Indigenous Slavers in North America

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 172-177:

NATIVE AMERICANS WERE involved in the slaving enterprise from the beginning of European colonization. At first they offered captives to the newcomers and helped them develop new networks of enslavement, serving as guides, guards, intermediaries, and local providers. But with the passage of time, as Indians acquired European weapons and horses, they increased their power and came to control an ever larger share of the traffic in slaves.

Their rising influence was evident throughout North America. In the Carolinas, for instance, English colonists took tens of thousands of Indian slaves and shipped many of them to the Caribbean. In the period between 1670 and 1720, Carolinians exported more Indians out of Charleston, South Carolina, than they imported Africans into it. As this traffic developed, the colonists increasingly procured their indigenous captives from the Westo Indians, an extraordinarily expansive group that conducted raids all over the region. Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge has coined the term “militaristic slaving societies” to refer to groups like the Westos that became major suppliers of Native captives to Europeans and other Indians. The French in eastern Canada had a similar experience. They procured thousands of Indian slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as they moved away from Quebec and Montreal and into the Great Lakes region and upper Mississippi basin, they encountered a world of bondage they could scarcely comprehend, let alone control. Indians preyed on one another to get captives whom they offered to the French in exchange for guns and ammunition and to forge alliances. Throughout North America, Natives adapted to the sprawling slave trade and sought ways to profit from it.

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The most dramatic instances of Indian reinvention occurred in what is now the American Southwest. Multiple factors propelled Indians of this region to become prominent traffickers. The royal antislavery activism of the Spanish crown and the legal prohibitions against Indian slavery dissuaded some Spanish slavers of northern Mexico, leaving a void that others filled. Moreover, the Indian rebellions of the seventeenth century that culminated in the Great Northern Rebellion [of the 1680s and 1690s] restricted the flow of Indian slaves from some regions and led to the opening of new slaving grounds, creating new opportunities. Most important, the diffusion of horses and firearms accelerated at this time, giving some Indians the means to enslave other people. Thus new traffickers, new victims, and new slaving routes emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some Native communities experienced a process of “deterritorialization,” as Cecilia Sheridan has called it, becoming unmoored from their traditional homelands, fusing with other groups, and reinventing themselves as mobile bands capable of operating over vast distances. They made a living by trading the spoils of war, including horses and captives.

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Comanche captive taking introduced Apaches from the east, Navajos from the west, and Pawnees from the north into New Mexico. The Comanches’ radius of action was astonishing. In 1731 a New Mexican friar asked one of the Comanches’ captives to which nation he belonged and how far it was to his country of origin. The slave responded that he was a “Ponna” (quite possibly a Pawnee, whose traditional homeland was along the North Platte and Loup Rivers in present-day Nebraska). The Indian also said that he had traveled with his captors for “one hundred suns,” moving at a rate of about ten leagues (thirty miles) for each one. The friar estimated that in the course of a year, Comanches might travel “more than one thousand leagues [three thousand miles] from New Mexico,” a distance that may have been entirely possible, considering that Pawnee country was eight hundred miles away from northern New Mexico and that the Comanches traveled to and from these lands, making various detours along the way.

The Comanches sold their first slaves in New Mexico sometime in the first decade of the eighteenth century. By the 1720s, they had become well-established traders. And by the 1760s, they were acknowledged as the preeminent suppliers of captives in the region.

Miners in Latin America, 1573-1820s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 123-124:

Beyond northern Mexico, coerced Indian labor played a fundamental role in the mining economies of Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, the Andean region, and Brazil. Yet the specific arrangements varied from place to place. Unlike Mexico’s silver economy, scattered in multiple mining centers, the enormous mine of Potosí dwarfed all others in the Andes. To satisfy the labor needs of this “mountain of silver,” Spanish authorities instituted a gargantuan system of draft labor known as the mita, which required that more than two hundred Indian communities spanning a large area in modern-day Peru and Bolivia send one-seventh of their adult population to work in the mines of Potosí, Huancavelica, and Cailloma. In any given year, ten thousand Indians or more had to take their turns working in the mines. This state-directed system began in 1573 and remained in operation for 250 years. Other mines of Latin America, such as the gold and diamond fields of Brazil and the emerald mines of Colombia, depended more on itinerant prospectors and private forms of labor. But even though the degree of state involvement and the scale of these operations varied from place to place, they all relied on labor arrangements that ran the gamut from clear slave labor (African, Indian, and occasionally Asian); to semi-coercive institutions and practices such as encomiendas, repartimientos, debt peonage, and the mita; to salaried work. Mines all across the hemisphere thus propelled the other slavery.

Rescinding Emancipation in Manila

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The backlash against the campaign to free the Indians was strongest in the Philippines. The royal order of June 12, 1679, specifying that “no native could be held as a slave under any circumstance” and that “all Indians enslaved up to now are hereby set free as well as their children and descendants” caused a great deal of turmoil in Manila. As in Chile, the first recourse in the Philippines was to stall using the traditional formula: “This cédula [royal order] is of the kind that must be obeyed but not complied with,” observed the members of the Audiencia of Manila, “and we must write back to the Prince so that better informed he could send us his orders.” Their displeasure was patent. “When royal orders are so far apart from the natural law, they cannot be executed,” wrote an irate audiencia member to Charles II, “and with all due respect, even less so when that natural law is for the benefit of those who have been vanquished in war, for the victors would have a right to take their lives but only choose to take away their liberty.”

Yet even in the distant Philippines, there were some courageous crusaders. While waiting for the king’s reply, the audiencia’s attorney prodded his reluctant colleagues to make public the emancipation decree. The immediate result was a flood of requests: “So many were the slaves who crowded around this Royal Audiencia to claim their liberty that we could not process the multitude of their papers, even when being extracted in brief and summarily.” Many slaves around the capital abandoned their masters, who were left “without service,” as the archbishop of Manila, Felipe Pardo, observed.

It was in the provinces that the situation became truly critical. Native Filipinos faced total ruin, as they had most of their wealth invested in their slaves. Moreover, the slaves supplied much of the rice and other basic foodstuffs of the islands, and now “agitated and encouraged by the recent laws setting them free [they] went to the extremity of refusing to plant the fields.” The greatest threat of all was that “by setting these slaves free, the provinces remote from Manila may be stirred up and revolt, such as those in the Visayas and Nueva Segovia; and in the island of Mindanao, the malcontent Caragas and Subanos might well join forces with the Muslim insurgents there.”

In Chile the governor had taken the lead in opposing the Spanish campaign, but in the Philippines all branches of the imperial administration, including the governor, the members of the audiencia, the city council of Manila, members of the military, and the ecclesiastical establishment beginning with the archbishop, sent letters to Charles II requesting the suspension of the emancipation decree. Among the petitioners were Native Filipinos, for whom slavery had been a way of life since time immemorial. “When a principal native walks around town or visits a temple,” observed a Spanish chronicler, “it is with great pomp and accompanied by male and female slaves carrying silk parasols to protect their masters from the sun or rain, and the señoras go first followed by their servants and slaves, and then come their husbands or father or brothers with their own servants and slaves.” The emancipation decree came as a great annoyance to these Native slave owners. Those of Pampanga, a province on the northern shore of Manila Bay, in central Luzon, resolutely opposed the liberation of their slaves, whom they regarded as “the principal nerve and backbone of our strength.” They wrote a long letter to the king of Spain explaining how the Spanish galleons were built in the nearby shipyards of Cavite with teak and mahogany supplied in part by slaves: “And while our women together with our slaves plant the seeds, we men are up in the hills cutting wood for the royal yards.” By emancipating the slaves of Pampanga, the empire stood to lose its ships.

In the end, the Audiencia of Manila rescinded the king’s emancipation decree on September 7, 1682, and replaced it with a new decree: all previously liberated slaves had to return to their duties within fifteen days upon penalty of one hundred lashes and one year in the galleys (forced service as a rower aboard a galley, or ship). Charles II continued to press his case for liberation, but ending formal slavery in the Philippines proved very difficult.

In 1674, the Governor of Chile similarly resisted emancipation (p. 143):

The tenor of the governor’s letter was defiant, but it was consistent with a medieval legal tradition that can be summed up in the curious dictum “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but do not comply). In a vast empire such as Spain’s, royal officials used this response to show both their respect for royal authority and the inapplicability of a decree or order to a particular kingdom.

Gold Rush vs. Silver Marathon

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 102-103:

THE CALIFORNIA GOLD rush transformed the western United States. Within one decade of James W. Marshall’s discovery of a few flecks of gold in a ditch in 1848, some three hundred thousand migrants had moved to California. These Chinese, Italian, German, Chilean, and other newcomers turned the remote and picturesque Mexican outpost of San Francisco into a bustling port. They also fanned out into the Sierra Nevada to build cabins, divert rivers, and pan for the yellow metal. This is a familiar story of long journeys, ethnic conflict, broken dreams, and explosive growth.

