by Alan Mikhail
With the devastation of Taino populations in the Caribbean, the Spanish need for massive numbers of slaves collided with the Crown’s desire to keep Muslims out of the Americas. Many in Spain and its colonies advocated for direct shipments from Africa, causing no fewer than five decrees to be issued expressly banning such commerce. In the words of one of the decrees, “In a new land like this one where faith is only recently being sowed, it is necessary not to allow to spread there the sect of Mahomet or any other.” But economic pressures soon forced the government to compromise. A major sticking point was the stipulation that Muslims could only become ladinos by living in Spain or one of its eastern Atlantic island possessions for two years in order to de-Islamize. This long wait proved a massive impediment to the operations of Hispaniola’s plantation owners—even though colonists regularly complained that their ladino slaves still behaved like full-fledged Muslims. To satisfy demand, the Crown occasionally, and increasingly frequently, gave official sanction to individual direct transshipments of slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean. Thanks to both these royal decrees and the illegal trade, by 1513 most of Hispaniola’s incoming slaves arrived directly from Africa. Thus, Spain initiated one of the most centrally formative, though never complete, geopolitical processes of the last millennium: the demographic replacement of indigenous Americans with Africans in the New World.
In so doing, it also exported the Old World’s major civilizational battle across the Atlantic. Islam is not thought of as central to the history of the New World; however, the realities of slavery, which is obviously critical to any understanding of the history of the Western Hemisphere, cannot be separated from the conflict between Islam and Christianity. In fact, as we will see, Muslims led the first ever revolt against European slavery in the Americas.
BEGINNING WITH COLUMBUS AND continuing well into the 1500s, gold was the prime motivator for Spanish exploration throughout the lands bordering the Caribbean and provided the initial justification for slavery. In Hispaniola, the Spanish forced the Taino to mine as much of the island’s modest deposits as they could. But when the first West African slaves reached the Caribbean in 1501, the Spanish learned that these captives were more productive than the Taino, since many had worked the mines of West Africa. Natives were assigned to the auxiliary tasks, such as sifting and hauling. Side by side, Africans (mostly Muslims) and Taino spent long hours under the boiling tropical sun, searching for glimmers of gold in the dark silt. In the crucible of this backbreaking coerced labor, the two communities quickly recognized a shared interest against their common Spanish enemy. As early as 1503, some Spaniards took notice of this budding alliance, fearful that their African slaves were teaching their Taino slaves what they termed “bad customs”—a standard Spanish euphemism for Islam.
Soon, sugar would replace gold as the primary economic engine of the Caribbean colonies. As with other Old World crops (and animals) taken to the Americas as part of what is now known as the Columbian Exchange, the history of sugar cultivation betrays a deep Islamic influence. The cane first arrived in Iberia and the rest of the Mediterranean via Central Asia and Mesopotamia, following the Islamic conquests. It reached Spain in the tenth century, when Spaniards—as they would later do with naval technology—adapted Muslim irrigation techniques and olive presses to construct their first rudimentary sugar mills. The Portuguese took sugar and its associated production processes to Madeira, the Azores, and the Canary Islands, along with a novel technology that Muslims had never used in their cultivation of sugar: slavery. Madeira would prove the most profitable of the eastern Atlantic sugar islands, serving as a kind of dress rehearsal for the slave economies of the Caribbean. The Portuguese clear-cut the island, established a monocropping culture of sugar, built plantations with their own and some Genoese investment capital, and created a slave society. Most of the slaves who worked in the cane fields of Madeira were Moroccans, Berbers, West Africans, and other Muslims. On his second westward voyage, in 1493, Columbus made scenic, mountainous Madeira his last stop before crossing the Atlantic, and it was then that he transported the first Muslim slaves and sugar cane to the New World—two imports which forever transformed the Americas and the world.
