The Protestant Pilgrim, The Catholic Inquisitor, And The Muslim Pirate

An excerpt from, “America Wasn’t Founded on Slavery in 1619 — but on Pilgrims’ Ideals Written in 1620″ By Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars, November 17, 2020:

In August 1619, a pirate ship, the White Lion, stopped at Jamestown and traded 20-some captive Africans for food. The Africans were treated as indentured servants and soon released.

Fifteen months later, in November 1620, an English ship blown off course on its way to Virginia ended up off the barren coast of Massachusetts. It landed more than 100 men, women and children. Those voyagers founded Plymouth Colony.

Which event mattered more?

Last year, the New York Times declared that the arrival of the captives in Virginia was the “true beginning” of America — an America that the Times characterized as a “slavocracy.” The Times calls its campaign to promote this story The 1619 Project. In my new book, “1620,” I argue that the arrival of the Pilgrims along with dozens of non-Pilgrims (“strangers” as the Pilgrims called them) aboard the Mayflower is the real beginning of America.

As every schoolchild learns, Columbus set sail with India on his mind’s horizon. Rarely, though, do schoolchildren learn why Columbus sought to cross the Atlantic. Hoping for an alliance with the Grand Khan of the East, he aimed to retake Jerusalem and destroy Islam; more prosaically, his voyages promised an end run around the trade monopolies of the Ottomans and the Mamluks. And when Columbus arrived in the Americas, fresh from the battle which marked Spain’s final defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, he saw—or, more accurately, imagined—Muslims everywhere. Spanish conquistadors would claim to see mosques in Mexico, American Indians wearing “Moorish” clothing and performing “Moorish” dances, Turks invading New Spain from the Pacific, and West African slaves attempting to convert America’s indigenous peoples to Islam. Filtering their experiences in the Americas through the lens of their wars with Muslims, Europeans in the New World engaged in a new version of their very old Crusades, a new kind of Catholic jihad. Long after the many Matamoros—Moor-slayers—who sailed to the Americas aboard Columbus’s ships were dead themselves, Islam would continue to forge the histories of both Europe and the New World and the relationship between the two.

On either side of the unambiguous watershed represented by the year 1492, Islam endured as Europe’s primary obsession, its perennial rival and major cultural “other”—a spur of innovative historical change as well as an enemy on the battlefield. Throughout the 17th century and into the 18th, Europe remained far more concerned about the Ottomans and Islam than about the lands across the Atlantic. Remarkable, in fact, is the apparent lack of interest in the Americas among most Europeans. Spain’s Charles V, for example—the leader most responsible for his empire’s enormous expansion in the New World—uttered not a word about the Americas in his memoirs. What obsessed him were the Ottoman advances in Europe and his fears about the growing weakness of Christianity vis-à-vis Islam. 16th-century France produced twice as many books about Islam as it did about the Americas and Africa combined. Overall, between 1480 and 1609, Europe published four times more works about the Muslim world than about the Americas. This disparity only increased over the course of the 17th century.

. . .In the 17th century, many of the thousands of English Protestants who crossed the ocean would cite two evils as the reasons for their flight: the injustices and discrimination of their Catholic coreligionists and the scourge of the Muslim Ottomans. In 1621, for instance, Robert Cushman, a passenger on the Mayflower, wrote of the promise of America as a refuge from an Old World then in the grip of the Protestant–Catholic Thirty Years’ War: “If it should please God to punish his people in the Christian countries of Europe, for their coldness, carnality, wanton abuse of the Gospel, contention, &c., either by Turkish slavery, or by popish tyranny, (which God forbid) . . . here is a way opened for such as have wings to fly into this wilderness.” As Luther had done at the very start of the Protestant Reformation, Cushman here speaks simultaneously of two enemies: pope and sultan. Persecuted by papal tiara and sultanic turban, he saw America as his salvation from both.

Slow though the progress of these fledgling colonies was, when juxtaposed with their ongoing skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire and Barbary pirates in North Africa, the English experience in North America was, by the end of the 17th century, beginning to look like a resounding success.

In the course of that century, North Africa remained the primary locale of England’s overseas operations. With its storied riches of gold, slaves, and spices, North Africa attracted more English adventurers in the 17th century than North America did. Some of these adventurers succeeded in earning handsome profits, but many more succumbed to the entrenched power of North Africa’s numerous independent sovereigns and pirate captains. Barbary pirates regularly captured English ships in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic (many of them sailing to and from the Americas) and enslaved those on board. Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, there were more enslaved Englishmen in North Africa than free ones in North America. “Conquerors in Virginia, they were slaves in Algiers,” as the scholar Nabil Matar nicely summarizes.

In 1699, the infamous Puritan minister Cotton Mather bemoaned the fate of those prospective New England settlers taken into North African slavery. “God hath given up several of our Sons, into the Hands of the Fierce Monsters of Africa. Mahometan Turks and Moors, and Devils are at this day oppressing many of our Sons, with a Slavery, wherein they Wish for Death, and cannot find it.” Mather—a slaveholder himself—thus drew a direct line between the English colonial project he represented in America and the Muslims of the Mediterranean. At the same time that he attacked North African slavery, he expressed no qualms about—and, in fact, encouraged—the American and English enslavement of African Muslims and non-Muslims. Moreover, Mather believed it was the duty of all Christians to contribute to the annihilation of the Ottoman Empire, in order to precipitate the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel in Palestine, a vital prerequisite for the second coming of Christ.