Istwa Nou

In 1699 twenty enslaved people took a canoe from Jamaica to Cuba. The Spanish authorities who received them granted asylum on religious grounds, under a crown policy of accepting fugitives from Protestant colonies and instructing them in Catholicism. The policy was a weapon. Spain could not match English or French naval strength in the Caribbean, so it worked at the seams of its rivals' plantations instead, and freedom for anyone who could reach Spanish ground drained labour from colonies that had none to spare. For the twenty people in the canoe the theology was beside the point. What they had was a boat, a night, and knowledge of where the current would take them. Julius Scott records this as the earliest documented case of a practice that went on for more than a century, people crossing between islands in small craft to get out from under whoever held them. Our own century calls them boat people. The phrase has been describing this stretch of water for three hundred years.