During the first years of sugar cultivation in the Caribbean, the Spanish used both native slave labor and some of the few African slaves they had at the time. Between 1492 and 1517, however, the Taino population of Hispaniola plummeted due to European diseases and the harsh conditions instituted by the Spanish. At the same time, the sugar plantations demanded more and more hands, especially in 1517, when Selim’s conquests in the eastern Mediterranean would temporarily disrupt Egypt’s sugar trade, thereby boosting the development of the Caribbean economy.
Sugar cane’s heft and the crushing and pressing needed to extract its juices make it a labor-intensive crop. To undertake this grueling work, in their first quarter century in the New World, the Spanish progressively and soon insatiably replaced Caribbean natives with African slaves, mostly men but some women as well, making black Africans the majority of the population of Hispaniola. According to one Spanish writer on Hispaniola in the early sixteenth century, “There are so many [blacks] in this island because of the sugar mills that the land appears a copy or image of Ethiopia.” Indeed, within a few years, the Spanish represened a tiny minority, perhaps just a twentieth of the African population.
Caribbean sugar plantation
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING 1521, a group of twenty “bellicose and perverse” Muslim Wolof slaves on a sugar plantation in Hispaniola owned by Diego Columbus—the appointed Spanish governor of the island, and son of Christopher Columbus—rose before sunrise to put into motion a plan they had been hatching for weeks. They grabbed the machetes they used for clearing trees and brush and began a “wild and bloody expedition under dawn’s early light,” dismembering their blindsided white masters and slaughtering livestock throughout the settlement. The rebels torched the thatch-roofed houses and sugar cane fields of the estate—named La Isabella after the queen who had made it all possible—before fleeing to the mountains, where they met up with other Muslim Wolof slaves from nearby plantations who had waged coordinated insurrections. Neither the Spanish nor the Taino understood a word of Wolof, so the slaves enjoyed the advantage of secret communications while planning and executing their rebellion.
The day after Christmas, the rebels attacked the estate of Melchor de Castro, the Spanish royal notary of mines. Just one day into the rebellion, their ranks had already doubled to forty. They destroyed Castro’s cattle ranch, seizing some of his animals as food. They killed a Spanish carpenter with his own tools and murdered a few other Spaniards as well. They grabbed all the provisions they could carry, then burned buildings and any remaining supplies. Most importantly, they also liberated thirteen of Castro’s slaves—twelve Indians and one African. Thus, the group of rebel slaves now included both Wolof Muslims and Tainos, united in hatred of their Spanish masters.
On the third day, the group headed for the sugar plantation of the colonial judge Alonso de Zuazo, located about twenty miles from Santo Domingo, the Spanish capital of Hispaniola. There they slaughtered eight to ten Spaniards and recruited to their cause another 120 African slaves, mostly Wolof. The rebels’ plan seemed to be working perfectly. They had incited a wave of slave anger in the countryside and were now surging toward the ultimate prize, Santo Domingo. As if with the force of the hurricane that had destroyed many European structures on the island in 1502, the Wolof and Taino rebels sought to level the capital. As had occurred many times before on the other side of the ocean, a Muslim army—in this case, interspersed with Taino allies—marched to capture a Catholic Spanish city. If these Muslims had succeeded, the entire European venture in the New World would have been dealt a serious blow, perhaps even a mortal one, and the subsequent course of world history might have been very different.
Typical Spanish colonial estate in the Caribbean
Instead, Melchor de Castro, who had escaped his ra
nsacked estate, along with a few other plantation owners who had heard about the revolt but had not been affected, raced ahead of the slaves on horseback to beat them to Santo Domingo. These colonists, many of whom were veterans of the battle for Granada, met with Diego Columbus to draft a plan to quell the rebellion. Twelve horsemen from a cattle ranch were dispatched to meet the oncoming rebels outside Santo Domingo. The horses—animals that had arrived in the New World with the Spanish—tipped the advantage, as they charged back and forth through the crowd of about two hundred slaves, who were weary from having been on the march for three days. Six slaves were killed in the charges, and dozens were wounded. A few Spaniards also died, and a Wolof machete nearly severed Melchor de Castro’s right arm.
