A July 4th reflection on years and numbers

Jul 03, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

When America’s Independence Day celebrations coincide with the Caribbean’s Caricom Day activities, it gives me a chance to use my imagination, and to reflect on a bit of Old World/New World history. What was it like in the fledgling American colonies, and the rest of the Americas in 1776 when the ‘group of thirteen’ adopted the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming themselves the United States of America and no longer a part of Great Britain?
Thirteen years earlier in the Dutch colony of Berbice, the African slave Cuffy led a revolt against the European plantation landlords on the Berbice River. Although deemed unsuccessful by historians, the 1763 Rebellion/Revolt no doubt started a line of thought, and action, by mostly non-White residents, that opposition to slavery, Guyana’s one-sided plantation economy, and unjust colonial rule, was possible. (Cuffy’s name and legacy have been tarnished by some later Guyanese, but that’s another story for another day.)
At about the same time in the ‘New England’ colonies, the settlers were just about fed up with Britain’s intrusion into their affairs. Indirect government from London, accommodation of British soldiers in the colonies and taxes on goods imported from England, especially tea, goaded them into retaliation. The notable Boston Tea Party in 1773 was followed two years later by the start of the American Revolution, and a year later by the momentous declaration of independence.
The glory story of the United States of America had just begun. But what about that century and a half before 1776, following the first English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607? For example, what would the native Indians have told us about those years and their interaction with the pale interlopers from across the Atlantic, had they left written records? Would Thanksgiving have had a more troubling connotation, and would the Pocahontas love story have had a different plot?
Could the story of the indigenous people north of the Rio Grande somehow have drummed its way to their brothers and sisters in the southern colonies including Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, and vice versa? How similar or different were the reactions of the Caribs and the Lokono to those of the Powhattan and Iroquois when Christopher Columbus and John Smith respectively arrived at their doorsteps?
Younger Guyanese and West Indians are still shocked and saddened at the history of the New World, especially how the indigenous and non-white populations were treated by 17th, 18th and 19th century European colonists. In North and South America, Central America and the West Indies, the stories are of genocide, slavery, resource exploitation and colonial power. It was a game of wealth and misery. Guess who got the gold and other minerals, the sugar, cotton, and coffee profits? And guess who got the misery?
The indignities heaped upon New World Amerindians, African slaves, and East Indian indentured workers are relatively well known, but some revelations are truly frightening. Northern tribes unaccustomed to European diseases were decimated by measles, influenza, cholera, and syphilis among others. This susceptibility was used at least once to deadly effect in an act of biological warfare.
In 1763, a rebellion led by the native Indian leader Pontiac was so worrying to the English forces that a British General, Jeffrey Amherst proposed a terrifying solution.
Amherst wrote to one Colonel Henry Bouquet suggesting that the Indians be deliberately infected with smallpox by sending them blankets used by British soldiers infected with the deadly disease at a fort under his command.
He wrote, “Could it be contrived to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must use every stratagem … to reduce them” and in a subsequent letter, “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
Apparently this suggestion was actually carried out with deadly efficiency. Not surprisingly, apart from disease, there was the related scourge of severe malnutrition.
Additionally, records show that colonists in search of gold staged violent ambushes on tribal villages, fueling animosity on the Indians’ part. Several wars broke out between tribes and American settlers leading to huge death tolls, land dispossession, oppression, and blatant racism. Then of course there was forced labour and ‘relocation’. And no less a figure than England’s King George II had called for ‘pursuing, capturing, killing, and destroying all and every of the foresaid Indians.’
Meanwhile in good old B.G. the Dutch had established solid trading partnerships with the Amerindians during the 17th and 18th centuries. The locals had to deal also with Spanish and English colonists, but found the Dutch, of all the warring European nations, more compatible with their way of life and the requirements forced on them, including the tracking down and capture of runaway African slaves. (The latter had by the end of the 18th century become the labour mainstay of the colony’s economy.)
Before that however, the naiveté and the wealth of native Indians from Mexico to Peru had been ruthlessly exploited by European ‘explorers’ and settlers (Remember Cortez and Pizarro) and large numbers Aztecs, Incas, and other native populations were wiped out. African slave populations in the Americas were subjected to other forms of oppression and dehumanization including chattel ownership, unconscionable labour, the deliberate stripping of their dignity, and severe forms of punishment, including death, for sometimes minor offences.
The numbers were staggering. The non-profit organization ‘United to end Genocide’ states that out of an estimated 10 million-plus native Indians living in America when the first Europeans arrived in the 15th century, only about 300,000 could be accounted for by 1900. That’s in the USA alone. That level of decimation was repeated in the rest of the Americas and the West Indies.
As for the Americas’ slave population, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History states that some 12.5 million Africans had been shipped from Africa between 1526 and 1867. Some 12% of that number (roughly 1,500,000) died during the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. How many African lives were unjustly cut short in the colonies is anybody’s guess.
Altogether, both on land and at sea, the New World was the unwelcome graveyard of millions of native Indian and African souls at the hands of those from Europe who came, saw, exploited, and killed. The tale of numbers, and of power, exploitation, and death continues, more subtly, and on a less obvious scale.
Now with Brexit, Jamaica’s mulling over withdrawal from Caricom, the Venezuelan crisis, and Donald Trump’s strange ascension on the American political stage, anything is possible as the story of the Americas continues to unfold. Just a little something to think about tomorrow!

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