delanceyplace.com 7/9/08 - the caribbean

• 0 COMMENTS

In today's excerpt - British adventurers in the Caribbean:

"The Caribbean was ... the Wild West of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, promising far more in the way of glamour, excitement, quick profit, and constant peril than the prosaic settlements along the North American coast. ... The English pioneers heard ample tales about the gold and pearls that had been found in the isles, and stories of Spanish cruelty, English robbery, and Indian and Negro slavery. They associated the Indies with incredible wealth and amazing savagery. Everything was larger than life. The English colonists expected -- and rather hoped -- that outrageous things would happen to them, and they armed themselves with a code of conduct that would never be tolerated at home. ...

"Some had come looking for El Dorado, like [Sir Walter] Raleigh himself when he explored Trinidad and Guiana. But most had come to trade clandestinely with the Spanish colonists  -- or to seize their ships and loot their settlements. Here was the scene of Francis Drake's first outlandish exploit, where he stole £40,000 in silver, gold and pearls in 1673 [from the Spanish Main]. ... Nor did English privateering and illicit trade stop with the Spanish peace treaty of 1604. It is probable that English investors -- chiefly London merchants -- put more money into commerce and piracy in the Caribbean from 1560 to 1630 than into any other mode of long-distance, overseas business enterprise, even the East India Company. ...

"The Elizabethan war was still being fought in the Caribbean, for the Indies lay 'beyond the line', that is, outside the territorial limits of English treaties. In America, might made right, and international law was suspended. ...

"To live 'beyond the line' meant more than a flouting of European treaty obligations. It meant a general flouting of European social conventions. ... White men who scrambled for riches in the torrid zone exploited their Indian and black slaves more shamelessly than was possible with the unprivileged laboring class in Western Europe. And they robbed and massacred each other more freely than the rules of civility permitted in European combat. Sir Henry Colt thought the devil must have special power in America. 'Who is he that cann live long an quiett in these parts?' Colt asked. 'For all men are heer made subject to the power of this Infernal Spiritt. And fight they must, although it be with ther owne frends.' "