[Footnote 1:  A Tropical Dependency, James Nisbet & Co., Ltd., London, 1906, p. 17.]

If now we come to America, we find the Negro influence upon the Indian to be so strong as to call in question all current conceptions of American archaeology and so early as to suggest the coming of men from the Guinea Coast perhaps even before the coming of Columbus.[1] The first natives of Africa to come were Mandingoes; many of the words used by the Indians in their daily life appear to be not more than corruptions or adaptations of words used by the tribes of Africa; and the more we study the remains of those who lived in America before 1492, and the far-reaching influence of African products and habits, the more must we acknowledge the strength of the position of the latest thesis.  This whole subject will doubtless receive much more attention from scholars, but in any case it is evident that the demands of Negro culture can no longer be lightly regarded or brushed aside, and that as a scholarly contribution to the subject Wiener’s work is of the very highest importance.

[Footnote 1:  See Wiener, I, 178.]

2. The Negro in Spanish Exploration

When we come to Columbus himself, the accuracy of whose accounts has so recently been questioned, we find a Negro, Pedro Alonso Nino, as the pilot of one of the famous three vessels.  In 1496 Nino sailed to Santo Domingo and he was also with Columbus on his third voyage.  With two men, Cristobal de la Guerra, who served as pilot, and Luis de la Guerra, a Spanish merchant, in 1499 he planned what proved to be the first successful commercial voyage to the New World.

The revival of slavery at the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the system of Negro slavery were due to the commercial expansion of Portugal in the fifteenth century.  The very word Negro is the modern Spanish and Portuguese form of the Latin niger.  In 1441 Prince Henry sent out one Gonzales, who captured three Moors on the African coast.  These men offered as ransom ten Negroes whom they had taken.  The Negroes were taken to Lisbon in 1442, and in 1444 Prince Henry regularly began the European trade from the Guinea Coast.  For fifty years his country enjoyed a monopoly of the traffic.  By 1474 Negroes were numerous in Spain, and special interest attaches to Juan de Valladolid, probably the first of many Negroes who in time came to have influence and power over their people under the authority of a greater state.  He was addressed as “judge of all the Negroes and mulattoes, free or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble city of Seville, and throughout the whole archbishopric thereof.”  After 1500 there are frequent references to Negroes, especially in the Spanish West Indies.  Instructions to Ovando, governor of Hispaniola, in 1501, prohibited the passage to the Indies of Jews, Moors, or recent converts, but authorized him to take over Negro slaves who had been born in the power of Christians.