Dispatches: Reflections on the Atlantic World

INSIDE Dispatches

Interactions Sunken Island, Surfaced Legend: The Influence of Atlantis and its Lost People

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The King who Could not be Found: The Influence of Prester John and his Kingdom Page 4 “The Eldorado Spirit”: The Lure of the Man, Lake, and Myth of El Dorado

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Not a Drop to Drink: The Fountain of Youth and the Quest for Eternal Life

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The Impacts of Invaders: Invasive Species in the Atlantic World

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Microscopes on the Past Animal Spotlight—Bluebuck Plant Spotlight—New Mexico Sunflower Farmed to Extinction: Plant Extinction in the Atlantic World

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One Mosquito Bite Away from Colonization: Malaria Resistance in Africa due to Sickle Cell Anemia Page 18 The Forgotten History of Trade Languages

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Feature Second-hand Smoke: Tobacco and the Lingering Seeds of the Columbian Exchange Page 25

Editor Robynne Rogers Healey Designer/ Art Director Tammy Chomiak Writers Sydney R. Dvorak Haley Friesen Jessica Knapp Fiona Kroontje Heather Lam Adriana J. Loewen Maritha Louw Mariah Neily Katrina Nicolle Janina Ritzen Pulfer Analise Saavedra Kim Vandermeulen Jessica Vriend

Disruptions

REFLECTIONS ON THE ATLANTIC WORLD

Sabotage, Suicide, and Flight: Slave Resistance and Resiliency in the Atlantic World

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Privateers and Pirates in the Spanish Atlantic

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Notorious Pirates of the Caribbean: Blackbeard and Anne Bonny

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The False Promise of Liberty: Slavery and the American Revolution

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The French Revolution: An Atlantic Perspective

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Feature The Determined, Decisive, and Diverse: Women of the Atlantic World

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Echoes Empire in a Glass Case: The Diaspora of Atlantic Artifacts in the British Museum Page 65 To Vax or Not to Vax: The Debate as Old as Vaccines Themselves

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The Inca Roads and the Atlantic Network

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Port Royal: Shaky Morals, Shaky Ground

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Gorée Island, Senegal: The Doorway to the Transatlantic Slave Trade

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Sea Shanties: A Microcosm of Exchange

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Spirituals: Faithful Voices in the Midst of Oppression

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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

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Cover image A Pirate Ship Sailing on Sea during Golden Hour pexels.com.

EDITORIAL

Welcome to our digital magazine project! This project is a summative, collaborative undertaking of the students in the Spring 2022 course History 392/592 – Sugar, Slaves, Silver: The Atlantic World, 1450 – 1850. 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 three thematic sections— Interactions, Disruptions, and Echoes. Each section contains articles that explore an area of Atlantic history related to the theme.

A number of the authors have approached their topics from a perspective informed by their major or areas of particular interest.

Readers will recognize the influence of biology, environmental studies, linguistics, literature, museum studies, and political science and the ways students have viewed the Atlantic world through multiple lenses. For more recognized, often romanticized topics, the focus is on the history behind invented pasts and the complexities necessary to nuance historical narratives. Our hope is that the study of interactions and disruptions in the Atlantic world will also disrupt simplistic ways of understanding the rich and varied history of the Atlantic world. The articles in the final section of the magazine reflect on ways that the Atlantic past remains present.

The past echoes around us even today in the spaces we occupy, the monuments we create, the songs we sing. Echoes remind us of the silences inherent in the production of history and the stories we still need to tell. As Michel-Rolph 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 wonderful students who willingly ventured into an unknown learning experience. Their thoughtful and committed engagement throughout this process has been inspiring. Thank you to Janina Ritzen Pulfer for providing 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

INTERACTIONS

Sunken Island, Surfaced Legend: The Influence of Atlantis and its Lost People

ENDNOTES

Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, prosperous and advanced, the legendary island of Atlantis was said to have sunk under the ocean. As the myth depicts, Atlanteans thrived on their island which had filled up the expanse of water between Africa and the Americas, advancing in knowledge and power1 until an earthquake plunged an entire civilization into the depths of the Atlantic.2 As a legend dating back to ancient Greece, retaining connections which spanned even further back to the time of the Flood, the notion of lost Atlantis subtly brought explorers to the coasts of the Atlantic world. As the lure of the unknown brought explorers west, interactions between Europeans and Indigenous Americans urged the question of whether the descendants of the lost civilization still prospered on the other side of the ocean, commonly known as the Mayas.3 The civilization of Atlantis, recorded in a fictional account from Plato’s Timaeus, is described by the Greek philosopher to have lived on an island making up the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, which “there could be crossed, since it had an island before the mouth of the strait which is called, as ye say, the pillars of Herakles.”4 According to Plato, Atlantis was home to a city of wealth and royalty which connected the continents and “all this power gathered itself together, and your country and ours and the whole region within the strait it sought with one single swoop to enslave.”5 With unfortunate luck, the might of Atlantis drowned as it sank, swept to the bottom of the ocean by an earthquake and a flood, believed for centuries to be the Great Flood in the Book of Genesis.6 According to legend retold by Plato, the Atlantic Ocean overtook the mighty civilization of Atlantis, “eat[ing] away the best part of it.”7 Plato’s description gave rise to other interpretations of the legend, as well as the desire to find the lost city and its civilization. In the sixteenth century, most Europeans traversed the Atlantic for settlement, trade, and conquest. Some contemporary writers such as the explorer Francisco Lopez de Gómara and the abbot Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg studied the legend of Atlantis and theorized that it was located in the Americas. During expeditions, Gómara examined the similarities found in mythologies and religions. He noted, for instance, the customs of the Indigenous empires to be “the product of men who shared a common lineage,”8 supposedly as descendants of a once-great Atlantean civilization.

As the Atlantis legend came to be analyzed by scholars over the centuries, the interactions and similarities between religions regarding flood myths created an apparent connection between Plato’s account and Gómara’s deductions. The common assumption emerged that the western and eastern continents were previously interconnected. While traversing the Americas, the missionary Joseph-François Lafitau examined the cultural and religious similarities between the Indigenous myths and those in Europe and concluded that, in addition to Europe, “the ancients knew this part of the world.”9 Indigenous flood myths shared similarities with those in the east, seeming to suggest that Atlantis had been the land believed to bridge the gap between the continents in ancient years.10 One Aztec legend recorded in the Codex of Chimalpopoca refers to a flood brought to earth by gods, as“‘the sky came nearer the water’” and“‘all was lost, and the day Nahui-xochitl, ‘flower,’ destroyed all our flesh.’”11

Amar Preciado, Boy in Traditional Mayan Dress, from Pexels.com

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Athanasius. “Atlantis” by Kircher Athanasius (1678). Wikimedia Commons.

With the parallels in flood narratives came a connection with Atlantis which neither Europeans nor Indigenous Americans learned from one or the other, but rather the similarities “were derived from an actual knowledge of Atlantis possessed by the people of America.”12 The mythological similarities eventually gave rise to suspicion about the descendants of the Atlanteans, “the Toltecs,” who were believed by Brasseur de Bourbourg to be the Mayas.13 The speculation that the Mayas were descendants of Atlanteans remained just that. As the flood myths in the Americas bore similarities to the legend of Atlantis, exploration came to be influenced by its connection to different cultures, even when separated by the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.

Jessica Knapp English major, History minor

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ENDNOTES The King who Could not be Found: The Influence of Prester John and his Kingdom

“Prester John Map” by Abraham Ortelius, from History Today (February 20, 2018). Fair use.

In the Byzantine Empire during the twelfth century, the emperor received a mysterious letter from a Christian king by the name of Prester John. Written in Latin, the letter described Prester John’s kingdom as a place of prosperity and apparent righteousness, though “[n]o

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one could say where the letter had come from or what messenger had carried it to Europe.”1 The mystery surrounding Prester John drove explorers to begin searching regions of India and, in the 1500s, to take the search along the coasts of Africa, seeking out the mythic king who might be an ally for Christian kingdoms trying to convert their neighbours. Exploration was influenced by the desire for an upper-hand over religious enemies, and Prester John, the Christian King of India, was considered central to that effort, no matter how elusive he proved to be.

With religious conflicts raging across Europe and the Middle East, and with the quests for conversion in the Americas, Prester John offered hope of yet another army to serve in the name of Christianity. News eventually spread in the twelfth century, describing the mysterious king, Presbyter Johannes, who “intended to lead his army to the Holy Land in support of his hard-pressed coreligionists there.”2 A Portuguese variation of Prester John’s letter, translated by Damião de Góis in the sixteenth century, led to further curiosity about the location of the Christian king.3 The common belief emerged that Prester John’s kingdom resided in Africa, drawing various expeditions to the African coast seeking proof of the existence of the monarch.4 The quest to discover his kingdom in Ethiopia is one that urged exploration not only “for a better understanding of the whereabouts of Préster John, but for the understanding of the world’s geography.”5 The most notable expedition to search for the kingdom was led by Prince Henry the Navigator, who sought Prester John as an ally along with his African subjects.6 Prince Henry was encouraged by the need “to learn the extent of the Moslem domains in Africa, and to discover ‘if there were in those parts any Christian princes…that they would aid him against those enemies of the faith.’”7 Though no one bearing the name Prester John was ever discovered in Ethiopia, the Portuguese believed they had found him in the sixteenth-century Ethiopian Emperor, Lebna Dengel.8 Regardless of their discovery, the name of Prester John was never admitted to the list of African rulers and the mystery of his identity remained confined to mere speculation.

Prester John’s letter spurred a search which spanned centuries into the 1500s.

Portuguese explorers sailed to the coasts of Africa, seeking the support of Prester John and his “thoroughly virtuous” subjects against the Muslims.9 Sir John Mandeville alludes to the king and his kingdom, reflecting on the “many full noble cities and good towns in his realm”10 and examines the power of this mysterious king, as reflected in his letter, that he “hath under him many kings and many isles and many diverse folk of diverse conditions.”11 In this way, Prester John became an mythical example of a successful Christian kingdom at a time when religious disputes raged throughout Eurasia.12 Thus, the legend of Prester John encouraged exploration in the name of religion throughout the Atlantic world. Those who searched for the Christian king in Africa were influenced by a myth, a simple letter describing a utopian kingdom and they viewed this mythical kingdom as a source of potential allies waiting to be called upon for the service of God. The interactions between Ethiopian and European diplomats resulting from these searches established connections through the mystery of a king never to be found by Atlantic explorers.

Jessica Knapp English major, History minor

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ENDNOTES “The Eldorado Spirit”: The Lure of the Man, Lake and Myth of El Dorado

As Spanish explorers arrived in Quito in the 1530s, they heard a story that would, over time, be carried back across the Atlantic: the story of a man whose skin was covered with gold dust, shining on a floating raft upon a lake. This story developed into a myth, telling of how El Dorado, an Indigenous prince, took part in a ceremony of his people while covered in gold dust and floated on a raft across a lake of buried treasure.1 The myth of El Dorado and his elusive home abundant with gold, a pinnacle of wealth, influenced European exploration of the Americas as explorers searched for mythic wealth.

The myth of El Dorado first appeared in the sixteenth century, through a slow and gradual process as Europeans came to explore the Americas. While exploration urged “the quest for souls and the quest for gold,”2 knowledge of a gold-coated man began to spread in the mid-1500s. Word of an Indigenous ceremony involving the anointment of gold dust brought news of el indio dorado, “the Golden Indian,” which reached the eager ears of explorers across the Atlantic. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the quest to find El Dorado escalated, the myth evolved. As conquistadors explored the regions of South America, the image of a golden man was replaced by a golden lake, a place of ritual ceremony overwhelmed with treasure.3

Contemporary writers describe the legend through different lenses, adding Muisca Raft, Museo Del Oro, Bogota, photo by Reg Natarajan (2016), Wikime and omitting details over the years.

The historian Pedro Simón based his own narrative on the expeditions he had witnessed, writing about a ceremony of the Muisca at Lake Guatavita in Colombia.

Knowledge of the Muisca ceremony brought conquistadors to the region to no avail.4

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Two accounts describe the search for the golden lake. Pedro de Ursúa’s travels in South America in 1559 brought a Spanish expedition to the place believed to be El Dorado, which ultimately ended with disputation when no such place was found.5 The English explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh, carried out an expedition in 1595, which led him to a town called Guiana in South America, believed to be a place near mountains “very rich and full of gold.”6 The discovery that Guiana lacked the mountains of gold he had longed for brought further knowledge of an Indigenous ceremony. The ceremony in this Indigenous town was similar to that of the stories, as Raleigh illustrated: “they are anointed all over, certain servants of the emperor, having prepared gold made into fine powder, blow it thorough hollow canes upon their naked bodies, until they be all shining from the foot to the head.”7

edia Commons.

The interactions accompanying the search for El Dorado present the conflicting narratives of European explorers, leaving little to be said of any lasting contemporary accounts

by Indigenous witnesses. “We can only try to imagine what they thought of this mysterious and menacing column that had suddenly emerged from the forests,” writes historian John Hemming,8 as the accounts of Indigenous perspectives of the El Dorado story can only be assumed. The accounts of conquistadores suggest they were encouraged by Indigenous locals who told stories of golden cities and wealth far away. This is evident in Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s claim of “an Indian slave” who suggested that “in his country to the east lay Golden Quivira” another assumed variation of El Dorado.9 The tale of the golden man and the golden lake created a curiosity which resulted in connections between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of South America. Thus, El Dorado became a catalyst which spurred the escalating greed for golden treasure, “the eldorado spirit,”10 and served as a source of opportunity and the thrill of the unknown “with all the perseverance, hardship…and exhilaration it involved.”11 Jessica Knapp English major, History minor

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ENDNOTES Not a Drop to Drink: The Fountain of Youth and the Quest for Eternal Life

Where there were the old, the sick, and the dying, so too was there the myth of powerful water which could restore to health anyone who drank it. The lure of eternal life is a theme carried forward through works of literature and mythical tales, evolving and changing over the centuries.1 By the Middle Ages, the notion of magical rejuvenation took the form of water collected in a fountain, springing up throughout Eurasian mythologies.2 The Fountain of Youth bears connections to Indigenous and European legends, carrying throughout the continents on both sides of the Atlantic. By the sixteenth century, the myth of restorative waters had found its connections in the Americas through the account of the Spanish historian, Peter Martyr.

Martyr claimed to have encountered a slave whose father had bathed in magical water in the Florida region.3 As a result, the claim was made that there was a discovery of a spring with magical properties in the Bahamas.4 One author in the 1300s, who went by the name of John Mandeville, offered an account of its discovery, though more fictionalized than factual. Briefly he provides a description of a supposed fountain discovered near a city called Polombe.5 Mandeville writes of the “well” at the base of a mountain from which “they that dwell there…never have sickness; and they seem always young.”6 As Mandeville’s and Martyr’s accounts drew focus to the Americas as a location for the legendary fountain, the drive for exploration of the Atlantic briefly shifted for those who sought eternal life rather than gold.7 Along with accounts of the Fountain of Youth came explorers seeking to obtain its restorative properties in the mysterious regions of the Americas. These explorers included Antonio de Herrera and, as commonly believed, Juan Ponce de León.8 Herrera insisted what many

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scholars later believed: that Ponce de León sought out the fountain for the same reasons as other explorers—he wished to have his youth restored. He wrote a vague account of Ponce de Leon’s first expedition to Florida and details his “search for the sacred fountain...and the river whose water rejuvenated the aged.”9 The connection between Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth resulted from misconceptions of his exploration in Florida, while historians, contemporary and modern, assume the validity of his search to be a sure possibility.10 The search in Florida led Herrera to Bimini in the 1500s, an island in the Bahamas where his expedition came to a halt.11 Christopher Columbus reflected on Ponce de Leon’s alleged search for and failure to find the “terrestrial paradise.” Eventually de Leon gave up and settled to rule the land instead.12 As these explorers searched for the mythic fountain in the Americas, the mythologies of Eurasia and the Indigenous peoples of South America interacted, demonstrating the lure of similar tales and folklore.

While there are no records on any Indigenous contemporaries in the sixteenth century who searched for the fountain, Maori mythology refers to the power of water in relation to medicine and the power of deities.

Though no exact fountain may bear any connection between myths, the common reference to the powerful properties of water in a spring—perhaps the lake of Bimini—demonstrate the conception of the supernatural in different cultures.13 Thus, the myth of the Fountain of Youth relates not only to Eurasian folklore but also Indigenous tales of rejuvenating waters.14 As Maori mythology “Ponce De Leon in Florida” by Thomas Moran (1877-78), Wikimedia Commons. alludes to powerful water which could cure sickness, and even bring back the dead, the search for such a spring with restorative properties brought explorers to America in search of the impossible.15 From the influence of stories about eternal waters told from the mythologies of Asia and the Middle East, the connections made to mythologies in the Atlantic world were brought to light as a result of the quest for the Fountain of Youth.

Jessica Knapp English major, History minor

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The Impacts of Invaders: Invasive Species in the Atlantic World

ENDNOTES

Simon Rizzi, Pexels.

As the Atlantic world expanded and different people groups connected with one another, they shared knowledge, resources, and culture, but their mingling had unforeseen impacts that would forever change the world. While the appearance of ships from Europe and elsewhere may have changed the lives of the people living around the Atlantic basin, life was also transformed for the plants and animals in those same areas. The introduction of invasive species—accidentally or purposefully—led to the extinction of hundreds of species and continues to threaten thousands more.1 Today, over thirty percent of threatened bird species and over eighty percent of threatened mammals are endangered due to invasive species.2 Over millennia, invasive species had been able to make their way across continents, by floating on debris across oceans or migrating across the land.3 This process could take years to occur and meant that the introduction of invasive species in new environments happened slowly. With the arrival of ships that had crossed the Atlantic, this process was sped up as large vessels traversed oceans quickly and carried life that made its home elsewhere.

Small rodents and insects found their way aboard ships and disembarked on different shores, making their way into new habitats, disrupting native flora and fauna. Travelers also brought their pets with them as companions, but these pets often became top predators in their new environments. In the Canary Islands, the giant Tenerife rat fell victim to cats brought to the island by the Spanish.4 Unused to predators, many species did not know how to protect themselves and quickly declined in numbers. New species also brought competition for food, water, and shelter. If a species was not able to compete for food and habitat, then they were at risk of disappearing, which almost happened to several species of giant lizards off the coast of West Africa.5 The survival of many threatened species in the Atlantic is due in large part to the removal of invasive species from habitats so that native species do not have to compete or be hunted into extinction.

The largest and perhaps most influential invasive species in the Atlantic world happens to be us: human beings. Human activity in the Atlantic world has directly impacted the safety and security of native life, leading to several extinctions. All over the Atlantic world, human life existed before colonists began spreading out from Europe. What was invasive was the cultural and economic practices that followed exchanges with different people groups.

Hunting for sport was usually only practiced by wealthy elites and led to the direct extinction of several species such as the Falkland Islands Wolf6 and the South African Bluebuck.7 Additionally, the clearcutting of forests to grow crops or build settlements destroyed the natural habitats of species and has not stopped in over four centuries. This practice continues to threaten forested species and leads to the extinction of approximately 0.3 percent of all plant species per year.8 If deforestation continues, then the complete extinction of subspecies such as the Cebidae primates in the Amazon9 will lead to irreversible effects on the environment. Invasive activity in the Atlantic world has resulted in the extinction of many species and will result in the extinction of many more, which suggests that perhaps we should consider how our actions can change to allow us to coexist in nature without the destruction of life.

Katrina Nicolle Humanities major, English concentration, History minor

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Microscopes on the Past

ENDNOTES

Little remains of the plants and animals that went extinct as a direct result of colonization, but this does n avenues of exploring the past are made known to us. The evidence of extinct species’ existence remains with. Using new DNA technology, scientists have been able to piece together information about the lost 200 years.

Plant and animal samples of extinct species can be found in our world through fossils, furs, plant presses specimens contain the DNA of the species they belong to, which until as recently as 2001, were not able piece together vital information about these extinct species. Every plant and animal has their own unique essence, DNA maps out the identity of different species, and for the extinct species of the Atlantic whos furs that previously were of unknown species can be identified. Sometimes fossil evidence can also be di have been proven to belong to the Sable antelope instead.2 Because gene sequences of species are ent from other species.

From the beginning of life on earth, plants and animals have been evolving to survive as best they can, a creation of new species. These species diverge from one another, but still share physical and behavioral relatives, scientists are able to determine where and how they have diverged. Connections have been fo been able to prove the birds the parakeet is most closely related to.3 Studies show that while the bird is understand how it evolved. Similar discoveries have been made with other species such as the extinct G with other known animals, but have identified features that diverge from other species. Specific sequenc create features such as feathers or strong hind legs. While the purpose of most of these sequences is unk them to one another. As scientists continue to research and explore plant and animal DNA, their discove relatives.

There is a lot to learn about the lost species of our past, but as research continues, more is being uncove 400 years ago, the chances of their DNA still surviving is decent, as some fossils, furs, and prints have be sequencing and the specific purposes that DNA has on the characteristics of species, the more we can e these species through first-hand accounts of them and fossil evidence, we may just come to know throug lost to us, or are they still waiting for us to find them, hidden in the microscopic strands of their DNA? On

not mean that these species are completely lost to us. As scientific knowledge continues to grow, new s through fossils, taxidermies, journals, reports, and even other species they share evolutionary ancestors t species of the Atlantic world, giving us insight into a forgotten world that has been lost to us for over

s, and taxidermies which can be found in museums and private collections all over the world. These e to be examined by scientists.1 The technology to analyze this DNA now exists and is being used to e sequence of DNA, which determines how they grow, what they look like, and how they survive. In se DNA still exists, the map of who they remained. By comparing samples to one another, fossils and isproved this way, as several antlers which were once thought to belong to the now-extinct Bluebuck tirely unique, examining what remains of extinct species can teach us about what made them distinct

and within different familial groups of animals, evolution has created changes that have led to the traits with one another. By comparing the remaining evidence of extinct species with their evolutionary ound between the extinct Carolina parakeet and other birds of North America, but DNA analysis has similar to the monk parakeet, it is more closely related to the North American parrot,4 which can help us Geochelone Atlantica tortoise5 and the giant Tenerife rat,6 which show that the species share similarities ces of genes serve a purpose in the survival and growth of a species, dictating how their cells develop to known, shared gene sequences between species can give scientists some understanding by comparing eries can be used to understand more about extinct species, as they are seen through their genetic

ered. Because the Atlantic species that went extinct due to colonization disappeared no more than een stored by collectors or found with DNA still present on them. As we learn more about genetic expect to know about the lost species of the Atlantic world. The information we cannot know about gh the examination of their genetic makeup. Does this mean that the extinct Atlantic species are forever nly time will tell.

DNA. Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons.

Animal Spotlight: Blue Antelope

Amongst a golden sea of rippling grass stand a dozen blueish eyes scan their surroundings for any signs of danger whilst hu set apart by their blue hides, which awarded them the name ‘ they sense danger. They are at home in the heat of South Afr

The game parks of South Africa could have been dotted with extinction two hundred years ago. Today, all that remains of t in the Vienna Museum of Natural History. The DNA taken from antelope, but they have their own unique genealogies which first-hand accounts of these antelope, we have been able to d twenty. Whilst they most likely would have been extremely sim about them we do not know.

Blue antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus), Natural History Museum website, Vienna, Austria, 2021. Fair use.

When European colonizers came into contact with the Bluebu in their populations. Nonetheless, it was the desire to kill thes Advanced weapons such as hunting rifles made it easier to ki before. In South Africa, prey would have only been hunted fo traded. European collectors would have taken pride in collect crossed their minds. When the antelope finally disappeared in sport, and made people question the impact of the activity o

Plant Spotlight: New Mexico Sunflower

All that remains of the New Mexico sunflower is an old, driedNo greenhouses cultivate it. No science labs examine it. Ther Mexico sunflower’s disappearance is what awarded it the alter tall, this sunflower was far more modest than the common sun yellow petals sprung outward from a circle of hard, black seed wherever their seeds landed, but unlike weeds, they were una urbanization in North America after colonizers expanded into for the settlements, and farmers allowed their herds to graze new diseases as well. The lost sunflower may have suffered fro support this claim, as the people in North America at this time numbers may have already been dwindling but because there mystery, lost to time and circumstance.

Helianthus praetermissus (Lost sunflower), photograph by Richard Spellenberg, 2001,New Mexico Rare Plants. Fair use.

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Katrina Nicolle Humanities major, English concentration, History minor

h-grey mounds. Two curved horns peak out from on top of each mound and jut towards the sky. Beady ungry mouths chew on the vegetation. Looking almost identical to other antelopes, these creatures are ‘Bluebuck’. Traveling in groups, the Bluebucks work together to avoid predators, alerting one another if rica’s plains.

h these animals if the majestic Bluebuck—also known as the Blue Antelope—was not hunted to this beautiful antelope are sixteen preserved specimens and taxidermies, one of which can be found m these specimens shows that they are closely related to other antelope such as the roan and sable set them apart in ways scientists are still trying to determine. By studying their taxidermy and looking at determine that they preferred to live in open grasslands, were grazers, and traveled in groups of around milar to other antelope, their extinction means that we can no longer study them and that there is much

uck, their numbers were fairly limited, as habitat loss and disrupted migratory patterns caused a decline se animals that caused them to face extinction, as colonists overhunted these already rare creatures. ill prey in comparison to bows and arrows or spears which the South Africans might have used to hunt or necessity, but once traders and sports hunters arrived, hunting became profitable, as hides could be ting trophies of an animal so scarce in the environment, that the issue of their extinction may not have n 1800, it was notable, as it was one of the first extinction of a larger mammal caused by hunting for on the ecological world.

-out plant press that was collected over 150 years ago.1 Nowhere on Earth does this small plant grow. re is only one plant press, which happened to be preserved the last time anyone saw it.2 The New rnate name ‘the lost sunflower’, as it, unfortunately, has been lost to history.3 Standing at three feet nflower which often looms over eight feet and has a much larger head. Atop the lost sunflower’s head, ds, echoing the appearance of a little sun. When these plants existed, they grew like weeds, spurting able to survive their changing environments. Their disappearance has been largely attributed to the continent. When new houses and towns were created, plants were destroyed to create clearings on wild flora. It has been speculated that when colonizers brought new crops to cultivate, they brought om a fungal disease that caused their flowerheads to rot,4 but there is no substantial evidence to e took no notice of this fairly discrete plant. Indeed, when settlers moved into North America, the plant e is little evidence that this plant existed, there is no way to know. Today, this unknown plant remains a

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Farmed to Extinction: Plant Extinction in the Atlantic World

ENDNOTES

One of the most significant changes to occur in the Atlantic during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was the mass production of goods such as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar. The production of these plants resulted in a drastic shift in the natural biodiversity of the landscapes they were grown in, as plantations stripped away the other vegetation in order to produce one product.1 The production of single products resulted in a change of soil compositions which made the ground inhospitable for certain plants.2 When plantations proved to be highly profitable, labour and land were repurposed to create as much revenue as possible, which led to the promotion of certain plants over others. As these specific plants grew in popularity, cultures shifted to rely on these products, forcing farmers to produce more goods to meet demands. The agricultural history of human civilization—not just in the Atlantic world—shows that cultivation practices that center around the production of certain crops result in biodiversity shifts within the surrounding areas that can endanger certain plants.3 Furthermore, the growth of human civilization and the creation of new settlements often cut into natural landscapes, by removing flora so that buildings and roads could be made in their place.4 Constant human activity and animal grazing made human settlements hostile to a lot of vegetation and have resulted in a significant decrease in plant populations across the Atlantic world.

