Expanding The Horizon

American Voyages is dedicated to the exploration of North America, which I have thus far defined as being anything a part of our continental plate and landmass, as well as attachments such as the parts of California not on our plate.  Under this definition, I also include Cuba and the Bahamas, which have at least enough common features in fauna, flora, and history to be considered North American.  Where do I draw the line elsewhere, however?  Do I exclude Guatemala and Belize simply because they have more in common with the rest of Central America than they do with Mexico?  Do I refuse to talk about any of the Caribbean, especially when it does have a significant link to our continent?  In general, I started up this blog to show people what they have in their backyard (and as a secondary goal, to dispel myths about Mexico), and the thought of getting just a bit more tropical than what Oaxaca or southern Florida has to offer starts to look more like promoting knowledge about what people have in mind for their next vacation.

Ah, but there are people who live and have lived on the many islands beyond the reach of Floridian or Yucatan beaches.  The history of the three major North American nations is very much connected to what was going on in the Caribbean.  Many of the colonials there set up domestic, semi-representative governments just like the colonials in the North American mainland did.  Alexander Hamilton, along with a great many other British colonists living in the "West Indies", either lived in the Thirteen Colonies/United States or had involvement in trade between the various colonies and Britain.  Much of this trade involved the movement of rum, sugar, spices, and the "commodity" needed to make it all possible, slaves.  In this regard some of those distant islands were not too distant in culture and climate from some of the American South.  Barbados, for one, is very keen on reminding people that much of their population was once in the supplicant position in this culture. 

Many American ports would also bear a bit of a visible connection with distant islands.  New Orleans and Charleston have in many ways seemed more connected with the life of the tropical mariner and chic associations with motherlands back in Europe.  Florida, of course, had for the longest time been the meeting place of the Spanish Caribbean with mainland North America, and still largely is, particularly in Miami.  In return, Cuba has always seemed like another world from the rest of the Caribbean, even after American cultural connections were shut down once Castro took power.  From another angle, Cuba and Mexico have often expressed love and affinity with one another, as if sitting at another table focused on one another and no one else in some grand Latin American ballroom.  The Caymans Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos these days find themselves being sent similar love letters from fellow Commonwealth member Canada; the banks and financial concerns on the islands certainly reflect this budding, if unconsummated relationship.  The story gets more fascinating further south.  So why not shake off the last of the winter blues and visit some of those lands across the Straits of Florida?  Our first destination will be St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The First Underground Railroad

I know I have been on a kick about the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida lately, but the truth is that this region was an incredibly diverse and storied region until it fought for the wrong side of history during the Civil War.  Yes, here there was the hearth of the house of Southern elite slaveholders and their belles, but there were also the non-slave holding Second Born Georgians, First Born, Spanish, French (of both Hugenot and Royal varieties), long forgotten Austrians, and of course Black people which would soon, through economic reasons, come to outnumber all of these groups.  Needless to say, I also have long loved the majestic world of palm and pine which thrives here in an otherwise humid, bug-infested wild country.  When I recently began to read more about both the birth of slavery and its opposition among abolitionists and freedom-seekers here, I just had to share what a powerful crossroads in history this truly difficult land had become.

No one can argue against the fact that the Spanish colonizers were brutal and racist in their treatment of the First Born, and that they enjoyed watching their conquered subjects tend the fields for them.  That said, it was the English colonizers who were real pros at commercial exploitation of the new land and exotic peoples from just about anywhere on the planet.  The Spanish, you see, were plunderers less than merchants (they kicked out a good portion of their merchant class when they told every Jew in Spain to head out of town in 1492), and they were also enthralled by the concept of converting the planet to Roman Catholicism.  In contrast, the English also plundered, but on a smaller scale (except maybe in India), so as to better gradually set up favorable economic conditions for their cult of free-enterprise.  Oh sure, they had religion too, many Protestant varieties of it in fact, but their concept of spreading the faith was pretty much centered on trying to get freedom for themselves to contemplate and pray as they so wished, which they had to cross an ocean for in the face of Anglican and then Calvinistic and then lip-service Anglican successions of power.  They rejoiced when the First Born converted, but otherwise just regarded them as pagans who could either be helpful to setting up commercial security or harmful in trying to dismantle colonial progress.  The French were another story altogether, and that one takes a while to explain...

