And all they will call you is “deportee”

he’s completely forgotten today, but give a thught to Robert Tomson. Who?
not only the first native English speaker to settle in the Americas, but the first “illegal alien” deportee.

Born about 1535, the son of a British merchant, Robert was sent to Cadiz when he was 17 or 18 on family business. Or .. perhaps… his gap year? He was supposed to stay with John Field, and English merchant in the busy port city. He did learn Spanish (pretty quickly… a bright lad, apparently) but somehow managed to catch the attention of Maria de la Barrara, herself from a wealthy merchant family… one looking to expand operations in the “new world”.

We have no clue what the de la Barraras thought about their foreign son-in-law. Maybe they put a lot of faith in his abilities, or maybe they wanted him out of the way. Who can say? At any rate, he and John Field (which suggests he’d not been taken into the de la Rarrara family business) sailed to Vercruz in 1556. Where Field immediately contracted “vomito negro” (what we call yellow fever today) and died on the way to Mexico City. Tomson did find another English resident in the Capital… Thomas Blake¹.

While Robert did recover from his own but of “vomito” at Blake’s residence, he ran into a little problem. Tomas had been born in 1535…and what happened in back in 1534 no one expects?

Yup… the Spanish Inqusition. Once Robert was healthy enough, the Inquisitors locked him up as a heretic. As I’ve pointed out before, the gory stories of torture and burnings at the stake are over-blown². He had his effigy hung up in the Cathedral and sentenced to walk around with a dunce cap until he was deported abut three years later.

What recognition Tmson has today comes from his observations, which he wrote down, of Mexico City… later quoted by, and a source, for Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages. Travels and Discoveries of the English Nation. — usually credited with generating the buzz among English elites for their own colonial expansion into the Americas.

Whatever happened to Tomson after his return to England we just don’t know. All we can call call him is the first deportee.

1. There doesn’t appear to be much information on Blake. However, it does confirm that there were “other than Spanish” Europeans in Mexico much earlier than we realize. ↩︎
2. Just in the Tutor era of Robert’s lifetime, the English burned or beheaded… in a much smaller population than Spain… offed more of their own for “heresy” than the Inquisition managed world-wide in 300 years. By a factor of at least 5! ↩︎