Since Europeans started settling in the Americas, almost 600 species of plant life have disappeared as a direct result of human activity. These include the blue cycad, the stringwood tree, and the St. Helena ebony tree.5 Most of these species have gone extinct within the Atlantic world, centering within the forests of South America where many plantations were built to produce luxury goods. Despite this harrowing number, plant extinctions have been largely ignored in popular culture in comparison to the extinction of animals, even though the number of lost animals is lower.6 In 2022, one in eight plants across the world still face extinction as a result of human activity,7 as urbanization has decreased the natural habitats of flora, and pollution has poisoned many soil and water sources that plants rely on to survive.8 Additionally, the consumer culture that resulted from the introduction of luxury goods from the Atlantic world has placed increased demand on the production of resources. This has only increased the negative effects of plantations, as more land is being clearcut to grow crops or herd cattle.9 The need for lumber also endangers vegetation, as forests are chopped down to produce wood, which not only affects the trees but the plants and animals that live around them that rely on the shade and nutrients they provide. The IUCN Red List reports that almost fifty percent of plant life on earth is somewhat threatened with extinction, most of which are directly threatened by human activity.10 The expansion of human settlements results in the decrease in natural habitats for species, and pollution produced by humans poisons the environments many plants and animals exist within. Humans have the power to protect endangered plant species if they want to, as we can choose not to develop land that hosts threatened species,11 reduce our levels of pollution, and engage in sustainable farming practices and reforestation,12 but these steps will not bring back the plants that have already fallen to our actions. The negative effects of colonization and consumer culture still harm the wildlife that exists in the Atlantic world, threatening to take away even more life from our world if changes are not made to stop the destruction of natural habitats.

Katrina Nicolle Humanities major, English concentration, History minor

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Karsten Winegeart, “Sunsets,”August 24, 2020. karsten-winegeart-Y4pW7n5FnsQ-unsplash.jpg.

Fair use.

ENDNOTES One Mosquito Bite Away from Colonization: Malaria Resistance in Africa due to Sickle Cell Anemia

In the early 1600s, Europeans successfully colonized the Americas. However, deadly diseases such as yellow fever and malaria stalled their conquest of Africa at the continent’s coast. While Europeans vindicated this anomaly with pseudo-scientific racism, modern science shows that high frequencies of the genetic disease sickle-cell anemia gave Africans a resistance to malaria that Europeans did not possess. It was not until the discovery of the antimalaria drug quinine that Europeans were able to survive malaria and move their colonization project further into the interior of Africa, demonstrating the importance of understanding the role of science in history.

In the eighteenth century an estimated thirty to seventy percent of Europeans died each year from various diseases while travelling to Africa; Europeans were quick to blame these high death rates on race.1 Diseases like sleeping sickness, worms, dysentery, yellow fever, and malaria were common to African regions.2 However, the eighteenth-century medical community struggled to rationalize the cause of the diseases. Ancient Roman and Greek philosophers created the miasma theory which hypothesised that tiny animals who dwelled in swampy places could enter the body via the air and cause illness. Through this theory “bad air” became an explanation for malaria epidemics, especially in swampy West Africa.3 Europeans noticed that malaria mostly affected white men to the extent that Sierra Leone became known as “White Man’s Grave,” and they began to attribute race as an explanation for infection.4 Pseudo-scientific racism emerged with the idea that different races of men were created by God as different species in a hierarchy topped by white men.5 This meant that white men thought black people were not susceptible to malaria because they were a different species, plagued by a different subset of disease. However, high malaria rates can actually be attributed to West Africa’s ideal environment for mosquitoes in the genus Anopheles (Figure 1), which are vectors for the malaria causing parasite, Plasmodium.6 In a time before the microscopic causes of disease were known, Europeans wrongly believed that survival of malaria depended upon a person’s skin colour; however, modern population genetics and epidemiology have attributed African survival of malaria to the genetic disease, sickle cell anemia.

Figure 1: The Anopheles mosquito bites a human and exposes them to the Plasmodium parasite. Pexels.

Unbeknownst to scientists of the eighteenth century, Africans have higher frequencies of sickle cell anemia than any other racial group.

Sickle cell anemia is caused by a mutation in the gene that produces haemoglobin, the oxygen carrying component of red blood cells.7 A rendering of a genetic mutation is shown in Figure 2. *figure title in the comments on trello* When a human egg is fertilized, a copy of half of the mother’s and father’s genes are passed to the child.

Individuals with two copies of the sickle cell gene (HbS), one copy from each parent, are affected with sickle cell anemia and are said to have an SS genotype.8 They have abnormally functioning sickleshaped haemoglobin, and present with fatigue, swelling, and frequent infections.9 Individuals with one normal copy of the gene (HbA) and one copy of HbS are said to have the AS genotype and are carriers for the disease.10 They are carriers because they can pass the affected HbS gene onto their own offspring but are not affected themselves. Children with the SS genotype for sickle cell disease have a low life expectancy; however, HbS carriers do not usually display sickle cell symptoms or deleterious side effects.11 The higher frequency of the HbS gene in African populations strongly correlates with the regions where malaria is endemic.

A study in 2010 found that the HbS frequency was maximal at 18.18% in northern Angola, 9% in Ghana and Zambia, and 0.5% everywhere else in the world.12 These frequencies almost perfectly match the occurrence of malaria infections in the world as seen in Figure 3.13 This supports the hypothesis that Africans could better survive malaria because of this evolutionary adaptation and disproves the attribution to race which European colonizers held.

Figure 2: A single mutation in this strand of DNA can alter the gene and cause genetic diseases, like sickle cell anemia. (“What Happens When a Genetic Mutation Occurs.” Accessed March 21, 2022. https://pathologytestsexplained.org.au.)

Figure 3: A) The current percent frequency of the HbS allele across the globe compared to B) which shows the severity of malaria globally since 1900.

(Piel, Frédéric B., Anand P. Patil, Rosalind E. Howes, Oscar A. Nyangiri, Peter W. Gething, Thomas N. Williams, David J. Weatherall, and Simon I. Hay. “Global Distribution of the Sickle Cell Gene and Geographical Confirmation of the Malaria Hypothesis.” Nature Communications 1, no. 1 (December 2010):

104. Fair use.

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Figure 4: Sickle-shaped red blood cells of a person with sickle cell anemia. The sickle shape prevents the malaria parasite from reproducing, giving people with sickle cell anemia a better chance of surviving malaria. (Correspondent.

“Experimental Gene Therapy Reverses Sickle Cell Disease for Years,” The Daily Guardian blog, January 3, 2022.)

Africa experiences a balanced polymorphism, the paradox of a deadly disease-causing allele maintaining a high frequency in a population, because the malaria parasite cannot survive in people with sickle cell disease.14 Malaria begins with the Anopheles mosquito ingesting the Plasmodium parasite. As the mosquito bites, the parasite enters the human host and completes its life cycle within the liver and blood cells.15 The parasite develops in the blood cells and causes toxins to enter the blood stream, resulting in fevers and chills as the immune system fights the invader.16 Carriers of the HbS gene produce some sickle-shaped blood cells, shown in figure 4, that prevent the parasite from completing its lifecycle, but have enough normal blood cells that enable them to live unaffected by sickle cell anemia.17 Because sickle cell anemia protects against malaria, the genetic disease continues to be selected for within African populations. For Europeans to successfully colonize Africa, they had to circumvent the disease that was stopping them from penetrating the continent. While human motivations for wealth and power often shaped conquests in the Atlantic world, the way that malaria, genetics, and quinine shaped the colonization of Africa advocates for the role of science in historiography.

Europeans soon found quinine, a cure for malaria within the bark of a South American tree.

They were able to exploit and mass produce quinine, giving them one of the defenses they needed to colonize Africa. It was well known to Indigenous Americans that the Cinchona

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Figure 5: This glass bottle would have contained quinine sulphate to treat malaria. (Wellcome Collection. “Quinine Sulphate Bottle, London, England, 1860-1910.” Fair use.

tree’s leaves could abate fevers.18 Jesuit missionaries discovered the tree in the 1600s, leading to European exploitation of the tree for its medicinal properties.19 Traditionally, the bark was ground and mixed with a liquid that patients drank; this treatment was neither effective nor efficient as it required many trees.20 In 1820, Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou extracted and purified the active chemical compound, quinine, from the bark.

Figure 5 shows a bottle which would have contained the mass produced, synthesized quinine which became a more effective treatment for malaria.21 Quinine’s success is demonstrated by the thirty-three percent decline in deaths among the French military in Senegal in the mid1830s.22 Likewise, from 1849 to 1890, the British military death rate in West Africa dropped about twelve percent after the widespread introduction of quinine.23 With decreased mortality and increased military power, the European scramble to colonize Africa was finally successful in the late nineteenth century.24 Haley Friesen Biology major, Chemistry minor

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The Forgotten History of Trade Languages

ENDNOTES

Modern society considers the age of encounter to be the doorway to trade and globalization that brought wealth and cultural exchanges. However, within this discussion, many forget the foundation which made the aforementioned developments possible: communication.

Although deeply imbedded by inequality and power dynamics, Europeans, Africans and indigenous peoples all faced the challenge of communication with one another. Whether it was to understand trade methods or negotiations, each group had to discover a way to communicate their desires. This task is imminently difficult considering cultural and linguistic differences. Throughout the Atlantic world, sign, and body language as well as interpreters helped bridge the gaps until eventually creoles and pidgins were formed to help overcome the linguistic barrier.

On the African continent, interpreters and gestures were essential, although fraught with challenges. One of the Photo by Lara Jameson, Pexels. first European groups to adopt the use of interpreters was the Portuguese. This involved the creation of a methodology to find and train translators.

After its creation, it was adopted by other European powers and laid the foundation for West African exploration and trade.1 Slave ships were a necessary area of employment for these interpreters. For example, a 1550 expedition took enslaved Africans to England to learn English before attending a voyage.2 In some cases, slaves on board with the ability to translate were given freedom. However, in the case that the interpreters escaped, remaining crew had to resort to gestures, which were not always successful. According to Gomez Pirez, upon his arrival on the Guinea Coast in 1456, he attempted to show the locals his desire for peace through the presentation of a cake, mirror, and a sheet of paper with a cross. However, these symbols meant nothing to the indigenous Guineans and as a response, they broke the cake, smashed the mirror and tore the paper.3 This was a result of cultural differences. Just because one symbol had meaning in one place did not mean it was significant in another. Although hand gestures and body language were necessary in emergency situations, it was translators that made the early stages of communication simpler.

As time went on, communication became easier through creole peoples. A creole is defined as “any person of European (mostly French or Spanish) or African descent born in the West Indies or parts of French or Spanish America (and thus naturalized in those regions rather than in the parents’ home country).”4 Creoles were able to understand African and European cultures, and also languages. Consequently, many served as intermediaries and provided insight into commercial practices and diplomatic etiquette which benefited African merchants and European sea captains.5 The intercultural skills of Creoles contributed to the formation of pidgins and creoles. Portuguese played a large role in the development of these creole languages as it contributed to the development of pidgin babble which allowed for widespread communication.

This is reflected in the languages of Bini and Kongo which were spoken by the first African slaves in Sao Tome. For example, Cape Verdean Creole maintained African influence in syntax and morphology as the Portuguese verbal conjugation shifted towards the African style conjugation.6 This created a language that was neither Portuguese nor African but could be understood

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by both groups. Furthermore, as these pidgins developed among newer generations, it borrowed vocabulary from both sides and formed a unique grammar structure known as a creole “Guinea speech” to West Africans and “black Portuguese” by Europeans.7 As a result, it became the lingua franca of the Atlantic. As the settlement of the new world continued, so did the spread of the Guinea Speech to Cape Francis, Cartagena, San Salvador, Mexico City and Havana, along with a united linguistic culture and community.

In the case of North America, these same patterns continued among creole languages such as Gullah. A large contributing factor which led to the development of Gullah was isolation on South Carolina’s Sea Islands. Not only were these islands separated from the United States and other islands by dense marshlands, rivers and channels but for many centuries, interisland communication was limited to boat travel.8 As enslaved peoples who spoke a variety of languages such as Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, and Twi became isolated on plantations, they began to produce their own divergent language developments.9 This led to the formation of unusual sentence patterns. For example, much of the grammar is based in the aforementioned West African languages while the lexicon is primarily English.10 This is still reflected in the way Gullah is spoken today. For example, many Gullah speakers use a single pronoun to refer to feminine, masculine and neuter genders unlike English which uses distinct pronoun forms.11 This reflects how language took different forms to provide new means of communication.

Although the earliest methods of communication have significantly changed and died out over time, their importance cannot be understated. From hand gestures to interpreters to the formation of jargons or creoles, all laid the foundation of the world we know today.

If it was not for these ways of communication, the interconnectedness of culture through ethnicity, food and technology would not exist. The transformation of communication from the sixteenth to twentyfirst century from hand gestures to fully developed languages is what allowed for more complex connections which built the world as known today.

Analise Saavedra International Studies major (International Development track), Spanish concentration

Photo by Bre Smith on Unsplash.

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FEATURE

Second-hand Smoke: Tobacco and the Lingering Seeds of the Columbian Exchange

ENDNOTES

The tobacco plant is one of the stronger transatlantic players, one which merged culture and economy for centuries. Tobacco smoking was first noted in the journals of Columbus’s men as part of their documentary on the behaviors of the Indigenous peoples of Cuba.1 Upon further expeditions in 1508, Europeans marveled at similar smoking habits in Brazil, where Amerindians smoked a dried leaf in a single shared pipe during diplomatic negotiations and medical reasons.2 Over time, the growing, curing, and smoking of tobacco gained a hold on the international market, its ash coating the walls of homes around the Atlantic world. As a heavily traded product in the Columbian exchange, the tobacco plant secured its grip as a cultural cash crop; a nonessential good which came to play an essential role in the lives of millions of individuals.

The oldest tobacco seeds of any variety, domesticated or wild, date from 387 to 205 BC.3 Oral tradition relates that the Navajo people believed that the Sky Father and Earth Mother smoked sacred tobacco, and thereby the universe was born. Aztec priests utilized tobacco to communicate with their deities, with the belief that the earth-goddess Cihuacoatl was embodied on the earth as a tobacco plant.4 Tobacco also had medical uses including treatment for asthma, fevers, and alleviating the pain of childbirth.5 It is likely that the tobacco plant was used for religious and medical reasons because its predictable and shortlived effects were more pleasant than other hallucinogens.6 In the early days of American agriculture, tobacco spread to Central and South America from what is now present-day Virginia.7 There are two main varieties of tobacco plants, nicotina tobacum, and nicotina rustica. Although n. tobacum may escape from cultivated plots in some places, it has never been found as a truly wild plant.8 A variety of n. rustica does grow naturally in the Andes from Chile to Ecuador, which has led some botanists to consider it wild.

This was the tobacco variety initially grown by Indigenous peoples until it was replaced by n. tobacum.9 The ultimate success of n. tobacum came from its adaptation to the tropical lowlands.

Initially, the close connection between Indigenous peoples and tobacco resulted in settlers considering the plant to be uncivilized and, in some cases, demonic.10 The smoking of tobacco could be regarded as a material embodiment of ‘suffocating’ Indigenous culture, as settlers also engaged in the smoking of a plant which was grown by Indigenous hands. While seemingly strange that Indigenous peoples used tobacco as Monardes Tobacco,1574. Wikimedia Commons.

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both a pain killer and hallucinogen, the French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot Villemain (from where the term nicotine originates), supported these medicinal properties, sending a sample of tobacco to Catherine de Medici, the Queen of France.11 In 1607, Virginia settlers planted their first crop of tobacco and exported it to Europe in 1613. As early as 1610, English settlers tested the first complete crop of n. rustica, but were dissatisfied with its bitterness. Instead, Virginian settler John Rolfe began growing a variety of tobacco judged “pleasant, sweet and strong” that had been traded from Trinidad or Venezuela,12 grown along the banks of the James River.13 From this initial planting of n. tobacum, tobacco growth and consumption would become heavily integrated into colonial society.

A member of the nightshade family (along with the tomato, peppers, petunias, and belladonna), tobacco is a perennial grown in temperate regions, requiring warmth to flourish.14 The word “tobacco” is derived from the Spanish term tobaco, itself derived from the Taino language of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic).15 The tobacco plant is a resilient one; a self-pollinator which does not require bees or other insects, cross-pollinating less than five percent of the time. As well, one tobacco plant is exceptionally fertile, capable of producing one million seeds, or the equivalent of twelve acres of grown plants.16 It is no surprise that this plant is second only to cotton in the global average of non-food crops,17 and swiftly found its place within early colonial agriculture.

The English favoured tobacco from Spanish America, consuming an estimated 130 000 pounds (worth £200 000 at the time) annually as early as 1605.18 As tobacco imports increased, the English monarchy upheld a A Treatise on the Culture of the generally negative view of the product, with King Tobacco Plant, Wikimedia Commons.

James I labeling American tobacco “that stinking weed,” and King Charles I encouraging the settlement of Virginia to diversify their economy rather than place all hope on “a noxious weed.”19 With similar growth in popularity in both France and Spain, the Catholic Church denounced tobacco smoking in the seventeenth century, but was forced to repeal when members of the church elite took up a smoking habit themselves.20 By 1617, the British had devoted large tracts of land for the growth of tobacco in Virginia.21 This was a puzzling choice to some as tobacco was a non-essential crop grown for personal enjoyment and consumption, and did not provide any nutritional value to the consumer.

The tobacco plantation gamble was well underway by the mid-seventeenth century. The temperate zone of the Atlantic coast of North America was well-suited to tobacco cultivation, which was traditionally carried out on small plots of land, as the plants required diligent and continuous care.22 A single planter or group assigned to the land had to oversee the whole

26

operation through from planting to harvesting; the entire plant itself was the end product.

Whereas minimal damage to an orchard tree’s bark may not affect its fruit, injury to any part of the growing tobacco plant compromised end profit.

The majority of cash crops require concentrated planting and harvest seasons, which are separated by a period of minimal activity. Tending to tobacco, by contrast, occurs over most of the calendar year.23 Due to the high volume of seeds a single tobacco plant produces, one individual could produce their own plantation, complete with a full growth to harvest cycle in only a few years.

Emily Jones Salmon and John Salmon, “Tobacco in Colonial Virginia,” Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities, July 1, 1612), Fair use.

Once these new plantations produced their first crop (taking approximately one year), they maintained a steady, replicable harvest cycle. Unfortunately, they did not last long. Tobacco was notorious for exhausting soils, forcing farmers who planted it in monoculture to relocate in as few as three to five years, and the old land often needed to lie fallow for as long as twenty years before replanting tobacco.24 Although planters could preserve the quality of their soils by rotating tobacco with staple crops (and simultaneously ensuring a degree of food self-sufficiency) as recommended by emerging American agricultural literature, most tobacco farmers were doing the opposite. This led one observer to remark that “agriculture in the South does not consist so much in cultivating lands as in killing it.”25

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With the European mentality of millions of acres of the Americas being ripe for the taking, the limitation of available soil was a relatively minimal concern at the time. Congruent with the colonial mentality, tobacco was a crop which was quickly attached to an image of financial prosperity.

In 1621 a shipment of young European women sent to be wives for Virginian colonists arrived.

Each colonist who desired to marry one of these women had to pay 120 pounds of “best leaf Biles men in tobacco, Christopher Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian tobacco” for her transportation Exchange: Stories of Biological and Economic Transfer in World History. charges.26 Quickly, beginning (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 454. Fair use. a personal tobacco plantation became appealing to many young men. Despite being the “poor relative” of sugar, or” an early starter and an early loser,”27 tobacco quickly became the temperate Atlantic power crop, rivaling cotton production and promising its consumers lower prices than Caribbean sugar.

Amidst a growing Virginian settler population, soil exhaustion and plantation relocation soon caused a decline in available land. In 1632 the General Assembly passed a law which restricted the number of tobacco plants each settler could grow to 1500. In response, settlers registered fields under different family names, or relocated to just outside their county, to ensure virgin land free of legal restraints. A particularly devastating flood in Virginia in 1771 resulted in the loss of more than 2.3 million pounds of tobacco, with damage estimates amounting up to £2 million (£325 million today), along with 150 fatalities.28 While land can be drained and crops replanted, tobacco plantations were also subject to pests. The green hornworm and “tobacco worm” were problematic, with claims these were “the only animal, save man, which is life proof against the deadly nicotine of this cultivated poison.”29

Tobacco hornworm, Wikimedia Commons.

In response, farmers would often allow guinea fowl or turkeys into fields to eat the worms, but in turn were tasked with fowl management.

Therefore, a tobacco farmer’s knowledge rested on experience, patience, and skill passed from one generation of successful plantation owners to the next. The Virginia tobacco manual declared “it is difficult to convey an idea of ripe tobacco by description. It can only be learnt by observation and experience.”30 The colony of Virginia existed within the confines of North America, yet the knowledge required for a successful tobacco crop flowed freely amidst trade routes across the Atlantic. Similar to Virginia, settlers in Cuba took advantage of the international marketplace and demand for tobacco, with their personal plantations quickly occupying a large percentage of the island’s available agricultural land.31 While tobacco production may have linked together settlers from the island of Cuba and the English colony of Virginia, slavery remained the common denominator of the Atlantic cash crop system. In 1625, France acquired the Caribbean island of Saint Christopher, first utilized to grow tobacco before its transition to sugarcane in the 1640s.32 In 1619, Virginian colonists imported slaves into British North America, to work the newly developed tobacco farms in both Maryland and Virginia.33 These slaves, which were brought across the Atlantic by a Dutch ship, were paid for in pounds of tobacco.34 Due to falling tobacco prices and a decline in white immigration, there was an increase in slave labour in the late seventeenth century. In 1650, slaves made up only three percent of the town of Chesapeake’s population, but had increased to fifteen percent in 1690.35 Further, the number of slaves recorded on the Virginian state census more than doubled from 1755 to 1790, with just under half of the purchased slaves belonging to members of Piedmont County.36 The need for slave labour in Harvesting tobacco plants. Wikimedia Commons. tobacco production for export was 37 consistent with other plantation crops. Significantly, the transition of tobacco from a crop of the first Indigenous horticulturalist, to the European farmer, to the European-owned slave, divorced the sacred image of tobacco from the Indigenous world. For Europeans, tobacco’s role in the Columbian Exchange was solely for recreational purposes.

Due to the nature of tobacco production, there remained little technological expansion or sophistication of existent technology, nor did it require much in the realm of agricultural change.38 Compared to sugar cane, the plant required little processing, and slave labour remained sufficient for its production. Planting, tending to fields, harvesting, and hauling could all be maintained with slaves, although the curing process proved the most labour intensive. A skilled tobacco planter could observe the change in plants’ colour and the turn of the leaves, indicating it was time to

29

harvest. In this short period, planters gambled between harvesting the plants and storing them in the safety of the barn, or waiting for the plants to reach their maximum point of maturity.

Leaving plants to grow for an extra day could result in a heavier harvest and higher profit,39 assuming that the plants did not attain great damage from heavy rains or a sudden cold snap, which could cause the loss of entire fields of tobacco plants overnight.

Once harvested, tobacco leaves could be cured in two different ways: air curing (in which the barn is opened during the day to allow natural air flow to dry the hanging leaves), or fire curing (the barn is made air tight and slowly heated from an outside fire).40 According to a popular legend in a local newspaper The Piedmont Press, a slave named Stephen working on the Caswell County Farm of Captain Slade in 1839 accidentally discovered the efficacy of the charcoal curing process. Stephen fell asleep while tending the fire and when he awoke to the last embers dying, in haste he attempted to rekindle the flames with charcoal logs. This method ultimately produced the best cured leaves ever seen.41 The story spread through the surrounding towns, upon which most local farmers adopted this new method.

Slavery remained essential to tobacco production, and after the American Civil Facts for Farmers; also for the Family Circle. A Compost of War, white residents of the tobacco belt viewed Rich Materials for all Landowners, about Domestic Animals and Domestic Economy; Farm Buildings; Gardens, Orchids, the future of their plantations with trepidation, and Vineyards ..., via Wikimedia Commons. fearing that freedmen would depart and the region would be left without most of its labour supply.42 However, tobacco served as a means of extra income for some slave families. Slaves often grew their own tobacco plants in personal gardens to serve in both recreational consumption, as well as excess supply to sell to European men for cash and the opportunity for slaves to enhance their quality of life.43 Masters allowed slaves to take smoking breaks in the belief that it increased their stamina,44 as well as commitment to crop production. African American labourers transferred the “hands” (bushels) of tobacco from field wagons into the curing warehouses under the eyes of white supervisors, and provided prominent labour roles after the harvests’ yearly tobacco auction.45 Black men transferred the tobacco to factories known as “stemmeries” or “priseries” located near the curing warehouses, where they sat on long benches and manually ripped the stems away from the tobacco leaves.46 Despite some efforts at autotomizing this process, black women and children continued to be employed to do this 30

task well into the middle of the twentieth century.47 It was believed that exposure to both sunlight and fresh air would damage the tobacco, so stemmeries most often had both closed and covered windows, leading to suffocating conditions.48 One labourer, William Batts, recalls his experience farming in the spring and summer months, while his wife worked in the stemmery: “I don’t like the work in the warehouse…the scent of the tobacco was so strong that it made me sick, even if I was raised with it, and I’ve spent my whole life around here and you can imagine I’m used to the stuff.”49 Wages at the stemmery were low, such as the case of W.H. Etheridge, a stemmery worker in Wilson who worked full time during tobacco season and only earned approximately $600.50 Tobacco and the development of society would remain closely intertwined, as commented the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, the businessman, the landowner and his juniors, the women (with the exception of the ladies of the highest rank), children from age seven or ten years of age, city slaves, and the free people of colour…smoke and make smoking a serious business with between ten and up to twelve cigars [tabacos] a day.51 on by Irish doctor Richard R. Madden: As tobacco increasingly became associated with recreational use in taverns, meetings, and brothels,52 group tobacco consumption allowed members of seemingly disparate groups to interact with one another, which led Richard H. Dana Jr. to remark the “cigar [is] a great leveler. Any man may stop another for a light, and go on – all as a matter of course.”53 The evolution of tobacco from religious ritual to secular addiction has lived on as one of the most enduring products of the Columbian exchange. While historical focus tends to pause on the negative impact of syphilis from the western Atlantic, the morbidity and mortality of illnesses from tobacco products swiftly exceeded the toll of other diseases and infections.54 Within Indigenous societies, tobacco was regarded as a source of great spiritual power and danger, confined to specific ritual and medical settings, minimizing the health consequences of traditional tobacco use.55 While Europeans recounted Indigenous peoples portraying signs of addiction through excessive smoking, snuffing, chewing, and even drinking tobacco, the real danger of recreational tobacco use emerged as it was separated from its religious roots and engaged in a world of commercial exploitation through international trade.56 Tobacco would see its revenge in the eventual death of hundreds of thousands of Europeans through various health ailments over the next century.57 Ultimately, once tobacco products reached European markets, the desire of the individual to consume tobacco usually overrode preferences of where it came from or how it was produced.

