christopher W. Landsea, William M. Gray, Paul W. Mielke, and Kenneth J. Berry, “Seasonal Forecasting of Atlantic Hurricane Activity,” Weather 49, no. 8 (1994): 274–75.

33. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 47.

34. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 48.

35. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 48; Campbell, Sable Island Shipwrecks, 4.

36. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 44.

37. Waters, The Art of Navigation, 4–5; 36; 59.

38. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 47; 49. See marginal note on page 47.

39. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 51.

40. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 52–53.

41. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 62–63.

42. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 50–51.

43. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 61.

44. Baehre, Outrageous Seas, 2.

45. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 63; Campbell, Sable Island Shipwrecks, 4; 5.

46. Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, A Dune Adrift: The Strange Origins and Curious History of Sable Island (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), 123; 132.

47. De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, A Dune Adrift, 61; 65; 67.

48. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 85–86.

49. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 65–66; 85–86.

50. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 67.

51. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 40. Since the voyage started with two-hundred-and-sixty men, a loss of about a hundred men in the Delight reduced it to one-hundred-and-sixty, without counting desertions, deaths, and the Raleigh’s and Swallow’s return to England. A rough estimate of fifty-two men for each of the five ships would make two ships equal one-hundred-and-four men. Given that the Raleigh was the largest ship, it probably held more than fifty-two men. While the Golden Hind was average-sized, the Squirrel was the lightest ship, I estimate that less than a hundred men remained in the voyage at this time, which approximates to one-third of the original contingent.

52. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 69.

53. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 68–69; 71–72.

54. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 72–73.

55. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 73–74.

56. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 75.

Under the Banner of the Jolly Roger: Pirate Flags of the Atlantic World

1. Chris Land, “Flying the Black Flag: Revolt, Revolution and the Social Organization of Piracy in the ‘Golden Age,’” Management and Organizational History 2, no. 2 (2007): 170. https://doi. org/10.1177/1744935907078726.

2. Land, “Flying the Black Flag,” 171.

3. Land, “Flying the Black Flag,” 171.

4. H. G. Carr, “Pirate Flags,” The Mariner's Mirror 29, no. 3 (1943), 131. https://doi.org/10.1080/00253359.194 3.10658840.

5. Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, Ports, Piracy, and Maritime War: Piracy in the English Channel and the Atlantic, c. 1280-c. 1330 (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2013), 13.

6. Heebøll-Holm, Ports, Piracy, and Maritime War, 16.

7. Heebøll-Holm, Ports, Piracy, and Maritime War, 14.

8. Heebøll-Holm, Ports, Piracy, and Maritime War, 16.

9. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the AngloAmerican Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 279.

10. Carr, “Pirate Flags,” 132.

11. David Whetham, Just Wars and Moral Victories: Surprise, Deception and the Normative Framework of European War in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2009), 45.

12. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 279.

13. Land, “Flying the Black Flag,” 177.

14. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 279.

15. Land, “Flying the Black Flag,” 177.

16. Hand Turley in Land, “Flying the Black Flag,” 177.

17. Carr, “Pirate Flags,” 133.

18. Carr, “Pirate Flags,” 133.

19. Carr, “Pirate Flags,” 134.

Spectres of the Atlantic

Decolonizing the Curriculum: A comparative review of Canada Revisited: A Social and Political History of Canada to 1911 and Nelson Socials 9

1. Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer, “A Snapshot of the Public's Views on History,” Perspectives on History (August 30, 2021), https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/ september-2021/a-snapshot-of-the-publics-views-on-history-national-poll-offers-valuable-insights-forhistorians-and-advocates.

2. Dane Kennedy. Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). https://search-ebscohost-com.twu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=666791&site=edslive&scope=site, 1.

3. Penney Clark and Roberta McKay, Canada Revisited: A Social and Political History of Canada to 1911 (Edmonton, Alberta: Arnold Publishing Ltd., 1992), 26.