Yet the California gold rush was neither the largest metal-induced rush of North America nor the most transformative. By any measure, that title belongs to the earlier Mexican silver boom. In terms of duration, for instance, the California gold rush was like a hurricane. Gold production skyrocketed in 1849 but peaked as early as 1852, only four years after the start of the rush, and declined markedly thereafter. For all practical purposes, the rush was over by 1865, lasting less than twenty years. The use of pressurized water to wash down entire hillsides—a process known as hydraulic mining—kept gold production from declining even faster than it did. By contrast, Mexico’s silver boom started in the 1520s and grew through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reaching a plateau at the end of this period. Remarkably, it gained a second wind in the late seventeenth century and kept increasing during the eighteenth century, not attaining its high-water mark until the first decade of the nineteenth century—almost three centuries after the boom had begun. By then silver was the principal way in which empires and nations around the world stored their wealth, and the Spanish peso had emerged as the first global currency, used throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, where it was often countersigned (authenticated by the treasury or other monetary authorities) and employed in everyday transactions. It remained legal tender in the United States until 1856.

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Not only did the Mexican silver boom last longer than the California gold rush, but it was more extensive. The gold rush was confined largely to the northeastern quadrant of the state, with a few additional mines sprinkled along its border with Oregon and in southern California. Prior to the gold rush, there had been small strikes in the southern Appalachians (North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia), and after the California discoveries, new goldfields emerged in some of the Rocky Mountain territories. Mexico’s centuries-long silver boom surpassed these gold strikes in both geographic scope and sheer density. Historians usually refer to the mines of northern Mexico, but in truth the silver boom started in southern and central Mexico. Present-day tourists driving from Mexico City to Acapulco still stop at Taxco (1534), a silver town that Hernán Cortés himself developed. Taxco was part of a cluster of mines in southern Mexico that included Sultepec (1530), Amatepec (1531), Zacualpan (circa 1540), Zumpango (1531), and others. Only gradually did prospectors venture north into the lands of the Chichimecs, along the Pacific coast and up into the escarpments of the Sierra Madre Occidental. They had to bring in Indians from central Mexico as workers and overcome other tremendous logistical problems, but they succeeded in establishing a string of mines throughout western Mexico. After this initial push, prospectors crossed the Sierra Madre, proceeding on to the central plateau, where they founded some of the richest mines in the world, including Zacatecas (1546) and Guanajuato (1548). But even these mines were not sufficient. Spaniards next explored the present-day states of Durango and Chihuahua, as well as parts of northeastern Mexico. Altogether, they founded more than 400 mines (143 in the sixteenth century, 65 in the seventeenth century, and 225 in the eighteenth century) scattered throughout much of Mexico, from the semitropical regions of the south to the deserts of Chihuahua, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast.

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Given its longer duration and more extensive geography, it is no wonder that Mexico’s silver boom produced roughly twelve times as much metal as the nineteenth-century gold rushes in the United States—44.2 million kilograms (48,722 tons) of silver compared with 3.7 million kilograms (4,078 tons) of gold (see appendix 4). This massive production is even more impressive considering the work and danger involved. The gold of California lay in placers, or surface deposits of sand and gravel, which had resulted from mountains eroding and yielding nuggets or flecks of gold, which collected at lower elevations along hillsides and in streams. Mining these bits of precious metal required a great deal of superficial digging, carrying, and washing. As we saw earlier in the Caribbean, that could be very hard work, but it was not nearly as daunting or dangerous as mining silver. Instead of lying in open-air deposits, the silver had to be extracted from deep underground. The main shaft in the mines of San Luis Potosí was 250 yards long, and that in the Valenciana mine in Guanajuato plunged 635 yards down. When this shaft was completed around 1810, it was considered the deepest man-made shaft in the world. Digging to such depths required an untold amount of work, and yet this was only the beginning of a long, involved process that required bringing the ore to the surface (frequently on the backs of humans), crushing the rocks into a fine powder, and mixing that powder with toxic substances such as lead and mercury.

If the silver boom had occurred in the nineteenth century, Mexico would have become a worldwide magnet, like California. In an era of newspapers, steamboats, and widespread transoceanic travel, there is little doubt that the great Mexican silver mines would have lured immigrants from all quarters of the globe. But because the boom predated these communication and transportation conveniences and unfolded at a time when the Spanish monarchy prohibited all foreigners from going to the silver districts, Mexico had to make do with its own human resources. Whereas California attracted three hundred thousand people, colonial Mexico had to satisfy a hugely greater labor demand with no access to volunteers from the rest of the world.

Redefining New World Slavery, 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 74-75:

In spite of the crown’s insistence, New World liberations were few and extremely difficult to accomplish. The specific application of the New Laws in the various colonies differed, but the results were much the same. In Venezuela, for example, the laws, and specifically the prohibition against Indian slavery, were made public but not enforced. Slave raids continued in Cubagua and Margarita even though royal officials were well aware that such activities were strictly forbidden. Colonists in Venezuela generally refused to give up their Indian slaves and insisted that the brand on a slave’s face was sufficient title and reason to keep him or her in bondage. They also retained the service of a class of Indians known as naborías, who were indigenous servants attached to them for life. The only difference between naborías and outright slaves was that naborías could not be legally bought and sold.

In contrast, in Central America an uncompromising and vigorous royal official named Alonso López de Cerrato embarked on blanket liberations of Indian slaves. Next to Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cerrato ranks as the most ardent champion of Indian liberty of the sixteenth century. As president of the Audiencia of Central America, Judge Cerrato prosecuted slave takers, criticized officials who “preferred to make friends with the colonists rather than applying the New Laws,” and refused to make invidious distinctions among Indians to justify the enslavement of some of them, as happened in Mexico. Cerrato’s vigorous reforms ended formal Indian slavery in Central America, restricted the use of naborías, and regulated the use of Indians as tamemes, or load bearers. But even these victories proved temporary. Cerrato acquired a reputation of being an overzealous crown official and died in 1555 largely repudiated by his fellow colonists. After his passing, subsequent officials reversed some of his policies. The naborías returned, Indian load bearers proliferated, and many Indians, though technically free, were compelled to render “personal services” to the Spanish colonists under various guises.

All over Spanish America, Indian slave owners and colonial authorities devised subtle changes in terminology and newfangled labor institutions to comply with the law in form but not in substance. Frontier captains no longer took “Indian slaves,” but only “rebels” or “criminals” who were formally tried and convicted; forced to serve out sentences of five, ten, or twenty years; and sold to the highest bidder. Colonists in Venezuela and the Caribbean resorted to naborías, while those in Central America continued to receive “personal services” throughout the sixteenth century. Ranchers in northern Mexico relied on encomiendas that, unlike those of central Mexico, often amounted to cyclical enslavement as they gathered their “entrusted” Indians at gunpoint and forced them to work during planting and harvesting time. Miners in many parts of the New World relied on the repartimiento system, in which Indians received token salaries but were otherwise compelled to work. In short, Spaniards adapted Indian slavery to fit the new legal environment, and thus it became the other slavery.

Indian Slaves in Spain, 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 48-51:

To understand how the law shaped the lives of Indian slaves, we need to begin in Spain. During the first half of the sixteenth century, upwards of 2,500 Natives were shipped to the Iberian Peninsula and spent years there toiling in obscurity. Locked up in houses and shops in various towns and cities in southern and western Spain, they would have died without leaving a trace had it not been for the New Laws of 1542, which specifically required all Spaniards already in possession of Indians to show their legitimate titles of ownership and if they did not have them, to liberate their slaves at once. By all accounts, the Spanish king Charles I was very serious about enforcing this provision. Immediately after the promulgation of the code, he directed royal officials to make inquiries and look for Natives held in bondage improperly.

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Who were these Indians? They hailed from the areas colonized by Spain, first Española and the other Caribbean islands, then coastal Mexico, Florida, and Venezuela, as well as elsewhere. The most striking observation about them is that a majority were women and children. When we think of the Middle Passage, we immediately imagine adult African males. This image is based on fact. Of all the Africans carried to North America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, males outnumbered females by a ratio approaching two to one, and they were overwhelmingly adults. The “reverse Middle Passage,” from America to Spain, was just the opposite: the slave traffic consisted mostly of children, with a good contingent of women and a mere sprinkling of men. The main reason was that Indians going to Europe were intended for work in homes, not on plantations, and European heads of household largely regarded children and women as better suited than men for domestic service. Children were more adaptable than adults, learned new languages quickly, and they could be trained and molded with greater ease. Women were less threatening than men and could be sexually exploited. These preferences had enduring demographic consequences. Most slaves held in Italian and Spanish households in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries—whether Slavs, Tartars, Greeks, Russians, or Africans—were women. Females comprised an astonishing eighty percent or more of the slaves living in Genoa and Venice, the two leading slave-owning cities in Italy. The situation was similar in the Iberian Peninsula. Contrary to what one might expect, women accounted for a majority of the African slaves in cities such as Granada and Lisbon.