Tobacco therefore, remains an actor within a wider transatlantic context. Not immune to forces outside of the local plantation, the tobacco trade ebbed and flowed throughout Atlantic history due to frequent conflicts among European nations. A strong player in the history of African American slavery, the plant led to wide changes in culture, society, levels of governmental control, and varying economic conditions. Scientific studies have continued on the chemical nature of tobacco plants,58 and contemporary popularity for tobacco products, specifically the Cuban cigar, reflect a continued impact of this portion of the Columbian exchange.

Janina Pulfer Ritzen MAIH (History stream)

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DISRUPTIONS Dido Belle (left) and her cousin Dido Elizabeth Belle (l) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (right), From the collection of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace, Perth, Scotland, Fair use.

ENDNOTES Sabotage, Suicide, and Flight: Slave Resistance and Resiliency in the Atlantic World

The reality of slavery in the Atlantic world is dominated by a depiction of slaves as submissive, compliant, and replaceable beings. Contrarily, slave resistance narratives provide a more accurate portrayal of how slaves responded to slavery. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Moses Roper, to name a few remind contemporary individuals that slaves did not passively accept their horrifying circumstances. Rather than becoming a victim to the institution of slavery, many slaves resisted their enslavement and restored their dignity. Thus, slave resistance frequently stemmed from the desire to re-establish one’s personhood rather than to seek revenge. Viewing slavery through this lens recognizes slavery itself as the sole cause for resistance. Acknowledging slave rebellion, suicide, and flight as a direct response to slavery replaces the portrayal of slaves as a commodity with an image of strength and resiliency.

Slave narratives reveal that slaves resisted for no other reason than to escape captivity. The conditions for slaves were horrific. James Adams captures the appalling reality of slavery: “I look upon slavery as the most disgusting system a man can live under… Men who have never seen or felt slavery cannot realize it for the thing it is.”1 Similarly, Frederick Douglass writes, “We were worked in all weathers… I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died.”2 William Johnson, who lost two toes during his escape from bondage, reports, “My feet were frostbitten on my way North, but I would rather have died on the way than to go back.”3 Moreover, James Seward claims, “Where I came from, it would make your flesh creep, and your hair stand on end, to know what they do to the slaves.”4

“Punishment of the four stakes” by Marcel Verdier (1843), Wikimedia Commons.

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These testaments reveal that a person who has never been a slave cannot understand the brutality of slavery and the desperation for liberty. Even slaves did not always understand the extent of their awful circumstances until they were free. Harriet Tubman explains, “I grew up like a neglected weed, - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it… Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is.”5 Despite their unique experiences, each of these individuals resisted their bondage because of slavery. It was not that there was benevolent slavery and malevolent slavery. All slavery engendered resistance. Benjamin Drew contends, “remove the cause and the effects will cease; remove the oppression which induces to emigration, and a fugitive slave will be an impossibility.”6 Resistance to slavery was an integral aspect of slavery.

Sabotage was perhaps the most common form of slave resistance as it offered slaves the chance to impede the functioning of slavery. The most common forms of defiance against masters were open rebellion, feigned illness, destruction of property, machinery, or livestock, and working inefficiently.7 Some slaves attempted to resist enslavement by acting undesirably upon their arrival in the Americas to avoid being bought.8 Whether it be small acts such as hiding for a day or large acts such as ship revolts, slave resistance The Unionist’s daughter--a tale of the rebellion in Tennessee; (and,) Maum Guinea and her hindered slave plantation “children,” or, Holiday-week on a Louisiana estate - a slave romance (1861), owners’ ability Wikimedia Commons. to extract slaves’ labour. Without tools, slave masters, or slaves themselves, slavery could not proceed successfully, hence the willingness of many captives to die in their efforts to rebel.

Margaret Garner declared it better “to fight, and to die, rather than to be taken back to slavery.”9 This determination challenged slave masters’ efforts to limit rebellion. Describing his master, Frederick Douglass recounts, “He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.”10 Evidently, punishing slaves for sabotage did not guarantee future compliance. Contrarily, slaves may have been more motivated to rebel out of anger toward their master.

Slaves occasionally conspired against their masters to plan largescale attacks. In the 1712 New York City slave rebellion, for

34

example, two dozen slaves rose up against white planters.11 The Haitian revolution included eighty per cent of the slaves in Saint-Domingue who rose up against the white minority within the French colony.12 Rebellions of this nature typically derived from a utopian desire for freedom.13 Shipboard revolts, however, centered more around the desire to damage the system that made slavery possible.

Igbo slaves sailing to St. Simon’s Island rebelled against their captors, throwing them overboard, and then drowning themselves to evade enslavement. The site of their fatal immersion, known as Ebos (or Igbo) Landing, depicts the resiliency of the captives and the cruelty of the captors.14 The Amistad in 1839 and Creole in 1841 are examples of two successful ship revolts. The Amistad rebellion struck against Caribbean slavery under Spanish rule while the Creole targeted slavery under American rule. The Creole mutiny converted the Africans’ status as enslaved to free, rights-bearing citizens in the Bahamas.15 These collective rebellions demonstrate the refusal of slaves to submit to the system of oppression. By sabotaging against their masters, slaves impeded on the operative establishment of slavery, thus obliterating their passive status in the Atlantic world.

An additional method of slave resistance in the Atlantic world was individual and collective suicide. It is noted that since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, Africans responded to enslavement with self-destruction.16 Richard Bell recounts a story of six girls who collectively committed suicide as it was “the only means of escaping the most terrible cruelty.”17 Slave suicide was so common that several ships along the middle passage contained nets that prevented captives from jumping overboard.18 Some African slaves drowned themselves as they believed it would bring them back to Africa reincarnated.19 Therefore, it is no surprise that ship mutinies often encompassed slave self-destruction. Since slavery depended on slaves, it was damaging to planters when captives threw themselves overboard. Not only did these slaves free themselves from bondage, but they dismantled one element of the slave trade.

It is assumed that some slaves committed suicide in an effort to limit their master’s level of control. Southern slaveholders in the late seventeenth century actively prohibited suicides as it threatened their claim that the enslaved consented to their enslavement.20 Slaves who attempted or committed suicide directly refuted their masters’ attempt to control them. Suicide, therefore, provided the means for bondsmen to die on their own terms, especially if they were already condemned to execution. The story of Quashi depicts suicide as a means to assert control over a slave master. After pinning his master to the ground, Quashi raised the sword and surprisingly “plunged its cutting edge into his own flesh, tearing a wide gash across his throat.”21 Rather than killing his master, Quashi revoked his passive status and gained liberty. His humanity was revived as, in that moment, he held complete power over his and his master’s fates. In this sense, suicide was deemed admirable and equal to that of martyrdom by slaves in the Atlantic world.

After hearing that Anthony Burns was arrested as a fugitive and re-enslaved, one woman cried, “‘Oh! why is he not man enough to kill himself.”22 Evidently, some

“Slave on Deck,” The image first appeared as an engraving in the 1793 edition of Thomas Day’s anti-slavery poem “The Dying Negro”’ (1773), Wikimedia Commons.

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individuals interpreted the refusal to self-destruct as a concession to the status as a white man’s property.

As an extension of this effort to dismantle slavery, slaves occasionally committed infanticide.

By murdering prospective slaves, individuals directly attacked a slaveholder’s property and impeded the future success of slavery.23 In 1837, Lydia Maria Child killed her three sons after he owned a woman who was the mother of several chillun and when her babies would get about a year or two of age he’d sell them and it would break her heart. She never got to keep them. When her fourth baby was born and was about two months old she just studied all the time about how she would have to give it up and one day she said, ‘I just decided I’m not going to let old Master sell this baby; he just ain’t going to do it.’ She got up and give it something out of a bottle and purty soon it was deed.25 learning that they would soon be sold to a slave trader.24 Likewise, Lou Smith recalls a woman who murdered her child to inhibit her master from selling the infant. She writes, Margaret Garner attempted to kill her four children in order to avoid being re-enslaved, though she failed in her endeavor and was arrested.26 When asked why he attempted to kill a young boy in 1798, Manuel Sante Fe responded by stating that “he considered it best that the little boy did not suffer as he did and be free [of slavery] once and for all now when he was young.”27 Therefore, some individuals did not commit infanticide to sabotage their masters, but because they wanted to shield the younger generation from the horrific nature of slavery.

Lucy Higgs with her daughter Mona escaping slavery from Grays Creek, Tennessee to the Union lines, June of 1862, by Kathy Grant. Wikimedia Commons.

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A common form of slave resistance in the Atlantic world was flight.

Since slaves “lacked personhood under the law,” fleeing from plantations aided captives in obtaining humanity.28 William Grose writes, “I served twenty-five years in slavery, and about five I have been free. I feel now like a man, while before I felt more as though I were but a brute… Now I feel like a man, and I wish to God that all my fellow-

creatures could feel the same freedom that I feel.”29 In an effort to redeem a similar sense of freedom as Grose describes, slaves occasionally ran away from their plantations.

Charles Foy notes that coastal cities, most notably New York City, provided slaves with ample avenues to hide or escape on the numerous ships docked in the harbour.30 Fleeing onto ships proved to be advantageous as it was widely believed that getting to Great Britain was the key to perpetual freedom.31 For those without access to a ship, escape proved to be more difficult. Nat Turner hit in a hole in a field for six weeks in an effort to be free.32 Henry Brown escaped slavery by nailing himself in a box which was shipped from Virginia to Philadelphia. He believed that “it would be far better to peril his life for freedom in this way than to remain under the galling yoke of Slavery.”33 Several organizations existed to support runaway slaves. Margaret Garner, for instance, escaped to Canada with the assistance of the Underground Railroad.34 Following a surge of slaves who fled the colony by boat in 1702, a slave code that declared it illegal for ship captains to assist runaways was enacted.35 More established communities of runaway slaves, known as maroon communities, existed throughout the Americas in impassable locations. Though maroon communities were constantly at risk of being eradicated, they lived freely without the assistance or influence of whites.36 Although flight was a high-risk form of resistance, those who succeeded escaped the harshness of bondage with a renewed freedom to live independently.

Whether rebelling, attempting suicide, or fleeing, the costs associated with these acts of resistance were severe. Some masters displayed the decapitated or dismembered corpses of slaves who committed suicides on the plantation in order to dissuade others from selfinflicted death.37 This legitimizes the hesitancy of many slaves to resist, including John Seward who longed to run away for over twenty years.38 David West describes the fear that prevented the majority of slaves from rebelling: “I have known slaves to be hungry, but when their master asked them if they had enough, they would, through fear, say ‘Yes.’ So if asked if they wish to be free, they will say ‘No.’”39 Regardless of this trepidation, many slaves did resist, demonstrating their desperation for freedom and humanity. Moses Roper was caught attempting to run away, resulting in him being stripped naked, tied up, whipped fifty times, weighed down by a chain hanging from his neck, and set on fire. Nevertheless, Roper attempted to run away two additional times, eventually succeeding.40 Likewise, Isaac Williams was caught aiding a runaway, causing him to be whipped and thrown in jail. Despite this torture for assisting another runaway, Williams successfully ran away himself.41 Regardless of punishments or deterrents, slaves continued to rebel in an effort to restore themselves as active agents in the Atlantic world.

In exploring these forms of resistance, it is clear that slaves were not the submissive commodities that their masters portrayed them as. The stories of sabotage, suicide, and flight reveal the capacity of slaves to sacrifice everything in pursuit of freedom. Frederick Douglass recounts his fight against his slave master and writes, This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood…

It was a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and now I resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.42 37

Douglass’s rebellion transformed his identity from a slave to a man. The absence of personhood was not an uncommon experience for slaves. Drew contends, “The manhood of [slaves] has not, indeed, been ‘crushed out of them:’ – it has never been developed. They are little children in every thing but bodily maturity.”43 By defying his master, therefore, Douglass developed the ability to see himself as a man.

After Isaac Williams escaped bondage, he declared: “If there were any chance to fight for the slave’s freedom, I’d go and stand up at the south and fight as readily as I would now go out of doors.

I believe it would be a just, and a righteous cause. I feel a great pity for the poor creatures there, who long for a way, yet can see no way out.”44 In this sense, rebellion reminded slaves that they deserved freedom as part of their humanity.

The personal liberation from enslavement expanded to a large-scale revival within the Atlantic world. As slave resistance occurred more frequently and openly, the appalling nature of slavery was revealed to the public.

The Dying Negro, by John Bicknell and Thomas Day, is a poem about a freed slave who moved to England only to shoot himself after being re-enslaved in America.

The poem states, Messages of this nature exposed the injustice of slavery. Suicide, in particular,

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Image from Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question In the United States (1837), Wikimedia Commons.

ARM’D with thy sad last gift—the pow’r to die, Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy; Thy dreadful mercy points at length the shore, Where all is peace, and men are slaves no more…

For all I’ve suffer’d, and for all I dare; O lead me to that spot, that sacred shore, Where souls are free, and men oppress no more!45

revealed that many slaves would rather die than be robbed of their humanity. Henry Brown felt that in “the condition of a slave … it would be impossible for him to remain.”46 Consequently, antislavery activism increased in the eighteenth century and stories of selfdestruction were used to expose the immorality of slavery.47 David West, an ex-slave, explains that slavery was commonly justified by slave holders because they were given slaves from their fathers, essentially perpetrating the notion that slaves were property, not people.48 As slave activism increased, however, the inequity of this notion was discussed. Naturally, this resulted in a more widely held view that slaves were human beings who deserved rights.

Although the transatlantic slave trade existed for over two centuries, it is clear that captives never consented to their enslavement.49 Despite this, slave masters regularly punished slaves for acts of defiance and justified their treatment by claiming that slaves were their property.50 In analyzing slave testimonies of resistance, however, the humanity Marker of a Place of of slaves is brought to Memory at Jan Kock, the spotlight. Regardless Curaçao, related to the 1795 armed mobiliof the cause, stories of zation of resistance of slave resistance transform Africans against slavery. the depiction of slaves Wikimedia Commons. from submissive to bold, from a commodity to a rights-bearing citizen, and from invisible to a fundamental element of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Kim Vandermeulen (she/her) Education major, History concentration, French minor

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Privateers and Pirates in the Spanish Atlantic

ENDNOTES

The pirates and privateers who relentlessly preyed upon Spanish colonies and treasure ships during the notoriously cutthroat, revolutionary age of sail have become the stuff of legend. Many people of the modern world imagine the audacious seafarers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as daring, ruthless heroes who were hungry for both the thrilling adventures and the immense wealth that thievery on the ocean could bring. The common depiction of a pirate’s life that persists to the twenty-first century is one of epic sea battles, boundless freedom, drunken nights on white sand beaches, and, of course, unhinged vice in the port cities’ taverns and brothels. While this interpretation of a seafarer’s existence is not entirely inaccurate, it is crucial to consider that pirates and privateers were far from simply mindless, murderous bands of renegades who merely thieved for the sake of thieving and left nothing behind in their wake. Many men—and in some cases women—accused of piracy and privateering were in fact renowned for their advanced military strategy, their acute political awareness, and their ability to shape entire American and Caribbean narratives with the sharpened tips of their blades and the black smoke of their cannons.

These sea thieves contributed greatly to how the early Atlantic world unfolded, and one of the undoubtable reasons as to why the hostile relationship between the European colonizers “An action between an English ship and vessels of the Barbary Corsairs”

by Willem van de Velde de Jonge.

1633-1707. Wikipedia. Fair use.

of the Spanish Main and the pirates and privateers who so violently disrupted their efforts is such an alluring topic is because Spanish conquest and the terrorism of criminals at sea is so closely interlinked with the history of the Atlantic world as a whole. Spain’s vicious encounters with privateers and pirates originating from their neighbours on the European continent not only greatly contributed to the country’s bitter political relations with other nations, particularly England, but they also shaped the outcome of various colonization attempts and they ultimately went on to determine how the Spanish went about building their seemingly indestructible empire in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is for this reason that it is so critical for historians to recognize that pirates and privateers should be recognized as figures far more calculated, complex, and impactful than the awe-inspiring epitomes of rebellion, fortitude, and violence often portrayed in Hollywood films.

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean on an expedition to seek out a western route to the Indies.1 The Spanish motivation to leave Europe and explore the other side of the globe seemed to be primarily religious at first. Aware that there were pagan people of other nations who had not yet been “discovered” by the Christians, the Europeans were convinced that they had been called by God to introduce Roman Catholicism to the indigenous people of the Americas so that their souls might be saved.2 It was also no coincidence that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the age in which the so-called age of discovery was unfolding, coincided perfectly with “Old town Potosi with Cerro Rico mountain Bolivia” by Benedek,(2018). istockphoto.com.

the religious competition that divided Christians in the midst of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. Spain was a firmly Catholic country at the time, which meant that efforts to convert the Indigenous population to Christianity began immediately after Columbus landed in the Caribbean.3 However, it quickly became clear that genuine concern for the souls of Indigenous populations was not at the heart of European exploration. The Spanish were in fact motivated by the mercantilist model, which stated that the total resources available in the world could only be distributed into the hands of a select few who emerged in triumph, either through military or colonial victories.4 The true objective behind Spanish expansion was wealth and power and they soon found this wealth in the Americas in the form of vast quantities of gold, and especially silver.5 In order to extract the precious metals, slavery, which had long been practiced in the Iberian Peninsula, was used as an instrument by the Spanish authorities in the Americas alongside precolonial methods of labor drafts to secure a workforce within the vast numbers of Indigenous people they figured they could exploit.6 It was the nature of the Spanish to colonize most extensively areas where pre-existing civilizations were located. Densely settled and economically advanced societies such as the Inca Empire dominating much of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, controlled important deposits of expensive minerals.7 These lands served as the ideal target for Spanish expansion. When word got out that gold had been discovered, Europeans, mostly men, began to pour into the Caribbean.8 Hispaniola was the first focus of colonization efforts,9 but after 1545 Spanish mining of extraordinarily rich veins of silver at Potosí (today’s Bolivia) produced a massive flow of bullion that financed Spanish economic growth and war campaigns.10 With the exploitation of severely overworked, abused, and underpaid slaves, the Spanish managed to become so wealthy so quickly from their harvesting of minerals from the Americas that in 1559 it was claimed that “from his realms his majesty (King Philip II) receives every year an income of five millions of gold in times of peace: one and one-half millions from Spain; a half-million from the Indies; one from Naples and Sicily, and another from Flanders and the Low Countries.”11 Spreading violence, disease, and enslavement across South America and the Caribbean in the pursuit of riches, the Spanish also took advantage of the dyes and dyewoods, medicinal plants, tobacco, hides, chocolate, and various foods and flavourings they could find within the foreign landscapes.12 They became so extravagantly wealthy over time that it was not long before their prosperity was the envy of the rest of Europe and their success attracted all sorts of unwanted attention. Huge amounts of wealth drew sea-roving adventurers of all sorts, legitimate and illegitimate, to the Spanish Main to seek their own fortunes. And, as can be predicted, waves of privateer and pirate attacks became an inevitable hurdle to Spanish greatness.

Pirating was practiced from the time that goods first began being traded by water, but the period from the twelfth century onward marked a pronounced surge in crime at sea as the world saw a major increase in seaborne trade and global exploration.13 Pirates did not operate in an economic sphere entirely separate from that of regular maritime trade. Because there was an absence of a comprehensive maritime law as well as available authorities that could have enforced it, there was oftentimes no clear distinction between merchants and thieves. In fact, the same individuals shouldered different roles according to their changing circumstances, which meant that armed merchant vessels could easily become aggressors

42

“Portrait of Sir Francis Drake,” by Nicholas Hilliard, 1581. Fair use.

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against other ships. At the same time, it was common for pirates to turn away from piracy and join crews aboard merchant vessels. Regular, lawful trade frequently interacted in the same markets as stolen goods being exchanged for a profit.14 Who became a pirate? What motivated them to adopt such a dangerous lifestyle? Did they do it because of greed or the taste for adventure? In reality, the reasons why seafarers turned to criminal behaviour are varied and often complex. Piracy tended to be the product of poverty, the need to ensure or increase resources for survival, or simple economic opportunism. All three of these factors played a greater or lesser role, depending on individual situations.15 Tradition, rebellion against the traditional mores and conventions of society, the lure of adventure, and the need to belong were also significant motivations for people to become sea thieves. To become a pirate was to defy the restraints of common societal norms and gain, in some respects, a sense of freedom that could not otherwise be achieved within the boundaries of a typical lifestyle at the time.16 Many of piracy’s recruits were men who had been displaced from their usual trades as merchant seamen, fishermen, or privateer sailors. They were drawn from the poor, disenfranchised, and restless adventurers of all classes, including those of noble birth who seemingly had everything to either lose or gain.17 There was indeed no set profile for a pirate; it was a lifestyle that anyone could choose. However, in general, pirates held either lawlessness, unemployment, a history of brutal abuse by their parents or guardians, or poverty as their common denominator.

Whatever the reason for an individual’s desire to turn to piracy or privateering, it was a given that under the right conditions, a minority of people, regardless of the ethics of their society, would take by force when the opportunity presented itself. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially, piracy became even more common because deterrents and consequences that confronted criminals at sea were often minimal, and early modern culture established an understanding that arming oneself and inflicting violence upon others was the only sure way to achieve material wealth.18 Pirates acting for their own benefit were not the only thieves on the sea. A major threat to Spanish colonies were privateering rovers who acted in the name of and with the permission of their government through the brandishing of what were known as letters of marque.19 In other words, privateers, at least in the view of the Spanish, were nothing more than pirates whom their home countries turned a blind eye to. From the onset of exploration and settlement in the Americas, Spanish superiority was fiercely challenged by other European nations. The ongoing feuds that took place between the Spanish and the English is perhaps the most well-known, especially considering that it was England who not only defeated the infamous Spanish Armada of 1588 but also produced one of the most notorious privateers of all time, Francis Drake. Drake, as many mariners of the time were, was granted permission

by Elizabeth I of England to plunder Spanish shipping without fear of legal repercussions. In England he was viewed as a courageous adventurer and explorer, but to the Spanish he was a horrible nuisance, as all English privateers were. Privateers such as Drake were inevitable obstacles to Spanish colonization, and their ferocity was not only due to sheer greed.

Particularly in the case of privateers, attacks against the Spanish were motivated primarily by the potential for material profit, but they were also driven by political tension and brutal religious division. English, Dutch, and French sovereigns, all seeking to overthrow Spain’s dominance on the global stage, had no qualms about commissioning privateers to do their dirty work for them. “Lawful piracy,” after all, would allow them to attack Spain directly

44

without formally declaring war. In England’s case, their attacks against Spanish colonies could additionally be justified by what the Protestant English viewed as their duty to stamp out the perceived evils of Catholicism.20 To counteract the ruthless attacks by privateers and pirates, the Spanish took a variety of measures to preserve their rule over the Americas as well as to assure their own safety.

They built powerful forts to guard their Caribbean coastlines from privateers seeking to plunder their colonies. Most significantly, they poured their protective manpower into the organization of what is now deemed the fleet system. This system entailed organizing the transport of bullion to the port of Seville in such a way that the vessels always travelled in fleets, both to intimidate potential raiders and to ensure that the riches arrived in Spain in a secure and timely fashion.21 But even though the fleet system and the establishment of ports along the coastline dissuaded some privateers’ attacks, the problem of piracy went on as long as Spain’s colonies were known as a treasure trove of gold, silver, and exotic resources.

Because of the success of privateers, the Spanish empire endured direct and heavy losses, as well as the destruction of capital in the form of sunken vessels, lost cargo, and slaughtered crewmembers. More indirect losses that are not always emphasized in literature on piracy included the damage of goods and the exponential loss of resources and productive energy due to a constant need for the Spanish to protect their land claims. These losses were unavoidable because piracy never represented a simple transaction that was economically neutral. Both predator and victim found their resources consumed as they contested the transfer of marketable goods and human labor.22 To make matters worse for the Spanish, there was little legal action they could take to suppress piracy, and their difficulties were compounded by the question of jurisdiction. As a growing number of independent European nation states emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the need to establish clearly defined frontiers between territorial units also grew. These efforts ensured that the jurisdiction within these territories could not easily be resisted or impugned. At sea, on the contrary, there was no such thing as defined frontiers other than the borders provided by natural coastlines. Strictly speaking, there could be no general policing of crime happening on the ocean at this time, especially because there were no parties who were willing to intervene in conflicts that were solely between nationals representing two separate nations with entirely different customs and legal systems. As a result, Spanish hands were tied unless they were willing to make the dangerous decision of taking up arms against enemy ships. It is for this reason that foreign invasion was allowed to continue, and violence between the Spaniards and the pirates hailing from other kingdoms raged on for centuries.

Mariah Neily History major (Honours), English minor

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Notorious Pirates of the Caribbean:

ENDNOTES

Barbarous Blackbeard

Pirates are characterized in everything from children’s birthday parties, and Halloween costumes, to multimilliondollar movies, focused around the central theme of plundering and pillaging while sailing the high seas. One of the pirates who has helped build this pirate reputation was a man named Edward Thatch, notably known as “Blackbeard.”1 Blackbeard rose to be a notorious pirate within the Atlantic world with the Queen Anne’s Revenge as his ship, pillaging the navy and merchant ships and blocking Charleston, one of the busiest ports in the Atlantic World. Although Blackbeard’s career as a pirate came to a violent end, his notorious legacy as a pirate lives on.

Little is known about Blackbeard’s childhood, however, historians agree that he was born around 1680, in Bristol, “Barbe Noire,” Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons.