4. Ball, Lyall, and Morton, Nelson Socials (Toronto, ON: Nelson, 2019), 18–19.

5. Ball, Lyall, and Morton, Nelson Socials, 48–49.

6. Kennedy, Reinterpreting Exploration, 2.

7. Richard White. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05965a& AN=alc.583914&site=eds-live&scope=site, 94.

8. Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lake Indians and the Making of America (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015), 15.

9. Clark and McKay, Canada Revisited, 24.

10. Clark and McKay, Canada Revisited, 31.

11. Ibid.

12. Ball, Lyall, and Morton, Nelson Socials 9, 22.

13. Ibid.

14. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens. Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015). https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=965246&site=edslive&scope=site, 35)

15. Susan Sleeper-Smith. “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade.” Ethnohistory 47, no. 2 (May 1, 2000): https://search-ebscohost-com.twu.idm.oclc.org/login. aspx?direct=true&db=edspmu&AN=edspmu.S1527547700202432&site=eds-live&scope=site, 424.

16. Sleeper-Smith. “Women, Kin, and Catholicism,” 424.

17. Clark and McKay, Canada Revisited, 31.

18. Ball, Lyall, and Morton, Nelson Socials 9, 22.

19. Clark and McKay, Canada Revisited, 32.

The Woman King (2022): A Review

1. Reuban Baron, “The Woman King Review: Entertaining, Even If Historically Questionable” Looper (September 12, 2022), https://www.looper.com/1000870/the-woman-king-review-entertaining-even-ifhistorically-questionable/.

2. Lovia Gyarkye, “The Woman King Review: Viola Davis Transforms in Gina Prince-Bythewood's Rousing Action Epic,” The Hollywood Reporter, (September 9, 2022), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/ movie-reviews/the-woman-king-viola-davis-gina-prince-bythewood-thuso-mbedu-1235215820/.

3. John C. Yoder, “Fly and Elephant Parties: Political Polarization in Dahomey, 1840–1870,” The Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 417–32.

4. Frederick Edwyn Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans being the journals of two missions to the king of Dahomey, and residence at his capital, in the year 1849 and 1850, (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), 139. (Nanisca Character Piece)

1. Dash, Mike, Dahomey’s Women Warriors, September 23, 2011 Smithsonian Magazine.

1. Jonathan Ringen, “Ryan Reynolds on ‘Deadpool,’ Diversity, and the Secrets of Successful Marketing,” Fast Company (August 4, 2020), https://www.fastcompany.com/90525283/most-creative-people-2020-ryanreynolds.

2. Michael Brice-Saddler, “Isn’t It Romantic? No, It Isn’t.” The Washington Post (June 2019, 12AD). https:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bwh&AN=wapo.a7158080-1839-11ea-8406df3c54b3253e&site=eds-live&scope=site.

3. Olivia Hosken, “It Was Never Ok to Get Married at a Plantation. Here’s Why.,” Town & Country (November 2, 2021), https://www.townandcountrymag.com/the-scene/weddings/a33446093/plantation-weddingcontroversy-ryan-reynolds-blake-lively/.

4. John R. Legg, “A Romantic Union? Thoughts on Plantation Weddings from a Photographer/Historian,” National Council on Public History (February 24, 2020), https://ncph.org/history-at-work/plantationweddings/

5. Legg, “A Romantic Union?”

6. Matthew Russell Cook, Candace Forbes Bright, Perry L. Carter, and E. Arnold Modlin. “Dead Labor: Fetishizing Chattel Slavery at Contemporary Southern Plantation Tourism Sites.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 21, no. 3 (May 2022): 2. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&db=a9h&AN=158469315&site=eds-live&scope=site.

7. Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin, “Dead Labor,” 2.

8. Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin, “Dead Labor,” 9.

9. Cook, Bright, Carter, and Modlin, “Dead Labor,” 3.

“This Place is their Legacy”: Uncovering the Dark History of the Plantation Wedding Industry

10. Melaine Harnay, “Slavery and Plantation Tourism in Louisiana: Deconstructing the Romanticized Narrative of the Plantation Tours.” Accessed November 5, 2022. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&d b=edsrev&AN=edsrev.7C943537&site=eds-live&scope=site, 2.

