Queen Calafia & her Amazons, Room of the Dons, Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco, CA

Halle Berry California 3R95158

Halle: a female name of Scandinavian origin that means Heroine
➥ English meaning: Home rule
➥ Norwegian meaning: Rock, heroine

Berry: baie

California: "land of Calafia" female caliph

➥ John William Templeton describes how Hernan Cortes' expedition in search of California had Africans as a third of his crew, including his second-in-command, Juan Garrido. He writes that Calafia is exemplary of a genre of literature from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries that featured black women as powerful, wealthy and beautiful. Historian Jack Forbes wrote that the Spanish were quite experienced in being ruled by Africans given the Moorish occupation from 710 to 1490.

Around the year 1500, in his novel The Adventures of Esplandián, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo drew upon reports from the New World to add interest to his fantasy world of chivalry and battle, of riches, victory, and loss, of an upside-down depiction of traditional sex roles. He wrote: "Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was inhabited by black women without a single man among them, and they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with strong passionate hearts and great virtue. The island itself is one of the wildest in the world on account of the bold and craggy rocks."

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