England.2 Before he became a pirate, Blackbeard worked as a privateer for the British during the War of the Spanish Succession.3 He arrived in the Caribbean in the early eighteenth century according to the book volume 1724 A General History of Pyrates.4 After working as a privateer, Blackbeard turned to piracy when he joined the crew of Captain Benjamin Hornigold during the early eighteenth century.5 Hornigold was partially responsible for forming the “Flying Gang,” a group of ex-privateers who had turned to piracy and Blackbeard was among the group’s founding members.6 The band of ex-privateers quickly became an enemy of all of their former employers who set out to rid the Atlantic world of them.7 While they were once considered allies, they were now regarded as outlaws, menacing the Royal Navy and commercial ships.8 Blackbeard aided the “Flying Gang” in forming the Republic of Pirates on the island of Nassau, which created a “code of conduct” for pirates.9 Hornigold put Teach (who would not become “Blackbeard” until 1717) in charge of a ship they had seized in 1716.10 Blackbeard then ran into pirate Stede Bonnet who was captain of the ship named Revenge; Bonnet was still recovering from wounds inflicted in a previous battle. This resulted in Blackbeard taking charge of the Revenge until Bonnet was able to recover.11 It was here that Blackbeard started to form his own small fleet.

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Hornigold was overthrown from his captaincy in the summer of 1716 after refusing to attack English ships; however, Blackbeard and Hornigold had already parted ways at this point.12 Hornigold’s crew and ship were taken over by Samuel Bellamy, and Hornigold returned to the Republic of Pirates in Nassau.13 Here he reunited with Blackbeard, and together the two captured a ship carrying 120 barrels of flour from Havana and another ship carrying 100 barrels of wine from Bermuda.14 The fleet now contained three ships: Teach on the Revenge, Teach’s old ship from Horingold, and Hornigold’s Ranger.15 Despite his success working in concert with Hornigold, Blackbeard decided to part ways with his allies and began a solo career of piracy.16 Blackbeard captured a French merchant ship named La Concorde.17 Primarily used as a slave ship, there are only four official recorded voyages that La Concorde took before it was captured by Blackbeard and his crew.18 La Concorde was a desirable ship for Blackbeard since she was swift enough to outrun the warships, massive enough to scare merchants and defeat some warships, and had the cargo capacity to transport a large amount of treasure and munitions.19 Blackbeard renamed the ship Queen Anne’s Revenge and employed her to terrify the Caribbean and the British North American colonies.20

“Cover of Blackbeard, Buccaneer” (1922) by Frank E. Schoonover, Wikimedia Commons.

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As captain of Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard developed a unique style of battle. Using former naval officers and merchants to build a massive crew, Blackbeard had a small fleet of ships surrounding the Queen Anne’s Revenge.21 Blackbeard then used strength and intimidation rather than the usual pirate tactic of “hit and run” to conquer ships.22 Blackbeard and his crew intimated other ships with upwards of one hundred fifty pirates between the fleet, and each ship was rigged out with cannons and guns.23 If the abundance of weaponry and crew did not scare other ships off, the common pirate code that was practiced by Blackbeard, known as “surrender or die” policy certainly did.24 For example, one historian notes that the response of those targeted by Blackbeard: “When it turned out that Blackbeard’s pirate crew was the belligerent bearing down on them, consistent with the effectiveness of pirates’ reputation for adhering to their surrender-or-die policy discussed above, ‘Wyers Men all declared they would not Fight and quitted the Ship believing they would be Murthered by the Sloops Company’.”25 This meant that when other merchant vessels saw Blackbeard’s fleet approaching, they often refused to engage in battle, and surrendered right away.26 Before firing a single shot, Blackbeard preferred to use his fearsome reputation to convince merchant captains to surrender.27 This saved him vital supplies and gold because each man who was injured was entitled compensation, and it was highly likely that the cannon balls firing at his ship would cause serious damage.28 Blackbeard had tremendous success in his career as a pirate captain. Colin Woodward outlines the scope of Blackbeard’s plunder: “Operating from three large open sailing canoes called periaguas, in just eight months the gang pulled in plunder worth £13,175, a staggering fortune at a time when a naval sailor made only about £12 a year. Nine months later their haul had grown to £60,000, several times the annual income of Britain’s wealthiest noblemen.”28 Blackbeard crafted his legacy when he and the crew of the Queen Anne’s Revenge blocked the British port of Charlestown, located in present-day South Carolina. Charleston, which became the capital of the Carolina colony, was a major site for trade and commerce within the Atlantic world.30 Between 1716 and 1807, Charleston served as a port of entry for an estimated 121,500 slaves, accounting for around 22% of all slaves lawfully imported into North America.31 Thus, Blackbeard destination was a treasure trove of possibility due to the amount of import and export and the population size of the port.

In 1718, for six days Blackbeard and his crew blocked the port entrance, raiding any vessel that tried to enter, and plundered the colony.32 The crew and their captain found treasure equivalent today to half a million U.S. dollars. During this pillaging and plundering of Charleston, Blackbeard took approximately six hundred hostages aboard his fleet but, instead of demanding gold or silver for their heads, he demanded a chest of medicine, likely because he and his crew were suffering from syphilis.33 Archaeologists have recovered urethral syringes from the shipwreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge. These syringes were used to inject mercury which was believed to be a cure for syphilis.34 If Blackbeard and/or members of his crew were suffering from syphilis, it makes sense why Blackbeard demanded medical equipment instead of gold or silver. By ensuring his crew was getting the medical attention 48

they needed Blackbeard was safeguarding his career as a pirate.

Without a crew, Blackbeard would have never been able to be as feared as he was within the Atlantic world.

Shortly after blocking the port of Charleston, the Queen Anne’s Revenge was officially “Capture of Blackbeard,” (1920), by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, Wikimedia Commons. retired when she ran aground off the coast of North Carolina and was abandoned by Blackbeard.35 In North Carolina in November of 1718 shortly after Queen Anne’s Revenge was laid to rest, Blackbeard was caught in a battle that led to his death.36 Lieutenant Maynard detailed the capture and Blackbeard’s death: “We kill’d 12, besides Blackbeard, who fell with five Shot in him, and 20 dismal Cuts in several Parts of his Body. I took nine Prisoners, mostly Negroes, all wounded. I have cut Blackbeard’s Head off, which I have put on my Bowsprit, in order to carry it to Virginia.”37 Within an issue of The London Gazette in 1719 Blackbeard’s death was written about in detail because he was so legendary throughout the Atlantic world.38 Instances of Blackbeard’s legacy is evident in the imagery that surrounds the characters of pirates. For example, a large part of Blackbeard’s legacy was his terrifying and intimidating physical appearance. One Captain that came up against Blackbeard described him as: frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared there in a long time. This Beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes; he was accustomed to twist it with Ribbons, in small Tails... and then turn them about his Ears: three Brace of Pistols, hanging in Holsters like Bandoliers; and stuck lighted Matches under his Hat, which appearing on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a Figure, that Imagination cannot form an Idea of a Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.39

This frightful appearance has stuck within the media today, and even transferred into other characters. Common fictional pirates seen in movies feature men who look like Blackbeard.

Consider Captain Jack Sparrow from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Captain Sparrow mirrors the appearance of Blackbeard in his long hair and beard that have been transformed into dreadlocks resembling tails and the classic hat with guns at his side.

Although Blackbeard was taken down, his legacy lives on. It is evident that Blackbeard and his crew aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge made quite the impression on the Atlantic world and trade. It is no wonder then why mainstream culture’s ideas of pirate characters continues to be built upon the character of Blackbeard.

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George S. Harris & Sons, “Anne Bonny, Firing Upon the Crew, from the Pirates of the Spanish Main series (N19) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes,” (1888) Wikimedia Commons.

The Fiercest Female Pirate: Anne Bonny

ENDNOTES

When the image of a pirate comes to mind it is often a garish fellow with an eyepatch, wooden leg, and pet parrot on the shoulder. For many, it is rare that the character that comes to mind is a female figure. However, just as male pirates like Blackbeard were able to disrupt the Atlantic world, so, too were female pirates. Perhaps one of the most notorious female pirates within the Atlantic world was Anne Bonny. As a pirate, Bonny made a name for herself within a culture where women were considered inferior and expected to be bound to the home. She pursued a life of piracy, rarely masking her gender as male, and rose to be one of the greatest female pirates in history.

Anne Bonny was born in Ireland circa 1698 as the illegitimate child of Irish lawyer William Cormac, and one of his housemaids, Mary Brenan.1 After learning of Cormac’s infidelity his wife separated from him and he assumed custody of Bonny.2 Bonny was sent to live with her mother however Cormac became so fond of her that he arranged for her to come live with him. To avoid scandal, Cormac dressed Bonny as a boy and called her “Andy” pretending she was training with him to be a clerk as justification for this child living with him.3 News soon got out about who “Andy” really was (an illegitimate child) and Cormac’s reputation became so tarnished that the three of them were forced to relocate across the Atlantic.4 Settling in Charleston, South Carolina, the three lived together until Bonny’s mother died of typhoid fever when she was thirteen.5 During her teen years, Bonny was rebellious and well known within community. Documented in 1724 volume A General History of Pyrates, Bonny was said to be a promiscuous young lady who was known for frequenting the town’s taverns, sleeping with local sailors and drunks.6 She was also known for having quite the temper. For example, A General History of Pyrates documents Bonny brutally attacking a man who tried to sexually assault her which

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resulted in hospitalization.7 Bonny also allegedly killed one of her servant girls with a knife simply because the girl and Bonny got into an argument.8 As a last desperate attempt to “fix” Bonny’s reputation, Cormac who was now a successful plantation owner, tried to betroth her to a local man when she was sixteen but she resisted.9 The damage her reputation was bringing to his business prompted her father to disown her.10 According to one source, this prompted Bonny to burn down his plantation although historians disagree whether this is true or not.11 Contrary to what her father wanted, Bonny married an informant for the governor of the Bahamas and the two set off for New Providence.12 Bonny quickly lost interest in her marriage, and became involved with pirate John Rackham also known as “Calico Jack.”13 Bonny and Calico Jack ran off with each other and joined the sloop William from Naus Habour, and along with a dozen crewmates started to pirate merchant vessels along the coast of Jamaica.14 As a pirate Bonny became ruthless, voyaging the high seas as an enemy of Britain. One could argue that Bonny was truly herself at sea, seeing how she adapted to pirate culture seamlessly. According to the book Villains of All Nations, Bonny was just as good a pirate as her male counterparts, spitting and cursing as a good sailor did.15 Bonny’s

“Ann Bonny and Mary Read,” by Benjamin Cole (1724), Wikimedia Commons.

bravery was remarkable seen by her leadership in battles, and willingness to fight alongside men. A detail that makes Bonny stand out from other female pirates is that she did not conceal her identity as a woman, except when she went into raids or battles with other

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vessels.16 Females openly presenting as women was highly unusual since pirates considered it very unlucky to have them on board a ship.17 As one historian states in his assessment of Bonny and fellow female pirate, Mary Read: “[they] carried their bold imposture into the always rough, sometimes brutal world of maritime labor…they were nonetheless direct challenges to customary maritime practice, which forbade women to work as seamen aboard deep-sea vessels of any kind.”18 Bonny was able to remain true to her identity as a female aboard ships because of her courageous, confident predisposition and the way she advocated for herself. These traits were primarily seen as male virtues that could not be possessed by a woman.19 Tales of her bravery and violence from her youth were well known aboard the William; this led the crew to know that Bonny was not to be meddled with.20 Bonny proved this on board as well. For example, not all were fond of Bonny’s female presence around the ship.

One of her fellow crewmates voiced his opinions against Bonny, however, this had deadly consequences for him.21 Bonny challenged the pirate in hand-to-hand combat, and then she stabbed him in the heart and threw him overboard.22 Onwards from this incident, Bonny was accepted onboard the William.23 It was this spunky, zesty, and brave personality that allowed Bonny success as a pirate, eventually leading to her legendary status.

Aboard ships, Bonny performed physical tasks that were considered men’s work. Historian Marcus Rediker explains how Bonny was willing to perform many tasks on board, she primarily worked as a “powder monkey” handing gunpowder to her fellow crew in battle.24 Bonny became well respected among the crew and she started to lead raids against other ships herself. An example of this is against one schooner, where she shot at the crew as they climbed aboard, cursing as she gathered her plunder: tackle, fifty rolls of tobacco and nine bags of pimento.25 Bonny then held their captives for two days before releasing them.26 Bonny never let the fact that she was a woman get in the way of the life at sea she wanted for herself.

Perhaps the largest example of Bonny’s skill of piracy is when she stole a ship (The Royal Queen) that belonged to Chidley Bayard, one of the richest men in the Bahamas.27 Bonny was able to use her intelligence to trick the captain her aboard for a romantic liaison.28 Her conditions for coming on board were that his crew was to remain below deck so as to not compromise her reputation as a “proper lady.”29 Bonny then laced a drink with sleeping powder and fed it to the captain. Once he fell asleep, Bonny explored the ship freely (since the crew was below deck) and dismantled the ship firing cannons.30 When the captain awoke, he found Bonny gone, and thinking nothing of it left the harbor. A few hours later, his ship was attacked by Bonny’s ship and crew but because of the dismantling of cannons done by Bonny, the Royal Queen had to surrender.31 This act of plunder proves how Bonny was a notorious pirate within the Atlantic world. By using her womanhood as a weapon along with intelligence, strategy, and piracy skill she was able to bring down a ship, which is no easy feat for any pirate.

Although Bonny was not a woman to be underestimated on the high seas, her success at sea was short-lived. Not without putting up a fight, Bonny was captured by a governor’s ship, and she was transported to stand trial at the Admiralty Court in St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica.32 Bonny was found guilty of piracy and sentenced to hang.33 However, at the time of

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“Female Pirate Anne Bonny,” Engraving, 17011800, Wikimedia Commons.

the trial she was pregnant, which allowed her to escape this fate.34 Bonny never returned to a life of piracy but gave birth, remarried, and lived out the rest of her life in Charleston.35 While the length of her time at sea was short, Bonny’s legacy is long. The historian Marcus Rediker explains Bonny’s impact effectively when he states: “Even though Bonny and Read did not transform the popular conception of gender, even though they apparently did not see their own exploits as a symbolic blow for rights and equality for all women, their very lives and subsequent popularity nonetheless undercut the gender stereotypes of their time and offered a powerful alternative image of womanhood for the future.”36 Instead of hiding her identity, Bonny was able to be a feared pirate who exceeded her male counterparts.

Despite experiencing adversities throughout her childhood and the limitations of a female during the Atlantic age, she was still able to pursue a life destined for a man. Bonny was then a notorious female pirate, who roamed the high seas being truly authentic.

Adriana J. Loewen (she/her) Education major, Special education minor, Social studies concentration

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The False Promise of Liberty: Slavery and the American Revolution

ENDNOTES

The Declaration of Independence lists liberty as one of humanity’s inalienable rights. Though the ‘Land of the Free’ was born out of the fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, American ‘liberty’ can be best understood as a vague constellation of values.1 At its most basic understanding, liberty means that one can act however one wishes as long as those actions do not infringe upon the life and liberty of another person. But American liberty, in particular, could better be defined by its limits. For example, “The master’s freedom rested on the reality of slavery, the vaunted autonomy of men on the subordinate position of women.”2 Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s author, believed that white men could only be free if they enjoyed the economic freedom of owning land on which to support themselves and their families. The limited application for these inalienable rights explains why the American experience of freedom has always been subject to disagreement and conflict. Even a deadly civil war did not resolve the disagreements, and the issues that guided the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement remain unresolved today.

From the beginning of the Republic, despite their enormous contributions of African Americans to the Revolutionary War effort, at least one-fifth of the American population was denied the very rights their country had fought to establish.

Prior to 1776, the Patriots compared their colonial experience under the British as one of slavery.

The political oppression the Patriots claimed to have suffered under King George III was, to them, “a condition as one of enslavement – nor merely metaphorical, but real enslavement – and they frequently cited the condition of their slaves as precisely what they meant when they wanted to be clear about what they were prepared to die for.”3 America’s colonial experience in particular struck in them an inherent distrust of executive power and a hatred for royal government. The Founding Fathers mention this in the Declaration of Independence, stating: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”4 The Patriots’ perspective of freedom “could be summed up in the belief in the inherent right to make what you can of yourself in every way, without being told what to think, do, or say.”5 Republicanism, thus, was intensified by the Patriots’ experience of enforcing slavery, in which they could witness the “immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.”6

“Declaration of Independence” (1819), by John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

But freedom in America has often been referred to as a paradox.

Though they claimed to be fighting in a “passionate defense of the principle of freedom,” many of the Patriots who instigated the Revolution were major slaveholders.7 Leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had hundreds of enslaved people working for them under oppressive conditions while they were fighting for their own liberty.8 The “Laws of Nature” they claimed to be gifted by God to all men in the Declaration of Independence did not,

in 1776, extend to the enslaved people working on the plantations of the elites.

In fact, the rise of the idea of liberty in America was coupled with the rise of slavery. For the Atlantic world’s ruling class, importing enslaved Africans was the most profitable form of labour and was also considered to be a less risky investment than employing indentured white or Indigenous servants. In the new United States in particular, strong social sanctions placed against the enslaved peoples made it so that the lower-class whites who did not own property or slaves had more opportunities to prosper in American society and the Atlantic economy.

They were able to “acquire social, psychological, and political advantages that turned the thrust of exploitation away from them and align them with their exploiters.”9 Additionally, the plantation economic model that proved so profitable in the American states allowed the new republic to flourish in its trade with the Atlantic world. It was also the source of wealth of the southern aristocratic slaveholders who had led the thirteen states to victory in the Revolutionary War. As Edmund Morgan notes, “American reliance on slave labour must be viewed in the context of the American struggle for a separate and equal station among the nations of the Earth.”10 Since the American Revolution there had existed a divide between the ideologies of northern and southern Americans. Both regions were passionately committed to the idea of liberty however, they held different ideas for how liberty was to be applied in society. For northerners, liberty meant the protection of property in order to enjoy the independence and freedom of movement it provided. For southerners, slavery was “a prerequisite for the maintenance of the liberty they had won in the revolution.”11 In the societal and economic context of the United States immediately following the Revolutionary War, slavery could not have been abolished. For all Americans, north and south, the plantation economy was a vital cornerstone to ensuring the success of their republican experiment. However, as southern plantation owners and farmers began creeping into the western frontier of the continent, there came a growing fear in the north that their freedom to own property would be infringed upon.

The abolitionist movement was born in the north, with it gaining greater traction there than in the south. But it was not, for most American abolitionists, a moral cause or a humanitarian movement, but rather a movement to protect their white material interests and social positions. From the northerner’s perspective, southern slaveholders’ expansion into the west infringed upon the boundless opportunities the ‘newly discovered’ land represented. For the north, their freedom to expand their own interests westward was being threatened by slave power. The southern elites had already taken control of the federal government, and their economic power, which was so closely associated with their enslaved workers, was on the verge of overwhelming the north.12 Slavery persisted until 1863 when the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. However, the introduction of Jim Crow laws and other segregationist policies proved that even after emancipation, racial segregation, and the oppression of people of colour was a necessary institution for white Americans to remain in a position of political, economic, and social power.

Maritha Louw Political Studies (Honours), History concentration

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The French Revolution: An Atlantic Perspective

ENDNOTES

Atlantic Revolutions and the origins of nationalism in colonial Atlantic societies came about in part because of the imperial crises created by overextended European empires. Nations emerged from the ashes of revolution as a “product of tensions wrought by efforts to recast the institutional framework of imperial sovereignty.”1 The French Revolution in particular was set in motion by the structural deficiencies in controlling the empire’s finances. Global and commercial warfare, growing economic inequality, and new Enlightenment ideas became the foundations upon which the National Assembly would construct their new model for France.

Along with other European monarchies, France was actively seeking out wealth and status in the Atlantic world. The state had invested heavily into carving out significant portions of territories in Africa, the Caribbean, and northern America, some for settlement and some for trade. However, the eighteenth century saw France enter into a series of wars with Britain, its closest competitor in Europe. Since the Seven Years War, the prevailing idea among French leaders was that the independence of British colonies in North America would be bad for Britain and therefore good for France.2 As the British colonies in America began their fight against the imperial authorities, there was an opportunity for France to enter into an alliance with the American Revolutionaries in order to weaken Britain’s imperial position.

The French ambassador in London wrote: If the resistance of the Americans is successful, this will reduce England to a point where she can no longer cause disquietude, and the influence of France on the continent will increase in proportion to the enfeeblement of the British empire.3 The treaties signed between Foreign Minister Comte De Vergennes and Benjamin Franklin formally tied French and American commercial and political interests together.

Triumphal Arch decorated with flag of France, Pexels.

As the American Revolutionary War progressed, France continued to supply the Patriots with financial donations, naval support, and military equipment. Many Frenchmen, inspired by the fight against British tyranny,

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even sailed across the Atlantic in order to support the Patriot cause.4 However, even as the Revolutionary War ended and Britain recognised the United States of America as an independent republic, the war between France and Britain continued. Not satisfied with the meagre territories they had captured from the British, such as the island of Tobago, France, with their Spanish allies, continued to target other British holdings in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean. By 1779, Britain had gained more French territories than it had lost. By 1783, France had only managed to regain the original territories of Dominica, St. Vincent, and Grenada, and had captured a miniscule amount of land along the Senegal River.

Their losses far outweighed their gains. The French navy had lost over twenty ships, and in order to resupply the arsenal, finance minister Jean-François Joly De Fleury imposed another income tax on French citizens.5 The cost of the war had done irreparable damage to the French economy, while the British ended up with good trade connections with their former colonists.6 The scope of the war debts accrued by the French monarchy had detrimental effects on the middle and lower classes of France. France’s expenditure on funding the war was heavily dependent on systems of public credit, and after the war it recurrently defaulted on this debt.7 To farmers and merchants alike, the aristocracy had focused far too long on imperial expansion at the expense of a suffering domestic population.8 Though the population in France had increased exponentially in the last hundred years, many of the rural and urban poor lacked the resources necessary to migrate to overseas colonies, where they may have had more opportunities for employment.9 Additionally, while agricultural methods in France were inefficient and unyielding, plantations in the Caribbean thrived.10 To the plantation owners, merchants, and traders, enslaved African labour was still the preferred means of servitude, as it was far cheaper than relying on indentured French peasantry.11 The French Revolution can therefore be seen as a movement against the wealth and political power of a closed group of aristocratic men. The root of the problem was that the taxation used to pay for imperialism was not applied or collected equally.12 The nobility and clergy, who accounted for under five percent of the French population, had long been exempt from the various forms of taxation imposed by the ancien regime. Additionally, even when the Estates General convened to regain control of the state’s finances, the First and Second Estates could outvote the Third. Ninety-five percent of the French population was being forced to pay taxes in order to fund the French regime’s grandiose ideas of imperialism, without even seeing any benefit from the foreign investments.

To the middle-class merchants and businessmen who had accrued small fortunes through investment in the Atlantic world, the problem was social as well as economic. Their social standings were still limited to the unrepresented Third Estate. These merchants posed a challenge to the traditional social hierarchy at Versailles. Emboldened by the success of the American Revolution, and increasingly frustrated with the mismanagement and financial oppression of the aristocracy, their grievances proliferated into popular discontent.13 Informed by their transatlantic connections and with the support of the urban and rural poor, the middle class developed a particularly Enlightened idea in which French society would operate as “a society of function in which individuals will be classed by their usefulness to the nation.”14 The military expenses associated with imperial ambition and the overreach of the ensuing taxation exposed the French empire not to moderate reform or modest resistance, but to a complete overhaul of government and ideology which would have lasting effects beyond the European continent.

Maritha Louw Political Studies (Honours), History concentration

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FEATURE

The Determined, Decisive, and Diverse: Women of the Atlantic World

ENDNOTES

One of the most destructive and devastating periods of the human history was the transatlantic slave trade occurring from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Millions of vulnerable African men, women, and children were forcibly taken from their homes, put on large, unsanitary, and overcrowded ships bound for European colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean. The life expectancy of these Africans was very short due to the tremendous hardships associated with being a slave. Moreover, as the demand of the European market was the main concern of slave traders, the African mortality rate soared as Africans were considered expendable and easily replaceable. In other words, Africans were seen as a disposable commodity, with the sole purpose of providing labour for Europeans who believed themselves to be the race superior in all regards. Even in such a savage world, free and freed women living in these profitable slave-trading communities were able not only able to assert themselves within the male-dominated societies, but they also found ways to exploit the harmful industry and reap its economic benefits. However, because of the traditional historical narrative which emphasizes the power of men during this period, women who climbed the social ladder to rival their male counterparts have often been forgotten.

This article explores the ways women were able maneuver through and overcome their society’s rigid expectations of gender roles and establish themselves as key players in the history of the Atlantic world.

To comprehend the transformative nature of a women’s place within society, it is important to understand sixteenth-century attitudes towards women. Perhaps the most common outlook towards women was the belief in their general inferiority to men, which significantly limited their participation in both the public and domestic spheres of society. For example, in western Africa, families were often polygamous with the husband taking on many wives whose importance was ranked based on seniority or by the number of children they birthed.1 As well, daughters were typically placed in marriages which would prove to be economically and socially beneficial to their families.2 Outside the home, in addition to the typical domestic duties of cooking and raising children, African women did have freedom to participate within the public marketplace in selling agricultural produce.

However, this freedom was limited as women needed their husband’s permission to participate in such activities since their husbands provided them with their initial capital.3 Even then, women did not have complete autonomy as their actions were closely monitored and their lives were dictated by their femininity.4

La Signare de Gorée avec ses esclaves (The Signare of Gorée with her Slaves), East India Company Museum, Ji-Elle, Creative Commons, via Wikimedia Commons.

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African women in the Caribbean were typically depicted into two contrasting stereotypes.

As historian Deborah Gray White explains, on one hand, they were seen as overly sexualized woman only concerned with matters of lust and depravity, and highly dangerous to the upstanding white male. On the other hand, they were portrayed as a motherly figure, also known as the “mammy” who was deeply religious, physically less attractive, and embodying many maternal characteristics.5 These stereotypes dictated a black woman’s place in society based on society’s beauty standards. Remarkably, it was through this second-rate treatment where women found an even greater motivation to enact their personhood and overcome the constant experiences of commodification and dehumanization they endured.6 By the mid-seventeenth century, as the slave trade became central to the rise of market economics7 and as the female population in the Atlantic world was at an all-time high,8 these oppressive attitudes towards women were challenged and transformed as females skillfully adapted to their environments and courageously sought to look out for their own interests.

