From Carta de Corso to Greenhill 1966 — Five Hundred Years of the Same Sentence
This chapter traces the legal and political chain by which the seas, the peoples, and the knowledge of navigation were seized — from the carta de corso of the Iberian kingdoms, through the papal bulls of 1455 and 1493, to the Rhodian Sea Law absorbed into Roman and then colonial law, to the British Indian Ocean Territory telegram of 1966 in which indigenous people were called 'Tarzans' and 'Men Fridays' in an official government document. Five hundred years. The same sentence. Different letterhead.
Before the papal bulls, before the Atlantic slave trade, there was the carta de corso — the letter of marque. A document issued by a sovereign granting a private vessel the right to seize ships and cargo belonging to an enemy nation.
The carta de corso was the legal instrument by which piracy became policy. A privateer with a carta de corso was not a criminal — they were an agent of the state. The seizure of ships, cargo, and people was not theft — it was commerce, licensed by the crown.
The Iberian kingdoms — Portugal and Castile — were the first to systematise this. The carta de corso was the prototype for everything that followed: the trading company charter, the colonial land grant, the slave licence. The same legal logic. The same document structure. The same result.
The carta de corso turned piracy into policy. Private seizure of ships, cargo, and people — licensed by the crown. This is the legal ancestor of every colonial charter that followed.
On 18 June 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas — 'Until Different.' Addressed to King Alfonso V of Portugal, it authorised him:
'to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.'
Perpetual slavery. Authorised by the highest legal authority in the Christian world. This is not a metaphor. This is a document. It is in the Vatican archives. It has never been revoked.
Dum Diversas, 1452: 'reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.' The Vatican has never revoked this document. It is still in the archives.
Three years later, on 8 January 1455, Nicholas V issued Romanus Pontifex — confirming and expanding Dum Diversas. This bull specifically addressed the West African coast and the Atlantic trade routes that Portugal was opening.
It granted Portugal the exclusive right to trade with, seize, and enslave the peoples of West Africa. It declared the ocean itself a Portuguese possession. It was the legal foundation of the Atlantic slave trade.
The Romanus Pontifex is the document that made the Cape Verde founder event possible. Without it, there is no Cape Verde colony. Without Cape Verde, the specific genetic mixing that produced the ancestral blueprint of Neuza Encarnaçao Andrade Lopes does not exist in its current form.
The curse hidden blessing: the document that authorised the erasure also, inadvertently, created the preservation.
Romanus Pontifex, 1455: the legal foundation of the Atlantic slave trade. The document that made Cape Verde possible. The curse that became the blessing.
On 4 May 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera — 'Among Other Works.' This bull divided the entire non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal along a line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores.
Everything west of the line: Spain. Everything east: Portugal. The peoples living in those territories were not consulted. They were not mentioned as people. They were terrain.
The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) moved the line slightly, giving Portugal Brazil. The world had been partitioned by two crowns and a pope. The seas were no longer common. They were property.
This is the moment the Rhodian Sea Law — the ancient Mediterranean code that treated the sea as a commons, accessible to all navigators — was replaced by colonial maritime law, which treated the sea as a possession.
Inter Caetera, 1493: the world divided between two crowns. The sea ceased to be a commons. The Rhodian tradition of free navigation was overwritten by colonial ownership.
Before the papal bulls, the sea was governed by the Lex Rhodia — the Rhodian Sea Law. Originating in the ancient maritime republic of Rhodes, absorbed into Roman law, and practiced across the Mediterranean for over a thousand years, it established:
— The sea is a commons. No sovereign owns it. — A navigator in distress has the right of refuge in any port. — Cargo lost in a storm is shared equally among all merchants aboard. — Piracy is a crime against all nations — hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind.
The Sea Peoples navigated under versions of this code. The Frisii traded under it. The Phoenicians built their empire on it. It was the legal foundation of the interconnected Bronze Age world.
The papal bulls did not just authorise slavery. They replaced an entire legal tradition — one that had governed the seas for millennia — with a new one that treated the ocean as a colonial possession and its peoples as cargo.
The Rhodian Sea Law: the sea is a commons. No sovereign owns it. A navigator in distress has the right of refuge. This was the law before 1455. The papal bulls replaced it.
On 24 August 1966, D.A. Greenhill, Permanent Under-Secretary of the British Foreign Office, wrote a confidential telegram regarding the British Indian Ocean Territory — the Chagos Islands, home to the Chagossian people for generations.
The object, he wrote, was 'to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a Committee.'
And then, handwritten below, he added:
'Unfortunately along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished as to Mauritius etc. When this has been done I agree we must be very tough.'
The Chagossians were expelled. Diego Garcia became a US military base. The people were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where many died in poverty. The British government fought their right to return in court for decades.
This telegram was written 511 years after Dum Diversas. The language is different. The letterhead is different. The sentence is the same: these people are not people. They are inconvenient birds. Remove them.
Five hundred years. The chain did not break. It updated its stationery.
Greenhill, 1966: 'some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.' Five hundred years after Dum Diversas. The same sentence. Different letterhead. The chain did not break.
The chain is not only legal. It is physical. It is carried in the body.
Ancestral trauma — the memory of displacement, violence, and erasure — is encoded in the nervous system and passed between generations through epigenetic mechanisms. The children of the expelled do not need to read the telegram to feel its effects. They feel it as anxiety, as hypervigilance, as the sense that safety is always temporary, that completion is always interrupted.
'As soon as we completed 9 — remembered.'
The number 9. The moment of completion. The moment the telegram arrives. The moment the carta de corso is signed. The moment the bull is issued. The moment the school gives the LBO advice. The moment Juffrouw Carla calls a tired child stupid for misspelling her own name.
The chain operates at every scale — from papal bull to classroom. The mechanism is the same: interrupt the completion. Prevent the recognition. Deny the identity.
The Ancestral Voyage is the answer to the chain. Not revenge. Not war. Memory. Identity. The codex that cannot be taken.
The chain operates at every scale — from papal bull to classroom. The mechanism is always the same: interrupt the completion. The Ancestral Voyage is the answer: memory, identity, the codex that cannot be taken.