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Archiver > Melungeon > 2004-09 > 1096341539


From: "PennyFerguson" <>
Subject: Re: [Melungeon] Origin of the Melungeons - 1619, Part 2
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:19:03 -0400
References: <e8.29f4d0d.2e8a25bf@aol.com>


Hi everyone,

Africans were here before British America. They played important roles in
the settling of the Americas. I'm leaving in a couple of days and figured
Tim may not be through sending his article before I left and I wanted to
point this out.

"Most of the earliest black immigrants to the Americas were indigenous to
Spain or Portugal: men such as Pedro Alonso Niño, a navigator who
accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, and the black colonists who helped
Nicolás de Ovando form the first Spanish settlement on Hispaniola in 1502.
The name of Nuflo de Olano appears in the records as that of a black slave
present when Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513. Other
blacks served with Hernán Cortés when he conquered Mexico (1519-1521) and
with Francisco Pizarro when he marched into Peru (1532).

A 1 Iberian Blacks

Estebanico, one of the survivors of the unfortunate expedition of Pánfilo de
Narváez to Florida in 1527, was a black. With three companions, he spent
eight years travelling overland to Mexico City, learning several Native
American languages in the process. Later, while exploring what is now New
Mexico, United States, he lost his life in a dispute with the Zuñi people."

http://au.encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761561183/Blacks_in_the_Americas.html

and
"From 1492 to 1607 is a long time. It is 115 years. During that period, only
Spain had colonies in North America. Spain was strong enough to keep other
Europeans out of North America. But Spain did not have enough people to send
settlers to live there. So most of North America was inhabited only by
Indians. By 1607, there were more than 150,000 Spanish settlers in the New
World. In 1502, Spain began bringing Black slaves to the New World. The
Spanish brought a huge number of Black slaves from Africa. The Portuguese
brought Black slaves to Brazil. Nobody counted the number of slaves.
Historians know that there were at least 150,000 Black slaves in the New
World before the first Englishman came to live in America. Some historians
think that the Spanish and Portuguese had as many as a million Black people
in the New World before the first English came."

http://sergiy.kyrylkov.name/amhistory/ch03.html

Thanks,

Penny




----- Original Message -----
From: <>


These were
> the very first Africans to arrive in British North America, one year
before
> the Mayflower.


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