11. Harnay, “Slavery and Plantation Tourism in Louisiana.”

12. Cook, Bright, Carter and Modlin, “Dead Labor,” 12.

13. “Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens,” Houmas House, accessed November 4, 2022, https:// houmashouse.com/.

14. “Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens.”

15. Ibid.

16. “Magnolia Plantation and Gardens,” Magnolia Plantation and Gardens | Charleston, SC, accessed October 24, 2022, https://www.magnoliaplantation.com/.

17. “Magnolia Plantation and Gardens.”

18. “Magnolia Plantation and Gardens.”

19. “Magnolia Plantation and Gardens.”

20. “Whitney Plantation Museum,” Whitney Plantation, accessed October 24, 2022, https://www. whitneyplantation.org/.

21. “Whitney Plantation Museum.”

22. “Whitney Plantation Museum.”

Decolonizing the Pope’s Museum: The Repatriation of Indigenous Artifacts in the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum

1. Pope Francis, “Meeting with Indigenous Peoples: First Nations, Métis and Inuit,” EWTN, July 25, 2022, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/meeting-with-indigenous-peoples-first-nations-metis-andinuit-24324 [on the link itself the author is listed as “Pope Francis.”]

2. Jenna Kunze, “Western Canadian Inuit leader to the Vatican: “It is not ‘the Pope’s kayak,’” Native News Online, December 3, 2021, https://nativenewsonline.net/sovereignty/western-canadian-inuit-leaderto-the-vatican-it-is-not-the-pope-s-kayak; Philip Pullella, “Canada Indigenous Ask Pope for Residential Schools Records,” Reuters, March 28, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-indigenousask-pope-residential-schools-records-2022-03-28/. According to Jenna Kunze, delegations consisted of residential school survivors, elders, knowledge keepers, and youth.

3. Kunze, “Western Canadian Inuit leader to the Vatican.”

4. Kunze, “Western Canadian Inuit leader to the Vatican”; Nicole Winfield, “Vatican says they’re gifts; Indigenous groups want them back,” Associated Press, July 21, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/popefrancis-entertainment-travel-canada-3e9ab6fad79ee444f20633fd8020edea

5. Nicole Winfield, “Vatican says they’re gifts”; Daniela Germano, “‘There’s a lot to it’: Repatriating Indigenous artifacts from Vatican may take years,” Toronto Star, April 1, 2022, https://www.thestar.com/news/ canada/2022/04/01/theres-a-lot-to-it-repatriating-indigenous-artifacts-from-vatican-may-take-years.html; Mary Annette Pember, “Indigenous Peoples Want Sacred Items Returned from Catholic Museums,” Indian Country Today, July 29, 2022. https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/indigenous-peoples-want-sacreditems-returned-from-catholic-museums

6. Winfield, “Vatican says they’re gifts.”

7. Angelyn Dries, “The 1925 Vatican Mission Exposition and the Interface Between Catholic Mission Theory and World Religions,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 40, no. 2 (April 2016): 1; 122–23. DOI:10.1177/2396939316638334.

8. “Ethnological Museum Anima Mundi,” Collections, Musei Vaticani, accessed November 30, 2022, https:// www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-etnologico/museo-etnologico. html

9. John J. Considine, The Vatican Mission Exposition: A Window on the World (New York: MacMillan Company, 1929), 30–31.

10. Gerald McMaster, “‘It's our mission to save our culture’ says art curator of Indigenous artifacts in Vatican,” Interview by Ginella Massa, Canada Tonight, CBC News, March 30, 2022. video, 0:22, https://www.cbc.ca/

player/play/2017675843537

11. McMaster, “‘It's our mission to save our culture,’” 0:22.

12. Alexander VI, “The Colonization of the New World (Inter caetera), 1493,” Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed., Robert S. Miola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 482–83, 484.

