were “rated according to their faculties, or personal abilities,” women were valued “for their youths and beauties.” Once a woman was purchased, her buyer examined her for “assurance (if so she be said to be) of her virginitie.” Masters could then “lye with them, chastise them, exchange and sell them at their pleasure.” But Christian masters were not completely void of compassion, he claimed, for he “will not lightly sell her whom he hath layne with, but give her libertie.”33 Such were the benefits that apparently accrued to women whose fate it was to be purchased for the sexual favors they were compelled to provide for their owners.
As fascinating as the subject may have been, female slavery was something that historically minded Englishmen could easily comprehend. William of Malmesbury’s twelfth-century Chronicle recounted several examples from pre-Conquest society of the selling of female slaves out of England. Malmesbury recorded these tales as examples of the degeneracy of England before the arrival of the Normans. In one particularly offensive example, Malmesbury cited the custom, “repugnant to nature, which they adopted; namely, to sell their female servants, when pregnant by them and after they had satisfied their lust, either to public prostitution, or foreign slavery.” Likewise, in another tale, Malmesbury recounted how the sister of the early eleventh-century King Canute had been killed by a lightning strike, supposedly as punishment for the king making money off the “horrid traffic” in English youths, especially girls, who were taken against their will and sold into slavery in Denmark.34 The purchase of females had a particular symbolic power in England where, as in Islam, the significance of the enslavement of women was historically rooted in the owner’s ability to exploit women’s sexuality rather than the women’s labor value. In addition, the use of slave women could enhance the master’s power not only over slave men but also over free men because of their ability to control access to a desired commodity or destination. Male slaves never forgot that regardless of how they might define the nature of their relationship with a female slave, another man—a free male—actually exercised the ultimate authority. Within this historical context, readers needed little elaboration in the accounts printed by Hakluyt and Purchas to understand that female concubinage was an insidious form of slavery that was part and parcel of the overall interest of the male population in controlling the sexual behavior of women.35
The enslavement of women clearly fascinated English observers, but they were arguably even more intrigued, or perhaps repulsed, by the closely related subject of eunuchs, particularly in the Islamic world. Once again, the account by George Sandys is instructive. Sandys claimed that many of the children “that the Turkes doe buy … they castrate, making all smooth as the backe of the hand, (whereof divers doe dye in the cutting) who supply the uses of Nature with a Silver Quill, which they wear in their Turbants.” Sandys was fascinated that eunuchs were “heere in great repute with their Masters, trusted with their States, the Government of their Women and Houses in their absence; having for the most part beene approoved faithfull, wise, and couragious.” Robert Withers went into even greater detail in his account of the “Grand Signiors Serraglio” from 1620. Withers was struck in particular by the role played by black eunuchs, who “goe about and doe all other businesse for the Sultanaes in the Womens lodgings, which White Eunuches cannot performe.” And, in fact, black eunuchs do seem to have become especially prized possessions and influential allies by the sixteenth century in the Ottoman Empire.36
Eunuchs played a particularly prominent role in Purchas’s volumes because they were an especially visible sign of the degeneracy he believed inundated the Mediterranean world and much of the east. Eunuchs were not merely men who had been castrated; they were agents of sexual depravity. The Withers account, for example, was preceded on the printed page by the record of the English cleric Edward Terry, who journeyed to India in 1616 to serve as Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain in the English Embassy. Like numerous other European witnesses, Terry mentioned eunuchs in passing as royal attendants, guards, and even high officials. But among his varied observations, Terry noted at one point that nobody lived “in the Kings house but his women and Eunuches, and some little Boyes which hee keepes about him for a wicked use.” At once, this comment reads as both a passing reference to the luxury in which a local ruler lived and a resounding condemnation of his detestable personal proclivities.37 Eunuchs repelled, then, not simply because they had been physically altered, but because they were emblematic of a widespread phenomenon that reflected a broader understanding of Islam, the exotic lands to the east, and slavery.
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As Terry’s account implies, the English were quick to identify the Mediterranean as the epicenter of bondage and captivity in the world, but there were other newly encountered places that were easily characterized in like terms. The presence and roles of slaves in these less familiar, and decidedly less menacing, societies reinforced the familiar conventions that human bondage often resulted from warfare and represented a kind of perpetual captivity involving a complicated interplay between indiscriminate and potentially brutal treatment and generous opportunities for the enslaved either to exercise power through their bondage or to reclaim their lost liberty. These ideas, however, were often based on imperfect and incomplete information. Because few Englishmen traveled to either south or southeast Asia before 1600, Richard Hakluyt had little in the way of firsthand observations or written narrative accounts before he published the final edition of the Principal Navigations. Samuel Purchas, however, was able to extract liberally from a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English narratives and therefore included significantly more material on Asia in his volumes.38 The English sources were a particularly rich body of material that Purchas acquired directly from the English East India Company (EIC) in 1622. The EIC had been founded in 1600 and English ships and merchants began to show up in the southeast Asian archipelago soon thereafter. Before the EIC reformed in 1613 as a joint-stock company, at least twelve separate expeditions voyaged to the region. English ships also sailed to India in 1608 and Sir Thomas Roe established the first formal embassy to the Mogul court in 1615. As a result of these contacts, Samuel Purchas had a variety of sources to draw on by the time his multivolume work was published in 1625.39
English ships and merchants were lured beyond the southern tip of Africa by the same promise of rich rewards in valuable commodities that dared them to chart the Russian interior and broach the Mediterranean market during the late sixteenth century. And just as they had difficulty avoiding the subject of human bondage in these regions, English observers took notice of the nature and character of slavery further east. Considering their precarious and decidedly dependent status in the region, the accounts authored by early English merchants in the Indian Ocean and Asia are particularly interesting because these Englishmen were not in the market for slaves, as their countrymen would later be in Africa.40 Equally important, unlike the accounts written about slavery in the Mediterranean world, the English who plied their trade in the Indian and Pacific Oceans were not necessarily worried that they might themselves be enslaved.41 For this reason, the handful of English reports about the presence and use of slaves in this arena are generally characterized by a much more matter-of-fact tone than those that emanated from the Mediterranean, where the slaves that interested English commentators the most would prove to be their fellow countrymen (particularly during the seventeenth century). Still, English observers did not shy away from drawing often negative conclusions about the indigenous slave systems of south and southeast Asia.
In Java, for example, the English factor Edmund Scot commented on the tenuous existence of slaves whose masters “may execute them for any small fault.” Javan elites often kept large numbers of Chinese slaves, so many that “[t]he Gentlemen of this Land are brought to bee poore, by the number of their Slaves that they keepe, which eate faster then their Pepper or Rice groweth.” Scot also made at least passing reference to concubinage of a sort found in the Mediterranean world when he observed that for every wife that a free Javan married “he must keepe ten women-slaves.” Scot sympathized with the plight of slaves in Java, who suffered under masters some Englishmen characterized in the harshest terms. Javans were, in Scot’s opinion, “idle” and “much given to stealing, from the highest to the lowest, and surely in times past, they have beene Man-eaters, before the Traffique was had with them by
