An excerpt from, "America Wasn’t Founded on Slavery in 1619 — but on Pilgrims’ Ideals Written in 1620" By Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars, November 17, 2020:
In August 1619, a pirate ship, the White Lion, stopped at Jamestown and traded 20-some captive Africans for food. The Africans were treated as indentured servants and soon released.
Fifteen months later, in November 1620, an English ship blown off course on its way to Virginia ended up off the barren coast of Massachusetts. It landed more than 100 men, women and children. Those voyagers founded Plymouth Colony.
Which event mattered more?
Last year, the New York Times declared that the arrival of the captives in Virginia was the “true beginning” of America — an America that the Times characterized as a “slavocracy.” The Times calls its campaign to promote this story The 1619 Project. In my new book, “1620,” I argue that the arrival of the Pilgrims along with dozens of non-Pilgrims (“strangers” as the Pilgrims called them) aboard the Mayflower is the real beginning of America.
After deciding to leave Holland, they planned to cross the Atlantic using two purchased ships. A small ship with the name Speedwell would first carry them from Leiden to England. The larger Mayflower would then be used to transport most of the passengers and supplies the rest of the way.Not all of the Separatists were able to depart, as many did not have enough time to settle their affairs and their budgets were too meager to buy the necessary travel supplies. The congregation therefore decided that the younger and stronger members should go first, with others possibly following in the future. Although the congregation had been led by John Robinson, who first proposed the idea of emigrating to America, he chose to remain in Leiden to care for those who could not make the voyage.In explaining to his congregation why they should emigrate, Robinson used the analogy of the ancient Israelites leaving Babylon to escape bondage by returning to Jerusalem, where they would build their temple. "The Pilgrims and Puritans actually referred to themselves as God's New Israel," writes Peter Marshall. It was therefore considered the destiny of the Pilgrims and Puritans to similarly build a "spiritual Jerusalem" in America.John Carver, one of the leaders on the ship, often inspired the Pilgrims with a "sense of earthly grandeur and divine purpose". He was later called the "Moses of the Pilgrims", notes historian Jon Meacham. The Pilgrims "believed they had a covenant like the Jewish people of old", writes author Rebecca Fraser. "America was the new Promised Land.": In a similar vein, early American writer James Russell Lowell stated, "Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little shipload of outcasts who landed at Plymouth are destined to influence the future of the world.
An excerpt from, "How the Specter of Islam Fueled European Colonization in the Americas" By Alan Mikhail, Literary Hub, December 17, 2020:
As every schoolchild learns, Columbus set sail with India on his mind’s horizon. Rarely, though, do schoolchildren learn why Columbus sought to cross the Atlantic. Hoping for an alliance with the Grand Khan of the East, he aimed to retake Jerusalem and destroy Islam; more prosaically, his voyages promised an end run around the trade monopolies of the Ottomans and the Mamluks. And when Columbus arrived in the Americas, fresh from the battle which marked Spain’s final defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, he saw—or, more accurately, imagined—Muslims everywhere. Spanish conquistadors would claim to see mosques in Mexico, American Indians wearing “Moorish” clothing and performing “Moorish” dances, Turks invading New Spain from the Pacific, and West African slaves attempting to convert America’s indigenous peoples to Islam. Filtering their experiences in the Americas through the lens of their wars with Muslims, Europeans in the New World engaged in a new version of their very old Crusades, a new kind of Catholic jihad. Long after the many Matamoros—Moor-slayers—who sailed to the Americas aboard Columbus’s ships were dead themselves, Islam would continue to forge the histories of both Europe and the New World and the relationship between the two.On either side of the unambiguous watershed represented by the year 1492, Islam endured as Europe’s primary obsession, its perennial rival and major cultural “other”—a spur of innovative historical change as well as an enemy on the battlefield. Throughout the 17th century and into the 18th, Europe remained far more concerned about the Ottomans and Islam than about the lands across the Atlantic. Remarkable, in fact, is the apparent lack of interest in the Americas among most Europeans. Spain’s Charles V, for example—the leader most responsible for his empire’s enormous expansion in the New World—uttered not a word about the Americas in his memoirs. What obsessed him were the Ottoman advances in Europe and his fears about the growing weakness of Christianity vis-à-vis Islam. 16th-century France produced twice as many books about Islam as it did about the Americas and Africa combined. Overall, between 1480 and 1609, Europe published four times more works about the Muslim world than about the Americas. This disparity only increased over the course of the 17th century.. . .In the 17th century, many of the thousands of English Protestants who crossed the ocean would cite two evils as the reasons for their flight: the injustices and discrimination of their Catholic coreligionists and the scourge of the Muslim Ottomans. In 1621, for instance, Robert Cushman, a passenger on the Mayflower, wrote of the promise of America as a refuge from an Old World then in the grip of the Protestant–Catholic Thirty Years’ War: “If it should please God to punish his people in the Christian countries of Europe, for their coldness, carnality, wanton abuse of the Gospel, contention, &c., either by Turkish slavery, or by popish tyranny, (which God forbid) . . . here is a way opened for such as have wings to fly into this wilderness.” As