The Red Atlantic

THE RED ATLANTIC:

Native American Travelers and Transoceanic Exchanges

I want to thank Evelyn and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in America for the invitation to, in some sense, intrude upon your deliberations and share a little about my work on the Red Atlantic for comparison’s sake, I suppose. This could, in fact, create a fruitful space for dialogue.

One month ago, at the annual meeting of the AmericanAcademy of Religion in Atlanta, I participated in a panel entitled “Rethinking Indigeneity in the Age of Globalization.” Among the others asked to speak on that panel was Frank Brennan, a White Australian Jesuit priest and lawyer. Earlier in October, he had accompanied a delegation of Aborigines to the Vatican for the canonization of Mary MacKillop, the first Australian saint. While there, the Aborigines performed a ceremony at the grave of Francis Xavier Conaci, an Aboriginal boy who had left his home in Western Australia in January 1849 to be trained as a Benedictine monk. He died in Rome on September 17, 1853 at the age of thirteen. He was buried in front of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

Though Conaci was an indigene from a very different place and though he crossed a different ocean than the one of my primary interest, it seemed to me that his story was consonant with those I hope to tell in the Red Atlantic. Both Brennan’s and my presentations demonstrated that the au courant focus on globalization is misplaced and that the processes of globalization actually are rooted centuries earlier.

Three weeks ago, the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia hosted an international conference entitled “Exploring the Red Atlantic.” The call went out last spring, and the response was heartening. Though I knew the work of some of those who submitted abstracts, most I did not know. As we listened and dialogued over two days, we were all impressed with how many people were beginning to think along these lines, but they lacked a language—a framework—to bring it together. The Red Atlantic gave them the concept.

What I have been asked to do today is share something of my work and to tie it in, in some way, to the Pacific. I am happy to do both. The work you are doing is, I believe, very important. After all, as I wrote in the Summer 2002 issue of Yale-China Journal of American Studies, the collapse of the World Trade towers signaled the definitive end of the American Century and the rise of the Pacific Century.

Before, however, I talk about the Red Atlantic and its roots, I want to speak briefly about the deeper roots of my project personally.

Except for one errant great grandfather, my brother and I were the first generation in or family to graduate from college. Our mother and father both began college, but World War II intervened. My mother left to work in an aircraft plant. My father resigned from the United States Merchant Marine Academy to fight in the war in the Pacific theater. Despite this lack in formal education, there was always a strong current of autodidacticism in my family. On a shelf at home, I have my grandmother’s Berle’s Self-Culture, edited in 1920 by Adolf Berle—the father of that other Adolf Berle, the ten-volume set purported to be a self-contained college education. In our house, when I was a child, we had an ancient set of the Book of Knowledge. Even before I could read, I can remember spending hours pouring over its pictures—deep sea divers, birds, exotic landscapes and peoples, images of the Great War. I was impressed even then with the ability of books to transport a American Indian kid who had never been out of Oklahoma to anywhere on the face of the earth.

This is another of my prize possessions. It is a copy of the American Practical Navigator published by the United States Navy Department. It is usually simply called the Bowditch because the first edition in 1802 was authored by Nathaniel Bowditch. This is a copy of the 1938 edition, identical to the one my father used as a navigator during the war aboard ships that took him to far-flung Pacific destinations like Australia, New Guinea, Fiji, Korea, and Guadalcanal. One of its features is an appendix setting forth the maritime position (the longitude and latitude) of every port, lighthouse, and island in the world. Once I did learn to read, I also spent hours sitting on the floor, hunched over a world map and the Bowditch, locating tiny islands, the more obscure the better.

So while I coined the term “the Red Atlantic” only fairly recently, I feel in some sense as though I have been preparing for this project all my life.

In the early 1990s, of course, Paul Gilroy defined the “black Atlantic,” examining the diasporic peregrinations of Africans around the Atlantic basin. He looks at the cultural imbrications between Europe and its peoples, on the one hand, and the peoples they encountered as they sallied forth, on the other. He writes, “If this appears to be little more than a roundabout way of saying that the reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other, then so be it. This seems as though it ought to be an obvious and self-evident observation, but its stark character has been systematically obscured by commentators from all sides of political opinion.”

It is certainly true, as I have written before, that all of us, as scholars and as human beings, have our own particular blinders. It begs saying, however, that in the processes of colonization and empire, it was not only “Indians” who were slaughtered, Asians not the only ones indenturerd, and Africans not the only ones enslaved. In my article defining the Red Atlantic, forthcoming in January in American Indian Quarterly, I discussed Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Though Diallo would seem to be a paradigmatic case study for the black Atlantic, Gilroy does not mention him. He does reference Crispus Attucks “at the head of his ‘motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, mulattoes, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tars” at the Boston Massacre. Yet he fails to note that Attucks was Native, his mother a Wampanoag.

