invited the English to come ashore. As they did, their ship was swamped, but the weakened Englishmen were rescued by their benefactors. Here, in strikingly different language from that used earlier in the poem, Baker commented favorably on the king’s son (“a stout and valiant man, / In whom I thinke Nature i’wis [certainly], / hath wrought all that she can”) and the natives’ generosity (“And gave to us, even such as they / themselves do daily eate”).89 After several days, however, the African hosts gave up trying to sustain the castaways and left them to their own devices. In the end, Baker and only two others lived long enough to be picked up by a passing French ship.
The lesson that Englishmen often learned in Africa was simple: There was more to fear from other Europeans in the region than from Africans themselves. William Towerson reported that the natives told him that “the Portugales were bad men, and that they made them slaves if they could take them, and would put yrons upon their legges.” Perhaps even more frightening, Towerson noted that “as many Frenchmen or Englishmen, as they could take … they would hang them.” Walter Wren, who wrote the narrative account of George Fenner’s voyage to Africa in 1566, described a failed attempt to trade with some Portuguese merchants who, in what would prove to be a recurring theme, intended nothing more than “villainously to betray us … although we meant in truth and honestie, friendly to trafike with them.” Richard Rainolds, writing about his trip to Guinea in 1591, made repeated references to the duplicity of the Portuguese and observed that whatever success the English were able to achieve was partly attributable to the fact that the local inhabitants “seemed to be very glad that no Portugall was come in our ship.” The local ruler, he noted, “did esteeme them as people of no truth.” Rainolds was inclined to agree but explained that most of the Iberians “resident in these places be banished men or fugitives, for committing most hainous crimes and incestuous acts.” Not surprisingly, then, “they are of the basest behaviour that we have ever seene of these nations in any other country.”90
By extension, Englishmen frequently authored sympathetic or even admiring comments about the Africans they encountered in Africa. Although the occasional English visitor to coastal West Africa may have dwelled on gross stereotypes that suggested sub-Saharan Africans were inferior or abnormal, most Englishmen before the mid-seventeenth century, as profit-oriented traders, seem to have been comfortable with the notion that Africans in Africa were “gentle and loving,” or “very friendly and tractable.” Francis Petty, who sailed with Thomas Cavendish during his circumnavigation, recounted that they stopped briefly at Sierra Leone on the outward leg of their journey where “they played and daunced all the forenoone among the Negros.”91 If Englishmen, in general, were ethnocentric and prone to characterize non-Europeans in unflattering ways, Englishmen in Africa were more pragmatic. Virtually every English voyager to Africa was involved in some sort of mercantile endeavor and therefore most written accounts dwell on matters having to do with the actual voyage, navigation, disease, and trade. When they did bother to comment on the nature or character of the local inhabitants, their observations tended to be impressionistic, even if they did take note that the natives were naked, black, and adorned with jewelry or extensive scarification. Even so, English observers rarely elaborated on these matters and often ignored them entirely.
The message from Africa was decidedly mixed. Just as they had learned elsewhere, the English found slavery to be a characteristic feature of Africa, with an internal logic they typically deemed not worth questioning. Unlike other parts of the world, other European nations were already actively engaged in the appropriation and transshipment of large numbers of indigenous inhabitants to southern Europe and the Americas where the unfortunates were destined to serve out the remainder of their days as slaves. Indigenous slave systems were remarkable and interesting to English eyes, but they did not often elicit much concern because the impact on English efforts to profit from other commercial exchanges was minimal. Some English merchants even bought into the system when they acclimated themselves to their new surroundings. Slavery in Africa was a different matter because, while English merchants may have first appeared in the region to tap into the trade in gold, pepper, ivory, and other regional commodities, the nature of slavery and the slave trade had already been changed by European actors. Slaves were more of a merchantable and potentially profitable commodity in coastal West Africa than in any other place the English visited in the early modern era. Perhaps to their credit, the first wave of English in Africa (John Hawkins apart) distanced themselves from the African slave trade. Their unwillingness to trade in human beings, however, was more an indication of the absence of reliable markets with reliable buyers than a measure of any kind of cultural revulsion to the practice or moral opposition to slavery.
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Early modern Englishmen encountered slavery, regardless of whether they wanted to, wherever they traveled. Slavery was characteristic of the exotic and remote regions of the world being encountered for the first time by intrepid Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Locating human bondage in the Russian steppes, the Muslim world, South Asia, China, and Africa was a useful way of emphasizing how England was not only some distance away from these places in geographic terms but also culturally distinctive. Even if these places came in for praise because of their wealth and power, the presence of slavery indicated that the inhabitants of Asia, Russia, the Islamic world, and sub-Saharan Africa lacked the same commitment to the principle of individual liberty that the English liked to claim was the hallmark of the world they inhabited at home. Slavery might also be a measure of the deficiency of a given society or culture. Slavery did not always factor into English characterizations of other nations and peoples, but even its absence was revealing. Perhaps ironically, English writers were seemingly more likely to mention slavery as a significant part of the day-today lives of people who lived in complex, civil societies than they were to consider the subject in settings they perceived to be uncivilized or among a people they categorized as barbarous. One way to read the rather minimal evidence of slavery in Ireland, for example, is to suggest that slavery was less a measure of incivility and savagery than it was glaring proof that a given society was corrupt, that a civilization had sullied itself. The same could be said of Africa where English observers, in their more reflective moments, were more likely to characterize slavery as a questionable trading practice of the less-than-honorable Portuguese rather than a fully rationalized domestic institution. When the English encountered people who willingly embraced an irrational, predatory system of slavery that reduced human beings to mere commodities, it reinforced an emerging exceptionalist worldview in which Englishness was buttressed by liberty while foreignness, strangeness, or corruption was indicted by institutional slavery.
It is also striking, considering the rapid development of the transatlantic slave trade and the emergence of scientific racism in subsequent decades, that early English impressions of slavery in Africa during this period were not especially distinctive in a comparative context. In the absence of any systematic English involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and as outsiders trying to break into a market largely controlled by the Portuguese, there were more reasons to embrace Africans as potential allies than to denigrate them outright and some logic to insisting that the English were not interested in the slave trade. To be sure, anti-black prejudice was on the rise in the Anglo-Atlantic world and the early stirrings of a racialized national consciousness was certainly in evidence even in the last half of the sixteenth century. But the pursuit of economic gain that underlay every English voyage to coastal West Africa played a larger role in conditioning the English to think and act in certain ways and helps explain why mariners might have been eager to point out the rather more positive qualities to be found in African societies and peoples. Interestingly, it was despite English activities in Africa rather than because of them that the English nation as a whole was increasingly inclined to associate African peoples with slavery. This occurred, however, because of circumstances in another part of the world: Spanish and Portuguese America, particularly the West Indies. In the Iberian Atlantic world of the early modern era, Englishmen thought of African peoples primarily as slaves, and English privateers, smugglers, and pirates—to the degree that it would further their mercenary aims—were perfectly content to engage them on that level.
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