The Mixing Ground

By The Harbor February 21, 2026

Not Just Indians

Cape Verde didn’t just receive indigenous Americans. It received everyone the Iberian empires wanted gone.1

Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Moors driven out during the Reconquista. Conversos — Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity but were never trusted. The Inquisition sorted Europe’s unwanted, and Cape Verde was one of the places they were sent.

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

    • One Policy, One Bull

    The Inquisition, the slave port, and the depopulation of America were not separate events. They were components of a single policy, under a single authority, executing a single papal bull.1

    Charles V inherited the religious framework established by Dum Diversas in 1452 and applied it systematically across his empire. The sorting categories were religious — Christian versus enemy of Christ — but the result was racial. Everyone who wasn’t white and Catholic ended up in the same colonial pipeline.

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

    • The Swarthy Jews

    When William Barrington visited the synagogue in Amsterdam in 1635, he noted that “the Jewish men are most black.” Scottish minister Robert Kirk visited the London synagogue in 1690, observing over 200 Jews worshiping, and noted “they were all very black men.”1

    One contemporary writer distinguished them plainly: “The English Jew is white, the Portuguese Jew swarthy, the American Jew olive, and the Rabbi Jew copper colored.”

  • Kurimeo Ahau, Pilgrims & Puritans / Crypto Sephardic Moors / Witch Trials. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Columbus the Marrano

    Christopher Columbus was a Marrano — a crypto-Jew. Georgetown University linguist Estelle Irizarry analyzed hundreds of his handwritten documents and found his primary language was Castilian Spanish, the Ladino tongue of Spanish Jews.1

    His voyage was financed through interest-free loans from Jewish conversos — Luis de Santángel, Gabriel Sánchez, Rabbi Don Isaac Abravanel. Simon Wiesenthal documented that Columbus’s true motivation was finding a safe haven for Jews suffering under the Inquisition. His triangular signature matched patterns found on gravestones in Spanish Jewish cemeteries.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, Columbus and His Negro Friends / Marranos, Moors, Black Conquistadors; Simon Wiesenthal, Sails of Hope. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Jamestown’s DNA

    DNA evidence suggests Jamestown, Virginia was founded and settled by persons of Jewish ancestry — not Anglo-Saxons. Using genealogical DNA methods and global databases, researchers found that the majority of Jamestown Colony organizers and colonists were likely of Jewish ethnicity, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic.1

    The same pattern appeared among the Huguenots, the Acadian French colonists in Canada, and the Mayflower Pilgrims. Most of colonial North America from the 1500s to the 1700s was settled by persons of Jewish ancestry who had publicly presented themselves as Christians.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, Sephardic Moorish “English” Colonizers / Jamestown, Roanoke, Plymouth. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Abraham Pierce the Blackmore

    On the earliest Plymouth Colony muster rolls — “the names of all the males that are able to bear arms” — one name stands out: Abraham Pierce the Blackmore.1

    “Blackmore” was a term for a dark-skinned person. A Moor. A Pilgrim among Pilgrims, dark enough to require a qualifier. If the founding colonists themselves included Moors, Sephardic Jews, and conversos, then the racial narrative of colonial America collapses at Plymouth Rock.

  • Plymouth Colony muster roll; Kurimeo Ahau, Pilgrims & Puritans / Crypto Sephardic Moors / Witch Trials. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Witch Trials

    The Salem witch trials weren’t just Puritan hysteria. They followed the pattern of the Inquisition — the same institution that had driven Sephardic Jews and Moors out of Iberia and into the colonial pipeline.1

    The official title for the chief rabbi of Portugal from the 13th century was “Arabi Mor” — literally, the Moor. The reason given for the Inquisition’s persistence was that “in spite of the incessant and most energetic efforts, the Marranos were beguiled by those who adhere to Judaism to return to their old faith.” The witch trial was the Inquisition wearing a Puritan hat.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, Pilgrims & Puritans / Crypto Sephardic Moors / Witch Trials. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Mixing Ground

    Cape Verde was where all of this converged. Indigenous Americans from Labrador and the Caribbean. Sephardic Jews from Iberia. Moors from North Africa. Conversos caught between faiths. Portuguese settlers.1

    They mixed on islands that had been uninhabited a century earlier. Their children were called Creole. Their grandchildren were called Cape Verdean. Their great-great-grandchildren checked a box that said “Other” and moved on with their lives.

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

    No comments yet.