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  • The Global Luster of the Early Caribbean
  • Mary S. Draper (bio)
Molly A. Warsh. American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700. Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xviii + 275 pp. $39.95.

"In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue"—so begins the popular ditty that chronicles Columbus's accidental arrival in the Americas. One of the better-known versions of this rhyming poem continues, "Columbus sailed on to find some gold / to bring back home, as he'd been told." In the stories we tell about the nascent years of the Atlantic world, historians often mimic this narrative. We begin with Columbus's journeys, tracing his voyages around the Caribbean Sea. Then we abandon the region much like the Spanish did. Within a few decades of Columbus's voyages, the Spanish had deserted the shores of the Caribbean to move into the interiors of North and South America in search of gold. Dazzled by the wealth they found, conquistadores toppled the Incan and Aztec empires. In this oft-told tale, the early Spanish empire was terrestrial, predicated on precious metals. Just offshore, the islands of the Caribbean lay derelict, allegedly waning into an imperial backwater until the seventeenth century.

Molly Warsh's American Baroque offers a new interpretation of this early moment in Atlantic history by tracing the "jagged global paths" of the Caribbean's earliest commodity (11). Before the silver of Potosí, another lustrous commodity inundated Atlantic markets: the pearls of Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche. In the seabeds of northern South America (offshore present-day Venezuela), divers excavated 1.2 billion oysters—in search of the pearls ensconced within—between the 1520s and 1540s. Ubiquitous, mysterious, and desirable, these pearls cascaded into imperial markets. American Baroque restores these commodities to their rightful place at the center of the early Caribbean and an increasingly connected early modern world.

In 1492, when Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, his directives from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella included pearls. This desire for pearls was not new, as Warsh reveals. Europeans had been enchanted with pearls since the classical era. These shiny, seaborne specimen evoked sex and death. [End Page 529] Their inexplicable origins embodied the sea's procreative power. Yet, to extract them from the depths of the ocean, divers risked their lives. Pearls' allure continued into the sixteenth century. By that time, officials were eager to regulate and tax their circulation. They attempted to use the Siete Partidos as a legal guideline, but pearls' marine origins complicated their classification. The sea belonged in common to the people, so those who harvested pearls would enjoy considerable independence.

Europeans' desire for pearls yielded far-ranging consequences, especially in the Caribbean. Following Columbus's first encounter with pearls in 1498, news of undisturbed oyster beds enticed colonists to settle Cubagua. Warsh highlights how violence as much as knowledge buttressed the early Spanish pearl industry that developed on the island. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Warsh's haunting account of maritime slavery. Profit-hunters created a coercive labor regime that ruthlessly exploited surrounding coastal ecologies. To guarantee a labor supply, Spaniards enslaved local indigenous populations and imported captive Africans. As they harvested pearls, enslaved divers hemorrhaged blood from prolonged time underwater, risked shark attacks, and endured beatings for taking too long between dives. The human toll was appalling; the riches were astounding.

By reconstructing the lives, knowledge, and skillset of enslaved divers, Warsh contributes to a growing body of scholarship on enslaved maritime culture, such as Kevin Dawson's Undercurrents of Power (2018), as well as studies of slavery beyond the plantation complex including Jennifer Anderson's Mahogany (2012). In these accounts, slavery was both physical and intellectual coercion. Command of and profiting from the Atlantic's peripheral settings—from sea-beds and coastlines to the interiors of islands—depended upon enslaved labor and knowledge. In this sense, slavery along the Pearl Coast paralleled slavery within the Atlantic world's mahogany forests as well as the labor of enslaved pilots. Enslaved divers leveraged environmental knowledge. This enabled them to negotiate some—albeit limited—material reprieves...

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