Spanish reinforcements from Santo Domingo streamed down the road behind the horsemen, chasing the slaves as they fled. Diego Columbus, determined to send a message to any other would-be rebels, ordered the ultimate punishment to be meted out; the roadside near the scene of the battle was said to be “planted with gallows and the hanged.” The Spanish believed they had successfully projected their superior power. As one of them wrote, “The blacks were punished as befitted their daring and madness, and all the others were scared thereby and shown what would happen with them if such a thing crossed their minds.” Of the nearly two hundred rebels, however, most successfully escaped the battle and subsequent reprisals by fleeing to the relative safety of the densely forested Bahoruco Mountains.
Thus, within just a few short decades after 1492, Muslims and Christians were slaughtering each other in the Caribbean, playing out a very old script that had been staged in the Old World countless times before.
AS THE SPANISH SUGAR economy progressively undercut the native elite of Hispaniola, creating a subject population of mostly African slave labor, the Taino intermediaries who had attempted to work with the Spanish invaders by providing them with food, support, and labor in return for some European wares and recognition of their authority were deemed dispensable. This Taino elite joined the community’s common classes by turning on the Spanish as well, helping to organize pockets of rebellion in the mountains.
In 1519, just two years before the Wolof slave rebellion on Diego Columbus’s plantation, a Taino leader dubbed Enriquillo by the Spanish led a series of raids. Born around 1500 into a prominent Taino clan, he and his family, like most of the native elite, had lost out in the island’s changing demographics. From a line of caciques, or indigenous chiefs, he and his large extended family had lived for centuries in houses of straw and palm leaves at the center of several villages, the area reserved for a community’s leadership. As a youngster, he was taken from his home to Hispaniola’s newly established Franciscan monastery in Verapaz, where he was baptized and educated in Catholicism and Spanish culture. Following his schooling, he was assigned to work on an estate as the overseer of a group of Taino slaves—a position of relative distinction but still one of subjugation to Spanish authority. Here Enriquillo experienced the abuse that ultimately transformed him into a rebel leader. Las Casas relates the story: “Among the few and poor goods that he [Enriquillo] had, he owned a mare”—a particularly rare and prized possession for anyone on Hispaniola, let alone an Indian—“which was taken from him by the tyrant of a young man whom he served. After this, not content with this robbery and violent act, he managed to violate the marriage of the cacique and force his wife. . . . [When Enriquillo] complained of this to him, asking why he had done him such an injury and insult, it is said that he beat him.” After these violations of his family, person, and property, Enriquillo recruited a group of slaves on the estate—“probably mostly men,” according to one historian—to flee with him up into the Bahoruco Mountains, where they joined other runaway slaves.
Given his status among the Taino and his knowledge of the Spanish, Enriquillo earned respect within the growing maroon world in the Bahoruco. (Maroons were runaway slaves who formed independent communities away from the plantation economies of Europeans.) Ever since the arrival of the Spanish, the native people of Hispaniola had been fleeing into the mountains, depleting the labor pool, which contributed to the Spanish importation of slaves—first, Tainos and other natives from nearby islands, and then Muslim and non-Muslim Africans. Many of these slaves escaped into the Bahoruco as well. In this humid tropical landscape so similar to the land the Wolof had left behind, Muslims and indigenous Americans—Old World and New World enemies of Spanish Christians—gradually forged new political, social, cultural, and familial relationships.
From these mountainous outposts, Enriquillo regularly led his followers in raids on Spanish settlements—killing animals, seizing supplies and weapons, and sometimes liberating slaves. These diverse rebels were able to sustain themselves in the mountains because they knew how to grow and collect food, what to hunt, where to find fresh water, and how to remain undetected in the thickly forested Bahoruco. As one Spanish official in pursuit of them wrote, they “know the land, and so they mock the Spaniards.” While the maroons thrived, the Spanish complained that the terrain was so rough that “for each day a pair of sandals is needed.” The rebels survived on spiders, crayfish, snakes, and roots. “The island is large and full of cows, wild hogs and other staples,” wrote Melchor de Castro of some of the animals that proliferated on Hispaniola after 1492, “and so the blacks in revolt have security and food.”
