A Tale of Two Shipwrecks: Origins and Early Histories of the Miskitu Sambo and Garifuna Communities, 1635–1755

The Miskitu Sambo and Garifuna (“Black Carib”) peoples, two distinct mixed-race Afro-indigenous communities living today primarily on the Caribbean coast of Central America, share a very similar origin story. Written histories and oral traditions both testify to the wreck of a slave ship as the origin of both communities. Attempts to reconstruct the origins and early history of these communities have been preoccupied with identifying or dating the shipwrecks. Yet the social world out of which both emerged was much more heterogeneous than their respective single-shipwreck origin stories suggest, and the growth rates of both communities cannot be attributed to natural reproduction alone. This paper evaluates the competing shipwreck hypotheses, provides evidence of alternative or additional origins, and compares the early histories of the two peoples.

In the case of the Garifuna, who originated in the Eastern Caribbean before being forcibly relocated to Central America by the British in 1797, the indigenous Kalinago (“Island Carib”) of Yurumein (Saint Vincent) harbored thousands of runaway slaves from nearby colonies. In the case of the Miskitu Sambo, indigenous Miskitu in colonial Guatemala were joined by Africans who came as the survivors of wrecked slaveships or runaways from nearby towns and plantations, and their ranks were swelled by buccaneers who came to the Central American coast to cut dyewoods, purchase supplies, and put distance between themselves and colonial authorities. The core primary sources are French and Spanish colonial correspondence and notarial records, supplemented by Spanish diplomatic correspondence and French, English, Dutch, and Latin published contemporary accounts and document collections which predate the earliest surviving archival records. Together, the two cases constitute an important and understudied chapter of Latin American colonial history with the potential to enrich our understanding of the wider history of Afro-indigenous relations in the Americas.