Thus it is no wonder that Europeans would also demand women and children from the New World. Slave prices in the Caribbean already implied such preferences. Women were easily the most expensive of all Indian slaves. On average, adult Native women in Santo Domingo or Havana cost sixty percent more than adult males. Girls were next, followed by boys in the middle of the price range, then full-grown men, who were considerably cheaper (see appendix 3). It is difficult to know exactly what determined these prices. One possibility is that the supply of women and minors was less abundant due to restrictions on their capture and enslavement. But the most likely explanation is simply that the demand for women and children was much greater. Indeed, scattered price information indicates that the premium for Indian women and children spanned the entire hemisphere, from southern Chile to northern Mexico, and endured from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.

Indian women and children were carried to Europe primarily because customers wanted them. Additionally, the well-intentioned but ultimately deleterious royal policies regarding Indian slavery played a role. As we have seen, the Spanish crown originally prohibited Indian slavery except in a handful of cases (cannibalism, ransomed Indians, and slaves obtained in “just wars”) but closed those loopholes in 1542 with the passage of the New Laws. As a result, Spaniards who wished to transport Indians to Europe had to demonstrate that they were taking legitimate slaves—branded and bearing the appropriate documentation from the time when slavery was legal—or were accompanied by “willing” Native travelers. Faced with these circumstances, traffickers went to great lengths to procure “willing” Indians, particularly children, who were more easily tricked and manipulated than adults. Years later, when these Indians appeared in court and recounted their lives, they often began with how they had been taken to Spain by “deception” and “trickery” when they were twelve or thirteen years old. Some enslaved children may have been even younger. Since Native children did not come with birth certificates, traffickers determined age by height, by the presence of pubic hair, and, undoubtedly, by the need to comply with regulations that prohibited the enslavement of children below age twelve.

Caribbean Slave Traffickers, early 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 42-45:

Slave traffickers prowled the Caribbean in the 1510s and 1520s, greatly expanding Europeans’ geographic knowledge. Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida—often depicted as a deluded explorer bent on finding the Fountain of Youth—was in fact deeply involved in the early Caribbean slave trade, sponsoring slaving voyages to the Bahamas and opening Florida to the trade. In fact, the royal patent confirming Ponce de León’s discovery of the “island” of Florida allowed him to “wage war and seize disobedient Indians and carry them away for slaves.” Similarly, the Spaniard who first laid claim to the coast of South Carolina, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a man of “great learning and gravity” deferentially addressed as el licenciado, was a prime mover in the slave trade. (The term licenciado refers to someone who holds a university degree, usually a lawyer.) We often think of these men simply as “discoverers,” when in reality considerable overlap existed between discoverers and slavers.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the dispersion of Natives across the Caribbean greatly facilitated the task of capturing and transporting them. Villagers living in small communities on self-contained and exposed islands had little chance to hide from the intruders or to repel unexpected attacks. Slave raiders formed compact groups of around fifty or sixty men. They arrived quietly on their ships; waited until nighttime, “when the Indians were secure in their mats”; and descended on the Natives, setting their thatched huts on fire, killing anyone who resisted, and capturing all others irrespective of age or gender. Once the initial ambush was over, the slavers often had to pursue the Indians who had escaped, unleashing their mastiffs or running the Natives down with their horses. If there were many captives, the slavers took the trouble of building temporary holding pens by the beach, close to where their ships were moored, while horsemen combed the island. The attackers literally carried off entire populations, leaving empty islands in their wake.

The Indians were then loaded on the ships, packed into the space belowdecks. The scene in the hold of a slaving ship was infernal. Lack of air, poor provisioning, and the relentless tropical heat magnified the slaves’ suffering to the highest degree. “The Indians could not move,” wrote a young man from Milan named Girolamo Benzoní, “and there they lay like animals amid their vomits and feces. When the sea was calm and the ship could not move, sometimes there was no water for these poor people. Broken down by the heat, the bad smell, and the discomforts, they died miserably down there.” Unlike the Middle Passage, which required a month of travel, slaving voyages in the Caribbean lasted only a few days. Yet the mortality rates of these short passages surpassed those of transatlantic voyages. Friar Las Casas reported that “it was never the case that a ship carrying three or four hundred people did not have to throw overboard one hundred or one hundred and fifty bodies out of lack of food and water”—making for a mortality rate of twenty-five to fifty percent. Although it is tempting to disregard this claim as another of Las Casas’s exaggerations, sources confirm his mortality estimates. Vázquez de Ayllón’s slaving expeditions were among the most notorious for their poor provisioning and very high mortality rates, which cut deeply into his profits and caused untold human suffering and senseless death.

Spanish slavers did not win every time. In particular, the Natives of the Lesser Antilles were able to fend off raids and occasionally even go on the offensive, surprising lonely ships and Spanish strongholds. In 1513 about one thousand Caribs attacked the Spanish settlements of Puerto Rico, killing many colonists. Ponce de León blundered when he led a retaliatory slaving raid on the island of Guadalupe in 1515, which ended in total disaster: twenty Spaniards were wounded, and five died. The Indians found themselves at a tremendous technological disadvantage. Indian arrowheads made of fish bones could not penetrate the chain mail armor of the Spaniards, and Indian canoes, though they could easily outmaneuver a caravel, had no chance in a long-distance chase. Nevertheless, the Natives were occasionally able to prevail against the Europeans.

In general, however, small crews of European slavers operating from dilapidated ships proved tremendously effective in subduing and capturing Indians across the Caribbean. Slaving licenses issued by crown authorities reveal just how responsive these crews were to market opportunities. The number of licenses grew steadily from 1514 through 1517, the years when the Taínos of Española were no longer available in sufficient numbers to satisfy the Spaniards’ demand for gold. There was a sudden drop in licenses in 1518, followed by an extraordinary spike in 1519. It is not difficult to explain these changes. A smallpox epidemic ravaged the Caribbean archipelago in 1518, curtailing the traffickers’ activities. The following year, slavers worked harder than ever before to replenish the dead or dying Indian workforce of the large Caribbean islands, launching more slaving raids than in all the previous years combined and spreading desolation and death to the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, and parts of the mainland (see appendix 2). We can only imagine the grim circumstances of the Caribbean islanders who had to endure the alarming epidemic that took the lives of family members and neighbors, causing widespread dislocation and famine and tremendous hardship. And just when the worst seemed to be subsiding, Indian slavers appeared on the horizon, ready to stuff them into the holds of their ships and take them to the goldfields of Española or the pearl banks off the coast of Venezuela. The Bahamas became almost entirely depopulated. Las Casas estimated the number of Lucayos captured at forty thousand, while a slave trafficker put the figure at “only” fifteen thousand. Regardless of the actual number, no Lucayo communities remained in the Bahamas except as bands of refugees. By 1520 armadores like Vázquez de Ayllón were forced to bypass the Bahamian archipelago altogether and venture on to Florida and beyond to find human prey.

Caribbean Gold Rush, c. 1500

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 32-34:

Spanish miners and prospectors flocked to the streams, savannas, and mountains of Cibao. Although flecks of gold could be found all over the region, only certain areas contained enough gold to make extraction profitable. An early colonist, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, tried his hand at gold panning and left the most detailed portrayal of these activities.

Each Spaniard arrived with his cuadrilla, or team of Indians. In most cases, the “miner” was merely a colonist with no knowledge of metals or mining techniques. Once he settled on a place—probably chosen after a mixture of hearsay, intuition, and preliminary digging and sampling—he had his Indians clear a square trench of about eight by eight feet. Sandy beaches along the rivers were ideal, but many alluvial placers were in wooded areas, known as arcabucos, or along hillsides that required the removal of large rocks and trees. Once the Indians completed this preparatory work, they dug the cleared area to a depth of about twice the length of a worker’s palm setting aside the removed sand and earth. They dug with simple tools, even with sticks and their bare hands in the early years. This was strenuous labor, but easier than the next step.