Luther had done at the very start of the Protestant Reformation, Cushman here speaks simultaneously of two enemies: pope and sultan. Persecuted by papal tiara and sultanic turban, he saw America as his salvation from both.Slow though the progress of these fledgling colonies was, when juxtaposed with their ongoing skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire and Barbary pirates in North Africa, the English experience in North America was, by the end of the 17th century, beginning to look like a resounding success.In the course of that century, North Africa remained the primary locale of England’s overseas operations. With its storied riches of gold, slaves, and spices, North Africa attracted more English adventurers in the 17th century than North America did. Some of these adventurers succeeded in earning handsome profits, but many more succumbed to the entrenched power of North Africa’s numerous independent sovereigns and pirate captains. Barbary pirates regularly captured English ships in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic (many of them sailing to and from the Americas) and enslaved those on board. Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, there were more enslaved Englishmen in North Africa than free ones in North America. “Conquerors in Virginia, they were slaves in Algiers,” as the scholar Nabil Matar nicely summarizes.In 1699, the infamous Puritan minister Cotton Mather bemoaned the fate of those prospective New England settlers taken into North African slavery. “God hath given up several of our Sons, into the Hands of the Fierce Monsters of Africa. Mahometan Turks and Moors, and Devils are at this day oppressing many of our Sons, with a Slavery, wherein they Wish for Death, and cannot find it.” Mather—a slaveholder himself—thus drew a direct line between the English colonial project he represented in America and the Muslims of the Mediterranean. At the same time that he attacked North African slavery, he expressed no qualms about—and, in fact, encouraged—the American and English enslavement of African Muslims and non-Muslims. Moreover, Mather believed it was the duty of all Christians to contribute to the annihilation of the Ottoman Empire, in order to precipitate the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel in Palestine, a vital prerequisite for the second coming of Christ.
An excerpt from, "The Mayflower had a Sister Ship and Rival Puritan Colony" By Tom Feiling, Brewminate, March 25, 2018:
There was a sister ship to the Mayflower, which left England for the New World ten years after the Pilgrim Fathers. The passengers aboard the Seaflower founded a rival puritan colony on a seven-mile long speck of an island 150 miles off the coast of Nicaragua. The colony on the island of Providence is little known, probably because it only lasted for 11 years. But for a time, England’s most ambitious imperialists, who also happened to be among its most devout puritans, believed that the empire would rise not in New England, but on the Caribbean coast of Central America.In 1635, Central America looked the more promising location. The Miskito coast was a verdant savannah, and the Providence Island Company thought it well suited to the cultivation of mulberry bushes and grapevines. Demand for silk and wine was strong in England, and the company was keen to meet it, instead of having to rely on imports from Catholic Europe. Providence was too small and mountainous to produce much in the way of commodities itself, but its sheltered harbour and the protective reef that ran down its eastern flank made it a natural fortress. It would serve as an ideal base from which to build the vast plantations that the company envisaged on the Miskito coast.. . .The island’s puritans always opposed the turn to piracy, for it only made Spanish reprisals more likely. They had journeyed to Providence to build a New World utopia, where they could live like good Christians, free from the poverty, hypocrisy and tyranny that tainted life in England. But the island council was soon dominated by military men, who had no qualms about inviting every English ne’er-do-well with a taste for gold and glory to the island. For a time, the name of Providence was feared throughout the Caribbean, but in May 1641, a fleet of Spanish ships stormed the island and shipped the settlers – puritan and pirate alike – back to Cartagena in chains.Even if the colony had survived the invasion, it would probably have collapsed under the weight of its internal contradictions. For any colony to survive, it needed goods to sell, some form of local, representative government, and an army to defend it from attack. Providence had none of that, which is why everyone has heard of Providence, Rhode Island, while practically nobody has heard of the little island of Providencia, Colombia.
An excerpt from, "Barbary pirates: the Muslim corsairs and their role in the slave trade" By Nige Tassell, History Extra, January 21, 2022:
Barbary pirates, or corsairs, were the outlaws of the waves before the golden age of piracy. From the 16th century onwards, these Muslim pirates operated out of the main ports along the North African coast – Algiers, Tunis, Rabat, Tripoli – raiding towns and seizing merchant ships primarily across the Mediterranean, although they did also venture into northern Europe and along the Atlantic coast of West Africa.Their raison d’etre was to capture slaves for the Ottoman empire slave trade – although taking ownership of the valuable goods being transported across the Mediterranean was a gratefully welcomed by-product.The pirates didn’t discriminate about who they captured and placed in servitude. The make-up of those being forced into slavehood was a tangle of races, nationalities and religions. The pirates weren’t fussy, although Italian and Spanish slaves fetched a better price than northern Europeans.Nor did the pirates discriminate about which ships they attacked. Vessels sailing under all and any flags were considered fair game, making the Mediterranean a particular perilous sea for every nation.