The Bahoruco Mountains
Seizing the opportunity presented by the diversion of Spanish forces to Mexico beginning in 1517, Enriquillo and his men conducted their most daring operations in 1519. Raid after raid brought them weapons, recruits, and supplies. Although it is unlikely that they provided material support for the Wolof Rebellion two years later—and, as it lasted only three days, there was no time for Enriquillo to organize support for it—there is overwhelming evidence that, after the Wolof fled into the mountains, the Taino and the Muslims joined forces. Throughout the 1520s, the Spanish sought to eradicate these renegades. Accounts refer to the rebel guerrillas as both natives and African Muslims. In October 1523, for example, the governor of Hispaniola wrote to the Spanish Crown that he and his men had declared war on the “rebel Indians and Negros,” the latter here clearly referring to Wolof Muslims.
In addition to such textual evidence, recent archaeological finds indicate that Africans and natives shared a Bahoruco cave complex known as El Limona. These caves open in the rocky hillside like a series of gaping mouths. Inside, tight passageways and steep drop-offs lead into open spaces and lookout points. The identifiable skeletal remains found in the caves are those of African adult males. A number of other skeletons cannot be definitively identified, but there were indigenous Taino ceramics alongside them, suggesting strongly that these were natives living together with their African partners. El Limona seems to have been the upland rebel headquarters of the joint African Muslim–Taino resistance to the Spanish of Hispaniola.
The Wolof Rebellion of 1521 and Enriquillo’s insurgency in 1519 set the stage for several more Indian–African uprisings over the next two decades. In many of these—including in 1523, 1525, 1526, 1529, and 1533—Enriquillo led the charge.
THE CHRISTMAS DAY REVOLT in 1521 may have been sparked by some of the large number of Wolof slaves who had been transported to Hispaniola earlier that year—confirmation of the Muslim threat the Spanish had always dreaded. Changes in policy were implemented immediately. Thirteen days after the revolt, Spanish authorities instituted new laws making mutilation the punishment for a slave’s flight and deeming rebellion a capital crime. They further stipulated that slaves could not carry weapons and could leave their plantations only if accompanied by their master. These laws, meant to tighten the grip of the minority whites over blacks, would remain essentially the same over the course of the next few centuries in both South and North America—shaping, for example, laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act in the nineteenth-century United States. This is a further testament to the significance of the Wolof Rebellion as a watershed mo
ment in the history of the Americas—one that historians have mostly ignored.
From a slaveholder’s perspective, the Wolof were the most inapt choice for the role. Having come from a powerful empire in West Africa, they were politically sophisticated, resented Spanish domination, and spoke a language understood only among themselves. The Wolof who arrived in Hispaniola could read and write (in part because of their Muslim education); many were skilled warriors; and they were consummate traders. They were also master horsemen, having used the animals in warfare for centuries. Since horses in the Americas were novel weapons, knowledge of their use was a strategic asset. Furthermore, because the Wolof had traded with the Portuguese and then the Spanish for decades, they had a sense of how these European cultures functioned. Thus, being cosmopolitan, educated, and powerful, they were able to adjust better than most other slaves to their difficult circumstances in new places with new peoples.
For the Spanish, the absolute worst aspect of the Wolof was, of course, that they were Muslim. But, in desperate need of labor, they continued bringing Wolof slaves to Hispaniola, against their own best interests and despite numerous efforts to stop the importation. In 1532, Isabella of Portugal, the Queen Regent of Spain thanks to her marriage to Charles V, issued one of her many decrees outlawing the transport of Wolof to the Caribbean. In her words, they were “prideful, disobedient, rebellious and incorrigible” Muslims who killed Christians and corrupted “more pacific Africans from other lands.” This order, like the others, did little to curb the transport of Wolof slaves to the Americas.