West Africa

To consider the social and economic conditions in which women asserted their own agency, it is crucial to examine some of the communities most involved in the Atlantic world. Looking first to the west coast of Africa, it was here where majority of Africans were avid participants in gathering slaves from the continent’s interior and preparing them for transport across the ocean. Busy port cities along the western coast provided many opportunities for female labourers. However, as more women entered the public sphere, it encouraged other women to do the same which in turn constructed an environment which disconnected African women from the typical aspects of femininity to which they traditionally adhered.9 In other words, it is evident that within the domestic and economic spheres of their communities, women were moving from the fringes of the historical narrative and becoming integral to the flourishing to these trading communities.10 In particular, these ‘informal’ economies11 driven by woman’s entrepreneurship emerged and flourished in Yoruba, Senegal, and along the Upper Guinea Coast where females integrated themselves into this new era of commercialization in order to find their success.12 For example, in Yoruba where the slave trade flourished, villages supported a diverse and wealthy population as individuals from all walks of life would seek to do business there. This produced the perfect conditions for women to get involved in trading and the exchange of goods. Therefore, by establishing a woman’s market association led by the female chief, the Ìyálòde (mother of the outside, the public) who demonstrated masculine qualities and dressed in the coral beads of a chief, became the manifestation of female power within these communities. Furthermore, as these women were busy participating in trade and often did not have time for their domestic duties, these senior market women gained the respect and prestige of others as well.13

Signare and her servant in royal dress, G. Boulanger, “Singrare et nègrese de Saint-Louis en toilette,” Water colour (1861), Illustration for Le Tour Du Monde (Hachette, 1861). Fair use.

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Similarly in Senegal, French-African women who engaged directly in the slave trade were called signares and were

known for their ability to be manipulative and even willing to betray their own race and sex to ensure their own financial security and upward social mobility by engaging with European traders.14 Thus, historians view signares with contrasting opinions. On one hand, because of their economic ambitions, they have been interpreted negatively because of their participation in the slave trade; on the other hand, their ambition has been applauded as they were able to masterfully navigate the maleoriented environment by establishing lucrative business connections which ultimately led to their prosperity.

Be that as it may, by operating within the slave system, women openly challenged the basic hierarchies of gender as they demonstrated their capabilities in occupying positions superior to men.15 For that reason that their accomplishments should be more widely recognized in scholarship.

Saint Louis accompanied by her slave. Jacques G. De Saint-Sauveur, “Hommes Femmes et scènes du Sénégal,” (1788), Wikimedia Commons.

Caribbean

Turning now to the communities scattered around the Caribbean, it is clear that women’s immense engagement in the slave trade allowed them to achieve a similar outcome as their African contemporaries.

Located in the heart of the slave trade, free and freed white women and women of colour understood and took advantage of the overwhelmingly lucrative industry, especially by owning sugar mills.16 Thus, wealthy Atlantic entrepôts such as Jamaica’s Port Royal, or Bridgetown in “Dancing Scene in the West Indies” by Agostino Brunias, Oil on canvas. From Tate Patrons. Fair use.

Barbados served as the perfect location for women to take advantage of the slave trade’s profitable market. Consequently, despite operating in such a hyper-masculine environment and often being subjected to sexual exploitation and commodification,17 slaveholding women petitioned and fought hard for their right to own slaves as this feat contributed to their economic status, allowed them to live comfortable

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lives, and provided for their families.18 For those reasons, women found their motivation to assert their dominance by acting in a manner that demonstrated their strong-willed, persistent, and at times shrewd natures in order to navigate the male-dominated world.

One of the more common ways coloured free(d) women were able to elevate their social status, despite the unforgiving realities of their environment, was in trading slaves themselves. In her book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, historian Christine Walker contends that while marriage was the usual path for a women’s upward social mobility, slaveholding offered another possibility that gave the same outcome without the requirement of submission to a husband. To be a women engaged in such a ruthless and competitive industry, one had to be tremendously adaptable, calculating, and determined to prove one’s place within the public sphere. Yet, by involving their families in the slave trade, women committed future generations to this lifestyle and perpetuated the horrible practice of slavery. Thus, as Walker states, the first three generations of Jamaica’s female population paved the way for the British Empire’s success in the transatlantic slave trade by using slavery as an opportunity for their own advancement.19 In a period full of so much uncertainly and instability, for these women, slavery seemed to be one of the most stable and prosperous endeavours to participate because this was one area of life they were able to direct to fulfill their own agendas.20 Another aspect of the Caribbean that allowed for women’s social advancement came from the intimate relationships between free(d) women of colour and European men. As historian Jennifer Palmer writes, intimacy configured the institution of slavery, while the formation of families created a platform resistant to racial categorization.21 Thus, domestic relations allowed for individuals of various skin tones to explore alternative lifestyles, which contradicted the entrenched beliefs of the black and white hierarchy.22 As historian Christer Petley states, intimate relationships between whites and coloured individuals “Free women of Colour with their Children and Servants,” by had the potential to destabilize and even Agostino Brunias, Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum. Fair use. undermine the radicalized separation that served as the foundation of society and the slave trade.23 However, these close relationships benefited coloured women as they were able to make profitable connections and determine their own positions in society that did not conform to society’s restrictive norms.

Finally, legal wills were another acceptable course of action by which women became prosperous. This legitimate transfer of wealth was increasingly common during the eighteenth-century as both men and women bequeathed their material assets to female family members. This was an advantageous decision not only because it secured a household’s prosperity, but it also ensured that a woman could support herself. Wills contained mention of land, animals, personal belongings, and of course, slaves who were

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treated as a commodity. Through the notion of equity, this law enabled women to preserve their own material wealth based on the ideas of justice between the genders. Therefore, females were afforded the opportunity to hold bank accounts separate from males to store and manage their wealth how they saw fit.24 It was not unusual for property-owning women to leave their assets in the hands of their daughters or other female family members to secure their futures. For example, in the will of Charity Butler from 1744, the widow placed ten slaves in a trust for her daughter “for her sole and separate use,” stating that it was her “express will” that her son-in-law would have “no power to intermeddle with…negro slaves and that he [did] not receive any benefit from them.”25 This shows that Butler sought to pass on the slaves she owned to secure her daughter’s financial future and specifically deny her son-in-law benefit of the inheritance. Butler’s actions echoed many women of the time who sought to protect their assets from a legal system which left women vulnerable to the greed and envy of men.26 Similarly Mary Sissnett’s will from 3 February 1794 stipulated that the remaining property and thirteen slaves should go to the Honourable Joshua Gittens and Mr. Daniel Broadbent in !trust to and for sole and only proper use and behoof of my said dear daughter Mary Ann and her heirs.”27 Again we see a woman using legal means and specific instructions to ensure that no man, including her daughter’s future husband, would be able to take advantage of her daughter’s rightful inheritance. An even more unique example can be found in the final testament of Sr. Regnaud De Beaumont on the 18 June 1775, as he instructs that “a life pension of one hundred livres” to each of his “natural daughter, free mulâtresses” Marie-Claire and Marie-Olive, “daughters of Marie-Anne free négresse.” In this more unusual case, one can see Dr Beuamont choosing to leave his inheritance to his mixed-raced biological daughters instead of his white daughters whom he left in in France.28 It is evident, therefore, that entrusting a woman—regardless of their skin tone—with the right to own property was more common than believed as “some of the females of colour … possessed … considerable property, given [to] them by their white partners, or amassed by their own industry.” In turn, these women were able to build further on those riches and prove their intelligence when it came to managing finances.29 It is undeniable that women living within the Atlantic world demonstrated a resilience, determination, and keen aptitude for navigating the uncertainties and instability of their time. Whether in West Africa or across the ocean in the Caribbean, females found ways to become active participants in their communities through the endless number of opportunities made available to them by the profitable nature of the slave trade. Motivated to secure not only their own futures, but those of their children and future generations, these women broke gender barriers and asserted themselves in society as forces to be reckoned with by rivalling men in status and wealth. More importantly, “The Linen Market, Dominica, 1780” by Agostino Brunias, Oil on canwhile this period is often overshadowed by a vas. From Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Fair use. traditionally masculine narrative, the accomplishments of females should not go unnoticed and must be included in the historical narrative.

Heather Lam MAIH (History stream)

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ECHOES

Gorée Island Slave Memorial, Wikimedia Commons.

ENDNOTES Empire in a Glass Case: The Diaspora of Atlantic Artifacts in the British Museum

Vague Vocabularies and Victorious Collectors

The western world is accustomed to dialogues surrounding property rights, especially within the context and language of settler colonialism. There is, however, very little conversation about property and objects of cultural significance in the same manner. Sacred, royal, or powerful objects are “equally inalienable,” to the extent that they cannot be freely given away.1 The museum is built on the foundation of material culture, where the concept of ‘the gift’ and ‘acquisition’ have been embedded into the infrastructure of the museum since its Enlightenment inception. Today, many museum scholars and anthropologists would agree that it is “to our collective disciplinary and professional shame” that no similar theory of “looting, plunder, dispossession has been written.”2 A central function of militarist colonialism, looting and pillaging of objects were ways in which Victorian Europeans amassed collections to fill their museums, justified empire, and propagandised ‘race science.’

The very first example of this was the British Museum, founded in 1753 as the first national public, secular museum in the world. Today, it houses an estimated eight million artefacts, making it one of the largest museums of classical antiquities.3 In its mission statement, the British Museum states that “[t]he Museum’s aim is to hold a collection representative of world cultures and to ensure that the collection is housed in safety, conserved, curated, researched and exhibited.”4 This collection is one born from the violence of colonialism, beginning with Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician who began amassing his collection in 1687, when he served as physician to the colonial governor in Jamaica.

While on the island, enslaved Africans assisted Sloane in his collection of 800 plant and animal specimens.5 Sloane returned to Britain with his newly acquired collectables. He continued to add to his collection, using profits from sugar plantations to amass more items.6 He purchased items from other travellers and ‘explorers,’ eventually filling his two homes with 32,000 coins and medals, 50,000 books and manuscripts, 334 pressings of dried plants, and much more.7 One of the first items proven to be of African origin that was acquired from the Sloane collection is a drum, one that was found in the colony of Virginia. According to the Sloane register records, this drum was described as “Indian.” It is listed as item 1368, and detailed as “an Indian drum made of a hollowed tree carved, the top being brac’d [sic] with peggs [sic] and thongs, wt [sic] the bottom hollow, from Virginia, by Mr Clerk.”8 The drum is goblet shaped, made of wood, deer or antelope skin, and corn. It is decorated on the lower half with a series of carved notches, designs Drum, Ghana, ca. 1753, camwood and deer skin, 24 × 41 cm. The British Museum, Fair use.

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of rectangles and squares. The drum is meant to be played with an open hand, as part of eighteenth-century West African drum groups or ensembles.9 When compared to other drums of West African origin, it becomes clear that the drum found in Virginia was actually created in West Africa. In 1906, anthropologist David Bushnell postulated that the drum was not “Indian” but “probably made by negroes, and may even have been taken to Virginia from Africa.”10 It is very likely that this drum was brought to the Americas on a slave ship from West Africa in the eighteenth century.11 Upon his death in 1753, Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his vast collection to the nation. After King George II assented to the British Museum Act of 1753, Sloane’s 79, 575 objects became the founding collection of the British Museum.12

An Agent of Empire

Since its inception, the British Museum has remained “a trope of empire,”13 in that it continues to be an imperialist institution that embodies past British colonial exploits. It was designed around the removal of objects from the “colonial periphery” to the “imperial centre,” acquired by aggressive tactics, such as the looting of African communities.14 One example of this is the British punitive expedition to Benin City in 1897. On this occasion, British soldiers stole thousands of sacred and royal objects as a means of exerting colonial power. The major pre-colonial kingdom of the Niger Delta once controlled the land and river systems that connected the interior of Africa with the Bight of Benin and the Atlantic world.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the kingdom gained more power and importance due to its involvement in the transatlantic trade with Portuguese, British, and French traders. By the late nineteenth century, the Oba (king of Benin) and Edo peoples held a monopoly on palm oil and other important commodities.15 This inspired various claims and frustrations over trading rights between Britain and the Oba. In January 1897, a small party of British officers were ambushed on their way to Benin, and between five and seven British men were killed.16 Because of this, the ‘punitive expedition’ of twelve hundred British soldiers was launched to punish the Oba “for the massacre of the political expedition.”17 Benin City was completely destroyed by British forces in a mere nine days.

It was during this punitive expedition that British forces ‘discovered’ Nigerian art. Benin is well known for its rich tradition of artwork, especially their work in brass, “which represent one of the oldest living traditions of art on the African continent,”18 developing well before European contact by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. What has become known today as the Benin Bronzes are rectangular brass relief Three hundred bronze plaques. For centuries, thousands of reliefs sent to Britain

by Sir Ralph Moor and these bronzes adorned the wooden placed at the Foreign pillars of the royal palace in Benin, Office, Sydney Dvorak, 2022, graphic design. depicting important cultural and historical moments in the Kingdom.19 These bronzes were seized by the British forces on behalf of the British Foreign Office, and eventually three hundred were given to the British Museum.

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One such plaque in the British Museum’s collection, which can be seen here, was ‘collected’

by Consul-General Sir Ralph Moor.20 According to the British Museum, it was created around 1700. It is a traditional rectangular relief-plaque, cast in brass and richly decorated with leaf patterns, stippling, and rosettes in the bottom corners. It depicts an Oba with a beaded crown, mudfish legs around his waist, and a leopard tail in each hand. Nail holes can be seen in each corner, and the remains of iron nails fill both the top and bottom left corners, where they once affixed this piece to the palace pillars. These bronzes are part of a time-honoured tradition of Edo art. In the Edo language, the verb sa-e-y-ama means “to remember,” but the literal translation is “to cast a motif in bronze.”22 This valuable form of cultural memory was unceremoniously ripped from the walls of the Benin palace and shipped to Britain, where the Victorian masses could look upon them with a vague ethnographic interest, proof of racial inferiority, and justification for colonialism.

More Edo bronze art examples are brass figures, specifically cockerels and leopards, taken from shrines.23 Included in these specimens is this cockerel sculpture in the British Museum.

While the exact date of creation is unknown, the Museum has determined it was made during the eighteenth century.24 The cockerel sculpture is a lost-wax cast in brass, and the eyes are inlaid with coral. The sculpture details the plumage, comb, wattles and spurs. It stands upright on a square base, the sides of which are decorated with interlace patterns.

For the first time, people at the imperial centre of Britain could view “objects of exotic Edo Plaque, ca. 1700. Brass, iron, 49 x 34 delectation”25 from cm. The British Museum, Fair use. the edges of the empire.

The looted objects were on display in Britain no more than six months after the 1897 expedition, and the Illustrated London News reported on Benin culture as the “habits of disgusting brutality and scenes of hideous cruelty and bloodshed, ordained by the superstitions of a degraded race of savages.”26 This is exemplary of the European racialized attitudes toward Africa, analysing a grand tradition of Edo art with only western aesthetic criteria, resulting in discourse that praised the ‘civilising’ aspects of imperialism.

Some Europeans went so far as to believe that the bronze figures, such as the cockerel sculpture, were too beautiful to have been created by Africans, and claimed that they must have been created by Portuguese sailors as they travelled through Benin.27

Edo Sculpture, ca. 1700. Brass, 49.50 x 18 cm.

The British Museum, Fair use.

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“Busy Packing Loot!”

Edo Pendant Mask; Regalia, ca. 1700. Elephant ivory, copper, 24.50 x 12.50 cm. The British Museum, Fair use.

The total figure of what was looted could be up to 10,000 bronzes, ivories and other objects, but an exact number would be impossible to calculate given that there is so much hidden in private or family collections. Other than the items that were sent directly to the British Foreign Office, many looted objects ended up in the private possession of the looters themselves. In addition to the bronzes, hundreds of ornaments worn for palace ceremonies made of copper, iron, wood, coconut and coral-bead were taken.28 For example, one of the more famous ivory hip-pendants of Queen Idia was taken by Sir Ralph Moor, who oversaw the transfer of loot to the Foreign Office. These hip-pendants represent Queen Mother Idia, the mother of Oba Esigie who ruled Benin in the sixteenth century. This type of mask was worn by the Oba, on the hip, during important ceremonies.

The regalia is a human figure carved from ivory; the hairstyle is carved in low relief. The top of the hip mask is inlaid with copper alloy and decorated with heads of Europeans, representing Benin’s alliance and control over the Portuguese.29 It was recorded to have been found in the bedchamber of the Oba.30 Upon his suicide in 1909, the ivory, which Sir Ralph Moor had kept for himself, was bought by anthropologist Charles Seligman. It was then acquired by the British Museum in 1910.

Much evidence of British soldiers’ looting exists to this day. Personal diaries and official records provide insight into the attitude of the plunderers. The personal diary of Captain Herbert Walker details “All the stuff of any value found in the King’s palace and surrounding houses has been collected in the Palave house.”31 There is an almost giddy quality to Walker’s writing, especially in the way he describes packing for their return home, “Start for Gwato tomorrow, en route for England. Busy packing loot!”32 In addition to written records, there is also photographic evidence. There were many cameras present at the punitive expedition, perhaps numbering more than a dozen, both personal and for professional reporting. This photograph, in the British Museum’s collection, is one of many that depicts the objects taken from the palace at Benin. The soldiers can be seen seated in front of their booty, wearing their pitch helmets. Soldiers and administrators took photographs as tourists would while on vacation. In some cases, administrators developed multiple copies of the photographs they took so they could be included in soldiers’ diaries and personal photo albums.33

Possession is Power

In 1754, the trustees of the British Museum decided on the motto for the seal of the museum. They chose bonarum artium cultoibus, “For the devotees of human pursuits.”34 This motto can still be seen in the twenty-first century British Museum, and is often used to

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Members of the British Expedition to Benin City. 1897. Black and white photographic print by Robert Allman, The British Museum, Fair use.

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prop-up the idea that the Museum is a one for the world. This idea of a “world museum” has been debated between those who find themselves in either the cultural internationalism or cultural nationalism schools. Cultural nationalists argue that cultural property should remain within its country of origin, while internationalists believe that cultural property should belong to the world and therefore placed in whatever institution has the greatest resources.

Museums are essential to the formation of national identity and cultural memory, and as such “Power can be demonstrated by possessing cultural property from source countries or by possessing items belonging to a nation’s claimed heritage.”35 Holding cultural objects from another country of origin can be a sort of imperial power-play.

This leads to modern disagreements over cultural property and many cases for repatriation of stolen art. In 1970, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) met for the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The UNESCO Convention expanded the definition of cultural property, an attempt to “include all possible aspects of life,” ranging from natural specimens to musical instruments.36 This definition encompasses nearly all of what is housed in the British Museum, especially from the founding collection of Hans Sloane.

Repatriation, the process of returning disputed artefacts or art to its country of origin, emerged as early as the sixteenth century, but cases for it have grown since the twentieth century. For example, between 1970 and 1999, the British Museum received twenty-seven repatriation requests.37 While international law defines the British Museum’s collections as cultural property, it does not compel the Museum to return any of the artefacts to their countries of origin. This is largely because the British Museum Act of 1963 details that the Museum’s trustees are “legally bound by fiduciary duty to preserve the Museum’s collection and dispose of objects only in extremely specific and unusual circumstances,”38 of which repatriation is not one. Until the twentieth century, the British Museum did not even consider lending artefacts to museums in countries other than England. In the 1960s, the Museum lent thirty-five of the Benin Bronzes to the University of Pennsylvania, the British Museum’s first international loan.39 Museums around the world have been repatriating items to eliminate imperialism from their display cases, but the British Museum has not done the same. Greece, Egypt, and Nigeria have requested that antiquities and artefacts be returned to their jurisdictions. The British Museum has rejected these demands in favour of keeping its collections from diverse cultures as a “universal museum.”40 As of 2018, Nigeria has made it known that they are open to compromising with the British Museum and are willing to accept a loan of the Benin artefacts rather than full repatriation.41 Through all of these negotiations, it can be observed that the British Museum asserts a culturally internationalist perspective, saying that it is an “appropriate custodian with inalienable rights” to its disputed artefacts.42 This echoes rightsbased language that has been used for property since the Enlightenment, but does not take into account a more modern, nuanced understanding of the relationship of cultural objects to identity.

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Exterior of British Museum, Sydney Dvorak, 2016, digital photo.

Rooted in the museum’s policy of possession is the colonial idea that the source countries do not have the ability to maintain their own cultural objects, and therefore must rely on the British Museum to preserve their history.43 It seems as though the British Museum is clinging to the last vestiges of an empire that no longer exists. Meanwhile, Nigeria has insisted that the Benin Bronzes were used to commemorate important moments of the Edo people, and that their removal from Benin left a vacuum that swallowed crucial aspects of their cultural and historical identity.44 This proves that possession is indeed power, and that cultural imperialism is alive and well. So long as the British Museum, and other cultural institutions, continue to display the spoils of colonial violence, they are not “devotees of human pursuits.” Rather, they are stewards of monuments to an era in which western dominance over African civilisation was asserted and celebrated.

Sydney R. Dvorak (she/her) European Studies (history stream) major

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To Vax or Not to Vax: The Debate as Old as Vaccines Themselves

ENDNOTES

Since 2020, the modern world has been bombarded with the latest pandemic, COVID-19, and countries around the world have launched vaccination efforts to mitigate its effects.

Along with the virus, vaccine controversy has also spread. Just as COVID-19 is not the world’s first pandemic, this is not the first time that vaccines have been debated. The first vaccination campaign was aimed against smallpox, a variola virus that has existed for approximately 3000 years and has been the source of epidemics across the old world since the eleventh century.1 The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition (SRPE), aimed to eradicate smallpox through a widespread vaccination program in the Americas in 1803. It had philanthropic motivations on the surface, which hid the Spanish colonizers’ need to ensure a healthy, exploitable labour force. This vaccination campaign was riddled with minority exploitation, European arrogance, and untested science. What are the major similarities and differences with the current pandemic and the first vaccination campaign in 1803? While the SRPE was less effective, researched, and widespread than COVID-19 vaccines, it received much of the same backlash started humanity’s use of vaccines to fight viruses.

Smallpox epidemics had devastating effects on the Indigenous populations, but with the novel introduction of Edward Jenner’s vaccine, the Spanish monarchy decided to try and stop the spread.2 After smallpox was introduced to the Americas in 1518, Indigenous Americans experienced smallpox case-fatality rates over fifty percent.3 Europeans were not as drastically affected by smallpox after the introduction of variolation in 1717.4 While variolation, the introduction of contents of a pustule from an infected person to a healthy person, was commonly practiced, it still had a 2% fatality rate and was accompanied by a plethora of complications such as the transmission of syphilis and severe scarring.5 In 1797, Edward Jenner discovered that individuals could be inoculated with the contents of cowpox pustules to protect them from the smallpox virus.6

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Edward Jenner vaccinating a child with his new cowpox vaccine, University of Alicante, “Balmis Bicentennial Images.” Balmis Bicentennial, 2019. Fair use.

Figure 2: The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition’s ship, the María Pita, departing from La Coruña in 1803, University of Alicante, “Balmis Bicentennial Images,” Balmis Bicentennial, 2019. Fair use.

This was the first official vaccination and the first step in breaking the cycle of smallpox epidemics plaguing the Atlantic world.7 Smallpox had devastating effects on the Americas and catalyzed the invention of the smallpox vaccine. After a severe outbreak of smallpox in 1802 in Nueva Granada, the colonial administrators requested that the Spanish king send a vaccination program to the Americas.8 In response, the SRPE, led by Francisco Xavier Balmis, departed on the ship named María Pita in 1803 (Figure 2), with a commission to vaccinate people in the Spanish colonies.9

Considering the advancements in science since the eighteenth century, the vaccine manufacturing, transport method, and distribution of the premier smallpox and COVID-19 vaccination efforts are vastly different. Consider the issue of securing ultra-low temperature freezers to transport and store the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.10 This logistical issue has made access to the vaccines difficult in our contemporary world, especially in developing nations where access to extremely cold storage is limited.11 During the early nineteenthcentury smallpox epidemic, Balmis also encountered the challenge of transporting the vaccine as the vaccine fluid could not be kept alive on the transatlantic voyage. In the era before electricity, Balmis used a method that, while ingenious for the time, is frightening to the modern reader. To circumvent this obstacle, he transferred the vaccine fluid from one orphan child to another throughout the voyage.12 These children, essentially portable vaccine manufacturers, were infected with the disease so that they generated blisters (Figure 3); then Balmis drained the pus and transferred it to the next child.13 Using this human chain method, he was able to transport the vaccine across the Atlantic to the people of the Americas.14 The Spanish government justified what we might consider a grave ethical injustice by promising any surviving orphans a formal education after the expedition.15 Balmis’s free vaccine with onsite manufacturing differs greatly from the pharmaceutical company rivalry in the recent pandemic.

The scope and documentation of the SRPE and the current COVID-19 pandemic are vastly different. The SRPE was a worldwide vaccination effort, spearheaded solely

by Balmis, which differs from the current government-led COVID-19 vaccination programs. The 2021 vaccine distribution campaign has been spearheaded by the Figure 3: Phases of the vaccine postules that Balmis would have used in his human chain method, University of Valencia, “Smallpox Vaccination.” Fair use.

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governments of individual countries and provincial or state health authorities within those countries who required vaccination documentation. Some provinces required proof of vaccination which acted as a passport to allow entry to non-essential activities. This led to backlash over the past year. The SRPE sailed to the Caribbean, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, down the coast of South America, the Philippines, and China distributing vaccines worldwide. Balmis’s expedition independently vaccinated many different populations without any documentation.16 When Balmis landed in San Juan de Puerto Rico, the government officials rejected him as the area had already been vaccinated by another independent physician.17 However, Balmis was convinced his was the only true vaccine and he proceeded to reinoculated the people unsuccessfully.18 Despite the vaccine documentation debates in the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been effective in preventing these types of miscommunications.

Figure 4: Vaccination method in 2022 using Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Toronto, Canada. CBC news, Fair use.

The social perceptions of the two vaccination campaigns are surprisingly similar. Edward Jenner, the inventor of the vaccine, wrote in a letter to a friend that Dr. Moseley, who had written an anti-vaccination article, had “slain more men than the sword of Bonaparte.”19 This quotation demonstrates the two sides that modern readers are bound to recognize: support for and opposition against vaccination. Like today, those who opposed the first vaccine had no experience in vaccinations, and in later years Dr. Moseley confessed that his claims against the smallpox vaccination had been made “on the basis of theory” and that he could not actually recall where he had found such information.20 In the current pandemic, most governments endorsed mandatory vaccinations, and while the Spanish colonies endorsed the smallpox vaccination, they had no universal way to enforce it systematically. Many Indigenous peoples who were physically forced to receive the smallpox vaccination were not informed of what the vaccine pertained, resulting in the belief that their children were being poisoned.21 Balmis wrote that twenty Indigenous mothers whose children were vaccinated against their will “went to the apothecary, demanding an antidote against the venom that 74

had just been introduced into the arm of [their children].”22 In contrast, today’s governments used privilege incentives to encourage vaccinations and launched many COVID-19 education campaigns, a much more ethical vaccination process. Even so, in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, humanity’s tendency to protest what is unknown prevailed in both cases and led to similar social perceptions of the vaccines.

