Privateering, Slavery, and Resistance: Afro-Spaniards from the Greater Caribbean in Colonial North America

Drawing on eighteenth-century newspaper records from New York, Boston and Philadelphia, in addition to archival sources from New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, this study interrelates Spanish and English privateering in the Greater Caribbean and along North America’s Atlantic Coast with the unfortunate phenomenon of the enslavement of African-descendant and Indigenous sailors from the Spanish territories in the British colonies. It focuses on group escape attempts as one strategy employed by Spanish-speaking enslaved people to achieve freedom.