A Shade, Not a Race
Open any English text written before 1800 and search for the word "swarthy." You will find it used to describe Cape Verdeans. You will find it used to describe American Indians. You will find it used to describe Basques, Welshmen, Scots, Jews, Gypsies, Portuguese, Moors, and ancient Britons.1
One word. Applied to peoples on four continents who had no common ancestry, no shared language, no cultural connection. "Swarthy" was not a race. It was a shade.
What Dampier Saw
When Captain William Dampier anchored at St. Nicholas in the Cape Verde Islands in 1683, he described the inhabitants as "all very swarthy; the Governor was the clearest of them, yet of a dark tawny complexion."1
Not black. Not African. "Swarthy" and "dark tawny." A spectrum of color, not a single racial category. Even among the inhabitants, there were gradations — the Governor was "the clearest of them."
Not West Africans
Dampier was a careful observer — he spent years circumnavigating the globe and his descriptions are among the most detailed of the era. He did not describe Cape Verdeans the way he described West Africans.1
He used the same words that other writers used for American Indians: tawny, swarthy, dark but not black. The Portuguese had controlled Cape Verde for two centuries by the time Dampier arrived. In all that time, the standard narrative says the islands were populated by West African slaves. But Dampier didn't describe West Africans. He described people who looked like what every other European writer called "Indians."
Copper Colored
Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary defined "American" as originally referring to "the aboriginals or copper colored races" encountered by Europeans, before the term was appropriated to describe European descendants born in America.1
The word "American" didn't mean what it means now. It meant the people who were already here. Copper colored. The definition was changed. The people weren't.
Eight or Ten Shades
J.H. McCullough determined that the general color of American Indians "principally resembles the cinnamon," rejecting the oversimplified "copper-colored" classification. His research revealed eight to ten distinct shades among indigenous peoples, ranging from ash and yellow tones to "darkish blue very dark" complexions.1
He argued for "brown men" as more accurate than "copper-colored men" because copper itself comes in many hues. The people couldn't be reduced to one color any more than they could be reduced to one name.
Born White, Made Tawny
John Smith described the Powhatan in 1612 as born white but made tawny by the elements — as if their color was acquired, not inherent.1 Robert Beverley wrote in 1705 that Virginia Indians were "of the middling and largest stature of the English" and "generally tall and straight, of a comely proportion."
European writers couldn't decide what they were seeing. Not white enough to be European. Not black enough to be African. Swarthy. Tawny. Copper. Cinnamon. Every description circled the same people without ever landing on a race.
Aboriginal Blacks
Multiple Spanish explorers documented dark-skinned aboriginal peoples in California who possessed features "very nearly approaching that of the Negroes" but maintained straight hair.1 Native testimony described existing "negro villages" — populations that had been "settled in America from the earliest ages."
These weren't shipwreck survivors. These weren't escaped slaves. These were indigenous people whose skin was dark enough that Europeans reached for the only word they had. The word was wrong. The people were American.
The Trapdoor
"Swarthy" is the trapdoor in the historical record. Every time a colonial writer describes someone as swarthy, tawny, copper, or dark but not black, they are describing people who don't fit the racial categories that would be invented later.1
Read those descriptions now and you see Cape Verdeans. You see the people in your family photos. You see the gradations your father knew but never had a name for — because the name was taken before he was born.
795 swarthy references catalogued across primary sources in the AMERICA research database. ↩︎
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