13. Gloria Bell, “Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition,” Journal of Global Catholicism 3, no. 2 (2019): 19–20, doi:10.32436/2475-6423.1054

14. Donald Bolen, “Catholic Church has ‘Rescinded’ Papal Bulls on Colonization, says Regina Archbishop,” CBC News, July 26, 2022, video, 1:03, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/catholic-church-rescinded-papalbulls-184438688.html

15. Steven Newcomb, “Q+A | An Indigenous scholar on why the Pope needs to address the Doctrine of Discovery,” Interview by Jared Monkman. The Trailbreaker, CBC News, July 27, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/north/steven-newcomb-doctrine-of-discovery-1.6533637; Mark Gollom, “Why Pope Francis may be hesitant to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery,” CBC News, July 30, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/pope-francis-doctrine-discovery-indigenous-1.6536174

16. Blake A. Watson, “The Impact of the American Doctrine of Discovery on Native Land Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand,” Seattle University Law Review 34, no. 2 (2011): 508–9.

17. Bell, “Competing Sovereignties,” 33.

18. Cindy Wooden, “Vatican Museums repatriates mummies to Peru.” National Catholic Reporter, October 18, 2022, https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican-museums-repatriates-mummies-peru

19. Wooden, “Vatican Museums repatriates mummies to Peru.”

20. McMaster, “‘It's our mission to save our culture,’” 5:14.

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From Margins to Centre

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Cores and Peripheries

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Agency and Interest: The Role of African Middlemen in the Atlantic Slave Trade

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Davidson, Basil. The African Slave Trade. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1980.

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York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1975.

Sparks, Randy J.. Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

The Royal African: or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe. Comprehending a Distinct Account of His Country and Family; His Elder Brother's Voyage to France, and Reception there; the Manner in Which Himself Was Confided by His Father to the Captain Who Sold Him; His Condition While a Slave in Barbadoes; the True Cause of His Bring Redeemed; His Voyage from Thence; and Reception Here in England. Interspers'd Throughout with Several Historical Remarks on the Commerce of the European Nations, Whose Subjects Frequent the Coast of Guinea. To which is Prefixed a Letter from the Author to a Person of Distinction, in Reference to Some Natural Curiosities in Africa; as Well as Explaining the Motives which Induced Him to Compose These Memoirs. London: W. Reeve, G. Woodfall, and J. Barnes, [1750].

Thornton, John. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

(Un)seen Traders of the Atlantic World

Chet, Guy. “Smuggling: Armed Commerce and the Severe Limits of State Enforcement and Persuasion.” In The Ocean Is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1865, 66–91. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

Crofts, Marylee S. “Economic Power and Racial Irony: Portrayals of Women Entrepreneurs in French Colonial Senegal.” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 19 (1994): 216–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43007777.

Cromwell, Jesse. The Smugglers' World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela. United States: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Daly, Gavin. “Napoleon and the ‘City of Smugglers’, 1810-1814.” The Historical Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 333–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140133.

Head, David. “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 3 (2013):433–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24487048.

Head, David. “New Nations, New Connections: Spanish American Privateering from the United States and the Development of Atlantic Relations.” Early American Studies 11, no. 1 (2013): 161–75. http://www.jstor. org/stable/23546708.

Holmes, George K. “Some Features of Tobacco History” Agricultural History Society Papers2 (1923): 385–407. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44215783.

Hoonhout, Bram. “The Centrality of Smuggling.” In Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800, 111–35. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020.

Karras, Alan L.. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Kwass, Michael. Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Lemire, Beverly. Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, C.1500–1820. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Lemire, Beverly. “Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800.” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 2 (2015): 288–319. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/24702040.

Lieutenant Commander John Gedge to collector and controller of customs at Dover, at sea, 17 July 1811, The National Archives (TNA): CUST 54/25.

Monod, Paul. “Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690-1760.” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 2 (1991): 150–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/175831.

Roney, Jessica Choppin. “Introduction: Distinguishing Port Cities, 1500–1800.” Early American Studies 15, no. 4 (2017): 649–59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/9 0014819.

Rupert, Linda M.. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Greece: University

of Georgia Press, 2012.

Petition to the Customs Board 22 June 1784, Customs and Exercise Museum Library [hereafter CEM] 25,000/11C.