The same “digging” Indians or other members of the cuadrilla transported the piles of dirt to the nearest stream. An average-size trench produced more than six thousand pounds of dirt mixed with the tiniest fragments of gold. The Indians carried this dirt on their bare backs, in loads weighing three to four arrobas, about sixty to ninety pounds. These were very heavy burdens considering the slender build of most of the bearers. The work proceeded ceaselessly all day. Instead of using valuable beasts of burden, the Spaniards compelled Natives to do all the hauling; horses and mules were devoted to the tasks of conquest and pacification. The Indians were even forced to carry their Christian masters in hammocks. As a result, they developed “huge sores on their shoulders and backs as happens with animals made to carry excessive loads,” commented Friar Las Casas, who arrived in Española right at the time of the gold rush, “and this is not to mention the floggings, beatings, thrashings, punches, curses, and countless other vexations and cruelties to which they were routinely subjected and to which no chronicle could ever do justice.”

By the water, a third group of “washing” Indians—usually women, because this work was less physical—received the cargo. Standing in the stream with the water up to her knees, each woman held a large wooden pan called a batea. “She grabs the batea by its two handles,” wrote Oviedo, “and moves it from one side to the other with great skill and art, allowing just enough water to rush in as the earth dissolves and the sand is washed away.” With some luck, after sifting thousands of pounds of earth, the woman would find “whatever God wishes to give in a day”—a few grains of gold—in the bottom of the batea.

Each cuadrilla consisted of at most a few dozen laborers. The smallest had only five: two diggers, two carriers, and one washer. Yet put together, all these teams made Cibao a veritable anthill. In promising areas, the competition was fierce. When a miner struck gold, others immediately flocked there. To prevent rivals from setting up next to him, he would “invite someone whom he wishes to help and chooses as a neighbor” to move in first. Even though Columbus and his family attempted to limit the number of Spaniards going to the gold region, the number of cuadrillas grew steadily in the late 1490s and early 1500s. During the first decade of the sixteenth century, the heyday of gold production in Española, the island may have yielded around two thousand pounds of gold per year. It is possible to imagine an enormous ingot of that weight, but it is much harder to comprehend the madness of some of the Spanish owners—one of whom became notorious for throwing parties in which the saltshakers were full of gold dust—or to grasp the suffering of some three or four thousand able-bodied Indians—perhaps as many as ten thousand—toiling daily in the gold mines of Cibao to make such opulence possible for the colonists.

Like any other rush, the gold rush of Española was chaotic and destructive. “Take the most advantage, because you do not know how long it will last” was a saying that circulated among the early miners. This bit of wisdom applied not only to the amount of gold one could extract but also to the number of Indians one could command. Columbus’s initial proposals for enslavement fit perfectly with the labor needs. The first slaves working in the mines were islanders who had rebelled during the 1490s and whom the Spaniards had defeated and captured. The end of these rebellions, coupled with Queen Isabella’s insistence that the Indians were free, threw a monkey wrench into his plans and brought to the fore the problem of keeping the mines supplied with workers.

Long-term Effects of Pacific Crossings

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 242-244:

Among other things, the newfound transpacific connection led to a population boom in Asia, driven by the introduction of New World crops, especially sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts. Today, China is the second-largest producer of corn in the world, after only the United States; China and India are the top two producers of peanuts; and New Guineans obtain more calories per person from sweet potatoes than anyone else in the world. Corn, for example, was domesticated in the Americas at least nine thousand years ago but spread across the Pacific only in the sixteenth century. In China, this New World crop made inroads along the Yangtze and Han River valleys, where rice had been cultivated for millennia. Rice requires flooded fields of arable land, so cornfields sprang up at higher elevations and in drier conditions, where rice cultivation was marginal or impossible, thus extending China’s agricultural frontier and transforming what had once been forested hills into cornfields. Roughly speaking, corn produced the same number of calories per hectare as rice, but with far less irrigation and labor. This led to a significant population boom. Although the precise timing and magnitude of this demographic expansion varied from one Asian nation to another, all of them benefited from the incorporation of New World crops. A full accounting of this vast energy transfer from the Americas to Asia has yet to be made, but the preliminary information shows that it was enormous.

Regular transpacific contact also created the first global trading system recognizable to us even today. Economic activities in the Americas came to depend not just on colonial-metropolitan relationships across the Atlantic but on supply and demand around the world—especially in Asia. Excellent examples are the great silver mines of Peru and Mexico, which constituted a mainstay of the economy of the Americas in colonial times and structured life for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who directly or indirectly, forcibly or not, became a part of the silver economy. Traditionally, this is told as a story of European empires extracting valuable resources from their American colonies. Left unsaid is that the most important end-market customer by far was not Europe but China, where a major tax reform known as “the single lash of the whip” replaced paper money with silver in the sixteenth century. With this tax reform, China instantly became a worldwide magnet for the white metal, absorbing the silver production of neighboring Japan and then turning to the New World mines, which produced upwards of eighty percent of the world’s silver between 1500 and 1800. Without China’s massive and persistent demand for silver, the mines on the American continent would never have attained the scale they did, nor would their profits have spilled over into other colonial enterprises and affected so many lives throughout the hemisphere. The sixteenth century gave rise to the first truly global economy, in which Asia’s relative demographic and economic weight was significant and at times paramount. This feature of our world economy has become familiar to us, as China has continued to demand global resources such as soybeans, copper, and steel, affecting markets all around the world.

By the end of the eighteenth century, British and especially American merchants began building on these earlier transpacific linkages to launch their own ventures. As the Spanish empire in the Americas crumbled in the early nineteenth century, American ships came to replace the old Spanish galleons. The story of the United States’ expansion through the Pacific is well known, as the nation took control of Hawai‘i, Guam, and the Philippines, opened direct trade with Japan and China, and forged a vast network of transpacific interests. As we live in a world increasingly centered on the Pacific, it is imperative that we understand how we got here. The voyages of Urdaneta and of Lope Martín, the Black pilot who now takes his place in world history, were at the dawn of this transformation.

Finding the North Pacific Way East

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 189-192:

Not everything, however, was against the San Lucas expeditionaries. By paralleling the coast of Japan, they were riding the most powerful current in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese call it Kuroshio, or “Black Current,” owing to its characteristic cobalt-blue color. An integral part of the North Pacific Gyre, the Kuroshio Current is an enormous ribbon of warm water that starts in the Philippine Sea, brushes against the coast of Taiwan, and moves rapidly up the eastern side of Japan, snaking and pushing against the cold waters coming from the Bering Sea. After veering off from Japan, the current continues eastward for about a thousand miles as a free jet stream known as the Kuroshio Extension, eventually feeding into the larger North Pacific Gyre. This explains why historically some Japanese ships disabled in storms have washed up in North America. This may have occurred prior to 1492, although no hard evidence has surfaced. More convincingly, scholars have estimated that between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, more than a thousand Japanese vessels were swept out to sea. Among them, a handful are known to have made landfall in the Americas. A rice cargo ship called the Tokujômaru, for instance, ran into a storm that broke its rudder, causing it to drift for sixteen months until running aground in 1813 near Santa Barbara, California, with only the captain and two crew members still alive. Nearly twenty years later, a similar incident occurred when a merchant ship bound for Tokyo, the Hojunmaru, was knocked off course by a typhoon, only to reappear after fifteen months, rudderless and dismasted, in Cape Flattery, the most northwesterly point in the continental United States.

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The San Lucas voyagers reported an unexpected abundance of life in that part of the ocean, an observation that confirms their whereabouts. The collision of the warm Kuroshio Current with subarctic water produces eddies of plankton that are visible even in satellite images. In turn, the plankton attract a variety of animals. The Spanish expeditionaries saw “pig fish as large as cows” and marveled at the “dogs of the sea with their paws and tails and ears . . . and one of them came aboard and barked at us” (almost certainly sea lions, with external ear flaps and very vocal, in contrast to true seals). Quite fittingly, the men of the San Lucas also crossed paths with the greatest migratory species of all. “Black shearwaters followed us, shrieking all day and night,” Don Alonso recalled, “and their cries were very unsettling because no sailor had ever heard them like that.” Sooty shearwaters pursue a breathtaking figure-eight migration spanning the entire Pacific. As they range from New Zealand to Alaska and from Chile to Japan, these noisy birds dive for food in some of the most productive regions of the Pacific, including the plankton-rich eddies off the coast of Japan, where some must have spotted the San Lucas slowly making its way in a northeasterly direction.

Climbing to forty degrees and up to forty-three degrees of northern latitude, the pioneers overshot the warm waters of the Kuroshio Current. They had journeyed farther north into the great ocean than any other Europeans, sailing through frigid waters coming from the Bering Sea. Only Magellan’s Trinidad had plied this part of the Pacific more than forty years earlier, where a storm had dismasted it and forced the last survivors to turn back. Extreme cold—that old nemesis of previous return attempts—became a serious concern for the crew members of the San Lucas, especially because they were missing most of their clothes after the washing party had to abandon them in Mindanao months earlier.