In 2001, historian David Armitage wrote:

Until quite recently, Atlantic history seemed to be available in any color, so long as

it was white. To be sure, this was the history of the North Atlantic rather than the

South Atlantic, of Anglo-America rather than Latin America, and of the connec-

tions between North America and Europe rather than those between both

Americas and Africa. The origins of this history of the white Atlantic have been

traced back to anti-isolationism in the United States during the Second World War

and to the internationalism of the immediate postwar years, when historians

constructed histories of “the Atlantic civilization” just as politicians were creating

the North Atlantic treaty Organization. The Atlantic Ocean was the Mediterranean

of western civilization defined as Euro-American and (for the first time, in the

same circles) as “Judeo-Christian.’ It was therefore racially, if not necessarily

ethnically homogenous. Such uniformity was the product of selectivity. Like

many genealogists, these early proponents of Atlantic history overlooked incoveni-

ent or uncongenial ancestors. Students of the black Atlantic, from W.E.B. Du Bois

to C.L.R. James and eric Williams, were not recognized as fellow practitioners of

the history of the Atlantic world, just as Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rebellion was not

an event in R.R. Palmer’s Age of Democratic Revolution….

The development of Armitage’s “white Atlantic” history thus parallels the Cold War origins of American Studies with its mission to define and promote “American culture” or “American civilization.” Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, published nearly fifty years later, served as a necessary corrective.

Armitage’s statement leads his review of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s important The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. In the piece, he refers to the “red Atlantic,” by which he means “red” as in radical. And though I had not read it when I coined the term, Kate Flint in passing uses the phrase a single time in her book Transatlantic Indians. She, however, does not define it and addsno context. I’ll return to both Flint’s usage and the blind spot of Atlantic world historians referred to by Armitage in a moment. Within Native American Studies, I am identified as a “nationalist.” Yet in this project, I take a cosmopolitan turn. I posit, define, and demonstrate the Red Atlantic.

Gilroy subtitles his monograph Modernity and Double Consciousness. It has long ago become a commonplace—albeit a much contested one—that the year 1492, with the Catholic Monarchs’ expulsion of the Moors (and subsequently Jews) from the Iberian Penninsula, the resultant rise of the nation-state, and Columbus’ first voyage, marks the beginning point of modernity. There is a reason, as some passionately argue to reject the term, that the Americas were called the “New World.” For those who came to the western hemisphere from Europe, it was, to borrow a Disney-musical expression, “a whole new world.” Today, 48% of the world’s table vegetables originated in this hemisphere and were cultivated and eaten by the indigenes of the Americas. Algonkian Indians had to show English colonists how to cultivate corn (one of those vegetables). Incans performed the same service with potatoes for Spanish conquistadors. And there were twenty-pound lobsters washing up on New England beaches as the Pilgrim’s starved until Indians showed them how to eat them. (But as I always tell my students, the Pilgrims contributed melted butter, so it was a fair cultural exchange.)

Beyond fruits and vegetables, or foodstuffs more generally, America’s peoples provided chocolate and tobacco, to which Europeans adapted themselves in great numbers. Looted American wealth fueled the development of a resource-depleted Europe and financed European wars and foreign adventures. Not only colonists but those who remained in the newly-minted “Old World” came to define themselves by comparison with, and in opposition to, the indigenous Other. While Natives were not part of a Triangle Trade, as were black Africans, and while they experienced nothing as horrific as the Middle Passage, they were nonetheless enslaved and shipped abroad in numbers that are startling to most. Many died in the process. And the Atlantic became a multi-lane two-way bridge that American indigenes traveled back and forth in surprising numbers.

In his book Indians in Unexpected Places, Phil Deloria discusses “expectations” and “anomalies.” Focusing on non-Native expectations at the turn of the twentieth century, he asks “how we might revisit the actions of Indian people that have been all too easily branded as anomalous…. I want to make a hard turn from anomaly to frequency and unexpectedness.” I appreciate Deloria’s interpretive maneuver. Atlantic world scholars and scholars of the black Atlantic tend to, in the words of historian Joshua Piker in his essay in progress “Lying Together: Imperial Implications of Cross-Cultural Untruths,” “absolutely exclude” Indians; far too few “effectively unite Atlantic and Indian history.” Perhaps this is why Flint does not attempt to follow up her vague, passingreference to a “red Atlantic.” Atlantic scholars do view Indians traveling the Atlantic as anomalous, a small fraction of Western Hemisphere Natives, as opposed to Europeans traveling to the New world or blacks of the Middle Passage. A kind of preciousness sets in: “Isn’t that cute; a few Indians did travel to Europe.”

