The Atlantic Itineraries of Afro-Caribbean Entrepreneur Catalina de los Santos, c.1590-1600

FAIN: FEL-289625-23

David Wheat
Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI 48824-3407)

Research and writing leading to a book on the social history of race and gender in the Afro-Caribbean Atlantic World of the 1590s.

This book retraces the remarkable itineraries of an Afro-Caribbean merchant and widow named Catalina de los Santos during the 1590s. After purchasing a 100-ton vessel in the Azores, she traveled aboard her ship to Seville and the Canary Islands in Spain's Indies fleet, returning to the Caribbean several years later. As a transregional social history, this book uses her story to reconstruct the experiences of free women of African descent in the Greater Antilles, the Azores, and the Canary Islands during the second half of the sixteenth century. It emphasizes ways their lives were shaped by diverse forms of oceanic traffic that linked these archipelagos to one another and to Seville, and the influences that these women in turn exercised within their communities. In so doing, this book contributes to our understanding of the Caribbean, the Azores, and the Canary Islands in the late 1500s as interconnected spaces located at the center of multiple, overlapping maritime circuits.