Stern, Philip J. and Wennerlind, Carl. Mercantilism Reimagined : Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Willis, Sam. “The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe.” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 4, no. 1 (2009): 51–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23747381.

Tract printed in Aberdeen in 1739, sent to the Directors of the East India Company, 1740, IOR /1/29/52B,52d, BL.

Vaisy, David, ed., The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765 (Oxford, 1985).

On the Atlantic

Newfoundland Lost: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage in the Early Atlantic World Baehre, Rainer. Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters off Newfoundland, 1583–1893. Montreal and Kingston: Carleton University Press, 1999. Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Burnard, Trevor. “The British Atlantic.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Reinterpreting History, edited by Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, 111–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Campbell, Lyell. Sable Island Shipwrecks: Disaster and Survival at the North Atlantic Graveyard. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 2001.

Cell, Gillian T. English Enterprise in Newfoundland 1577–1660. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Collinson, Richard, ed. The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576–8, Reprinted from the First Edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages, with Selections from Manuscript Documents in the British Museum and State Paper Office. London: Hakluyt Society, 1867.

Conlan, James Peter. “‘[Who] Hath Covered the Naked with a Garment’: The Homespun Origins of the English Reformation.” Reformation 9, no. 1 (2004): 49–66.

Dee, John. Cotton MS Augustus I.i.1. Quoted in William H. Sherman, “Putting the British Seas on the Map: John Dee’s Imperial Cartography.” Cartographica 35, no. 3-4 (1998): 1–10. DOI:https://doi.org/10.3138/ H698-K7R3-4072-2K73

Dee, John. “General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation [1577].” In John Dee: Essential Readings, compiled by Gerald Suster, 47–60. Western Esoteric Masters Series. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2003.

De Villiers, Marq, and Sheila Hirtle. A Dune Adrift: The Strange Origins and Curious History of Sable Island. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004.

Hakluyt, Richard. Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of All by Our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons: With Two Mappes Annexed Hereunto. London: Thomas Dawson for T. Woodcocke, 1850.

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Over-Land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any Time within the Compasse of these 1600 Yeeres. Vol. 7 and 8. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904.

Hakluyt, Richard. Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage from the Collection of Richard Hakluyt. London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1886.

Landsea, Christopher W., William M. Gray, Paul W. Mielke, and Kenneth J. Berry. “Seasonal Forecasting of Atlantic Hurricane Activity.” Weather 49, no. 8 (1994): 273–284.

Mancall, Peter C. Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

McGhee, Robert. The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher: An Elizabethan Adventure. Montreal and Kingson: McGill Queen’s University Press with Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2001.

Miola, Robert S., ed. Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Nicholls, Andrew. A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.

Probasco, Nate. “Cartography as a Tool of Colonization: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 Voyage to North America.” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2014): 425–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/677407.

Quinn, David B., ed. The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Vols 1 and 2. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society. Surrey: Hakluyt Society, 2010.

Rose, George A. Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries. St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2007. Waters, David W. The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times. London: Hollis & Carter, 1958.

Under the Banner of the Jolly Roger: Pirate Flags of the Atlantic World Carr, H. G. “Pirate Flags.” The Mariner's Mirror 29, no. 3 (1943): 131–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00253359.194 3.10658840.

Heebøll-Holm, Thomas K. Ports, Piracy, and Maritime War: Piracy in the English Channel and the Atlantic, c. 1280–c. 1330. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2013.

Land, Chris. “Flying the Black Flag: Revolt, Revolution and the Social Organization of Piracy in the ‘Golden Age.’” Management and Organizational History 2, no. 2 (2007): 169–92. https://doi. org/10.1177/1744935907078726.

Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700 - 1750. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989.

Whetham, David. Just Wars and Moral Victories: Surprise, Deception and the Normative Framework of European War in the Later Middle Ages. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2009.

Spectres of the Atlantic

Decolonizing the Curriculum: A comparative review of Canada Revisited: A Social and Political History of Canada to 1911 and Nelson Socials 9

Ball, Brenda, John Lyall, and Tom Morton. Nelson Socials. Toronto, ON: Nelson, 2019.

Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. “A Snapshot of the Public's Views on History.” Perspectives on History. American Historical Association, August 30, 2021. https://www.historians.org/research-andpublications/perspectives-on-history/september-2021/a-snapshot-of-the-publics-views-on-historynational-poll-offers-valuable-insights-for-historians-and-advocates. Clark, Penney, and Roberta McKay. Canada Revisited. Edmonton, Alberta: Arnold Publishing Ltd., 1992. Kennedy, Dane. Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World. Reinterpreting History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=666791&s ite=eds-live&scope=site.

McDonnell, Michael A. Masters of Empire: Great Lake Indians and the Making of America. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015.

Sleeper-Smith, Susan. “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Catholicism: on the Fur Trade / Femmes, Parentèle, et Catholicisme: Nouvelles Perspectives Sur Le Commerce de La Fourrure.” Ethnohistory (Print) 47, no. 2, January 1, 2000: 423–52. https://searchebscohost.com.twu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db= edscal&AN=edscal.156737&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Sleeper-Smith, Susan, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens. Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians. First edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. https://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=965246&site=edslive&scope=site.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground. [Electronic Resource]: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. 20th anniversary ed. Studies in North American Indian History. Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05965a&AN=alc.5 83914&site=eds-live&scope=site.

The Woman King (2022): A Review

Alpern, Stanley B. “On the Origins of the Amazons of Dahomey.” History in Africa 25 (1998): 9–25 Baron, Reuban, (September 12, 2022). “The Woman King Review: Entertaining, Even If Historically Questionable,” Looper.com. Bay, Edna G. “Belief, Legitimacy and the Kpojito: An Institutional History of the 'Queen Mother' in Precolonial Dahomey.” The Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (1995): 1–27 Dash, Mike, Dahomey’s Women Warriors, September 23, 2011, Smithsonian Magazine. Gyarkye, Lovia (September 9, 2022). "The Woman King Review: Viola Davis Transforms in Gina PrinceBythewood's Rousing Action Epic". The Hollywood Reporter. Law, Robin. “The 'Amazons' of Dahomey.” Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, 39 (1993): 245–60. Liman Murtala, Mohammed, Maryam Hamza, and Anas Lawal. “Recognition of the Place of Women in 19th-Century African Warfare: A Study of the Amazons of Dahomey,” LASU Journal of History and International Studies (2021): 175–93.

Obichere, Boniface I. “The Social Character of Slavery in Asante and Dahomey,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 12, no. 3 (1983): 191–205, https://doi.org/10.5070/F7123017144.

Prince-Bythewood. The Woman King. September 16, 2022; United States: Sony Pictures. Film. Yoder, John C. "Fly and Elephant Parties: Political Polarization in Dahomey, 1840-1870," The Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 417–432.

“This Place is their Legacy”: Uncovering the Dark History of the Plantation Wedding Industry

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens, October 9, 2022. https://www.boonehallplantation.com/. Brice-Saddler, Michael. 12AD. “Isn’t It Romantic? No, It Isn’t.” The Washington Post, June 2019. https:// searchebscohostcom.twu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bwh&AN=wapo.a7158080183911ea-8406-df3c54b3253e&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Cook, Matthew Russell, Candace Forbes Bright, Perry L. Carter, and E. Arnold Modlin. 2022. “Dead Labor: Fetishizing Chattel Slavery at Contemporary Southern Plantation Tourism Sites.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 21 (3): 1–20. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&d b=a9h&AN=158469315&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Hosken, Olivia. “It Was Never Ok to Get Married at a Plantation. Here’s Why.” Town &Country., November 2, 2021. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/the-scene/weddings/a33446093/plantation-weddingcontroversy-ryan-reynolds-blake-lively/.

“Houmas House Historic Estate and Gardens.” Houmas House. Accessed November 4, 2022. https:// houmashouse.com/.

Legg, John R. “A Romantic Union? Thoughts on Plantation Weddings from a Photographer/Historian.” National Council on Public History, February 24, 2020. https://ncph.org/history-at-work/plantation-weddings/.