Because of this exclusion-per-anomaly, I want to go further than Deloria and suggest that from the earliest moments of European/Native contact in the Americas, Indians, far from being marginal to the Atlantic experience, were, in fact, as central as Africans. Native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves traveled the Atlantic with regularity and became among the most basic defining components of Atlantic cultural exchange. The Red Atlantic is more than the movements of Indians peoples, as numerous as they were. It also includes the transfer of Native wealth (gold, silver), technology (terrace farming, the suspension bridge), commodities (foodstuffs, chocolate, tobacco), and so forth.

The title I agreed upon with Evelyn involves Native travelers. That suggests persons. Native persons traveled the Atlantic as captives, slaves, soldiers, sailors, diplomats, entertainers, tourists, even as explorers. I also promised her that I would also, out of deference to the proper subject of this convocation, at least touch upon the Pacific.

In the remainder of my time, I want to discuss briefly two individuals, both of whom open at least a small window upon the Pacific. The first of these is Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, a mixed-blood Quechua, born16e-century Peru.

Some have questioned how in any work called the Red Atlantic I could even mention Peru. One very helpful, if not careful, reader of my book proposal to UNC Press pointed out that Peru is on the Pacific not the Atlantic. Peru is included not because of its geographic location but because it sent both materiel (gold, silver, mercury, potatoes) and people (like Garcilaso) across the Atlantic. Peru became the Spain’s “treasure house,” and the saying “vale un Peru” (it’s worth a Peru) entered its language as an expression of opulence.

Garcilaso was bornGómez Suárez de Figueroa in Cusco on April 12, 1539, the illegitimate son of Don Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas, a conquistador, and his Incan princess concubine, Chimpa Ocllo. Chimpa was the daughter of Auqui Huallpa Túpac, the puppet Inca appointed by Pizarro. She was the granddaughter of Túpac Inca Yupanqui who ruled from 1471 to 1493. According to Inca legend, Yupanqui led a voyage of exploration into the Pacific circa 1490. Pedro Sarmiento in his 1572 History of the Incas writes:

[T]here arrived at Tumbez some merchants who had come by sea from the west,

navigating in balsas with sails. They gave information of the land whence they

came, which consisted of some islands called Avachumbi [OuterIsland] and

Ninachumbi [Fire Island], where there were many people and much gold. Tupac

Inca was a man of lofty and ambitious ideas, and was not satisfied with the regions

he had already conquered. So he determined to challenge a happy fortune, and see

if it would favour him by sea….

The Inca, having this certainty, determined to go there. He caused an immense

number of balsas to be constructed, in which he embarked more than 20,000

chosen men….

Tupac Inca navigated and sailed on until he discovered the [aforementioned]

islands, and returned, bringing back with him black people, gold, a chair of

brass, and a skin and jawbone of a horse. These trophies were preserved in the

fortress of Cuzco until the Spaniards came. The duration of this expedition under-

taken by Tupac Inca was nine months, others say a year, and, as he was so long

absent, everyone believed he was dead.

The referenced islands are commonly identified as the Galápagos.

Garcilaso grew up speaking both Spanish and Quecha in a household dominated by his mother and her Incan relatives. Talented and intelligent, he depicts his Latin teacher, the Canon of Cuzco, “as yearning to see a dozen of these young Peruvians exposed to the academic wonders of Salamanca.” But his desire to visit Spain would have to await his father’s death. Using his inheritance, he left for Europe in 1560. Some sources suggest that the idea was that of Philip II, “who was beginning to fear the rising influence of this young mestizo among the Children of the Sun.”

In Spain, Garcilaso secures an audience with Philip and the Council of the Indies. His purpose is to present a petition, asking for additional compensation for his father’s service to the Empire. The sight of a dark-skinned mestizo created a spectacle in the Court, and the Council of the Indies received his petition with sympathy. It, however, languished, and after several years was denied. He came to the attention of Bartolme de Las Casas, but when the latter found out that he was from Peru rather than Mexico or Guatemala, the Benedictine lost any interest in him. To support himself, he joined the army. In the Morisco Revolt (1568-1571), he commanded troops in Andalucia, fighting Moors as had his father’s ancestors. After his discharge, he remained bitter, claiming “that because of the old reproach against his father [concerning his father’s ultimate loyalties] he was unable to obtain satisfactory recognition for his own military service and as a result left the army so naked and impoverished that he dared not appear again at Court.”

Retiring to Cordoba, he turned to writing. He produced two important texts: La Florida del Ynca, an account of Hernando de Soto’s expedition, the “Inca” of the title being Garcilaso himself; and Comentarios Reales, a general history of Peru and the Incas. He also produced a family history, Relación de la Descendencia de Garci Pérez de Vargas. He died in Cordoba in 1616 and was interred in the cathedral, the former grand mosque.