Caribbee

AUTHOR'S NOTE By the middle of the seventeenth century, almost a hundred thousand English men and women had settled in the New World. We sometimes forget that the largest colony across the Atlantic in those early years was not in Virginia, not in New England, but on the small eastern islands of the Caribbean, called the Caribbees. Early existence in the Caribbean was brutal, and at first these immigrants struggled merely to survive. Then, through an act of international espionage, they stole a secret industrial process from the Catholic countries that gave them the key to unimagined wealth. The scheme these pious Puritans used to realize their earthly fortune required that they also install a special new attitude: only certain peoples may claim full humanity. Their profits bequeathed a mortgage to America of untold future costs.