THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN HISTORY I DISCOVERY, COLONIZATION, SLAVERY THE discovery and colonization of America was primarily for greed, and this dominant principle was illustrated in different stages of the growth and development of the country. Spain, which in the sixteenth century was not only a world-wide power, but one of the greatest of modern times, bore a very important part in the conquest and settlement of the New World. It was mainly her capital, her merchantmen, that plowed the main, her capital and the patronage of her sovereigns that led. The Dutch and the English followed in the rear. Settlements in North America and the West Indies were made by her sons early in the sixteenth century, but it was one hundred years after, at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, that the English made the first permanent settlement within the continental limits of the United States of America. In the early voyages it was not at all remarkable that Negroes were found as sailors, though slaves. It is well authenticated that in the explorations of Narvaez and among the survivors of the Coronado expedition was Estevan, a black, who was guide to Friar Marcoz in 1539 in the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola. The celebrated anthropologist Quatrefages in "The Human Species" strongly intimates that Africa had its share in the peopling and the settlement of some sections of South America. The exception but proves the rule that the Negro came to the New World as a slave. He was stolen from or bought on the West Coast of Africa to add to the wealth of America by his toil as bondman and laborer. Slavery was first introduced in America on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti) where the aborigines of America and the West Indies had been found not sufficiently robust for the work in the mines and the plantations. Large numbers of Negroes were imported by the Portuguese, who owned the great portion of the African coast then known, into Europe a half century before the discovery of America.1 To Las Casas who pleaded the cause of the poor American Indian who had been enslaved in the New World, large responsibility for importing the African must be given notwithstanding the opposition of Cardinal Ximines, then regent of Spain. Las Casas lived to regret the part he played by his fateful suggestion. To supply this labor the Slave Trade, as it became known, was begun. La Bresa, a Flemish favorite of Charles V having obtained from the king a patent containing an exclusive right of annually importing four thousand Negroes into America, sold it to some Genoese merchants who first brought into a regular form the commerce for slaves between Africa and America.2 Sir John Hawkins made three trips to America from the West Coast of Africa between 1563 and 1567, taking with him several hundred of the natives whom he sold as slaves. Queen Elizabeth became a partner in this nefarious traffic. So elated was she at its profits that she knighted him, and he most happily selected for his crest a Negro head and bust with arms tightly pinioned. It was a lucrative business and though it at first shocked the sensibilities of Christian nations and rulers, they 1 Bancroft, Vol. I. 2 Spanish Conquest of America, Vol. I. |