The Islands

By The Harbor February 21, 2026

Barren of People

The Cape Verde Islands sit 350 miles off the West African coast. When the Portuguese arrived in the mid-fifteenth century, they were uninhabited — “barren of people but not vegetation.”1

That’s the official story. Empty islands, waiting to be settled. But empty islands don’t explain what came next.

  • Primary source quoted in Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Cotton Problem

    American cotton and other American plant species reached Cape Verde twenty-five years before Columbus’s first voyage.1

    If nobody had crossed the Atlantic yet, how did American plants get to an island off the coast of Africa? Somebody was already making the trip. The question is who — and in which direction.

  • Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Not Primitive Craft

    Columbus documented canoes carrying “70 and 80 men” and saw “a handsome dugout…95 palmerston length…150 persons would fit and navigate.”1 Near Honduras, he intercepted a Maya trading vessel “as long as a galley and eight feet wide,” carrying 25 paddlers plus cotton mantles, copper hatchets, and crucibles to melt copper.2

    These were not rafts. These were engineered maritime infrastructure.

  • Columbus expedition records. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Phoenicians of the New World

    J. Eric S. Thompson classified the Putun Chontal Akalan Maya as “the Phoenicians of the New World” and “the Argonauts of the Western Caribbean.”1 They operated vast trading networks across the Caribbean and beyond.

    The Americas had seagoing peoples with industrial-scale vessels, trade routes, and navigational knowledge. The Atlantic was not a wall. It was a road.

  • J. Eric S. Thompson, cited in Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2007). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Within Decades

    Within decades of Portuguese arrival, the islands had a population large enough to supply an imperial charter.1 Uninhabited islands don’t populate themselves in fifty years — not without people being brought there.

    The question your father never thought to ask: if the islands were empty, and the Portuguese were the first Europeans there, who are Cape Verdeans actually descended from?

  • Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Standard Answer

    The standard answer is West Africans and Portuguese. Senegalese, Ghanaian, Nigerian — mixed with European settlers over centuries to create what we now call Creole.1

    That answer isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete. It leaves out the people who were already crossing the Atlantic before Columbus, and the people who were shipped there from the other direction after he arrived.

  • General Cape Verdean historiography. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Copper Islands

    The copper islands were wherever displaced indigenous Americans landed. Cape Verde, the Canaries, the Azores. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut.1

    The people were American. The islands were just where the pipeline deposited them.

    1. Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. J. Eric S. Thompson, cited in Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2007). ↩

    No comments yet.