Barbados, 1648. The lush and deadly Caribbean paradise, domain of rebels and freeholders, of brigands, bawds and buccaneers. CARIBBEE is the untold story of the first American revolution, as English colonists pen a Declaration of Defiance ("liberty" or "death") against Parliament and fight a full-scale war for freedom against an English fleet -- with cannon, militia, many lives lost -- over a century before 1776.
The powerful story line, based on actual events, also puts the reader in the midst of the first major English slave auction in the Americas, and the first slave revolt. We see how plantation slavery was introduced into the English colonies, setting a cruel model for North America a few decades later, and we experience what it was like to be a West African ripped from a rich culture and forced to slave in the fields of the New World. We also see the unleashed greed of the early Puritans, who burned unruly slaves alive, a far different truth from that presented in sanitized history books. Finally, we witness how slavery contributed to the failure of the first American revolution, as well as to the destruction of England's hope for a vast New World empire.
We also are present at the birth of the buccaneers, one-time cattle hunters who banded together to revenge a bloody Spanish attack on their home, and soon became the most feared marauders in the New World. The story is mythic in scope, with the main participants being classic American archetypes -- a retelling of the great American quest for freedom and honor. The major characters are based on real individuals, men and women who came West to the New World to seek fortune and personal dignity.
Reviews
“This action-crammed, historically factual novel . . . is a rousing read about the bad old marauding days, ably reserarched by Hoover”
Publishers Weekly
“Meticulous . . . compelling.”
Kirkus Reviews
“It should establish Thomas Hoover in the front rank of writers of historical fiction."
Reissued by arrangement with Doubleday and Co., Inc. First Zebra Books Edition: December 1987. Print ISBN 0-385-19366-1
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.
The Caribbean shown here was a dumping ground for outcasts and adventurers from many nations, truly a cockpit of violence, greed, drunkenness, piracy, and voodoo. Even so, its English colonists penned a declaration of independence and fought a revolutionary war with their homeland over a hundred years before the North American settlements. Had they respected the rights of mankind to the same degree they espoused them, the face of modern America might have been very different.
The men and women in this story include many actual and composite individuals, and its scope is faithful to the larger events of that age, though time has been compressed somewhat to allow a continuous narrative.