Caribbee

(Doubleday, 1985)

Barbados and Jamaica 1648. The lush and deadly Caribbean paradise, domain of rebels and freeholders, of brigands, bawds and buccaneers. CARIBBEE is the untold story of the first American revolution, as English colonists pen a Declaration of Defiance ("liberty" or "death") against Parliament and fight a full-scale war for freedom against an English fleet -- with cannon, militia, many lives lost -- over a century before 1776.

The powerful story line, based on actual events, also puts the reader in the midst of the first major English slave auction in the Americas, and the first slave revolt. We see how plantation slavery was introduced into the English colonies, setting a cruel model for North America a few decades later, and we experience what it was like to be a West African ripped from a rich culture and forced to slave in the fields of the New World. We also see the unleashed greed of the early Puritans, who burned unruly slaves alive, a far different truth from that presented in sanitized history books. Finally, we witness how slavery contributed to the failure of the first American revolution, as well as to the destruction of England's hope for a vast New World empire.

We also are present at the birth of the buccaneers, one-time cattle hunters who banded together to revenge a bloody Spanish attack on their home, and soon became the most feared marauders in the New World.