Anyway, the Spanish would not hesitate to bring over Africans for use as slaves, but seeing as how plantations of cash crops were but one of many different agendas behind the otherwise important gold-plundering and conversion game, race slavery never developed to the same degree that it did in the English colonies.  Again, this is not to say that it did not happen; many Black communities can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and a few traces of where African slavery did make inroads into Mexico can be found in Veracruz and Guerrero, the two important states of colonial landing of the Mexican coast.  The ban on a Spanish-run slave trade made importation of Africans difficult, if nothing else.  When they wanted slaves, the Spanish could run to the English or Dutch for their needs, which further compounded the general aloofness from the enslavement of Africans.  What's more, racial hatred did not develop in nearly the same way throughout New Spain than it did it the English colonies.  As I state in my post about the most important event in North American history, while the Spanish came as conquerors and extractors, they also often fell in love with the land and the people of the New World.  Mexicans to this day are largely Mestizos of heritage reaching back to both sides of the Atlantic.   Yes, you can find hatred towards the First Born in the Spanish-descended elite of El Salvador or Argentina, but by and large the rest of modern Latin America is a culture resulting from pure exchange rather than separation. 

So it was that when a few runaway slaves heading south from the Carolinas made their way into Florida, they were not immediately chained up and re-enslaved in their new home of Florida.  Rather, they were not only welcomed, but encouraged to keep coming.  Those who chose a more colonial existence in St. Augustine would be required to convert to Catholicism, but often times the Black refugees found a happy existence with the First Born of the area.  Further north, they often helped the refugees through to their freedom, which as usual was a very difficult and terror-filled trip to safety, but down here in the still-largely natural hot and humid subtropical lushness, they had the advantage of not being readily followed by the prone-to-malaria and easily sweat-able northern Europeans.  The Spanish authorities figured that they would be so grateful to make their way into waiting freedom and safety that they would rise up in arms with them, Black beside colonist, against English advances from Georgia.  They were not wrong. 

Some stayed in town, some even enlisted in the Spanish forces.  Others left to form new societies of their own in the wilds, and sometimes they came across the First Born and formed a new culture of this encounter.

Public domain.

You can read more and see some pictures here.  Actually, that website can tell you quite a lot about some of the Black experience I never knew existed.

Expanding the Horizon

The very first post on American Voyages defined North America as everything consisting of continental Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but technically speaking, such limits are not really being fair to what North America really encompasses.  In truth, our continental plate extends as far east as half of Iceland and as far west as parts of Russia and Japan.  Now of course, a blog about North American geography, history, etc. would be rather silly if I took some time to cover Hokkaido or Siberia, but my recent reading into everything botanical regarding Florida got me thinking about some of our outlying nearby continental islands, namely Cuba and the Bahamas.

Both places have been historically linked to the rest of North America, in some cases in far stronger ways than with the rest of their Caribbean neighbors.   Cuba was the departure point of choice of Spanish explorers and colonizers for expeditions into Mexico and Florida, and the island was lusted after for years by the United States during the late nineteenth century.  Though the current embargo keeps Cuba at arm's length from the United States, she has decent diplomatic relations with both Canada and Mexico.  The Bahamas pretty much experience economic vitality because of trade and tourism links with the United States.  Both nations feature a climate and biodiversity remarkably similar to that of southern Florida.  I have been fortunate enough to see this up close and personal in the Bahamas, but my only experience thus far of Cuba has been of a few distant glimpses of a mountainous coast from the Straits of Florida.  There are no reasons why we can't occasionally talk about her though, especially since I have some rather controversial posts about language coming up this week.  You know, posts about, gasp, that dreaded Spanish language everyone here seems to be afraid of.

Oh, and for those of us wondering, this would be where North America technically ends down south:

Thanks USGS!  This map and all sorts of fun stuff can be found here.