By the middle of the seventeenth century, almost a hundred thousand
English men and women had settled in the New World. We sometimes forget
that the largest colony across the Atlantic in those early years was
not in Virginia, not in New England, but on the small eastern islands
of the Caribbean, called the Caribbees.
Early existence in the Caribbean was brutal, and at first these
immigrants struggled merely to survive. Then, through an act of
international espionage, they stole a secret industrial process from
the Catholic countries that gave them the key to unimagined wealth. The
scheme these pious Puritans used to realize their earthly fortune
required that they also install a special new attitude: only certain
peoples may claim full humanity. Their profits bequeathed a mortgage to
America of untold future costs.
The Caribbean shown here was a dumping ground for outcasts and
adventurers from many nations, truly a cockpit of violence, greed,
drunkenness, piracy, and voodoo. Even so, its English colonists penned
a declaration of independence and fought a revolutionary war with their
homeland over a hundred years before the North American settlements.
Had they respected the rights of mankind to the same degree they
espoused them, the face of modern America might have been very
different.
The men and women in this story include many actual and composite
individuals, and its scope is faithful to the larger events of that
age, though time has been compressed somewhat to allow a continuous
narrative.
To Liberty and Justice for all.