Balmis’s methods may not have been ethical and in accordance with today’s health and safety regulations; his worldwide administration of the smallpox vaccine marked the initiation of vaccinations which have allowed humanity to rise against disease. Vaccination manufacturing through biotechnology, refrigerated modes of transportation, and globally enforced health standards have improved vaccine efficacy, transportation, and regulations. Unfortunately, one thing that has not changed is how disadvantaged people groups lack access to vaccines and are often taken advantage of by authority figures. Balmis used orphans as vaccine hosts to vaccinate Spain’s dying Indigenous workforce. Today racial and ethnic minorities and developing nations are neglected due to lack of funds, supplies, and personnel. Smallpox is a perfect case study for how effective vaccination programs can be. It took over 150 years, but in 1980, the World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox: a feat solely due to global vaccination efforts.23 Despite ethical concerns, the first vaccination program was eventually successful in protecting people from smallpox, and with global cooperation, humanity has a fighting chance against the pathogens that plague us today.

Map of Francisco Xavier Balmis’s expedition, University of Alicante, “Balmis Bicentennial Images – Expedition of Francisco Balmis,” Balmis Bicentennial, 2019. Fair use.

Haley Friesen Biology major, Chemistry minor

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The Inca Roads and the Atlantic Network

ENDNOTES

Seven hundred ago, the towering Andes possessed more than snow-capped mountains and lush, green forest. Through valleys and deserts was a map of Inca ambition, the Capac Ñan, or the “Great Road” which represented the expanse and expertise of the empire.1 These roads served numerous functions ranging from military, commercial and spiritual.

The construction of the network of Inca roads reflects not only strategic intelligence, but also sophistication. The roads covered 40,000 km of land through two main north-south highways. One spread from modern day Ecuador to Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina while the other passed through the highlands.2 The Inca used a variety of tools to build their roads.

Consequently, the roads are not made of one uniform material. For example, one portion of the road was constructed with wood, while others were made of stone or bronze as each population utilized the tools available to them.3 In an attempt to impress travelers with Inca prowess, the roads possessed an extreme amount of elaboration and attention to detail.4 The vast expansion of the roads served various purposes across the empire.

In times of war and conflict, not only did the roads provide direction for armies, but also for government communication. These roads optimized communication through the use of Chasquis or “runners.” These messengers operated in relays to pass information to a new runner stationed every six to nine kilometres.5 This system was necessary considering the Indigenous people did not use written language. Consequently, the messages were short and concise to aid in recollection and minimize errors.6 However, communication was not just reliant on the use of Chasquis. In times of rebellion or invasion, fires were lit from distant mountain tops near the roads to alert travelers.7 As a result of their interconnected nature, the roads provided efficient communication amidst the challenges created by mountainous terrain. This led to further consolidation of Inca power and control.

The Chasqui was a messenger of the Inca’s empire, Wikimedia Commons.

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Additionally, Incan roads were of commercial and spiritual importance. As a result of the vast expansion of the roads, economic opportunities were born. Not only did they allow for the movement of goods across plains, deserts and mountains, but also connections to neighbouring peoples.8 The expansion of roads beyond Inca settlements allowed for the facilitation of trade with different people groups.9 Even those on the road for trade purposes were connected to the spiritual values of the Incan empire. Along the route were religious centers like Pachamac and sacred mountains and volcanoes where human sacrifices were made.10 Furthermore, the stones of the road carried importance as they were considered to be of “fluid form”. As a result, the Incas who constructed the road had to ask permission and negotiate with beings already there to turn the stones into a “functional form.”11 Therefore, the roads not only represented the commercial desires of the Incas, but also their spiritual worldview.

However, once the Spanish arrived, the roads no longer worked in the Incas’ favor and soon fell into disarray along with the rest of the empire. Upon the arrival of the Spanish in 1526, the road was not necessarily a symbol of Incan power, but of its vulnerability. Not only did the Spanish presence lead to internal fighting and disease, but the road system allowed for them to benefit from the unprecedented access to the empire that the Incas used to enjoy.12 What once tied the Inca Empire together was now its downfall as Pizzaro used roads to aid in his conquest.

The construction workers of the rope bridges along the road would likely be surprised to know that their expertise allowed the Spanish to ride their horses across and conquer the empire.13 However, even the road’s vital use to the Spanish faded over time. Within a year of the consolidation of their rule, the Spanish shifted their interest The Inca’s engineering of roadways and agricultural terraces in mountainous terrain was one key to the towards the fallen empire’s gold expansion of the empire, photo by Liesl Clark, “The Lost Inca Empire.” PBS. Fair use. and silver and the once great Capac Ñan fell into disrepair.14 However, not all was lost. Many sections of the road network are still used today by pedestrians and the same bridges and roads which were essential to life in the Inca Empire are now occupied by tourists.15 The Incas’ vision for crossing terrain and distances was so advanced that modern roads were built directly above several routes.

Despite the tragic changes that altered the use of the road and the lives of its builders, it remains a reminder of the intelligence, strength, and story of the ancestors of the Andes.

The Inca road system was used almost exclusively by pedestrians Perhaps their stones serve as a and pack animals, including llamas. historyofinformation.com. Fair use. representation to the many tourists of what was lost, and what grandeur Analise Saavedra this region could possess had history International Studies major played out differently.

(International Development track), Spanish concentration

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Port Royal: Shaky Morals, Shaky Ground

ENDNOTES

Natural disasters have historically presented a threat to human life and civilization and have often altered the course of nations and cultures. Famous examples include the volcanic eruption in Pompeii, which claimed two thousand lives and left a whole city fossilized in ash, and more recently the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, which caused 20,000 deaths and a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 154,000 people. Humans have attempted to adapt and protect themselves from such disasters as best they can but these “Acts of God,” to use an insurance term, have altered the course of world history. One such event during the Atlantic trade era was the earthquake that destroyed much of Port Royal, Jamacia in 1692.

“A correct draught of the harbours of Port Royal and Kingston, with the keys and shoals adjacent &c. from a late accurate survey, by Mr. Richd Jones, engineer,” (1756), Wikimedia Commons.

Present-day Jamaica is the home to the small port city of Port Royal, located at the end of a long spit protecting an important deep-water harbor. In the 1600s, Jamaica, along with other Caribbean islands, was making a name for itself, emerging as a key location for producing cane sugar, one of the most profitable commodities of the Atlantic world. Islands such as Jamacia and Hispaniola emerged as points of conflict between many European nations as a result of this trade. When the British failed to take Hispaniola from the Spanish, they sailed to the Spanish colony of Jamaica instead.1 In 1655 the British successfully invaded Jamaica, and quickly began constructing a fort on the island’s spit. This spit, known as the Palisadoes, is an eighteen-mile-long stretch of sand that reaches out into the Caribbean, forming a cay

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around Jamaica’s present-day capital city of Kingston. This spit offered the British a strategic advantage in that any attack on their city would have to come through the channel created by the Palisadoes.2 They called this fortification Fort Cromwell (later Fort Charles); other fortifications were added around the cay in the next twenty years to protect Port Royal.

The cay provided the unique ability to be able to bring large ships right into the harbor. In many ports on islands like Jamacia, the water became shallow well before the actual coast.

This resulted in having to row to shore on smaller boats, leaving cargo vulnerable on ships anchored at a distance from shore. However, the cay surrounding Port Royal meant that the interior harbor was deep enough along the coast for large ships to moor.

Port Royal circa 1690 prior to the 1692 Earthquake, by P. Dunn, P. Jamaica Port Royal. Fair use.

Port Royal grew to be a key part of the Atlantic trade world, claiming the title as the most influential British-controlled port. Port Royal produced few of its own goods. The port instead quickly became known as a hub for trading. However, the main contributor to the economy was contraband.3 At the time the British established Port Royal, piracy was a thriving industry in the Caribbean. As the Spanish tried to declare a monopoly on the trade in the area, the Spanish became more frequent targets of piracy and Port Royal, with its sheltered harbor, became somewhat of a safe haven for all forms of freebooting activities.4 Much of this could have been due to British privateers who were actively attacking Spanish ships. If privateers were able to overtake the Spanish fleets, they were able to travel to Port Royal, a British Port, where they were able to seek protection under the British crown. By 1689 nearly fifty percent of the 4000 inhabitants of Port Royal were taking part in the officially sanctioned privateering.5

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“A draught of the harbours of Port Royal and Kingston in Jamaica with the fortifications correctly laid down, also all the keys and shoals adjacent,” (1782), Wikimedia Commons.

Even after the British stopped sponsoring privateering, Port Royal remained a haven for pirates. Piracy was so common that the port began to be considered ‘the wickedest city on earth’. Along with piracy, Port Royal became seen as a haven for “alcohol, money, and sex.”6 Historians believe that roughly one-quarter of the infrastructure in Port Royal housed bars and brothels.7 Because of the illicit nature of the activities that dominated Port Royal’s economy, it is nearly impossible to estimate the amount of wealth and cash flow in the city. Vast fortunes came from Spanish ships; due to the way it was appropriated, we will never be able to know just how much Spanish wealth traveled through Port Royal. Riches also came from the transatlantic slave trade, as well as logwood and sugar trading. Although the exact amount of wealth that flowed through the city is unknown, there is no doubt that it was a city of great wealth at its height in the 1600s. Port Royal maintained its status as a sort of haven for those who otherwise would be displaced due to laws and economics. By the last decade of the seventeenth century, Port Royal included Fort James as well as Fort Charles and was home to roughly 6,500 individuals. Out of this population, nearly one-third were African slaves who had been transported via the Atlantic slave trade.8 On Saturday, June 7, 1692, Port Royal was hit with a devastating earthquake. E. Heath, a priest living in Port Royal, recorded his account of the earthquake: he “found the ground rolling and moving under my feet.”9 The earthquake was catastrophic. Heath wrote that he believed that it was sent as a judgment from God to punish pirates, prostitutes, and thieves for their actions.10 The earthquake itself lasted for less than fifteen minutes but its effects were felt for centuries to come. Because of the topography of Port Royal, the earthquake hit it extremely hard. The

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ground on the spit was mainly sand, and the foundations of the buildings were susceptible to shifting with the sand. The earthquake caused liquefication to occur, with the ground swallowing up everything on the surface. The British, being relatively new to the Caribbean, did not view earthquakes as a significant threat. With modern technology, today we are able to understand Jamacia’s location on the Caribbean tectonic plate, and that because of the fault lines, the Island is especially vulnerable to earthquakes. The earthquake destroyed thirty of the original fifty acres on which Port Royal was situated. All the infrastructure constructed on the sandy spit was compromised. The biggest concern for the population was the thirty acres that were now completely underwater. The exact number of casualties is difficult to assess although it is thought that over 2500 lives were lost.

The earthquake of 1692 in many ways changed the Caribbean and subsequently the trade in the area. The pirate haven that had offered protection to so many was now sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor. It opened the eyes of the Europeans to the natural threats that plagued the area. However, despite the extensive damage wrought by the earthquake, Port Royal remained a key player in the region’s trade. Today you can go and visit the sunken remains of what was once such a lively part of this transatlantic globalization. Surrounded by modern infrastructure, the ocean has in many ways preserved a piece of the 1600s Atlantic world on its floors.

“Port Royal earthquake 1692 by Jan Luyken and Pieter van der Aa,” Wikimedia Commons.

Fiona Kroontje International Studies major (International Political Economy track)

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Gorée Island, Senegal: The Doorway to the Transatlantic Slave Trade

ENDNOTES

Off the coast of Dakar Senegal, a small island sits out on the sea. This island looks peaceful, with its sandy beaches and the waves lapping the shore. However, the history of the island is quite the opposite. Gorée Island happens to be the most westward territory of the African continent. Gorée, although small in size played a key role in the transatlantic slave trade in the 1800s. The French noted the significant nature of the island, and in 1800, they claimed it for their own. The French interest was solely in opportunities in the slave trade. After the close of the slave trade the island faded into the background, however, Gorée has taken up more room in the press recently as some of the realities of this island’s history have come to light. As a slave-trading hub in the Atlantic world, this island represented a grim reality for many as the last piece of their home continent that they would ever see.

The place of nightmares for slaves was also the home of a number of free people. One individual who called Gorée home was Anne Pépin. Pépin was what was called a signare.

This is the term that they used at the time for individuals who were of mixed African and European heritage.1 Pépin belonged to the noble class of Senegal. It is suspected that signare bloodlines were able to acquire social power because of the vital role that they played as go-betweens for the two cultures. The signare women were especially important to the economy of the island. French males that were stationed on the island took a particular interest in the women of Gorée. What was unique about the relationships between the French men and the Gorée women, compared to many other relationships in the transatlantic era, was that many of their relationships were a mutual arrangement. The men, being under the command of the French crown, were forbidden to engage in private business ventures.

This meant that they were unable to be involved in the transatlantic slave trade for personal gain. However, these men’s wives were not bound by the same restrictions.2 Although it was still lust that led many to marriage, at least some of that lust was for economic gain. Pépin was one of these women, she had claimed the title as the ‘temporary’ wife, of the French commander and governor of Senegal.3 Map of Gorée Island, by Jean Baptiste Léonard Durand, Voyage au Sénégal (1802), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

After the governor moved on to other love interests, Pépin, used her knowledge of business to make a name for herself in the transatlantic slave trade. Slave trade companies such as Compagnie du Sénégal which operated within the area had been given exclusive rights to the slave trade from the region.4 This meant that the number of slaves that came from the area were suspected to account for nearly thirteen percent of the overall trade into the Americas.5 Naming her home and estate “Maison des Esclaves” (the House of Slaves), Pépin became a well-established individual in the trade. The role that the home actually played in the slave trade is something that, as we uncover more information regarding the number of slaves that passed through the home, has caused its role to be widely debated. Today, however, the number of slaves that passed through the walls of this structure is irrelevant.

Instead, the home stands as a stark reminder of the atrocities that occurred during the era of the transatlantic slave trade.

This island and prison disguised as a home were the last parts of Africa that many men and women saw as they were loaded for transport to a life of brutal labor in the west Atlantic. On the lowest level of Pépin’s house, down the hall from the cells that held slaves, there is a door that faces towards the open ocean. This door had been infamously labeled as ‘the door of no return’. No one (that we know of) that walked through that door from the slave cells and onto a slave ship ever made it back to their homeland. The home on the island has been turned into a museum to symbolize the horrors of the slave trade. Although there is debate about the influence that this building itself had on the slave trade, it still stands as a reminder of the trade and the horrors that came with it for so many. It is now a museum that you can walk around and take in a small inkling of the emotions that so many must have felt, leaving their homeland a captive, setting out into the unknown.

Maison des Esclaves (“The Slave House”), Gorée Island, Senegal. Photo by GoLo/Fotolia via Britannica. Fair use.

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Door of No Ruturn, Goree Island, Senegal, Toronto Star, Fair use.

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The museum that now stands on Gorée Island was established back in 1962. Ever since then, the island has hosted thousands of individuals coming to the island to visit the site. Some come to better understand the history, others come to trace family ties. These visitors are both international and domestic, but they all leave impacted by a building that helps transform stories and history we know it by focusing on individuals who experienced being sold into slavery. The island has seen visitors such as the Obamas, Pope John Paul II, and others who have all come to learn and experience Gorée.6 Back in 2015, the International Coalition of Sites and Conscience announced that they would be working on revitalizing the museum. This project is set to finish at some point in 2022. This revitalization will include a multitude of projects. A big goal of this project is to pinpoint the role of this house in the slave trade as well as to use it as a metaphor for what was happening all over the West coast of Africa at the time. In the modifications the International Coalition of Sites and Conscience is helping to bring about, the museum will be displaying artifacts such as maps, shackles, and chains that have all been unearthed on the island.7 This will help bring to life the realities that slaves on this island faced. The Coalition stated that they are going to “transform the site into an international hub for dialogue on slavery.”8 They are hoping that through their work, Gorée Island will provide a site to interpret transatlantic slavery.9 Their goal is to “turn memories into action”10 taking the stories of those who experienced history and using them to help write a new narrative of history. Sites such as the Maison des Esclaves help to tell an alternative narrative to traditional histories. Instead of viewing something such as the transatlantic trade through the lens of European expansion, sites like these provide a space to view transatlantic trade from the perspective of those who unwillingly made this form of commerce possible.

The Maison des Esclaves stands today as a museum that welcomes visits from tourists. If you do venture to the sandy shores of Gorée Island, you will see the infamous door of no return. You will stand with your back to the east, looking out into the blue of the Atlantic. Although a majority of the slaves that left the continent never stood directly where your feet might be, they would have experienced the same view. The leaving of everything that they knew, not by choice, but by force, and boarding a ship that had little more possibility than almost certain death. With so much uncertainty slaves were pushed forward towards the west, ripped from their home. As we continue to confront our shared history, we must not let the gruesome realities of this era escape us. For as many historians know and have studied, it is when we forget where we came from that we repeat our same mistakes.

Fiona Kroontje International Studies major (International Political Economy track)

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Sea Shanties: A Microcosm of Exchange

ENDNOTES

Sea shanties are a form of folk music created by sailors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They have recently come back into the forefront of popular culture with the song “The Wellerman” going viral on Tiktok in 2021, mimicking trends from the 1600s that romanticized the life of sailors in song.1 Though they have become a popular subject, very few of today’s ballads have actually been written by or regularly sung by sailors, making true shanties an overlooked form of music.2 The songs seamen composed in the early modern period can be separated into two categories, which each served different purposes. Frank Kidson explains: “A sailor sings two kinds of songs–those to assist him in his work, and (like other mortals) others for his own and his comrades’ amusement.”3 Shanties were defined as the songs that assisted in sailors’ work while sea songs or forebitters were sung for entertainment.4 This music’s rise and fall follows the history of the Atlantic world from an increasingly interconnected region to industrialized societies.

Ballads centering on the life of seamen became very popular in Europe, particularly in Britain, beginning in the 1600s. These songs formed the majority of popular music at the time, being sung in theatre, in the streets, and in the homes of private citizens.5 Even Jane Austen (1775–1817) had a personal sheet music collection that contained several sea ballads.6 This genre of music focused on the navy or men who were press ganged into that occupation, yet it was unlikely that these songs originated from this population as sailors regarded singing on a navy vessel as undisciplined. Neither were songs developed on merchant ships, as is evident by the lack of mention in the sea literature of the period.7 Since this music was not performed on vessels, it is unlikely to have been created by sailors nor be a reliable source for their experiences at sea.

The popular ballads romanticized a life at sea, which was actually strictly disciplined with harsh punishments and poor pay and food. Debt was often a function of acquiring simple necessities.8 The eighteenthcentury ballad “The Sea Martyrs” describes this harsh reality for sailors with “their starving families at home, expected their slow pay would come… their debts increase.”9 There was little time for song aboard vessels; if there had been, the subject matter would have certainly been more grim. As Henry Whates Flogging was one the most common punishments on naval vessels that could be enforced for small offenses, such as drunkenness or anti-social behavior. George Cruikshank, “The Point of Honour,” Print, 1 July 1825, (London: National Maritime Museum), Fair use.

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explains, “In no circumstances were shanties ‘quaint’ or whimsical and rarely indeed had they any suggestion of jolly.”10 “Blood-Red Roses,” one of the few shanties to have originated from the navy during the 1700s, highlights the men’s bleak existence: “We wisht ter hell we’d niver bin born… ‘Tis growl ye may but go ye must, If ye growl too hard yer head they’ll bust.”11 The seamen’s lament of their circumstances and fear of punishment reveal that life at sea was unromantic.

Sea shanties, songs created by sailors themselves, emerged in the 1780s. They assisted in various shipboard tasks that required group coordination by having the sailors work in time with the music, directed by a lead singer. These songs were also effective at providing motivation, as one source explains, “The purpose of a hauling shanty was to harness rhythm to the task of extracting just that last ounce from men habitually weary, overworked and underfed.”12 Following the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the British Royal Navy shrunk, leaving sailors to work on merchant ships where discipline was less harsh. No longer facing the threat of forced conscription by press gangs, sailors had more autonomy and more time for leisure activities, including music. This shift is reflected in ballads, known as forebitters created by the seamen themselves. In contrast to a shanty, forebitters were exclusively for entertainment and encouraged by the implementation of the second dog watch, a two-hour rest period that was observed every day. Believing that movement could prevent the contraction of illness, especially scurvy, singing and dancing was encouraged in merchant services and navy ships during this two-hour break.13 Many of these forebitters demonstrated the unique experiences of seamen. This golden age of sailor folk music lasted from the 1820s to the 1850s and was eventually overshadowed by the introduction of the steamboat. Industrialized ships no longer required many of the tasks that had been performed by sailors. In 1900 Kidson commented that “chanties, like everything else oldfashioned, are fast disappearing, for the simple reason that much of the pulling and hauling on steamers is done by the engines.”14

With the hours of rest sailors began to devote more time to other amusements, leading to the organic development of original sailor ballads. George Cruikshank, “Saturday Night At Sea,” Illustration, 1841, In Songs, Naval and National, of the late Charles Dibdin, ed. Thomas Dibdin, (London: John Murray), Fair use.

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Shanties, unlike forebitters or ballads, were created specifically for work. Typically sung as call-and-response, the leading singer or shantyman sang the first line and the working men responded with a refrain, completing a certain action on a specific word.15 The name shanty or chanty derives from this action.16 The chanties’ tempo and mood was adapted to the task at hand; there were many slower and more solemn songs which contrast the ballads about sea life that were so popular on land. For example, anchor shanties had long choruses and slow pace because drawing up the anchor required a large group to pull the weight in. The song’s purpose “was not to supply sharply accented rhythm to concentrated bursts of energy, but to relieve the monotony of a treadmill-like walking round and round.”17 In contrast, the halyard shanty was shorter and sung at a quicker tempo. The halyards were ropes used to hoist the sail, a quick task that could become especially crucial if a ship was caught in a storm.

Performing tasks on ships, such as hoisting the sail, required great exertion and group coordinator that was facilitated by shanties. Arthur Briscoe, “The Shadow of the Mainsail,” Print, 1932, National Gallery of Canada, Fair use.

“Blow, Boys, Blow” was one of the shanties sung quickly as men were expected to pull the halyards twice in the refrain, every time they sung the word “blow.”18 The types of shanties reflected the tasks performed by sailors and music’s role in providing coordination and motivation.

The ships that traversed the Atlantic were multicultural spaces. As Whates explains, “In the little world of sailing ships one saw perhaps a microcosm of the process known in the larger world as the diffusion of culture.”19 This was especially evident among packet seamen, who delivered mail and other goods across the ocean. The packet ships were especially prevalent from the 1820s to 1870s as they also provided cheap transportation for Europeans migrating to the Americas. The sailors learned the songs of the various immigrant groups and spent time working in the Americas, where they picked up songs from African Americans and the West Indies. Working alongside different groups on board or on shore facilitated the

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transmission of music. This is reflected in many sea shanties, such as a hauling song with lyrics in Anglo-Hindi, signifying the presence of Indians in the Caribbean and their interactions with sailors. The global context is also evident in forebitters such as “The Flying Cloud,” which describes British pirates’ journey transporting African slaves on the grim Middle Passage or the song, “Rude Boreas,” whose main subject is a Greco-Roman god sung with syncopation common in African American spirituals.20 “Sally Brown,” one of the most popular shanties of the 1800s, also illustrates the societal changes taking place in the Atlantic world. The piece originated among Africans in the West Indies, then spread to American and British sailors, and was still sung in Jamaica in the 1930s.

The subject is “Sally Brown,” described in the first line as “a bright mulatter.”

Despite years of courting, Sally refuses to marry her love interest, the singer.

Rejected, he “shipped away on a New Bedford whaler” and sailed away again During the 1800s, merchant crews not only interacted with different cultures at ports but also had increasingly diverse crews. George Cruikshank, “The Sailor’s when he discovered she had a new Description of a Chase & Capture,” Print, 1822, The British Museum, Fair use. lover.21 This shanty, though used for manual labour, highlights the frequent travel of this period and how race became an increasingly important classification. Intermixing in the Atlantic world, in addition to the expanding slave trade, gave rise to groups distinguishing themselves according to race.22 Sally, immediately identified as a “mulatter,” shows that, even among the working class of sailors, racial classification was prevalent. Moreover, the lover’s frequent trips across the Atlantic demonstrate how common it was to cross the ocean multiple times; people were not just migrants but also seasoned travellers.23 This shanty reflects an increasingly interconnected region.

Sailors’ folk music, for amusement and labour, demonstrates the immense economic and cultural changes that the Atlantic world underwent in the early modern era. Through firsthand experiences with various peoples and cultures, sea men adopted and exchanged musical traditions, a process of cross-cultural interaction that happened in every sphere of society. This transformation also reflects the economic changes brought about by a globalized economy facilitated through trading vessels. Through this folk music, a contemporary audience can hear the perspectives of a particular demographic and how they adapted to a changing Atlantic world.

Jessica Vriend Education major, History minor, Intercultural religious studies minor

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ENDNOTES

Spirituals: Faithful Voices in the Midst of Oppression African American spirituals emerged with the forced migration of African slaves to North America. These songs represent the cultural syncretism that came alongside the increased interactions between Europeans and Africans, as the enslaved peoples “partly composed under the influence of association with the whites, partly actually imitated from their music.”1 This music style particularly arose in North America because, though brutal, the living conditions and environment in that region enabled slaves to live longer, thus forming strong communities and families with children. Rather than the enslaved populations receiving a constant influx of new migrants, thus maintaining strong ties to their place of origin, the populations in North America slowly developed a unique culture that wasn’t fully African, but also not European, leading to the birth of African American culture and music.2

Kongo cross, solid cast brass, 15001600s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fair use.

A crucial step in the development of Black spirituals was the spread of Christianity. The initial introduction of European trade to the African continent also brought the merchants’ religious views and led to the conversion of some regions, particularly in western Africa and along the Congo River.