The San Lucas voyagers now faced “the greatest cold of winter,” as the captain put it, “even though it was the middle of summer in June and July.” For thirty days the sky turned so dark and stormy that they were unable to see the Sun or the stars. On June 11, snow fell on the deck and did not melt until noon. Lamp oil became so frozen that the bottle in which it was kept had to be warmed over a fire, “and it still came out in pieces like lard.” Modern historians have sometimes seized on such unlikely details to discount the veracity of Don Alonso’s account. “Porpoises as big as cows present no difficulty,” wrote one of these skeptics, “but it is unlikely that cooking oil would freeze in mid-summer.” Lamp oil freezes at around fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the process can start even at higher temperatures. Sailing by the Aleutian Islands in June, especially during the Little Ice Age, would force such doubters to amend their opinions.

Micronesia and the North Pacific Gyre

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 120-121:

The second arrow shot across the Pacific, the Villalobos expedition of 1542–43, essentially retraced the previous track and confirmed that the best way to sail from the Americas to Asia was indeed via a straight path across the ocean just north of the equator. Wind maps of the North Pacific show a broad westward-moving band of winds (and currents) between five and twenty-five degrees of northern latitude, connecting Mexico and the Philippines. Wide, continuous or nearly so, and quite regular all year round, this portion of the North Pacific Gyre amounts to a veritable highway across the ocean, far easier to locate and navigate than the northern portion for the return trip, as we shall see.

Just as earlier Atlantic navigators had used the Sargasso Sea to orient themselves, the Saavedra and Villalobos expeditions began identifying some of the Micronesian—that is, tiny—islands on the way to the Philippines. To get a sense of the difficulty, we need to consider that all the Micronesian islands add up to 271 square miles, or a quarter of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States, but are scattered over a patch of the Pacific that is roughly the size of all the contiguous states in the Union. Still, the Saavedra expedition was able to sight a group of low-lying atolls they grandly called “las Islas de los Reyes,” or “the Islands of the Kings” (probably the present-day Faraulep Atoll at 8.6 degrees of northern latitude). More promisingly, the Villalobos expedition spotted a small island with many coconut palms and thickly inhabited (likely the present-day island of Fais at 9.7 degrees of northern latitude). The captain called it Matalotes because, as they passed, some of the islanders paddled toward the vessels and called out in cheerful Spanish, “Buenos días, matalotes,” or “Good morning, sailors.” Somehow they had interacted with Spaniards before.

The Legazpi expedition pursued the same direct trajectory across the Pacific as the previous two voyages and benefited from the knowledge acquired up to then. The four vessels in Legazpi’s squadron remained safely inside the band of favorable winds and currents of the North Pacific Gyre, covering the six thousand miles between Mexico and the first Micronesian islands in record time. At every stage of the journey, the pilots—the very best in all the Spanish Empire—knew their precise location relative to the North Pacific Gyre because they estimated their latitude (north-south distance) every day.

Discovering the Atlantic Gyres

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 114-116:

The North Atlantic Gyre was a major find, but it turned out to be only half of the story. In the 1470s, the Portuguese crossed the equator and stumbled on a second gyre in the South Atlantic. Once again, it was necessity that prompted the discovery of this second great wheel of winds and currents. As the Portuguese sailors could not make any further progress in their Atlantic explorations by staying close to the African coast, on account of the contrary elements, they were forced again into the open Atlantic, this time venturing in a counterclockwise direction, away from the continent until practically crossing the entire ocean and nearing the coast of Brazil. This detour enabled Portuguese vessels finally to catch the southward-moving Brazil current and eventually to double back east toward the tip of Africa. This volta around the South Atlantic—a maneuver similar to the one in the North Atlantic but longer—could take up to three months of sailing without sight of land.

As early as 1500, Vasco da Gama, the great discoverer of the sea route from Portugal to India, penned a concise but unmistakable characterization of this second volta in the instructions that he left to his successor: “You should always go around the sea until reaching the Cape of Good Hope.” The recipient of such sound advice was Pedro Álvares Cabral, who followed da Gama’s words so closely that he drifted to the coast of Brazil, where he spent a few days before continuing eastward to India. Over the years, Portuguese seamen became familiar with the contours of the South Atlantic Gyre, as is evident in the so-called roteiros (derroteros in Spanish, rutters in English, routiers in French, and so on), or sailing instructions, occasionally penned by pilots to facilitate the task of future navigators. The South Atlantic roteiros alerted pilots to approach the coast of Brazil well to the south of Cabo de Santo Agostinho; otherwise they risked being knocked off course by the currents and pushed into the Caribbean, a disastrous turn of events that could delay the voyage by several months. Farther south along the Brazilian coast, pilots were warned to steer clear of the Abrolhos, a group of islands and reefs off the present-day state of Bahia. (“Abrolhos” comes from abre olhos, or “open your eyes” in Portuguese.) Once the fleets doubled back toward the tip of Africa, the only intervening land was Tristan da Cunha, a group of remote islands in the South Atlantic, first sighted in 1506, precisely during the early exploration of the South Atlantic Gyre.

Sixteenth-century navigators probably did not understand that Earth’s rotation is what causes the ocean gyres. It would not be until the early nineteenth century when Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis worked out the mathematics of the forces in a rotating system. Yet five hundred years ago, Portuguese pilots clearly referred to the ventos gerais (general winds) to distinguish them from more localized and variable winds. They also knew that these ventos gerais formed two rotating systems on either side of the equator. “When you have passed the equator and reached the general winds, you need to go with them for as long as possible,” a pilot named Bernardo Fernandes counseled in 1550, “because with them you will reach the Cape of Good Hope latitude.” Evidently seamen like Fernandes had a clear mental image of the gyres.

Spanish Shipboard Life, 1564

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 103-105:

Life aboard the ships followed new rhythms and obvious improvements over Navidad. The mosquitos and other insects vanished almost instantly (though not the fleas and lice), and the ocean breeze provided effective relief from the heat. The expeditionaries also gained immediate access to foods that had been denied to them before. Each soldier received a daily ration of one pound of hardtack and either a pound of meat or half a pound of dried fish along with fava beans or chickpeas. Doled out in three square meals a day, this was more than enough. Every Sunday afternoon, some cheese was added to the ration for variety. The liquids on offer were also generous: three pints of water per day along with wine, enough not only to keep hydrated but also to soak and soften the hardtack. Commander Legazpi had said nothing to the four ship captains about the distribution of spirits, but we know that the crew members would never have consented to crossing the Pacific without this indispensable tonic for the body and mind. Indeed, alcohol was an important tool, deployed especially during storms to steel the mariners’ resolve and “warm their stomachs.”

These rations were tangible improvements. Yet the negatives far outweighed the positives, beginning with the cramped conditions. To understand the sailors’ circumstances in a way that makes sense to us, we must imagine a good-sized urban apartment occupied by about one hundred strangers. A single toilet—but no shower or sink—would have to do for everyone, along with a very rudimentary kitchen and no furniture other than sea chests (wooden boxes) scattered all over the deck and below and serving as chairs and tables as needed. Two or three times a day, pages brought out platters of food into which everyone stuck their fingers liberally to get the best pieces of meat or servings of chickpeas. At night, everyone but the most privileged had to find a reasonably level surface to sleep on—always too close to others—and try to get some rest in spite of the noises, odors, and constant movement. Spending merely a week in these conditions would have been taxing, yet the expeditionaries had to endure this for months.

Aboard the ships, there was strict regimentation. Everybody “without skipping anyone if not for illness” was assigned daily to a four-hour shift. This could occur at any time of the day or night, with the worst shifts having evocative names like “drowsiness,” or modorra (from midnight to four), “dawn,” or alva (from four to eight), and so on. The time was measured carefully with multiple hourglasses, or ampolletas, that had to be turned without fail every thirty minutes, and the assigned tasks ranged from moving barrels and serving as lookouts to pumping out the awful-smelling water that always collected at the bottom of the ship. Those on shift could also be ordered to perform navigational duties like hoisting and trimming sails, not only because the crew was spread too thin but also “to get everybody trained and accustomed to such work in case of necessity.” The remaining twenty hours of the day were far more leisurely. With so much time to kill, the expeditionaries were tempted to play cards or engage in other games of chance, betting their daily rations, clothes, and weapons. Of course, all of this was strictly prohibited, as was invoking the name of God in vain or using profanity, a constant occurrence among seamen. Any of these infractions could lead to punishments ranging from public shaming and withholding of one’s daily ration to imprisonment and torture for repeat offenders.

