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.

William Dampier used it for the inhabitants of Cape Verde in 1683. John Smith used it for the Powhatan in 1612. David MacRitchie used it for the Picts of Scotland. William Ripley used it for the populations of southern Europe.

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.¹

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.”

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. He used the same words that other writers used for American Indians: tawny, swarthy, dark but not black. He noted that even among the inhabitants, there were gradations — the Governor was “the clearest of them.” A spectrum of color, not a single racial category.

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.”¹