Although Serina, as mulatto "bed-warmer" to Benjamin Briggs, had no specific prototype at that early time (a condition soon to change, much to the dismay of English wives at home), Atiba was inspired by a Gold Coast slave named Coffe who led an unsuccessful revolt on Barbados in the seventeenth century, intending to establish a black nation along African lines. As punishment he and several others were "burned alive, being chained at the stake." When advised of his sentence, he reportedly declared, "If you roast me today, you cannot roast me tomorrow." A contemporary broadside depicting the affair retailed briskly in London. Atiba's subsequent career, as a Maroon leader with whom the English eventually were forced to negotiate, also had various historical models, including the fearsome Cudjoe, head of a warlike nation of free Negroes still terrifying English planters on Jamaica almost eighty years after it was seized.
Very few physical artifacts survive from those years. On Barbados one can see Drax Hall, on which Briggs Hall was closely modeled, and little else. On Tortuga, this writer chopped his way through the jungle and located the site of Le Vasseur's Forte de la Roche and "dovecote." A bit of digging uncovered some stonework of the fort's outer wall, but all that remained of the "dovecote" was a single plaster step, almost three and a half centuries old, once part of its lower staircase and now lodged in the gnarled root of a Banyan tree growing against the huge rock atop which it was built. On Jamaica there seems to be nothing left, save a few relics from the heyday of Port Royal. Only the people of those islands, children of a vast African diaspora, remain as living legacy of Europe's sweet tooth in the seventeenth century.
The story here was pieced together from many original sources, for which thanks is due the superb Library and Rare Book Room of Columbia University, the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library, the Archives of Barbados, and the Institute of Jamaica, Kingston. For information on Yoruba culture and practices, still very much alive in Brazil in parts of the Caribbean, I am grateful to Dr. John Mason of the Yoruba Theological Seminary, the Caribbean Cultural Center of New York, and friends in Haiti who have over the years exposed me to Haitian vodun. For information on Tortuga and the boucaniers, including some vital research on Forte de la Roche, I am indebted to the archeologist Daniel Koski-Karell; and for their hospitality to an enquiring novelist I thank Les Freres des Ecoles chretiennes, Christian Brothers missionaries on the Isle de la Tortue, Haiti. I am also grateful to Dr. Gary Puckrein, author of Little England, for his insights concerning the role slavery played in Barbados' ill-starred attempt at independence.
Those friends who have endured all or portions of this manuscript, pen in hand, and provided valuable criticisms and suggestions include, in alphabetical order—Norman and Susan Fainstein, Joanna Field, Joyce Hawley, Julie Hoover, Ronald Miller, Ann Prideaux, Gary Prideaux, and Peter Radetsky. Without them this could never have been completed. I am also beholden to my agent, Virginia Barber, and to my editor, Anne Hukill Yeager, for their tireless encouragement and assistance.
BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER
Nonfiction
Zen Culture
The Zen Experience
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The Moghul