“Magnolia Plantation & Gardens.” Magnolia Plantation and Gardens | Charleston, SC. Accessed October 24, 2022. https://www.magnoliaplantation.com/.

Melaine, Harnay. “Slavery and Plantation Tourism in Louisiana: Deconstructing the Romanticized Narrative of the Plantation Tours.” Mondes Du Tourisme 21 (June 1, 2022). doi:10.4000/tourisme.4595.

Ringen, Jonathan. “Ryan Reynolds on ‘Deadpool,’ Diversity, and the Secrets of Successful Marketing.” Fast Company. Mansueto Ventures LLC, August 4, 2020. https://www.fastcompany.com/90525283/mostcreative-people-2020-ryan-reynolds.

“Whitney Plantation Museum.” Whitney Plantation. Accessed October 24, 2022. https://www. whitneyplantation.org/.

Decolonizing the Pope’s Museum: The Repatriation of Indigenous Artifacts in the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum

Alexander VI. “The Colonization of the New World (Inter caetera), 1493.” In Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources, edited by Robert S. Miola, 482–484. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2007.

Bell, Gloria. “Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition.” Journal of Global Catholicism 3, no. 2 (2019): 18–41. doi:10.32436/2475-6423.1054

Considine, John J. The Vatican Mission Exposition: A Window on the World. New York: MacMillan Company, 1929.

Dries, Angelyn. “The 1925 Vatican Mission Exposition and the Interface Between Catholic Mission Theory and World Religions.” International Bulletin of Mission Research 40, no. 2 (April 2016): 119–132. doi:10.1177/2396939316638334.

Francis I. “Meeting with Indigenous Peoples: First Nations, Métis and Inuit.” EWTN, July 25, 2022. https://www. ewtn.com/catholicism/library/meeting-with-indigenous-peoples-first-nations-metis-and-inuit-24324

Germano, Daniela. “‘There’s a lot to it’: Repatriating Indigenous artifacts from Vatican may take years.” Toronto Star, April 1, 2022, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/04/01/theres-a-lot-to-it-repatriatingindigenous-artifacts-from-vatican-may-take-years.html

Gollom, Mark. “Why Pope Francis may be hesitant to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery.” CBC News, July 30, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/pope-francis-doctrine-discovery-indigenous-1.6536174

Kunze, Jenna. “Western Canadian Inuit leader to the Vatican: “It is not ‘the Pope’s kayak.’” Native News Online, December 3, 2021. https://nativenewsonline.net/sovereignty/western-canadian-inuit-leader-to-thevatican-it-is-not-the-pope-s-kayak

McMaster, Gerald. “‘It’s our mission to save our culture’ says art curator of Indigenous artifacts in Vatican.” Interview by Ginella Massa. Canada Tonight. CBC News, March 30, 2022. Video, 6:41. https://www.cbc. ca/player/play/2017675843537

Musei Vaticani. “Ethnological Museum Anima Mundi.” Collections. Accessed November 30, 2022. https://www. museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-etnologico/museo-etnologico.html Newcomb, Steven. “Q+A | An Indigenous scholar on why the Pope needs to address the Doctrine of Discovery.” Interview by Jared Monkman. The Trailbreaker. CBC News, July 27, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/north/steven-newcomb-doctrine-of-discovery-1.6533637

Pember, Mary Annette. “Indigenous Peoples Want Sacred Items Returned from Catholic Museums.” Indian Country Today, July 29, 2022, https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/indigenous-peoples-want-sacreditems-returned-from-catholic-museums

Pullella, Philip. “Canada Indigenous Ask Pope for Residential Schools Records.” Reuters, March 28, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-indigenous-ask-pope-residential-schoolsrecords-2022-03-28/

Watson, Blake A. “The Impact of the American Doctrine of Discovery on Native Land Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.” Seattle University Law Review 34, no. 2 (2011): 507–552. Winfield, Nicole. “Vatican says they're gifts; Indigenous groups want them back.” Associated Press, July 21, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-entertainment-travel-canada-3e9ab6fad79ee444f20633 fd8020edea