New Spain Demographics, 1500s

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 89-91:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

Lope Martín was from Lagos, an old port near Portugal’s southwestern tip that had historically served as a stepping-stone from Europe to Africa. In the summer of 1415, a powerful fleet had gathered there before crossing the Mediterranean to capture Ceuta. In later years, Lagos had turned into Prince Henry the Navigator’s base of operations. Famous local pilots included Alvaro Esteves (who charted the “gold coast” of Africa) and Vicente Rodrigues (one of the foremost pilots to India). As Portuguese fleets had traced the contours of western Africa, Black slaves had flowed back into Lagos, giving rise to a sizable slave and free population of African ancestry. This contingent did much of the work around the city, in the harbor, and aboard the ships of exploration. Many of the apprentices and sailors in Lagos were Black slaves whose salaries were pocketed by their masters or free Blacks engaged in the harsh life of the sea.

Lope Martín was, as we have seen, a free mulatto, that is, a person of mixed Afro-Portuguese descent. Although little is known about his early years, he must have cut his teeth aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships of exploration, carrying sacks of flour and climbing ratlines to the top of the mast. The fleets outfitted all along the southwestern coast of Iberia, on both the Portuguese and Spanish sides, constantly required fresh recruits like him. Towns like Huelva, Moguer, and Palos de la Frontera had supplied Columbus with a crew willing to risk their lives across the great ocean in 1492. Less than one hundred miles in length, this stretch of Portuguese-Spanish coast was at the time the preeminent maritime region in the world. Somewhere in this exploited and often brutal milieu, where knife fights could erupt over insignificant incidents, Lope Martín went from page (children of eight to ten) to apprentice (older and more experienced) to mariner (twenty and older and in possession of a certificate), all the while voyaging to Africa, the Americas, and perhaps as far as Asia. Lope Martín’s passages likely ended in different Portuguese and Spanish ports. These comings and goings must have taken him away from his native Lagos, well inside Portugal, toward the Spanish border, and finally to Seville, the only Spanish port open to trade with the New World.

Magellan in Spain

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 52-55:

Columbus’s exploits loom so large in our understanding of the past that other great discoveries recede into the background. In truth, any reasonable observer at the turn of the sixteenth century would have conceded that, even after Columbus’s famous voyages, Portugal’s lead in the global race had widened until becoming almost unassailable. Portuguese navigators reached the tip of Africa in 1488 and found the route to India a decade later. King Manuel I of Portugal took pleasure in writing lengthy letters to the Spanish monarchs, his in-laws and rivals, informing them, “Our Lord has miraculously wished India to be found” and telling them about the spices, precious stones, elephants, exotic peoples, and the immensely profitable trade carried on there. “We are still awaiting news from the twenty-five ships that we sent the previous year [1502],” Manuel gloated to Ferdinand and Isabella in one of his letters, “and after they come back in September there will be time to send some more.”

In the meantime, Spain could point to only a few Caribbean islands and inklings of an unknown continent, but no precious spices, porcelain, or silk. The new lands did offer some gold, but they never replaced the original quest of finding a western approach to the incalculable riches of the Far East. Spaniards explored the continent blocking their way, looking for a passage that would connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. They came up empty-handed until Fernão de Magalhães—a Portuguese defector like the Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín a generation later—put Spain back in the race. Ferdinand Magellan had come of age during Portugal’s torrid expansion into Asia in the 1500s. Yet he had a falling-out with the Portuguese crown and went knocking on neighboring doors. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Magellan’s move to Spain.

Magellan caught up with the roving Spanish court at the town of Valladolid. For someone accustomed to the sound of waves and the proximity of sailboats, it must have been strange to have to journey to the middle of Iberia to propose a maritime venture in a town surrounded by agricultural fields and interminable plains. He did not arrive alone but was accompanied by two brothers, Rui and Francisco Faleiro, both cosmographers whose reputations exceeded Magellan’s. The trio complemented one another well. Magellan came across as a man of action who had fought in India, Malaysia, and North Africa, while the Faleiros were armchair academics. As they waited for an audience with the Spanish king in February and March of 1518, the Portuguese visitors grew unsettled by what they heard. The new monarch, Charles I, was an awkward eighteen-year-old who had come from Belgium just a few months before and had great difficulty communicating in Spanish let alone Portuguese. Worse, the trio had to tread carefully in a court riven by a power struggle between Charles’s advisers recently arrived from Belgium and the old Spanish officials from the previous monarch.

Interestingly, during the early negotiations Rui Faleiro rather than Magellan emerged as the leading voice. The older of the two Faleiro brothers, Rui was deferentially referred to as a bachiller (or bacharel in Portuguese), the highest university degree one could get at the time. Before leaving Portugal he may have been considered for a new chair in astronomy established at the oldest university in the kingdom (what is now the University of Coimbra) by the Portuguese king himself. It was the highest position in the field. One of the reasons that perhaps impelled Rui Faleiro to join Magellan in Spain was being passed over for this prestigious appointment; academic rivalries and pettiness were already alive and well in the sixteenth century! In spite of this setback, and notwithstanding a rumor that “he was possessed by a familial demon and in fact knew nothing about astrology,” Rui Faleiro remained a top European cosmographer. Sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described Rui Faleiro as “a great man in matters of cosmography, astrology, and other sciences and humanities.” There is little doubt that he was extremely accomplished if mercurial and mentally unstable. Rui’s younger brother Francisco Faleiro was just as talented and would go on to find long-term employment in Spain as a leading nautical expert. Together the two Faleiros and Magellan were very credible petitioners.

On the day of the audience, Magellan and Rui Faleiro arrived not with charts as would have been expected but with “a globe that was very well painted and showed the entire world, and on it Magellan traced the route that he would follow.” The two petitioners explained that they intended to cross from one ocean to the other “through a certain strait that they already knew about.” Even though the globe was detailed, the portion of South America where the strait was supposed to be had been left intentionally blank. Magellan and Faleiro had evidently taken some precautions in case anyone present at the audience should wish to steal their project.

Their knowledge of a passage between the oceans—the alpha and omega of many New World explorations—would have been more than enough for the royal sponsorship. But Magellan and Faleiro went further. As one witness at the audience recounted, “They offered to demonstrate that the Moluccas [Spice Islands] from where the Portuguese take spices to their country are on the side of the world that belongs to Spain, as agreed by the Catholic Monarchs and King Juan of Portugal.” The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had established a line of demarcation running from pole to pole through the Atlantic but did not contemplate extending the line to the other side of the world. As Portugal and Spain, however, had continued to sail in opposite directions, such an antimeridian had become necessary. Measuring longitude or east-west distance was still extraordinarily difficult in the early sixteenth century, so no one knew quite where to draw this line in the distant Pacific. All the same, in the early 1510s the Portuguese had planted trading forts in Malaysia and the Spice Islands while Spain had stood by helplessly. Yet in the winter of 1518, Magellan and Faleiro had become persuaded that the Spice Islands were actually on the Spanish side, a conclusion all the more startling in Spain because it was coming from these top Portuguese navigators and cosmographers.

Columbus in Portugal

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 38-41:

What made this contest [between Portugal and Spain] all the more startling was the stark differences between the two competitors. To put it bluntly, it was a race between a dolphin and an elephant. With a population of barely one million by 1500, Portugal was just too small to take over the world. Lisbon was a very modest capital and base of exploration of around forty thousand people. As it expanded through western Africa, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and China—even if only to establish trading forts or feitorias—the Lusitanian nation became overstretched. Everyone at home was scrambling to keep things running or consumed by one of these ventures halfway around the world. Still, what Portugal lacked in population it more than made up for in experience, cutting-edge nautical technology, and clarity of purpose.

In contrast, the kingdoms that coalesced into Spain contained some five to seven million inhabitants, easily dwarfing Portugal in human and material resources. Yet this aggregation of kingdoms was difficult to manage. Some of them possessed significant maritime experience: elephants do swim. Yet the core of this composite monarchy, the Crown of Castile, was more terrestrial than Portugal. This land orientation is evident in the cities where the Spanish court tended to reside: Valladolid, Toledo, and finally Madrid, right in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula, as far as possible from any coast or sea.

There is no better way to get a sense of these two contenders and understand the nature of the race than by following in Columbus’s footsteps. He lived in Portugal for a decade before moving to Spain and setting the contest in motion by proposing to his new hosts “to reach the east by way of the west.” Columbus’s initial arrival in the Iberian kingdoms had been entirely unplanned. Pirates had attacked the ship on which he was traveling and a great fire had broken out, forcing everyone to jump into the water, “and Columbus, who was a strong swimmer,” a near-contemporary chronicler informs us, “swam for two leagues [seven miles] to the closest land, holding onto an oar to get some rest along the way.” The twenty-five-year-old Columbus washed up on Portugal’s southwestern tip in 1476. It was probably the farthest he had ever been from his native Genoa. Up to that time, Columbus had been trading wools and textiles on behalf of his family, mostly within the Mediterranean.

