August 9, 1526: Slavery Comes to the Americas

A recent aerial photo of the area

August 9, 1526, 500 years ago: Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a Spanish magistrate, around 46 years old, founds the San Miguel de Gualdape colony. It was the first European settlement, as well as the first documented occurrence of enslavement of African peoples, in what would later become the continental United States.

Ayllón had previously served as an administrator in Hispaniola, in what would become the Dominican Republic. In 1521, he visited what would become the site of his colony, kidnapped 60 Native Americans living there, and took them back to Hispaniola as slaves.

He reported back to his superiors that the land he had found was not defended militarily, and could easily be taken. He received permission to establish himself as governor there, but only after he completed an audit of Spanish officials in Puerto Rico. It took him until 1526 to do that.

He named the settlement after St. Michael the Archangel, and the local Guale tribe. However, due to the similarity of the name to that of the Spanish city of Guadalupe, it is sometimes written as "San Miguel to Guadalupe."

When he got to his new colony, with some black slaves who had been brought first to Hispaniola, he found bad soil, making it hard to grow anything. And there weren't very many natives left, making trade next to impossible. His town survived less than 3 months, with settlers enduring exhaustion, cold, hunger, disease, and troubles with the local natives. When Ayllón died on October 18, from an unnamed illness, the entire enterprise fell apart. As my father would have said, "Served him right."

The surviving colonists broke into warring factions, including America's 1st slave rebellion. By mid-November, the colonists decided to give up and sail back to Hispaniola. Of the 600-700 people whom Ayllón had brought with him, only 150 survivors reached Hispaniola that winter.

Ayllón's account of the region inspired a number of later attempts by the Spanish and French governments to colonize the southeastern United States. In 1565, Spain would end all French attempts at colonizing the region, and establish St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement in what is now the U.S. England would follow with Virginia in 1607 and Massachusetts in 1620. France occupied what became Louisiana, the American Midwest, and eastern Canada.

Today, the place that Spain called San Miguel de Gualdape is called Winyah Bay, in Georgetown County, on the coast of South Carolina. Just to the south is the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center, on the site of a plantation once owned by Yawkey, as had been the Boston Red Sox, who turned out to be the last team in Major League Baseball to racially integrate. NCIS fans, take note: Some things are just coincidences. 

March 1, 1526: The Tyndale Bible

March 1, 1526, 500 years ago: William Tyndale publishes a complete edition of the New Testament, a translation from the German edition published by Martin Luther into English.

Tyndale, born around 1494 in Gloucestershire in the West Country of England, had previously published an Old Testament in 1522. This meant he now had a complete Bible, the 1st one in the English language.

At this point, the most common Bible was the Vulgate, in Latin, the language of the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church, published in 1382 by John Wycliffe. Before reaching Rome, most Bibles were published in Greek; before that, in Aramaic, the native language of Jesus; with Old Testaments having been in Hebrew.

A surviving Tyndale New Testament,

in the British Library in London

Given England's expansionism around the world, in the 16th Century, and the Protestant Reformation around Europe, this was a major step forward in the Bible, a.k.a. "The Word of God," becoming accessible to people on their own terms, as was the Gutenberg Bible published in Germany in 1455, at the dawn of the printing press.

This allowed people to read the Bible for themselves, without simply being told what it said by their priests. The priests didn't like that. The Church hierarchy really didn't like that.

In 1528, Tyndale wrote The Obedience of a Christian Man, arguing that a country's monarch should be the head of its church. This gave him an ally in King Henry VIII of England, who used this book was part of his reason to break away from the Catholic Church, and form the Church of England, with himself as its head.

But the main reason he wanted to do that was because he wanted to divorce his 1st wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. The Catholic Church wouldn't let him do that, so he broke away.

And Tyndale sided with the Catholics on this, writing The Practice of the Prelates in 1530. That pissed Henry off, and Tyndale fled to the Duchy of Brabant. Big mistake: While now part of the Kingdom of Belgium, Brabant was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was Catholic. In 1535, Emperor Charles V ordered Tyndale's arrest; in 1536, Charles ordered Tyndale's execution. Tyndale was about 42 years old.

In 1539, Henry VIII, by then between his 3rd and 4th marriages, published The Great Bible, the 1st royally-authorized Bible in English. It was mostly the Tyndale Bible. In 1611, King James I published a new version, which has become known, naturally, as the King James Version. It has been estimated that 76 percent of its Old Testament is Tyndale's text, and 83 percent of its New Testament is.

The Tyndale Bible introduced into the English language such words as "Passover," "scapegoat" and "atonement"; the phrases "it came to pass," "the powers that be," "the signs of the times," "mercy seat" and "filthy lucre";

Phrases which had previously appeared in other Bibles, especially the Wycliffe Vulgate, but were made accessible in English due to Tyndale, include: "my brother's keeper," "a moment in time," "in the twinkling of an eye," "the salt of the earth," "judge not that ye be not judged," "knock and it shall be opened unto you," "seek and ye shall find," "ask and it shall be given you," "a law unto themselves," and "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."