The Torrid Zone , livre ebook

The Torrid Zone
The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
Sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World of the College of Charleston
Edited by L. H. R OPER

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-890-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-891-3 (ebook)
Front cover map: Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Insulae Americanae in Oceano Septentrionali, cum terris adiacentibus , 1635
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I
Indigenous and Other Caribbeans
Kalinago Colonizers:
Indigenous People and the Settlement of the Lesser Antilles
Tessa Murphy
Aphra Behn s Oroonoko , Indian Slavery, and the Anglo-Dutch Wars
Carolyn Arena
Indigeneity and Authority in the Lesser Antilles:
The Warners Revisited
Sarah Barber
Part II
Empire, Settlement, and War in the Torrid Zone:
The Cases of Suriname, Jamaica, Danish West Indies, and Saint-Domingue
Second Is Best:
Dutch Colonization on the Wild Coast
Jessica Vance Roitman
Colonial Life in Times of War:
The Impact of European Wars on Suriname
Suze Zijlstra and Tom Weterings
Reassessing Jamayca Espa ola:
Spanish Fortifications and English Designs in Jamaica
Amanda J. Snyder
Making Jamaica English:
Priorities and Processes
James Robertson
The Danish West Indies, 1660s-1750s:
Formative Years
Erik G bel
Creating a Caribbean Colony in the Long Seventeenth Century:
Saint-Domingue and the Pirates
Giovanni Venegoni
Part III
Extending the Torrid Zone
The Martinican Model:
Colonial Magistrates and the Origins of a Global Judicial Elite
Laurie M. Wood
Experimenting with Acceptance, Caribbean-Style:
Jews as Aliens in the Anglophone Torrid Zone
Barry L. Stiefel
Carolina, the Torrid Zone, and the Migration of Anglo-American Political Culture
L. H. Roper
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
The idea for this volume germinated during a correspondence between Laurie Wood and I at the end of 2012, in which we noted the lack of a comprehensive historiographical treatment of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. As Laurie was then finishing up her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin and entering the job market, we agreed that I would undertake the editorial work, take the lead in recruiting our contributors, and secure a publication venue while she would render such assistance as the pursuit of her career permitted. Happily, this plan worked: Laurie now teaches at Florida State University, and this book has seen the light of day. Whether the latter result has any merit is due entirely to the cooperation and professionalism of my colleagues, especially Laurie, who, in addition to the kind contributions of their own labors, patiently answered my questions and comments as well as critiqued the introduction, saving me from committing any number of howlers. I should also like to thank the other contributors, as well as Nikki Parker, for reviewing and critiquing the introduction, as well as the readers for the press for their scrutiny of the volume; of course, I bear responsibility for any and all remaining errors.
I also want to extend my thanks to Alex Moore, then acquisitions editor at the University of South Carolina Press, with whom I met at the 2013 meeting of the Southern Historical Association to discuss this project. His enthusiasm convinced the press to tender a contract, which naturally helped considerably in advancing the endeavor, and he also introduced Barry Stiefel to the project. Once USC Press had the manuscript, Alex having retired, Linda Fogle took charge of its production, and I should like to extend my profound gratitude to her as well for her attention and assistance.
Introduction
By the onset of the seventeenth century, the Caribbean Basin had been the scene of Spanish colonizing activities for over one hundred years. In 1600 the Spaniards claimed the region as their preserve, having established settlements on the islands of, most significantly, Hispaniola and Cuba, as well as Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Trinidad, along with various locations on the neighboring Spanish Main. These honeypots of American wealth proved an irresistible attraction to interlopers such as the Dutch Sea Beggars, the English operators Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Sir Walter Ralegh, and smugglers from various nations who called at the Venezuelan salt pans. The Dutch Revolt against Habsburg rule (1568-1609, 1621-48), the French Wars of Religion (1562-98), and the furious English hostility to Roman Catholicism that manifested itself after the accession of Elizabeth I (November 1558) added religious fuel to the largely Protestant trading, plundering, and settlement ventures that sought to prey on papist shipping and duplicate the spectacular successes of the conquistadores in Mexico and Peru, as well as, perhaps more mundanely, create plantations of the sort that had emerged following those conquests and in Portuguese Brazil (also ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs from 1580 to 1630).
The accession of the ex-Huguenot Henri IV to the French throne (1598), the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Westminster (1604), and the Twelve Years Truce that interrupted the Dutch Revolt (1609-21) stayed these politico-religious convulsions in Europe during the first decade of the 1600s. This fragile state of affairs famously did not extend beyond the line set by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) west of the Azores Islands and north of the Tropic of Capricorn, which purported to divide the world outside of Europe between Spain and Portugal. Accordingly, penetration of the Spanish lake continued apace after 1605, even with the departure from the scene of El Draque and some of his contemporaries. Ralegh never abandoned his quest for El Dorado in Guiana despite the official thaw in Anglo-Spanish relations, nor did his 1618 execution for violating royal orders against engaging the Spaniards by any means deter English investigations of the area between the Amazon and the Orinoco Deltas. The Dutch and French likewise intensified their activities, while Danes began colonizing St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in 1666. Competition among these interests made the Caribbean the scene of an unprecedented scale of overseas rivalry
Some of these ventures received formal authorization from governments, while others, notably piratical ones, lacked official imprimatur. Thus, political and economic conflict in the Greater Caribbean region continued to increase during the seventeenth century: between adventurers from the same empire, between colonizers from different European states, and between Amerindians and Europeans. Non-Iberians took advantage of Spanish disinclination to perfect territorial claims, both on the mainland of South and North America and in the islands.
Thus, the English and French occupied parts of St. Christopher s (modern St. Kitts) as early as 1623-24. The English then assumed control of Barbados in 1627, followed by Nevis in 1628, Providence Island (located off the coast of modern Nicaragua but part of Colombia) at the very end of 1629, and Antigua and Montserrat (both settled in 1632), while the French secured Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635 and Dutch West India Company forces seized Curacao in 1634. Even these efforts did not proceed without complication: the Kalinago contested the French islands, as their Carib counterparts did the Dutch presence in Suriname, and Tobago was the scene of endemic conflict between the Amerindians and Couronian, Dutch, English, and French colonists; meanwhile, the Spanish, in addition to repelling Ralegh s Orinoco incursion, overran the Providence Island colony in 1640 and defeated the Cromwellian Western Design against Santo Domingo in 1655. As several of the contributions to The Torrid Zone discuss, Jamaica, which the English wrested from Spain after five years of resistance (1655-60), constitutes the most famous case of seventeenth-century imperial enterprise in the Caribbean. Yet, Guiana, like Tobago, remained the fiercely disputed target of multiple European claims, with the Dutch displacing their English rivals along the Berbice and Suriname Rivers in 1667 and the French taking control of Cayenne in 1664.
This volume offers a different sort of consideration of these activities, as well as of the corresponding interactions among Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans and establishment of colonial societies, which occurred in the period prior to and including the time when staple agriculture and slavery became entrenched in the Caribbean. As a center of European commercial and colonizing activity, the Torrid Zone has always attracted scholarly attention. Only relatively recently, however, has the study of the region s early history elbowed its way into a comprehension of the European colonization of the Americas that remains focused on thirteen of the colonies that constituted British North America prior to 1783, since the development of the sugar industry and its notorious reliance on the labor of enslaved people of African descent around the Caribbean provide a natural point of comparison with developments on the mainland.
This newer seam of scholarship has continued to track the formation and character of the region s slave societies following the paths carved from an economic perspective by Richard Sheridan s classic analysis in Sugar and Slavery , from a social p