Once in Portugal, the future “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” remade his life. After drying off his clothes and resting his weary limbs, he made his way to Lisbon where he found a community of Italian financiers, merchants, and nautical experts deeply involved in Portugal’s ventures of exploration. This group included Columbus’s own brother, Bartholomew Columbus, who had moved out of the family household years earlier and relocated to Portugal. The two brothers formed a partnership and made a living by drawing nautical charts and selling books. A contemporary who met Columbus in those years described him as “a dealer in print books of great intelligence although little book learning, and very skilled in the art of cosmography.”

Lisbon, surrounded by massive walls except along the waterfront, was a town on the move at the time of Columbus’s arrival. Sitting on the highest hill was the Castle of São Jorge, a structure that looked ancient even in the fifteenth century. It had a commanding view of the Tagus River and the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1470s through 1490s, when Columbus lived in Lisbon, the castle remained the nerve center of Portugal’s exploration activities. A huge map of the world mounted on gold-plated wood in a cavernous room signaled Portugal’s grand design. Officials bustled around the premises, keeping accounts, levying taxes, and organizing sales of exotic goods coming from Africa as well as from Asia and America later on. Some of these items were on display, including two lions kept in a pen to impress visitors.

Transpacific Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 25-27:

Dispersals across the Pacific are more daunting still. Some species do exist on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, as we have seen. Marsupials live in the Americas (opossums and shrews) and in Australasia (kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, etc.). Intriguingly, a tiny arboreal marsupial from South America known as the monito del monte is more closely related to Australian marsupials than to its American cousins. Could this be the first terrestrial mammal to cross the Pacific? Recent research shows that marsupials originated in South America and migrated to Australia tens of millions of years ago, when there was a land connection via Antarctica or at least great proximity among these three landmasses. The same holds true for other lineages distributed on both sides of the Pacific, including birds, frogs, and turtles.

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The only terrestrial vertebrate that seems to have survived a transpacific passage of six thousand miles is an iguana. The vast majority of iguanas are indigenous to the New World. Yet one genus called Brachylophus lives in the South Pacific islands of Fiji and Tonga. How did it get there? A passage from Central or South America would have taken a minimum of six months and more likely a year or more. Like geckos, iguanas are well suited for oceanic dispersals. They are able to obtain water from the plants they eat and possess nasal salt glands and thick skins that protect them from dehydration. Their presence not only on the American continent but also on many surrounding islands demonstrates their ability to travel across stretches of ocean. The Galápagos Islands, for instance, lie about six hundred miles away from the coast of Ecuador and are home to no fewer than three species of land iguanas as well as one marine iguana that lives on land but dives into the ocean to procure food, foraging on seaweed and reaching exposed rocks completely surrounded by water.

Still, it is one thing to drift on logs for a couple of weeks and quite another to endure a six-thousand-mile passage. After several months adrift and no food left, any voyaging iguana would have perished. Nonetheless, some biologists have proposed a possible solution. The stowaways may have spent much of this journey as eggs. Brachylophus has an unusually long incubation period of seven, eight, or even nine months, one of the longest of any iguana. It is possible then that thirty or forty million years ago an unsuspecting group of iguanas, some in the form of eggs, may have dispersed by means of an epic rafting passage in which everything went right. Yet even if Brachylophus was somehow able to cross much of the Pacific, few other terrestrial vertebrates ever did until humans began making inroads in far more recent times.

Transatlantic Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 23-25:

Oceanic dispersals are extremely instructive because they reveal what is biologically possible, showing what oceans could be crossed and in what direction and which ones constituted insurmountable barriers. The Atlantic, for instance, has been breached several times. One hundred million years ago, South America became something of an island unto itself, having broken off from Africa and decoupled from North America (until about three and a half million years ago, when the Isthmus of Panama finally connected the two halves of the hemisphere). South America therefore existed in “splendid isolation” for tens of millions of years, as one scholar has put it. Yet several dispersals from Africa occurred during this time. South America was originally rodent-free, but a type of rodent called caviomorphs—related to guinea pigs, chinchillas, and capybaras but different from mice and rats—irrupted into it between fifty-five and forty-one million years ago. The closest relatives to the South American caviomorph rodents live in Africa, clearly indicating the source population. Primates followed suit. Again, South America possessed no primates at first. Yet a monkey that scientists call Chilecebus carrascoensis somehow got across the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five to twenty million years ago. To succeed, any primate had to be small and extremely resilient. To judge by the extant fossils, Chilecebus carrascoensis weighed less than two pounds and had a skull barely two inches long. This intrepid voyager would give rise to all New World monkeys, including spider monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets.

As far as we know, about a dozen species have made it across the Atlantic Ocean, including rodents, primates, bats, tortoises, a blind snake, and even a weak-flying bird called the hoatzin. Of all these creatures, geckos and skinks were particularly capable of surviving long oceanic passages, as they hid underneath branches and laid eggs resistant to desiccation and even short-term immersion in seawater. Yet, irrespective of individual capabilities, two main factors explain these successful crossings. First, the closest two points across the Atlantic (Kabrousse, Senegal, and Touros, Brazil) now lie about 1,740 miles apart and, thirty or forty million years ago, perhaps half that distance. Nine hundred miles is far but not overwhelmingly so. Second, the rivers of western Africa constitute excellent launching pads to catch western-moving Atlantic currents leading to the Americas. Although crossing the Atlantic has never been easy, the biological record shows that it has occurred from time to time, and what is true for geckos and rodents applies no less to humans. When Christopher Columbus set out to cross the Ocean Sea in 1492, he and his crew were embarking on a voyage that other species had already made successfully.

Other oceanic paths have been less common. The reverse Atlantic passage from South America to Africa, for instance, has played a much smaller role in the dispersal of species. Negative evidence cannot settle the matter definitively. South American organisms may well have crossed but been attacked on arrival, or perhaps they survived in Africa but without leaving much of a trace. Still, it is striking that no terrestrial vertebrates are known to have made the eastward passage across the Atlantic.

Returning Shinto Shrines in Hawaii

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 209-211:

In December 1947, Hawaii’s Kotohira Shrine was finally allowed to reopen its doors, along with the other closed Buddhist and Shinto shrines. Rev. Isobe was still deported, so the religious services were nonexistent. As the shrine struggled to find its footing, the Justice Department swept in. In April 1948, citing the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, the government seized Kotohira’s assets. The Act cited was passed into law to confiscate German American property during World War I. Other shrines across Hawaii also had their assets seized, including the Izumo Taishakyo Mission, Hawaii Daijingu Temple and Wahiawa Daijingu.

Upon hearing of the move to liquidate the land, the Kotohira Jinsha solicits the services of the law firm Robertson, Castle & Anthony, which files suit on March 31, 1949, against the United States attorney general, the State of Hawaii and the Federal Alien Land Office. They’re challenging the apparent misuse of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

It’s the first such lawsuit initiated by a Japanese organization, and many eyes across Hawaii and the mainland are eagerly watching to see who wins.

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Judge Joseph McLaughlin knows the value of a good legal fight. That’s why he refuses both the plaintiff and the defendant requests for a summary judgment in Kotohira Jinsha v. McGrath.

It would have been easier to just rule from the bench and save months of judicial headache. The shrine wants its property back, and the government just wants the whole matter ended. But some scraps are worth having in the open forum.

Several trial dates were set and changed, delayed by both sides’ trips to Japan to gather evidence. The trial began on March 27, paused as attorneys travelled to Japan and resumed on May 3. The trial ended May 17, after a “two-day argument upon the facts and the law,” as the court puts it.

Today, McLaughlin dismantles the government’s case one blow at a time. His ruling finds the government presented no justification for Kotohira Jinsha’s closure. “The evidence does not establish any Japanese governmental control, direct or indirect, of this plaintiff, nor any direct or indirect doctrinal or financial control by any state shrine in Japan,” he states in his decision. “Nor is there any evidence upon which I could possibly find or hold that the national interests of the United States required that this little insignificant shrine in Hawaii, with not more than five hundred members, should be deemed to be an economic, military, or even ideological threat to the United States.”

The judge includes a pocket history of how the imperial government used religion to foster war. “To accomplish the ends desired by the militarists of Japan, Shinto was distorted and state Shrine loyalty became a test of patriotism and the false doctrine of Japanese supremacy and eventual world domination was fostered, which led to its ultimate defeat in World War II.”

