Wood starts the book with the earliest Africans to come to North America via the Spanish explores. The Africans served as soldiers, sailors and servants who were poorly led by the Spanish in a quest to take over what is now modern Florida. The Spanish put the African soldiers on the front line to fight the Indians for the land but because of poor leadership the Spanish and the Africans were separated from their supply boats and from each other. Because of the unknown of the gulf coast wilderness majority of soldiers and explorers died. But some survived to be healed by the local tribes.
In the early seventeenth century Africans were within the Dutch colonies of what is today New York. At this time the Africans were not seen as slaves but as indentured servants. They had a better chance of gaining freedom because an indentured servant was simply a person who worked for another person for a definite period of time. Although without pay the Africans had a chance to roam around the new country as freemen when they worked off the amount of years they were given.
In the late seventeenth century the life of being an indentured servant changed to what was a gruesome new life for the Africans who came to the America. Wood referenced this period as a “terrible transformation”. The conditions changed from simple servitude to the increase of labor and living conditions within the southern colonies. The settlements of white people from the Caribbean