On the morning of April 4, 1639, a guard unshackled the runaways one by one and brought them from the cell in the public jail before a scribe, where they were made to state for the record their masters’ names and the length of time they had been absent from service. Gregorio Álvarez de Zepeda, who as alcalde of the Holy Brotherhood of Mompox was in charge of seeking out maroons, further ordered each to give an account of “the cause of their flight.” One of the first runaways to have his name recorded was Juan, from the land of...

Isabel Criolla’s journey to Cartagena likely gave her ample time to think of how she would represent her dilemma and that of the other women in Camargo’s control before Cartagena’s governor. As an American-born enslaved women, Isabel’s life was deeply marked by the processes of creolization that occurred in spaces across the Atlantic World—perhaps especially intense for her, for she had negotiated and survived her subordinate status in Mompox’s urban settings and then integrated herself into the very different politics of the maroon enclave.¹ As a creole woman, Isabel may have been especially adept at translating her personal conflicts...

By the time Lorenzo de Soto returned to Cartagena to deliver his report to the governor, news had yet to reach the Americas that earlier that year, Pope Urban VIII had publicly condemned the slave trade, calling it “a means to deprive men of their liberty.”¹ His decree echoed medieval conceptions of the foundational importance of freedom: “All creatures in the world naturally love and desire liberty, and much more do men, who have intelligence superior to that of the others, and especially such as are of noble minds, desire it.”² The Siete Partidas had long asserted that although slavery...

In October 1651, Inquisition officials from Cartagena de Indias traveled to Jamaica to investigate the murder of the island’s governor, don Pedro Caballero, who also held a position as an Inquisition official, meaning that his killer would be tried under their jurisdiction. Inquisitors focused primarily on the servants and associates of Jamaica’s previous governor, don Jacinto Sedeño, Governor Caballero’s sworn enemy. One of the men in Sedeño’s cadre who witnessed the murder was especially interesting to officials from the Holy Tribunal: Nicolas Burundel, a reputed Englishman and alleged heretic who had scandalized residents with his anti-Catholic blasphemies. Several months later,...

On September 28, 1652, Nicolas was brought to the main audience chamber to hear the Tribunal formally charge him with the crime of Calvinism. The accusation alleged that he must have been comprehensively educated in the very fundamentals of this “damned” heresy to say the things he had. Medina Rico gave credence to the clerics who believed that Nicolas had consciously decided to fool them with a performance of madness, “hoping in this way to get out of prison without being corrected.”¹ After all 21 charges were read, the Frenchman was asked to respond in his own defense. Although he...

After bowing to the Tribunal’s serious threats to employ torture, Nicolas returned to his cellmates with a story. Juan de Noguera reported that when Nicolas came back that morning, he was quieter than usual. Murillo said that Nicolas later joined the two at the table to eat, then confided, rather dramatically, “that he had seen a place no other Christian had [ever] seen.” Nicolas proceeded to describe in great detail how during that morning’s audience, he had been left alone in “a small chamber, without any windows.” A writing desk, lit by only two candles, sat in front of an...

The day after Christmas 1654, Henry Whistler, a man of considerable sailing experience, waited aboard a ship anchored on the Thames as the cannon fired, a signal to call passengers on board. Whistler took advantage of the lull before the journey to begin composing what he titled “A Jornal of a Voaidg from Stokes Bay: and Intended by Gods assistant for the West Inga [Indies].” As he watched the ship slowly fill up and the tearful goodbyes on the docks below, Whistler’s imagination was sparked by how much the scene before him resembled a passage in a book he had...

Leaving the English islands for their chosen target of Hispaniola, the commanders of the expedition tried to refocus the company on their religious mission, ordering a day of fasting and waiting on the Lord. As their stomachs growled, the soldiers likely took part in each ship’s program of preaching, joint prayer, and other encouragements to reflect on their sins and the dangers of battle. For those men like Henry Whistler who were literate and had happened to bring along a small prayer book, such as the pocket-sized Manual of Devotions, they might have read “The Soldier’s Devotion” privately or with...

Caer’s comments about his fellow Protestants being forced to work “as if they were slaves”¹ are worth closer attention, for they hint at subterranean anxieties about the politics of labor exploitation and race that plagued Interregnum attempts to implement its colonial political economy. This chapter considers the revolt against what the Western Design’s participants imagined to be the cause of their relegation to the status of “slaves” in the West Indies: their own countrymen and co-religionists’ profit-seeking, not the machinations of cruel, foreign, “popish” enemies. This expedition fostered a sharp turn in the evolution of English thought on New World...

When news reached Barbados that Cromwell’s troops had failed in Hispaniola and were struggling to survive in Jamaica, Colonel Lewis Morris of Ape’s Hill must have said a silent prayer of thanks to God that he had declined Cromwell’s commission to command a regiment for General Venables. It had been a flattering offer, he knew, a reward for his loyal service to the parliamentary cause, and in recognition of his experience in the Caribbean. As a young indentured servant, Lewis had much in common with the masses of poor servants and younger sons described in the previous section who came...

With George Fox and several others in attendance, Colonel Morris’s household would have been a flurry of activity. The topic that reportedly occupied most of the visitors’ time was how Friends might best “settle” their membership in a more “disciplined” way.¹ Lewis Morris had impressed them. He and six other local Quakers were entrusted “to hold a Correspondency wth all ye Governors, Major Generalls, Judges & Justices in America” to better represent the Society’s grievances to civil authorities (they especially needed a way to conduct everyday legal business without swearing oaths).² Pleased with the “settling” of affairs in Barbados, some of...

Yet Yaff and Nell likely continued, cautiously, to seek a sense of sacred kinship with Lewis and Marie, for those personal bonds were the keys to a sense of security—salvation in the form of protection from the common rigors of their bondage. Despite the suspicion that many enslaved people in Barbados must have harbored towards the Society of Friends’ evangelizing “discipline,” some nonetheless found reasons to build on the positive connections that Quakerism offered. For enslaved people knew that they lived in an uncertain, brutal world, and that they needed to seek out shelter in whatever manner they could....

In 1720, a new pirate adventure by Daniel Defoe, The Adventures of Captain Singleton, became a best seller, bringing readers into the world of maritime captives and pirates, not to mention the first imagined journey across the African mainland.¹ Building on the success of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Defoe brought readers another pseudo-fictional narrative about ordinary men and colonial expansion. The story followed an English orphan whose early life sounds rather like that of Nicolas Burundel. Brought up from a tender age aboard various ships, Singleton survived traumatic experiences with exploitative masters and humiliating captivity in Barbary and Catholic lands, along...