He reserves some editorial commentary to the shrine’s form of Shinto, finding an umbrella approach to spirituality confusing. “Plaintiff and its members did not even understand what it was they believed or why,” he writes in the court’s ruling. “I am not even prepared to find on this evidence that this plaintiff, operating in the United States of America, held beliefs which could be agreed to constitute a religion . . . Its members practiced by way of prayers and ceremonies a primitive mythology known as Shinto or Way of the Gods, with special attention to three gods, but whether the plaintiff’s tenets were the same as state Shintoism in Japan, or even Sect Shintoism in Japan, has not been established by either party.”

Aside from these sharp elbows under the robe, the ruling is an unambiguous victory, not just for the shrine but for the democratic system tested by governmental overreach. “We have not yet come to the point nor will we ever while ‘this Court sits’ where the government can take away a person’s property because it does not approve of what that person believes in or teaches by way of religion or philosophy of life,” Judge McLaughlin writes. “The First Amendment forbids.”

The property is returned to the shrine. Getting legal permission for its leader, Rev. Isobe, to return from Japan will take longer. But the legal victory paves the way for more lawsuits and more overturned seizures.

Extent of Martial Law, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 126-129:

Lt. Col. Thomas Green, now the Hawaiian Department’s judge advocate, moves into Iolani Palace the day after Pearl Harbor. The man who wrote the rules governing the military administration is on hand to direct martial law operations.

At 12:30 P.M., Green switches on the radio to hear President Roosevelt address a joint session of Congress....

Green switches the radio off. The reality of his position washes over him like a wave—with the war official, the martial law over Hawaii is good as permanent. Now the Army must run everything. All civilians need to be registered and fingerprinted. Manpower is needed to censor the press, long-distance telephone calls and all civilian mail. The Army must police the ban on liquor sales. The list seems endless.

Emergency medical facilities fall under direct Army control. That includes the Japanese Charity Hospital—the military took control of over half of the hospital’s facilities in the aftermath of the attack. The day before, eight hundred volunteers from the United Japanese Society in Honolulu, freshly trained to respond to medical emergencies, went straight from their graduation ceremony to tend to the wounded.

Of all the challenges Green faces, creating a functioning justice system is the thorniest. It’s not easy to replace the civil system with military courts overnight. Easing his job is the lack of impediments: the writ of habeas corpus remains suspended, search warrants are unneeded and even written charges are optional. Being tried before a military court will be a shadow of the former process—presided over by a sole officer, who’ll be encouraged to sentence offenders the same day of their arrest.

Japanese Hawaiians are subject to special restrictions. For them, meeting in groups of more than ten is forbidden. Being outside during the nightly blackouts is cause for detention. The entire community is ordered to turn in all firearms, flashlights, portable radios and cameras.

At his home on Kalama Beach, Otto Kuehn hears the rap on his front door, blood frozen. The military police hustle him, Friedel, Hans Joachim and Susie into a truck. All are held in cells at the US Immigration Service’s detention center in Honolulu, held for the crime of being German in Hawaii.

Honolulu's Roundup Begins, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-123:

Gero Iwai tries not to feel the other men’s eyes on him as they gather in a conference room on the second floor. Most know him, but some do not. They’re taking second looks at the only Japanese American in the room of Army intelligence agents and G-men.

SAC Shivers is in charge. Army officials order their four commanding generals (and nine corps commanders) to work with the FBI to round up all persons on their detention lists. Shivers, Bicknell and Honolulu police acting captain John Burns sit down with a card file and make the final determinations on who’s to be arrested. Personal friends and acquaintances are spared at the last moment, but the number still hovers at more than four hundred people.

The wheels to sanction these arrests have been spinning for hours. Just after the second wave, Lieutenant General Short stood in Iolani Palace to ask Hawaii territorial governor Joseph Poindexter to declare martial law. The governor called President Roosevelt, who advised him to follow the recommendation, which he did. By the rules drafted beforehand by Lt. Col. Thomas Green, this enables local military authorities to apprehend US citizens without cause.

Hoover telegrams his field offices: “Urgent. Immediately take into custody all Japanese who have been classified in the A, B, and C categories.”

At just before 2:00 P.M., Shivers is handed a letter from Short authorizing execution of the arrests. By then, President Roosevelt has signed Proclamation 2525, classifying all Japanese aliens living in the United States or any of its territories as “alien enemies” subject to apprehension. Some arrests had already begun, but under martial law, the final official authorization had to be given by the Army.

Across Honolulu, FBI men, military intelligence agents and local cops gather the detainees and deliver them to the Honolulu Immigration Station. There are almost five hundred residents in Hawaii, citizen and alien alike, placed under armed guard that day: 345 Japanese aliens, twenty-two Japanese American citizens, seventy-four German nationals, nineteen citizens of German ancestry, eleven Italian nationals and two citizens of Italian descent.

Nearly every consulate support worker is seized, including Richard Kotoshirodo and John Mikami. (Of more than two hundred seized, only these two are actually guilty of abetting espionage.) Also detained are the Japanese language school teachers and religious leaders from Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Members of mainstream Japanese civic societies are hustled into cars and ferried away from their families.

Those detained are brought under armed escort to an immigration building next to the territorial government officers near Honolulu Harbor. The prevailing feelings inside the cramped quarters are disbelief and shame. These are the leading merchants, priests, teachers and social organizers in Honolulu, now rounded up with fewer rights than those afforded criminals.

Assessing AJA Loyalties, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 75-76:

At his new post with the 11th District Intelligence Office in California, Cmdr. Kenneth Ringle sees a larger lesson being lost among the hysteria. The real espionage threat doesn’t come from the Japanese population but the Japanese Consulate.

Ringle comes to this conclusion after intense study. He spends his time away from the ONI’s 11th District headquarters, instead working by himself out of a small office in the San Pedro YMCA. His self-separation is telling. Instead of chasing spies, he’s spent his time in California gauging the actual threat posed by the Japanese population.

He’s focused his loyalty study among the vegetable farmers and tuna fishermen before moving on to businessmen. Over the course of his investigation, Ringle’s built a network of informants within the targeted community, particularly among members of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). He finds that Japanese militarists had tried to send over visitors and fake immigrants to rile the Japanese American community. He knows this because those loyal to the JACL report them.

Ringle’s time in California has validated what he found in Hawaii. He reports officially in 1941 that “better than 90 percent of the Nisei and 75 percent of the original immigrants are completely loyal to the United States.”

Planning for Martial Law, 1940

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 48-50:

US Army Colonel Thomas Green takes in the view from his new post at Fort Shafter, gazing at the Kalihi and Moanalua valleys. The Army base is still in Honolulu, but it’s located away from downtown, perched on a ridgeline rising from the coastal plain. ... The landscape here is nearly alien—and so are many of the people.

Green freely admits to having no knowledge of, or experience with, Japanese culture, not to mention the subtleties of the Nisei and Issei. Yet he’s a key architect of their futures in Hawaii if there is war in the Pacific. He now works among the senior Army leaders in Hawaii; the headquarters of the Hawaiian Department moved here from the Alexander Young Hotel in June 1921.

Green is a freshly arrived lawyer, serving as a judge advocate. He graduated from Boston University in 1915; the next year he joined a cavalry unit of the Massachusetts National Guard and deployed to the Mexican border. Military life suited him, and he joined the regular Army....

In 1921, Green ... was assigned to Washington, DC, where he worked in the office of the assistant secretary of war while earning a master’s degree from George Washington University Law School. After duties in New York City, he transferred to the judge advocate general’s department in 1925 and helped adjudicate claims from German detainees during the Great War.

Green arrived in Hawaii on a lawyer’s mission: the search for a definition of “martial law.” It’s a hazy term that’s barely protected by US Supreme Court precedent. In 1849, the Court upheld the legality of a military seizure of control in Luther v. Borden, but that case centered on a state’s declaration (Rhode Island) and managed to never explicitly enshrine “martial law” as a legal term. After the Civil War, the federal government used martial law quite a bit less than individual states. Military generals also invoke it more than presidents to handle imminent crises; for example, in 1920, General Francis Marshall imposed martial law in Lexington, Kentucky, to protect a courthouse from a riotous lynch mob.

Green is finding that the precedential gray area can be exploited. “Martial law is not a law nor are the limitations or the responsibilities well defined anywhere,” he writes. He’ll pass this understanding to General Charles Herron, one of four district Army commanders. The idea that martial law is whatever the Army wants it to be informs the service’s wartime plans for the Hawaiian population.

That includes Green’s other assignment: drafting a set of General Orders to be implemented if shooting starts with Japan. The framework Green envisions will consolidate all the functions of government under the sole authority of the commander of the Army in Honolulu. When fully written, they’ll become the plan for a military governor to usurp the civilian government in Hawaii.