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Atlantic Biographies Atlantic World Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830 Edited by Benjamin Schmidt University of Washington and Wim Klooster Clark University VOLUME 27 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aw Atlantic Biographies Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World Edited by Jeffrey A. Fortin & Mark Meuwese LEIDEN • BOSTON 2014 Cover illustration: Carte de l’Océan Atlantique (Pierre Devaux, 1613), via Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atlantic biographies : individuals and peoples in the Atlantic world / edited by Jeffrey A. Fortin & Mark Meuwese. pages cm. -- (Atlantic world : Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500-1830, ISSN 1570-0542 ; volume 27) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-25897-6 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-25971-3 (e-book) 1. Atlantic Ocean Region--Biography. 2. Atlantic Ocean Region--History. I. Fortin, Jeffrey A. II. Meuwese, Mark. D210.A768 2014 910.9163--dc23 [B] 2013030104 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-0542 ISBN 978-90-04-25897-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25971-3 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. <UN> <UN> CONTENTS Preface .........................................................................................................................ix Jeffrey A. Fortin PART ONE ATLANTIC SOJOURNERS 1 Pierre Biard: Priest and Pirate of Mount Desert Island ..............................3 Laura M. Chmielewski 2 Thomas Morton .................................................................................................. 31 Charlotte Carrington 3 Alexander von Humboldt, His Scientific Expedition through the Americas and the Impact of His Atlantic Experiences .................... 69 Sandra Rebok PART TWO SLAVERY AND FREEDOM ON THE EDGES OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD 4 The Crossings of Occramar Marycoo, or Newport Gardner .................101 Edward E. Andrews 5 Constituting Value in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa ..........................................................................125 Bryan Sinche 6 Enslaved Ship Pilots: Challenging Notions of Race and Slavery along the Peripheries of the Revolutionary Atlantic World.................143 Kevin Dawson 7 From Ireland to Africa: the Criminal Career and Punishment of Patrick Madan ..............................................................................................173 Emma Christopher 8 The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Vulnerability of Free Blacks in Benguela, Angola, 1780–1830 ...................................................193 Mariana P. Candido <UN> <UN> vi contents PART THREE FORGING ATLANTIC IDENTITIES 9 Indigenous Leaders and the Atlantic World: The Parallel Lives of Dom Antônio Filipe Camarão and Pieter Poty, 1600–1650.........213 Mark Meuwese 10 Law and Colonial Reform in the 18th Century Spanish World: The Life of Francisco Xavier Gamboa, Mexican Lawyer ....................235 Christopher Albi 11 Benkos Biohó: African Maroon Leadership in New Grenada ...........263 Omar H. Ali 12 ‘Je me vois réduit…à la mendicité:’ Marine Veterans of New France and their New Atlantic World .....................................................295 Christian Ayne Crouch 13 Paul Cuffe’s Journey from ‘Musta’ to Atlantic-African, 1778–1811 ......................................................................................................323 Jeffrey A. Fortin Conclusion: Atlantic Lives and Atlantic History ..........................................345 Mark Meuwese Index.........................................................................................................................351 <UN> <UN> Joseph Moxon after Edward Wright, A plat of all the world [1657]. <UN> <UN> <UN> <UN> PREFACE Jeffrey A. Fortin The goal of Atlantic history and its practitioners is to consider the past from a perspective bound less by traditional fields of study, national bor- ders, and staid pedagogy that inhibits new ways of thinking and interpret- ing. No longer a new field of inquiry, Atlantic history still offers seemingly limitless opportunities for scholars to approach the past in fresh and excit- ing ways. Atlantic Biographies: Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World does just that by incorporating a “biography as history” approach that illuminates the interconnectedness of the peoples of the Atlantic by highlighting individual – and where appropriate, small groups in the spirit of prosopography – experiences made possible by their connection to the littoral. Composed of chapters that span a broad chronological, topical and thematic range, Atlantic Biographies highlight the uniqueness of the Atlantic as a social, political, economic, and cultural theater bound together to illustrate what the Atlantic meant to those subjects of each chapter. This is a book about people. To paraphrase W. Jeffrey Bolster, the goal of this anthology is to put people back into Atlantic history.1 The explosive growth of the field has yielded enormous amounts of new data and schol- arly studies that have truly reshaped our way of thinking about the past, yet this sometimes comes at the expense of the human side of Atlantic history. Marcus Rediker’s recent tome The Slave Ship: A Human History successfully injected the human element to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade through several biographical sketches in an attempt to make the reader intimate with the pain, suffering and death that built a capitalist driven Atlantic world.2 What can go missing in mountains of data, scores of examinations about race, economies, gender, politics, and numerous other topics are the individuals and small groups who proved central to 1 W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review, 113 (February 2008), 19–47. 2 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007). Rediker’s introduction thoroughly addresses the need to understand the slave trade as a “human history.” <UN> <UN> x jeffrey a. fortin the development of the Atlantic world. Each chapter in Atlantic Biographies seeks to build on Rediker’s lead by engaging human history, bringing back to the center of the story many forgotten and understudied Atlantic deni- zens, as well as re-examining a few better known characters from the past. As the contributors to this anthology demonstrate, the Atlantic world was not composed of a one-way oceanic highway with actors and agents traveling westward exclusively. The field of Atlantic history has matured, as the chapters in Atlantic Biographies demonstrate, and is no longer focused on British North America, but inclusive of a “red” Atlantic, Iberian Atlantic, and the numerous other descriptors scholars have used to define the various components of the littoral. The various “Atlantics” are not iso- lated from one another in this volume. Rather, Atlantic Biographies seeks to present an integrated Atlantic world where the interconnectedness and intermingling of the southern, northern, eastern and western por- tions of the Atlantic can be seen. Atlantic Biographies calls attention to the dynamic individuals and small groups who routinely crossed the ideologi- cal, political and geographic boundaries that have come to be ascribed to this transnational theater of the Atlantic world by modern historians. Several anthologies exploring important themes and issues in the study of Atlantic history have been published in recent years, simultaneously demonstrating the strengths while highlighting two key weaknesses in the historiography. The first general category of anthologies concerns itself with definitions – what is Atlantic history? Why are scholars concerned with an Atlantic world? Does Atlantic history exist? – in an attempt to legitimate or lend credence to a relatively young field in historical scholar- ship. Bernard Bailyn, Nicholas Canny, Peter Coclanis, Paul Gilroy and oth- ers have debated the larger framework of the Atlantic and its usefulness in the study of history.3 Although it is important to chart where a field of study originated and to continually assess any field’s place in its broader intellectual context, anthologies of Atlantic history have engaged in a degree of self-reflection and assessment that make it important to move beyond our collective desire to answer the ‘what is Atlantic History’ ques- tion. In contrast, Atlantic Biographies allows the voices of people who 3 See Bernard Bailyn’s seminal article “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario, Vol. 20, Iss. 1