The Taken

By The Harbor February 21, 2026

Before Columbus

The enslavement of American Indians predates Columbus by centuries. DNA evidence reveals American Indian women present in Iceland through Viking kidnapping operations.1

Around 1009 AD, Vikings captured two Beothuk boys — Voltov and Vimar — from the coast of Newfoundland and brought them to Norway.2 Five hundred years before the “discovery” of America, Europeans were already taking its people.

  • 2010 mitochondrial DNA study showing C1E lineage in modern Icelanders. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Labrador, 1501

    In 1501, the Portuguese began to systematically depopulate Labrador, “transporting the now-extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves.”1

    Labrador. Newfoundland. Nova Scotia. What the Portuguese called Terra Nova. The indigenous people of northeastern North America were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic.

  • James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press, 1995). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Extinct

    The Portuguese campaign against the Beothuk was so thorough that the last known Beothuk died in 1829. Complete extinction of an entire nation through European violence and deportation.1

    The historical record says they were “transported.” The destination was Cape Verde. The Beothuk are now classified as extinct. But their descendants are classified as something else entirely.

  • Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Not a Single Event

    This was not a single raid. It was a sustained operation. The Portuguese had established beachheads along the North American coast and were systematically removing the population.1

    Portuguese fishing fleets operating off the Grand Banks regularly kidnapped Beothuk individuals to sell in European slave markets, particularly through Cape Verde. The fishing expeditions were cover for a slave trade.

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

    • The Caribbean

    It wasn’t just the north. Columbus depopulated the Caribbean with the same method — ship the people out, sell them elsewhere, record no origin.1

    The Taíno, the Arawak, the Carib. Entire island populations were emptied. Some went to Seville. Some went to the Azores. Some went to Cape Verde. The textbooks call this a “population collapse from disease.” The records say they were shipped.

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

    • New England

    Then the English arrived and continued the work. The indigenous people of New England — Pequot, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc — faced the same pipeline.1

    Different flag. Same system. Take the people, ship them out, relabel them on arrival. The Portuguese started it in Labrador. The Spanish ran it through the Caribbean. The English perfected it in New England.

  • Smithsonian acknowledgment that “colonial America depended on the enslavement of indigenous people.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Foundation

    New England’s colonial success depended fundamentally on “the labor of thousands of Native Americans” who were systematically enslaved through manufactured conflicts and legal pretexts.1

    Wars like King Philip’s War were waged “in large measure to perpetuate slavery,” creating captives who could be legally enslaved under colonial law. This was not a side effect of settlement. It was the business model.

  • Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “Americans” exhibition (2018). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • Every Direction

    The people were taken in every direction. North American Indians shipped east to Cape Verde and Seville. Caribbean Indians shipped east to the Azores and Canaries. Later, Indians from New England shipped south to Bermuda, Barbados, Jamaica.1

    The pipeline didn’t run one way. It ran every way. And at every destination, the same thing happened: the record of who they were disappeared.

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

    • The Genetic Heritage

    The Portuguese began depopulating Labrador in 1501. By the 1860s, Cape Verdean “immigrants” were arriving in New Bedford, working on whaling ships that traveled the same Atlantic routes their ancestors had been forced to travel in the opposite direction.1

    The genetic heritage was American. The people taken from this coast ended up on islands where their descendants would one day board ships heading back. They didn’t know they were coming home.

    1. Portuguese depopulation from Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995). Cape Verdean immigration patterns from New Bedford whaling industry records. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). ↩

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