Therefore, Christianity was already prevalent among some of the enslaved peoples and some historians even suggest that the first African slaves brought to North America in 1619 were already believers.3 Peter H. Wood explains that enslaved Africans slowly adopted Christianity as the dominant belief towards the second and third generation because they had less exposure or ties to African religion. However, he argues that, despite its European influences, a distinct black Christianity developed that emphasized the Old Testament stories and Jesus’s role as “a friend of the afflicted and a redeemer of the weak.”4 These themes are reflected in the spirituals’ lyrics which frequently mention the biblical patriarch Jacob, and the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and eventual entry into the promised land.

The songs were also unique in their blending of European and African music styles. They were performed in a congregational setting, such as in church on Sunday or worship meetings that were facilitated multiple nights of the week on plantations.

They were also used as songs of labour to assist slaves in daily work, especially in tasks requiring physical exertion. Several of the melodies mimicked European music, but given the oral tradition of the songs, they often included other original elements.5 A significant characteristic of the spiritual, more African in origin, was improvisation. The leader would begin chanting one line, which the congregation would repeat several times before moving onto the next verse, while the congregation would break out into several harmonies and exaltations added alongside the usual lyrics. This reflects the African tradition of music being a communal activity in which everyone partakes and spontaneously changes the song while also shouting words of encouragement and clapping or dancing along.6 This collaborative approach is described by one observer as the piece was “sung by the entire multitude with

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“The Old Plantation,” watercolour on paper, 1785-1795, attributed to John Rose, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Fair use.

a zest and spirit, a swaying of the bodies and nodding of the heads and lighting of the countenances and rhythmical movement of the hands.”7 The lyrics of the spirituals are also notable as they used English words but with different grammar and pronunciation. Dialects would vary greatly depending on the state and even the plantation, but the researchers on the Sea Islands of South Carolina noticed that there was a frequent omission of auxiliary verbs and other small words while the “th” sound is often pronounced as “d.” This African American vernacular is demonstrated in the spiritual, “The Lonesome Valley” the first verse of which is: “My brudder, want to get religion?/ Go down in de lonesome valley/Go down in de lonesome valley/Go down in de lonesome valley, my Lord/ Go down in de lonesome valley, To meet my Jesus dere.”8 The unique dialect and style of performing spirituals reflects the amalgamation of African and European cultures that was taking place on plantations in the United States.

Since slaves in the United States were prohibited from learning to read and write, oral traditions and music, especially, became the main avenue for learning and passing on beliefs. The spirituals served a dual purpose as worship of God and expression of strong emotions in the face of great oppression.9 They are both a lament of Sojourner Truth from Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as blacks, by Elizabeth Catlett, Ink and graphite on paper, 1946-1947, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Fair use.

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slaves’ current circumstances and a reminder to have hope in the sovereign Lord of justice and redemption. As one author observed, “the words breathe a trusting faith in rest for the future — in ‘Canaan’s air and happy land,’ to which their eyes seem constantly turned.”10 This can be reflected in the spiritual “Poor Rosy” in which the lyrics comment on the troubles that the singers faced. “Got hard trial in my way,” is repeated three times as is the response that “heav’n shall-a be my home.”11 The songs reinforced the ideal of equality by drawing attention to African Americans slaves’ identity as children of God, similar to the chosen Israelites who also suffered enslavement. This is demonstrated in the spiritual “Let God’s Saints Come In” which first retells the story of God using Moses to free the Israelites and then the chorus becomes personal, saying, “Canaan land is the land for me.”12 By drawing a direct connection between biblical passages and their enslavement, spirituals acted as a form of resistance to slavery and reinforced African Americans’ spiritual identity and their belief in their equality as children of God. Spirituals also supported more overt forms of resistance as scholars have suggested that the lyrics also served as coded messages for runaway slaves.13 The themes of bondage and salvation alluded to slaves’ desire for freedom and parts of songs often directly addressed this, as is evident in the River Jordan being a direct reference for the Ohio river, the destination of the Underground Railroad.14 Frederick Douglass explained how a song about the land of Canaan was also about reaching the northern states or Canada, where slavery was abolished. He commented, “our repeated singing of “O Canaan, sweet Canaan…” [communicated] something more than hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north–and the north was our Canaan.”15 Spirituals were used among the slaves to spread information and form escape plans. For example, Harriet Tubman, the woman dubbed “Black Moses” for leading many slaves to freedom, had a signature song she would use to alert slaves to her presence and urge them to prepare to leave. The spirituals could also be

Harriet Tubman with rescued slaves, photograph, 1885, New York Times, Fair use.

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Ella Fitzgerald with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, and Timme Rosenkrantz in New York City, 1947, Photograph by William P. Gottlieb, United States Library of Congress, Fair use.

adapted to contain messages about the journey to liberation, such as “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” which guided fugitives to travel in the direction of the Big Dipper.16 The songs of African Americans in slavery not only served as an expression of their faith but also as an expression of their resistance to racist ideologies and the institution of slavery, in both their beliefs and actions.

Many of these spirituals have been lost to time as there was no attempt to record them until the end of the U.S. Civil War and the complexities and African aspects of the songs could not be fully represented in European musical notation.17 However, what has been recorded demonstrates how music and religion was used to lament enslavement and find hope in gaining freedom in both life in heaven and on earth. These songs have also been preserved through oral tradition and have continued to evolve into other distinct music genres from the United States, such as gospel music, blues, jazz, and hip hop.18 Spirituals represent the larger development of African American society and culture as diverse groups of Africans were forced together through slavery and exposed to European culture. The African American spirituals exemplify an Atlantic world in which people and cultures were constantly undergoing transformation and bringing diverse peoples together.

Jessica Vriend Education major, History minor, Intercultural religious studies minor

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ENDNOTES

Endnotes and Sources Consulted INTERACTIONS

“Sunken Island, Surfaced Legend: The Influence Back of Atlanis and its Lost People” by Jessica Knapp 1 Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis, Internet Archive, (Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2005), 30, htps://archive.org/details/historyofatlani0000spen_a0x4/mode/2up.

2 Spence, The History of Atlantis, xi.

3 Tripp R. Evans, R, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915, Internet Archive, University of Texas Press, 2004, 131, htps://archive.org/details/romancingmayamex0000evan/mode/2up.

4 Plato, The Timaeus, ed. by R.D. Archer-Hind, Internet Archive, Macmillan and Co., 1888, 79, https://archive.org/details/timaeusofplato00platiala/mode/2up.

5 Plato, The Timaeus, 79.

6 Spence, The History of Atlantis, 84.

7 Joseph-Francois Lafitau, Elizabeth L. Moore, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. by William N. Fenton, Internet Archive, (The Champlain Society, 1974), 48-49, htps://archive.org/details/ customsofamerica0001lafi.

8 Crisián A. Roa-de-la-Carrera, Histories of Infamy: Francisco López De Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism, translated by Scot Sessions, Internet Archive, (University Press of Colorado, 2005), 110, htps://archive.org/details/ historiesofinfam0000road/mode/2up.

9 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians, 43.

10 Ignaius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Internet Archive, (Harper & Brothers, 1882), 100, https://archive.org/details/atlantisantedilu00donnuoft/ mode/2up.

11 Donnelly, Atlantis, 100.

12 Donnelly, Atlantis, 98.

13 Evans, Romancing the Maya, 113.

Back “The King who Could not be Found: The Influence of Prester John and his Kingdom” by Jessica Knapp 1 1 Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1972), 1, htps://archive.org/details/realmofpresterjo00silv/mode/2up.

2 Karl F. Helleiner, “Prester John’s Leter: A Mediaeval Utopia,” Phoenix 13, no. 2 (1959): 57, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/1086970.

3 Jeremy Lawrance, “The Middle Indies: Damião De Góis on Prester John and the Ethiopians,” Renaissance Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 306, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/24412448.

4 Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John, 122.

5 Mateo Salvadore, “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306- 1458,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 621, htps://www. jstor.org/stable/41060852.

6 Lawrance, “The Middle Indies,” 313.

7 Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John, 197.

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8 Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John, 218.

9 Helleiner, “Prester John’s Leter,” 48.

10 John Mandeville, “Mandeville on Prester John,” Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University,n.d. htps://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/mandeville.asp.

11 Mandeville, “Mandeville on Prester John.”

12 Helleiner, “Prester John’s Leter,” 57.

Back

Back

“‘The Eldorado Spirit’: The Lure of the Man, Lake and Myth of El Dorado” by Jessica Knapp 1 C. Gregory Crampton, “The Myth of El Dorado,” The Historian 13, no. 2 (191): 117, htps:// www.jstor.org/stable/24436112.

2 Crampton, “The Myth of El Dorado,” 119.

3 John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, Internet Archive, (E.P. Duton, 1978), 102, htps://archive.org/details/searchforeldorad00hemm/mode/2up.

4 Pedro Simón, The Expedition of Pedro De Ursua & Lope De Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560-1, Internet Archive, (London, England: The Hakluyt Society, 1861), 50, https://archive.org/details/atlantisantedilu00donnuoft/mode/2up.

5 Simón, The Expedition of Pedro De Ursua, 50.

6 Walter Raleigh, Sir Walter Raleigh, Selections from His Historie of the World, His Letters, etc, Internet Archive. (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1917), 81, htps://archive.org/ details/cu31924013122753/mode/2up.

7 Walter Raleigh, “The Discovery of Guiana, 1595,” Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University, 1998, htps://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1595raleigh-guiana.asp.

8 Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, 76.

9 Ralph H. Vigil, “Spanish Exploration and the Great Plains in the Age of Discovery: Myths and Reality,” Great Plains Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1990): 10, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/23531150.

10 Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, 51.

11 Crampton, “The Myth of El Dorado,” 120.

“Not a Drop to Drink: The Fountain of Youth and the Quest for Eternal Life”

by Jessica Knapp 1 Douglas T. Peck, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce De Leon-Fountain of Youth Legend,” Revista de Historia de América, no. 123 (1998): 64-5, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/20139991.

2 Peck, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy,” 64.

3 Peck, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy,” 69.

4 Peck, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy,” 69.

5 John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Internet Archive, (Macmillan and Co, 1900), 113, htps://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.172783/page/n1/mode/2up.

6 Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 113.

7 Leonardo Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth: History of a Geographical Myth,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 21, no. 3 (1941): 365, htps://www.jstor.org/ stable/2507328.

8 Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth,” 365.

9 Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth,” 375.

10 Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth,” 377.

11 Samuel Turner, “Juan Ponce De León and the Discovery of Florida Reconsidered,” The

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Florida Historical Quarterly 92, no. 1 (2013): 27, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/43487548.

12 Benjamin Harrison, “Old Pictures of the New Florida: Ponce De Leon and His Land,” Publications of the Florida Historical Society 3, no. 1 (1924): 31, htps://www.jstor.org/ stable/30138250.

13 Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth,” 368.

14 Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth,” 367.

15 Olschki, “Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth,” 368.

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“The Impacts of Invaders: Invasive Species in the Atlantic World” by Katrina Nicolle 1 “Invasive and Other Problematic Species, Genes and Diseases” ICUN Red List, htps://www.iucnredlist.org/ 2 Stuart Butchart, “Red List Indices to Measure the Sustainability of Species Use and Impacts of Invasive Alien Species,” Bird Conservation International (2008): 245.

3 Jeremy Austin, et. al., “The Origins of the Enigmatic Falkland Islands Wolf” Nature Communications, (2013): 1553.

4 Félix Medina, and Manuel Nogales. “A Review on the Impacts of Feral Cats (Felis Silvestris Catus) in the Canary Islands” Biodiversity & Conservation 18 (2009): 830.

5 Félix Medina, and Manuel Nogales. “A Review on the Impacts of Feral Cats” 832.

6 Jeremy Austin, et. al., “The Origins of the Enigmatic Falkland Islands Wolf” 1553.

7 Elisabeth Hempel, et. al., “Identifying the True Number of Specimens of the Extinct Blue Antelope” Scientific Reports 11 (2021).

8 Álvaro Montoya, Edersson Montenegro, and Álvaro Piedrahíta. “Historical and Potential Extinction of Shrub and Tree Species through Deforestation in the Department of Antioquia, Colombia.” Revista Facultad Nacional de Agronomía Medellín 68 (2015).

9 Charles Morgan, “A Contemporary Mass Extinction: Deforestation of Tropical Rain Forests and Fauna Effects.” PALAIOS 2, no. 2 (1987): 167.

“Microscopes on the Past” by Katrina Nicolle 1 Antoine Louchart, et. al., “Ancient DNA Reveals the Origins, Colonization Histories, and Evolutionary Pathways of Two Recently Extinct Species of Giant Scops Owl from Mauritius and Rodrigues Islands (Mascarene Islands, South-Western Indian Ocean)” (December 2018).

2 Graham Kerley, “South Africa Suffers a Second Loss of the Blue Antelope (Hippotragus Leucophaeus) as DNA Analysis Confirms That the Sole Specimen Held in South African Collections Is Sable (H. Niger) Material,” South African Journal of Science 117 (2021): 7.

3 Jeremy Kirchman, Erin Schirtzinger, and Timothy F. Wright, “Phylogenetic Relationships of the Extinct Carolina Parakeet (Conuropis Carolinensis) Inferred from DNA Sequence Data,” The Aux 129 no. 2 (2012): 197.

4 Kirchman, Schirtzinger, and Wright, “Phylogenetic Relationships of the Extinct Carolina Parakeet (Conuropis Carolinensis) Inferred from DNA Sequence Data,” 201.

5 Christian Kehlmaier, et. al., “’Ancient DNA’ Reveals That the Scientific Name for an Extinct Tortoise from Cape Verde Refers to an Extant South American Species,” Scientific Reports 11 (2021).

6 Pere Renom, et. al., “Genetic Data from the Extinct Giant Rat from Tenerife (Canary Islands) Points to a Recent Divergence from Mainland Relatives,” Biology Letters 17 (2021).

“Animal Spotlight—Bluebuck” Works Consulted: Graham Kerley. 2021. “South Africa Suffers a Second Loss of the Blue Antelope (Hippotragus Leucophaeus) as DNA Analysis Confirms That the Sole Specimen Held in South African Collections Is Sable (H. Niger) Material.” South African Journal of Science 117 (7/8). doi:10.17159/sajs.2021/9489.

Hempel, Elisabeth, Faysal Bibi, J Tyler Faith, James S Brink, Daniela C Kalthoff, Pepijn Kamminga, Johanna L A Paijmans, Michael V Westbury, Michael Hofreiter, and Frank E Zachos. 2021. “Identifying the True Number of Specimens of the Extinct Blue Antelope (Hippotragus Leucophaeus).” Scientific Reports 11 (1): 2100. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-801422.

Jannie Loubser, James Brink, and Gordon Laurens. “Paintings of the Extinct Blue Antelope, Hippotragus Leucophaeus, in the Eastern Orange Free State.” The South African Archaeological Bulletin 45, no. 152 (1990): 106–11. htps://doi.org/10.2307/3887969.

Naturhistorisches Museum Wien - Mammal Collection. (2021). Retrieved from htps://www. nhm- wien.ac.at/en/research/1_zoology_vertebrates/mammal_collection Sclater, P. L., & Thomas, O. (1894). The Blue-Buck. In The Book of Antelopes (Vol. 4). essay.

“Plant Spotlight—New Mexico Sunflower” 1 C. McDonald, Helianthus praetermissus (lost sunflower) (New Mexico Rare Plants, 1999) 2 New Mexico Sunflower (helianthus praetermissus) iNaturalist United Kingdom, htps:// uk.inaturalist.org/taxa/163627-Helianthus-praetermissus 3 New Mexico Sunflower (helianthus praetermissus) 4 Soum Sanogo, et. al., “Head Rot of Sunflower Caused by Rhizopus Oryzae in New Mexico,” Plant Disease 94, no. 5 (May 2010): 638.

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“Farmed to Extinction: Plant Extinction in the Atlanic World” by Katrina Nicolle 1 Yiqing Li and Bruce Mathews, “Effect of Conversion of Sugarcane Plantation to Forest and Pasture on Soil Carbon in Hawaii,” Plant and Soil 335 (2010): 246.

2 Li and Mathews, “Effect of Conversion of Sugarcane Plantation” 249.

3 Richard Ford, “New Ideas about the Origin of Agriculture Based on 50 Years of MuseumCurated Plant Remains.” Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan (2010): 353.

4 Betsy Ladyzhets, “American Plants That Have Gone Extinct” Stacker (July 31, 2019).

5 Aelys Humphreys, et. al., “Global Dataset shows Geography and Life Form predict Modern Plant Extinction and Rediscovery,” Nature Ecology and Evolution, (2019): 1043.

6 Humphreys, et. al., “Global Dataset shows Geography,” 1045.

7 Ladyzhets, “American Plants That Have Gone Extinct”.

8 Eimear Lughadha, et. al., “Extinction Risk and Threats to Plants and Fungi,” Plants People Planet, (2020): 396.

9 “Threats, Agriculture and Aquaculture” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. htps://www. iucnredlist.org/search/stats.

10 “Threats, Agriculture and Aquaculture” htps://www.iucnredlist.org/search/stats.

11 “Conservation Actions Needed” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. htps://www. iucnredlist.org.

12 Li and Mathews, “Effect of Conversion of Sugarcane Plantation,” 251–2.

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“One Mosquito Bite Away from Colonization: Malaria Resistance in Africa due to Sickle Cell Anemia” by Haley Friesen 1 Philip D. Curtin, “The White Man’s Grave,” Journal of British Studies 1 (1961): 95.

2 Curtin, “The White Man’s Grave,” 95.

3 Kholhring Lalchhandama, “The Making of Modern Malariology: From Miasma to Mosquito- Malaria Theory,” Science Vision 14, no. 1 (2014): 3.

4 Richard Phillips, “Dystopian Space in Colonial Representations and Interventions: Sierra Leone As ‘The White Man’s Grave,’” Geografiska Annaler 84 B, no. 3-4 (2002): 191.

5 Curtin, “The White Man’s Grave,” 104.

6 “Fact Sheet about Malaria,” World Health Organization, 2021, htps://www.who.int/newsroom/fact- sheets/detail/malaria.

7 Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and David N. Weil, “Malaria and Early African Development: Evidence from the Sickle Cell Trait,” The Economic Journal 128, no. 610 (2018): 1210.

8 Depetris-Chauvin and Weil, “Malaria and Early African Development,” 1210.

9 “About Malaria,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 16, 2020, htps://www. cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/index.html.

10 Depetris-Chauvin and Weil, “Malaria and Early African Development,” 1210.

11 Depetris-Chauvin and Weil, “Malaria and Early African Development,” 1210.

12 Frédéric B. Piel et al., “Global Distribution of the Sickle Cell Gene and Geographical Confirmation of the Malaria Hypothesis,” Nature Communications 1, no. 1 (2010): 2.

13 Piel et al., “Global Distribution,” 2.

14 Depetris-Chauvin and Weil, “Malaria and Early African Development,” 1211.

15 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “About Malaria.”

16 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “About Malaria.”

17 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “About Malaria.”

18 Jane Achan et al., “Quinine, an Old Anti-Malarial Drug in a Modern World: Role in the Treatment of Malaria,” Malaria Journal 10, no. 1 (December 2011): 1, htps://doi. org/10.1186/1475-2875-10-144.

19 Achan et al., “Quinine,” 1.

20 Achan et al., “Quinine,” 1.

21 Achan et al., “Quinine,” 1.

22 Philip D. Curtin, “The End of the ‘White Man’s Grave’? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21, no. 1 (1990): 74.

23 Curtin, “The End of White Man’s Grave?” 74.

24 Phillips, “Dystopian Space,” 197.

“The Forgoten History of Trade Languages” by Analise Saavedra 1 Joan M Fayer, “African Interpreters in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Anthropological Linguistics 45, no. 3 (2003): 281.

2 Fayer, “African Interpreters in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 282.

3 Fayer, “African Interpreters in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 283.

4 “Mobilian Jargon,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc.), accessed

March 22, 2022, htps://www.britannica.com/topic/Mobilian-Jargon.

5 Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1996): 255. htps://doi.org/10.1163/9789004346611_039.

6 William Washabaugh and Sidney M. Greenfield, “The Portuguese Expansion and the Development of Atlantic Creole Languages,” Luso-Brazilian Review 18, no. 2 (1981): 225–38, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/3513551.

7 Berlin, “From Creole to African,”258.

8 “Gullah,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc.), accessed April 4, 2022, htps://www.britannica.com/topic/Gullah-language.

9 Patricia A. Jones-Jackson, “Gullah: On the Question of Afro-American Language.”

Anthropological Linguistics 20, no. 9 (1978): 422–29. htps://www.jstor.org/stable/30027488.

10 Jones-Jackson, “Gullah,” 422–29.

11 Jones-Jackson, “Gullah,” 422–29.

12 Jones-Jackson, “Gullah,” 422–29.

13 Jones-Jackson, “Gullah,” 422–29.

14 Jones-Jackson, “Gullah,” 422–29.

15 Jones-Jackson, “Gullah,” 422–29.

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FEATURE “Second-hand Smoke: Tobacco and the Lingering Seeds of the Columbian Exchange” by Janina Ritzen Pulfer 1 1 Christopher Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange: Stories of Biological and Economic Transfer in World History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 454.

2 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 455.

3 Charlote Cosner, The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World.

(Nashville, Tn: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), 12.

4 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 12-13.

5 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 13.

6 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 13.

7 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 454.

8 Charles Heiser, “On Possible Sources of Tobacco of Prehistoric Eastern North America,” Current Anthropology 33, no. 1 (1992): 55.

9 Heiser, “On Possible Sources of Tobacco”: 55.

10 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 14.

11 Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (2010): 176. htps://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.2.163.

12 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 456.

13 George Arents, “The Seed from Which Virginia Grew.” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1939): 125. htps://doi.org/10.2307/1922843.

14 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 350.

15 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 453.

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16 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 453.

17 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 453.

18 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 15.

19 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 456.

20 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 14.

21 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 456.

22 Marieta Morrissey, “Women in New World Slavery,” in Slave Women in the New World: GenderStratification in the Caribbean (University Press of Kansas, 2021), 21-2.

23 Morrissey, “Women in New World Slavery,” 22. htps://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1p2gmj7.7.

24 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 457.

25 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 457.

26 Arents, “The Seed from which Virginia Grew,” 126.

27 Morrissey, “Women in New World Slavery”, 22.

28 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 33.

29 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 33.

30 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 34.

31 For further reading on the nature of tobacco plantations and slavery in Cuba, see works consulted.

32 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 407.

33 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 407.

34 Arents, “The Seed from which Virginia Grew,” 126.

35 Morrissey, “Women in New World Slavery”, 22-3.

36 Image from Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, “Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 17201790,” The William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1989), 218. htps://doi.org/10.2307/1920253.

37 Morrissey, “Women in New World Slavery”, 28.

38 Morrissey, “Women in New World Slavery”, 28.

39 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 33.

40 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 34.

41 Roger Biles, “Tobacco Towns: Urban Growth and Economic Development in Eastern North Carolina.” The North Carolina Historical Review 84, no. 2 (2007), 158.

42 Biles, “Tobacco Towns”, 159-161.

43 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 456.

44 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 455.

45 Biles, “Tobacco Towns,” 171.

46 Biles, “Tobacco Towns,” 178-9.

47 Biles, “Tobacco Towns”, 179.

48 Biles, “Tobacco Towns”, 179. Note that while supervisors commonly forbade talking on the shop floor, workers were allowed to sing.

49 Biles, “Tobacco Towns”, 186.

50 Biles, “Tobacco Towns”, 186.

51 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 19.

52 Cumo, The Ongoing Columbian Exchange, 456.

53 Cosner, The Golden Leaf, 20.

54 David S. Jones, “Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer (Review),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 3 (2002), 612 htps://doi.org/10.1353/ bhm.2002.0130.

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55 Jones, “Tobacco Use by Native North Americans,” 611.

56 Jones, “Tobacco Use by Native North Americans,” 612.

57 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.

(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 17.

58 Robert M. Goodman, Encyclopedia of Plant and Crop Science (CRC Press, 2019), 157.

DISRUPTIONS Back

“Sabotage, Suicide, and Flight: Slave Resistance and Resiliency in the Atlantic World” by Kim Vandermeulen 1 James Adams, essay, in The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada.

Related by Themselves, With an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada, ed. Benjamin Drew (John P. Jewet and Company, 1856), 28.

2 Frederick Douglass, “Cowardice Departed, Bold Defiance Took its Place,” Excerpts from Slave Narratives - Chapter 31, 1845, assessed March 18, 2022, para. 2, htp://www.vgskole. net/prosjekt/slavrute/31.htm.

3 William Johnson, essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 29.

4 James Seward, essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 41.

5 Harriet Tubman essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 30.

6 Benjamin Drew, ed., The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related

by Themselves, With an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (J.P. Jewet and Co., 1856), 2.

7 Darold D. Wax, “Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade,” The Journal of Negro History 51, no. 1 (January 1966): 1, htps://doi.org/10.2307/2716373.

8 Wax, “Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade,” 2.

9 Margaret Garner, “She Would Kill Herself… Before She Would Return to Bondage,” Excerpts from Slave Narratives - Chapter 37, 1876, assessed March 18, 2022, para. 4, htp:// www.vgskole.net/prosjekt/slavrute/37.htm.

10 Douglass, “Cowardice Departed, Bold Defiance Took its Place,” para. 5.

11 Charles R. Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713-1783,” Early American Studies, no. 1 (April 2006): 47–48, htps://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2006.0002.

12 Gabino La Rosa Corzo, Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression, trans. Mary Todd (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 83.

13 Douglas R. Egerton, “Slaves to the Marketplace: Economic Liberty and Black Rebelliousness in the Atlantic World,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 4 (2006): 633, htps://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2006.0062.

14 Terri L. Snyder, “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” The Journal of American History 97, no. 1 (June 2010): 39, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40662817.pdf.

15 Anita Rupprecht, “‘All We Have Done, We Have Done for Freedom’: The Creole SlaveShip Revolt (1841) and the Revolutionary Atlantic,” International Review of Social History 58 (2013): 254, 272, 275, htps://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859013000254.

16 Snyder, “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” 40.

17 Richard Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 4 (December 1, 2012): 535, htps://doi.org/10.1080/0144039x.2011.644069.

18 Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” 535.

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19 Snyder, “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” 43.

20 Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” 544.

21 Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” 525.

22 Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance, 542.

23 Echeverri, “‘Enraged to the Limit of Despair’…” 409.

24 Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” 535.

25 Lou Smith, “Slave Narrative of Lou Smith,” Access Genealogy, August 23, 2012. htps:// accessgenealogy.com/mississippi/slave-narrative-of-lou-smith.htm.

26 Garner, “She Would Kill Herself… Before She Would Return to Bondage,” para. 4.

27 Echeverri, “‘Enraged to the Limit of Despair’…” 416.

28 Snyder, “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” 41.

29 William Grose, essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 86.

30 Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World,” 47.

31 Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World,” 72.

32 Nat Turner, “The Last Should Be First,” excerpts from Slave Narratives - Chapter 32, 1831, accessed March 18, 2022, para. 12, htp://www.vgskole.net/prosjekt/slavrute/32.htm.

33 Henry Brown, “He… Hit Upon a New Invention Altogether,” Excerpts from Slave Narratives - Chapter 36, 1872, assessed March 18, 2022, para. 2, htp://www.vgskole.net/prosjekt/slavrute/36.htm.

34 Garner, “She Would Kill Herself… Before She Would Return to Bondage,” para. 2–3.

35 Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World,” 55.

36 Tim Lockley, “Runaway Slave Colonies in the Atlantic World,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, April 2, 2015, para. 3, htps://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780199366439.013.5.

37 Snyder, “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” 50.

38 John Seward, essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 40.

39 David West, essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 91.

40 Moses Roper, “Among the Instruments of Torture Employed,” Excerpts from Slave Narratives - Chapter 29, 1837, assessed March 18, 2022, para. 1-3, htp://www.vgskole.net/ prosjekt/slavrute/29.htm.

41 Isaac Williams, essay, in Drew, The Refugee, 63.

42 Douglass, “Cowardice Departed, Bold Defiance Took its Place,” para. 6.

43 Drew, The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves, 8.

44 Williams, in Drew, The Refugee, 67.

45 John Bicknell and Thomas Day, The Dying Negro: a Poem, 3rd edn, London: W. Flexney, 1775, accessed March 18, 2022, www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/dying.htm.

46 Brown, “He… Hit Upon a New Invention Altogether,” para. 2.

47 Snyder, “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” 51, 53.

48 West, in The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves, 89.

49 Wax, “Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade,” 1.

50 Bell, “Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” 544.

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“Privateers and Pirates in the Spanish Atlantic” by Mariah Neily 1 Benerson Litle, Pirate Hunting: The Fight Against Pirates, Privateers, and Sea Raiders From Antiquity to the Present (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010), 133.

2 Ida Altman and David Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 1.

3 Altman and Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean, 1.

4 Mathew Lange, James Mahoney and Mathias vom Hau, “Colonialism and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies” American Journal of Sociology 111, no.5 (2006): 1416.

5 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 133.

6 Lange, Mahoney, and vom Hau, “Colonialism and Development,” 1424.

7 Lange, Mahoney, and vom Hau, “Colonialism and Development,”1423-24.

8 Altman and Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean, 69.

9 Altman and Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean, 69.

10 William D. Phillips and Carla Rahn Phillips, A Concise History of Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 142.

11 Phillip II of Spain, Two Letters on the Gold of the Indies, 1559.

12 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 133.

13 Sebastian R. Prange, “A Trade of No Dishonor: Piracy, Commerce, and Community in the Western Indian Ocean, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1269.

14 Prange, “A Trade of No Dishonor,” 1279.

15 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 9.

16 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 9.

17 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 11.

18 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 9.

19 Litle, Pirate Hunting, 5.

20 Altman and Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean, 122-23.

21 Altman and Wheat, The Spanish Caribbean, 116.

22 J.L. Anderson, “Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 179.

23 Anderson, “Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation,” 178.

“Notorious Pirates of the Caribbean: Blackbeard and Anne Bonny”

by Adriana J. Loewen Blackbeard 1 “The Story of Blackbeard- Queen Anne’s Revenge Project,” Qaronline, accessed April 5, 2022, htps://www.qaronline.org/blackbeard-history-old.

2 “Blackbeard-Edward Teach- Pirate,” Royal Musesm Greenwich, accessed April 15, 2022, htps://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/blackbeard-edward-teach-pirate.

3 “Blackbeard-Biography & Facts” Britannica, accessed April 6 2022. htps://www.britannica. com/biography/Blackbeard.

4 Daniel Defoe and Charles Johnson, A General History of Pyrates (Dublin: J. Wats, 1725), 80.

5 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach,” Golden Age of Piracy, htps:// goldenageofpiracy.org/history/pirate-governments/republic-of-pirates.php, modified 2012.

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6 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

7 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

8 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

9 “Republic of Pirates,” Golden Age of Piracy, Last modified 2012, 10 htps://goldenageofpiracy.org/history/pirate-governments/republic-of-pirates.php.

11 “Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach,” Golden Age of Piracy, Last modified 2012, 12 htps://goldenageofpiracy.org/history/pirate-governments/republic-of-pirates.php.

13 “Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

14 “Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

15 “Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

16 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

17 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

18 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

19 Sarah Watkins-Kenney, “A Tale of One Ship with Two Names: Discovering the Many Hidden Histories of ‘La Concorde’ and ‘Queen Anne’s Revenge,’” The North Carolina Historical Review 95, no. 2 (2018): 187, doi: 10.2307/45184935.

20 Watkins-Kenny, “A Tale,” 187.

21 Kenneth Kircher, “Queen Anne’s Revenge: A Systems Analysis of Blackbeard’s Flagship” (Master diss.,University of Missouri, 2017), 13.

22 Kircher, “Queen Anne’s Revenge”, 13.

23 Kircher, “Queen Anne’s Revenge,” 13.

24 Mark Wilde-Ramsing and Linda F Carnes-Mcnaughton, Blackbeard’s Sunken Prize: The 300-Year Voyage of Queen Anne’s Revenge (Chapel Hill: The University Of North Carolina Press, 2018), 3.

25 Kircher, “Queen Anne’s Revenge,” 13.

26 Peter T. Leeson, “Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 76, no. 3 (September 15, 2010): 501 htps://doi. org/10.1016/j.jebo.2010.08.015.

27 Leeson, “Pirational Choice,” 501.

28 Leeson, “Pirational Choice,” 501.

29 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

30 “Flying Gang - Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach.”

31 Colin Woodard, “The Last Days of Blackbeard,” Smithsonian Magazine, February, 2014, htps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/last-days-blackbeard-180949440/.

32 “Charleston History, Population, Atractions, & Facts,” Britannica, accessed April 8, 2022. htps://www.britannica.com/place/Charleston-South-Carolina 33 “Charleston History, Population, Atractions, & Facts.”

34 Woodard, “The Last Days.”

35 Jen Ashley, “Blackbeard’s Blockade of Charleston,” CHS Today , last modified November 15, 2018, htps://chstoday.6amcity.com/blackbeards-blockade-charleston- sc/#:~:text=In%20 1718%2C%20months%20after%20acquiring,ships%20and%20several%20hundred %20men.

36 Sarah LeTrent, “Not for the Faint of Hearties: Blackbeard’s Medical Devices”, CNN, last modified January 29, 2015, htps://www.cnn.com/2015/01/29/living/blackbeard-medicalsupplies- feat/index.html.

37 Qaronline, “The Story.”

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38 Arthur L. Cooke, “British Newspaper Accounts of Blackbeard’s Death,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61, no. 3 (1953): 305, htps://www.jstor.org/ stable/4245947.

39 Cooke, ““British Newspaper Accounts of Blackbeard’s Death.”

40 “St. James,” The London Gazette” April 21, 1719, htps://www.thegazete.co.uk/London/ issue/5740/page/1, (accessed April 8, 2022).

41 Defoe and Johnson, A General History of Pyrates, 80.

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Anne Bonny 1 Karen Abbot, “If There’s a Man among Ye: The Tale of Pirate Queens Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” Smithsonian Magazine, August 9, 2011, htps://www.smithsonianmag. com/history/if-theres-a-man- among-ye-the-tale-of-pirate-queens-anne-bonny-and-maryread-45576461/.

2 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 3 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 4 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 5 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 6 Kaleena Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny, the Fierce Female Pirate of the Caribbean,” last modified May 5, 2021, htps://allthatsinteresting.com/anne-bonny.

7 Daniel Defoe and Charles Johnson, A General History of Pyrates (Dublin: J. Wats, 1725), 172–73.

8 Defoe and Johnson, A General History, 172–73.

9 Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny.”

10 Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny.”

11 Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny.”

12 “Anne Bonny- Biography & Facts,” Britannica, accessed April 6 2022, htps://www. britannica.com/biography/Anne-Bonny.

13 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 14 Britannica, “Anne Bonny.”

15 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (London: Verso, 2012), 115.

16 Erin Blackmore, “Women Were Pirates, Too,” JSTOR Daily, May 6 2017, htps://daily.jstor. org/women-were-pirates-too/.

17 Blackmore, “Women Were Pirates.”

18 Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 110.

19 Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 116.

20 Britannica, “Anne Bonny.”

21 Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny.”

22 Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny.”

23 Fraga, “Meet Anne Bonny.”

24 Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 109.

25 Britannica, “Anne Bonny.”

26 Britannica, “Anne Bonny.”

27 Caroline Rowan, “Powerful on land and sea: An Analysis of History’s Attitude to the Lives and Careers of Two Female Pirates; Grainne Mhaol and Anne Bonny.” (Masters diss., University College Dublin, 1999), 20.

28 Rowan, “Powerful on Land,” 20.

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29 Rowan, “Powerful on Land,” 20.

30 Rowan, “Powerful on Land,” 20.

31 Rowan, “Powerful on Land,” 20.

32 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 33 Abbot, “If There’s a Man.” 34 Ryann Schulte, “But of Their Own Free-Will and Consent: Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and the Women Pirates in the Early Modern Times” Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History 6, no. 1 (April 1, 2016): 23.

35 Britannica, “Anne Bonny.”

36 Blackmore, “Women Were Pirates.”

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“The False Promise of Liberty: Slavery and the American Revolution” by Maritha Louw 1 Edward Gray, “Liberty’s Losers,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2013), 186.

2 Eric Foner, “Freedom: America’s Evolving and Enduring Idea,” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 4 (2006), 14.

3 Orlando Paterson, “The Unholy Trinity: Freedom, Slavery, and the American Constitution,” Social Research 54, no. 3 (1997), 545.

4 “Declaration of Independence, 1776,” available at htps://www.archives.gov/foundingdocs/declaration-transcript. accessed April 4, 2022.

5 James Adams, “Freedom in America,” in Ruth N. Ashen, ed., Freedom, Its Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 109.

6 Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 344.

7 Paterson, “The Unholy Trinity,” 543.

8 Paterson, “The Unholy Trinity,” 544.

9 Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 4.

10 Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 6.

11 Paterson, “The Unholy Trinity,” 545.

12 Paterson, “The Unholy Trinity,” 552.

“The French Revolution: An Atlantic Perspective” by Maritha Louw 1 Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” The American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (2008), 320.

2 Gunther Rothenberg, “The Origins, Causes, and Extension of the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (1988), 777.

3 James Perkins, “France and the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association 4 (1904), 75.

4 Perkins, “France and the American Revolution,” 82.

5 Jonathan Dull, The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British and French Navies, 1650-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 115.

6 Bailey Stone, The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia (London: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 132.

7 Michael Sonenscher, “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789: Part 1,” History of Political Thought

18, no. 1 (1997), 66.

8 Thomas Sargent and François Velde, “Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution,” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 3 (1995), 491.

9 Suzanne Desan, “Internationalizing the French Revolution,” French Politics, Culture & Society 29, no. 2 (2011), 140.

10 Desan, “Internationalizing the French Revolution,” 140.

11 Desan, “Internationalizing the French Revolution,” 142.

12 Ricardo Duchesne, “The French Revolution as a Bourgeois Revolution: A Critique of the Revisionists,” Science & Society 54, no. 3 (1990), 290.

13 Michael Sonenscher, “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789: Part 2,” History of Political Thought 18, no. 2 (1997), 268.

14 Pétré-Grenouilleau, “How did France Enter and Play its Role in the Atlantic,” 279.

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FEATURE “The Determined, Decisive, and Diverse: Women of the Atlantic World” by Heather Lam 1 Andrew Apter, “The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money, and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic Perspective,” The Journal of African American History 98, no. 1 (2013): 75, htps://doi. org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.98.1.0072.

2 Apter, “The Blood of Mothers,” 76.

3 Apter, “The Blood of Mothers,” 77.

4 Sasha Turner, Contested Bodied: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 5.

5 Apter, “The Blood of Mothers,” 82.

6 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, (Philadelphia Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 3.

7 Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 3.

8 Jennifer L. Morgan, Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 8.

9 Jennifer L. Morgan, “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Gender, Slavery, and Trans- Atlantic Passages,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 185, htps://doi.org/10.5406/ historypresent.6.2.0184.

10 Apter, “The Blood of Mothers,” 72–73.

11 11 Philip J. Havik, “Female Entrepreneurship in West Africa: Trends and Trajectories,” Early Modern Women 10, no. 1 (2015): 165, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/26431365.

12 Gwyn Campbell, Joseph C. Miller, and Suzanne Miers, Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic (Vol.2, Ohio University Press, 2008), 35.

13 Apter, “The Blood of Mothers,” 77.

14 W. H. Foster, “Women Slave Owners Face Their Historians: Versions of Maternalism in Atlantic World Slavery,” Patterns of Prejudice 41 (2007): 306.

15 Forster, “Women Slave Owners Face Their Historians,” 310.

16 Teresa Pardos-Torreira, The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in NineteenthCentury Cuba, (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2021) 2.

107

17 Christine Walker, Jamaica Ladies : Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, (Williamsburg, Virginia: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 5.

18 Pardos-Torreira, The Power of Their Will, 2.

19 Walker, Jamaica Ladies, 10.

20 Douglas Caterall, Jodi Campbell, Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800, (Netherlands: Brill, 2012), 5.

21 Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 3.

22 Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, 5.

23 Christer Petley,“ Legitimacy ’and Social Boundaries: Free People of Colour and the Social Order in Jamaican Slave Society,” Social History 30, no. 4 (2005): 482–83, htp://www.jstor. org/stable/4287265.

24 Walker, Jamaica Ladies, 174.

25 Butler, “Will of Charity Butler, 1744,” 138.

26 Sissnet, “Will of Mary Sissnet,” 90.

27 Sissnet, “Will of Mary Sissnet,” 89.

28 De Beaumont, “Testament du Sr. Regnaud de Beaumont,” 89.

29 James Stewart, A View of the past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica, (Edinburgh, reprinted 1969), 486.

ECHOES Back

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“Empire in a Glass Case: The Diaspora of Atlantic Artifacts in the British Museum” by Sydney R. Dvorak 1 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution.

(London: Pluto Press, 2021), 23.

2 Hicks, The Brutish Museums, 21.

3 Emily Duthie, “The British museum: An Imperial Museum in a Post-imperial World,” Public History Review 18, (2011): 12.

4 Hannah R. Godwin, “Legal Complications of Repatriation at the British Museum.”

Washington International Law Journal 30, no. 1 (December 2020): 145.

5 Paige Rooney, “A 21st Century Empire: The British Museum and its Imperial Legacies.”

The Forum: Journal of History 11, no. 1 (2019): 94.

6 Stuart Frost, “‘A Bastion of Colonialism’: Public Perceptions of the British Museum and its Relationship to Empire.” Third Text 33, no. 4 (July 2019): 487.

7 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 94.

8 David Bushnell, “The Sloane Collection in the British Museum.” American Anthropologist 8, no. 4 (1906): 676.

9 “Drum,” Collection, British Museum, accessed February 2, 2022, htps://www. britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am-SLMisc-1368.

10 Bushnell, “The Sloane Collection,” 677.

11 “Drum,” Collection, British Museum, accessed February 2, 2022, htps://www. britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am-SLMisc-1368.

12 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 13.

13 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 13.

14 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 15.

15 Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 9.

16 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 2.

17 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 2.

18 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 138.

19 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 138.

20 “Plaque,” Collection, British Museum, accessed February 2, 2022, htps://www. britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1898-0115-31.

21 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 139.

22 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 139.

23 “Sculpture,” Collection, British Museum, accessed February 2, 2022, htps://www. britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1898-1025-2.

24 Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 44.

25 Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 7.

26 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 96.

27 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 136.

28 “Pendant mask; regalia,” Collection, British Museum, accessed February 2, 2022, htps:// www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1910-0513-1.

29 Hicks, Brutish Museums, 160.

30 “Pendant mask; regalia,” Collection, British Museum, accessed February 2, 2022, htps:// www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1910-0513-1.

31 Diary of Herbert Walker, 14 March 1897, Pit Rivers Museum Manuscript Archives, Oxford University, Oxford, UK. 32 Diary of Herbert Walker.

33 Hicks, British Museums, 12.

34 Jonathan Williams, “Parliaments, Museums, Trustees, and the Provision of Public Benefit in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World.” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2013): 196.

35 Godwin, “Legal Complications,” 151.

36 Godwin, “Legal Complications,” 149.

37 Duthie, “The British Museum,” 17.

38 Godwin, “Legal Complications,” 149.

39 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 97.

40 Duthie, “The British Museum,” 13.

41 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 97.

42 Duthie, “The British Museum,” 20.

43 Duthie, “The British Museum,” 21.

44 Rooney, “21st Century Empire,” 93.

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“To Vax or Not to Vax: The Debate as Old as Vaccines Themselves” by Haley Friesen 1 “History of Smallpox,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, February 21, 2021, htps://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html.

2 Catherine Mark and José G. Rigau-Pérez, “The World’s First Immunization Campaign: The Spanish Smallpox Vaccine Expedition, 1803–1813,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 1 (2009): 65, htps://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.0.0173.

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3 Mark and Rigau-Pérez, “The World’s First Immunization Campaign,” 65.

4 Gabriel E. Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts: Biographical Sketch of Francisco Xavier Balmis (1753–1819),” Journal of Medical Biography, (August 5, 2021): 2. htps://doi.org/10.1177/09677720211034765.

5 Carlos Franco-Paredes, Lorena Lammoglia, and José I. Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition to Bring Smallpox Vaccination to the New World and Asia in the 19th Century,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 41, no. 9 (November 1, 2005): 1285, htps:// doi.org/10.1086/496930.

6 Franco-Paredes, Lammoglia, and Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition,” 1285.

7 Franco-Paredes, Lammoglia, and Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition,” 1285.

8 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

9 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

10 Alexandre F. Santos, Pedro D. Gaspar, and Heraldo J. L. de Souza, “Refrigeration of COVID-19 Vaccines: Ideal Storage Characteristics, Energy Effciency and Environmental Impacts of Various Vaccine Options,” Energies 14, no. 7 (March 26, 2021): 1849, htps://doi. org/10.3390/en14071849.

11 Santos, Gaspar, and de Souza, “Refrigeration of COVID-19 Vaccine,” 1849.

12 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

13 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

14 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

15 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

16 Catherine Mark and José G. Rigau-Pérez, “The World’s First Immunization Campaign,” 63.

17 Andrade, “A Great Inspiration for Today’s Vaccination Efforts,” 3.

18 Bernard Christenson, “Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition and Smallpox Vaccination,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 42, no. 5 (March 1, 2006): 731, htps://doi. org/10.1086/500267.

19 Philip King Brown, “A Review of the Early Vaccination Controversy with an Original Leter

by Jenner Referencing to It, and the Spread of Vaccination to the Spanish Possessions of America, The Philippines, and Other European Setlements in the Orient,” California State Journal of Medicine 7, no. 5 (1914): 172.

20 Brown, “Early Vaccination Controversy,” 174.

21 Sherburne Friend Cook, “Francisco Xavier Balmis and The Introduction of Vaccination to Latin America: Part II,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 12, no. 1 (1942): 71.

22 Cook, “Francisco Xavier Balmis,” 71.

23 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “History of Smallpox.”

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“The Inca Roads and the Atlantic Network” by Analise Saavedra 1 “What It’s like to Travel the Inca Road Today,” Smithsonian Magazine (July 1, 2015), htps:// www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/what-its-like-travel-inca-road-today-180955740/.

2 Mark Cartwright, “The Inca Road System,” World History Encyclopedia (accessed March 21, 2022), htps://www.worldhistory.org/article/757/the-inca-road-system/.

3 Cartwright, “The Inca Road System.”

4 Cartwright, “The Inca Road System.”

5 Cartwright, “The Inca Road System.”

6 Vega Garcilaso de la, Vigil Ricardo González, and Machaca Huamán Jorge, Comentarios Reales De Los Incas (Lima: Fondo Editorial, Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 2016).

7 Vega Garcilaso de la, Vigil Ricardo González, and Machaca Huamán Jorge, Comentarios Reales De Los Incas (Lima: Fondo Editorial, Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 2016).

8 Cartwright, “The Inca Road System.”

9 Cartwright, “The Inca Road System.”

10 Joshua Rapp Learn, “How the Inca Road System Tied Together an Empire and Facilitated Its Fall,” Discover Magazine, htps://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-the-inca-roadsystem-tied-together-an-empire-and-facilitated-its-fall.

11 Learn, “How the Inca Road System Tied Together an Empire and Facilitated Its Fall.”

12 Jane O’Brien, “Inca Road: The Ancient Highway That Created an Empire,” BBC News (BBC, July 1, 2015), htps://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33291373.

13 Learn, “How the Inca Road System Tied Together an Empire and Facilitated Its Fall.”

14 O’Brien, “Inca Road.”

15 Cartwright, “The Inca Road System.”

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“Port Royal: Shaky Morals, Shaky Ground” by Fiona Kroontje 1 D. L. Hamilton, and Robyn Woodward. “A Sunken 17th-Century City: Port Royal, Jamaica.”

Archaeology 37, no. 1 (1984): 39.

2 James March. “Jamaica’s Port Royal: The Wickedest City on Earth?” BBC Travel. BBC, (September 20, 2020.)

3 Nuala Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655- 1692.” The William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1986): 571 4 Nuala Zahedieh. “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655-89.” The Economic History Review 39, no. 2 (1986): 218 5 Donny L. Hamilton, Background History of Port Royal, accessed April 2 2022, htps://nautarch.tamu.edu/portroyal/PRhist.htm.

6 March. “Jamaica’s Port Royal.”

7 March, “Jamaica’s Port Royal.”

8 Mathew Mulcahy. “The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders in SeventeenthCentury Jamaica.” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 392.

9 Mulcahy, “The Port Royal,” 392.

10 Mulcahy, “The Port Royal,” 393.

“Gorée Island, Senegal: The Doorway to the Transatlantic Slave Trade” by Fiona Kroontje 1 Steven Barboza, Door of No Return: The Legend of Gorée Island (New York: Cobblehill Books, 1994),12.

2 Martin Klein, “Slaves, Gum, and Peanuts: Adaptation to the End of the Slave Trade in Senegal, 1817- 48.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 896.

3 Barboza, Door of No Return, 16.

4 Barboza, Door of No Return, 12.

5 Barboza, Door of No Return, 10.

6 Maison Des Esclaves (Senegal),” Sites of Conscience, accessed March 7, 2022, htps:// www.sitesofconscience.org/en/membership/maison-des-esclaves-senegal/.

7 “Revitalizing Maison Des Esclaves,” Sites of Conscience, accessed March 7, 2022, 8 htps://www.sitesofconscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Maison-Des-Esclaves-

111

Overview- 2021.pdf.

9 “Revitalizing Maison Des Esclaves,” Sites of Conscience.

10 “Revitalizing Maison Des Esclaves,” Sites of Conscience.

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“Sea Shanties: A Microcosm of Exchange” by Jessica Vriend 1 Claire Lampen, “Get in Losers, We’re Singing Sea Shanties,” (The Cut, January 12, 2021), htps://www.thecut.com/2021/01/sea-shanty-tiktok-whats-the-deal-with-the-shanty-trend. html.

2 Henry Whates, “The Background of Sea Shanties,” Music & Letters, (Oxford University Press, 1937), 259, htps://www.jstor.org/stable/727760.

3 Frank Kidson, “Sailors’ Songs,” Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1, (English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1900), 39, htp://www.jstor.org/stable/4433855.

4 Whates, “The Background of Sea Shanties,” Music & Letters, 260.

5 Kidson, “Sailors’ Songs,” 39.

6 Gillian Dooley, “‘These Happy Effects on the Character of the British Sailor’: Family Life in Sea Songs of the Late Georgian Period”, In Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion, and Exile, 1550-1850, ed. Heather Dalton, (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Retrieved from htps://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17ppcxr.15.

7 Stan Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, (Praeger, 1969), 9–10, htps://search.ebscohost. com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05965a&AN=alc.30005&site=eds- live&scope=site.

8 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 24.

9 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 29.

10 Whates, “The Background of Sea Shanties,” Music & Letters, 261.

11 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 185–86.

12 Whates, “The Background of Sea Shanties,” 262.

13 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 26–45.

14 Kidson, “Sailors’ Songs,” 39.

15 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 51.

16 Kidson, “Sailors’ Songs,” 39.

17 Whates, “The Background of Sea Shanties,” 263.

18 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 82-85, 179–81.

19 Whates, “The Background of Sea Shanties,” 261.

20 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 48-226.

21 Hugill, Shanties and Sailors’ Songs, 125–26.

22 Douglas R Egerton, Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888, (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007), 282–87.

23 Egerton et al, The Atlantic World, 446–47.

Samples of Shanties Allan Mills and the Shanty Men, “Sally Brown,” 1 January 1957, track 3 on Songs of the Sea: Sung by Alan Mills, Folkways Records, htps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT04eMYlUhQ. The Longest Johns, “Wellerman”, 16 April 2021, track 1 on Wellerman, Sony ATV Publishing, htps://youtube.com/watch?v=RQ2HbYnlc3s.

“Spirituals: Faithful Voices in the Midst of Oppression” by Jessica Vriend 1 William Frances Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of

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the United States. (A. Simpson & Co, 1867), vi, htps://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/ slavesongsofunit00alle.

2 Douglas R Egerton, Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888, (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007), 270.

3 Egerton et al, The Atlantic World, 262.

4 Peter H. Wood, Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 71, htps://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=160305&site=eds- live&scope=site.

5 Allen, Ware, & Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, vi–xxii.

6 Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, (W. W. Norton, 1971), 31–172, htps://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=cat05965a&AN=alc.24449&site=eds- live&scope=site.

7 Allen, Ware, & Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, ii.

8 Allen, Ware, & Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, xxxx, 5.

9 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 195.

10 Allen, Ware, & Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, xxxviii.

11 Allen, Ware, & Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, 7.

12 Allen, Ware, & Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, 76.

13 Randye Jones, “The Gospel Truth about the Negro Spiritual,” The Art of the Negro Spiritual. (November 13, 2007), htp://www.artotihenegrospiritual.com/research/ GospelTruthNegroSpiritual.pdf.

14 Randye Jones, “The Gospel Truth about the Negro Spiritual.”

15 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 129.

16 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 17 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 130–31.

18 Jones, “The Gospel Truth about the Negro Spiritual.”

Also Consulted: Chapman, Topsy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cast. Roll Jordan Roll. Music from and Inspired by 12 Years a Slave.

Columbia Records, 2013. htps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7iCMNIPNf8.

Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of NewYork, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana. United States: Michigan Publishing, 1853.

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