By the first decade of the sixteenth century, Granada—only recently recaptured from Islamic forces and once the center of Moorish civilization on the Iberian Peninsula—was enmeshed in a slave trade that heavily consisted of Africans. Again, this well preceded the push by Englishmen, for at this juncture few from their monarchy had visited Africa, let alone sold and traded its denizens. However, as early as 1530 there were Englishmen bringing enslaved Africans to Brazil, but, again, not in the systematic manner that was to flourish in the following century. The first English voyage to West Africa was said to be made in 1553 by Captain Thomas Windham, accompanied by a Portuguese pilot. By 1562 John Hawkins had seized Africans to sell into bondage,16 with the settlements in Hispaniola as purchasers.17 Allegedly, Hawkins was funded directly by Queen Elizabeth, indicative of the high-level support for slaving.18 Reportedly, along with Windham’s voyage, twenty-seven enslaved Africans wound up in England in 1553.19 Anticipating the various forms of resistance that were to define the slave trade, on one of his voyages Hawkins was traduced by an African leader who had pledged to sell him “prisoners of war,” but instead the leader deceived him by reneging on the arranged delivery. Flesh peddlers often “encountered hostile towns” during their sixteenth-century African forays.20
It was in the sixteenth century that Africans in Panama were convinced to pledge allegiance to Madrid in exchange for autonomy.21 This autonomy could then be leveraged to forge separate deals with the indigenous or competing European powers. It was evident early on that implanting this rapacious colonialism would be no simple task given the rambunctiousness of Africans.
This flexibility by Madrid was an understandable response to the necessity to preserve the obvious accumulated wealth generated by the emerging antagonist that was Spain, along with a reflection of the strength of mercantile interests that was to blossom in a full-bodied capitalism. By 1555 enslaved Africans were brought to what were to be termed the British Isles themselves.22
Moving away from the internal conflict with Irish and Scots that had been wracking England to the external engagement that was to occupy London for decades to come brought a new set of issues. By 1584, Richard Hakluyt, an ideologist of this new engagement, compared offenses of the rival Spaniards to “Turkish cruelties,” which was bracing to consider. Yet, dreamily, he contemplated a “Northwest passage” to the riches of China and the risk of encountering mere cruelties then seemed worthwhile.23
The success of Hawkins stimulated the avarice of his countrymen to the point that the monarch granted charters encouraging this baneful commerce in 1585 and 1588; then in 1618 a charter was granted to Sir Robert Rich in London for trade from Guinea, in West Africa, followed by another charter in 1631 and yet another in 1662, as the African Slave Trade began to take flight. The latter charter was allocated to the monarch’s brother, allowing for the delivery of 3,000 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. Then, on 27 September 1672, in a hinge moment in the history of capitalism, slavery, and white supremacy alike, the fourth and final exclusive company was chartered, the Royal African Company. From the point of view of capital, what made the “Glorious Revolution” really glorious was the banning of such exclusive charters, the seeds of which were planted in 1688. The deregulation of this trade opened it to the strenuous efforts of merchants, led to the takeoff of capitalism itself and imbricated participation in the African Slave Trade with bourgeois democratic rights against the power of the state.24
IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THIS PROCESS, Africans—slave and free—in the Americas proved to be indispensable allies of London as it sought to plunder Spanish colonies in the late 1500s and early 1600s. This established a transformational template that was to accelerate in the seventeenth century and became a hallmark of the entire experience of enslavement: Africans rebelling against those who seemed to be in control and aligning with a foreign invader to topple a shaky sovereign.25 Near that same time in the sixteenth century, the English received a dose of this medicine when Portuguese traders on a now growingly beset continent successfully encouraged Africans to attack arriving mariners from London.26 It was in 1527 that Spanish explorers were accused of inciting perhaps the earliest rebellion of enslaved Africans on the North American coast, and one of the earliest anywhere on this continent, when Africans revolted in what is now South Carolina, serving to foil European competitors.27
This contestation with Madrid led to London’s increasing ties to Levantine and Mediterranean Muslims, meaning Turks and Moors were to be found on English soil in growing numbers in the 1500s.28 That is, the final ouster of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492 left lingering resentments between Muslims and Catholics that Protestant London sought to exploit.
It is fair to infer that increasing competition with Spain was driving London’s policies, not only in terms of diplomatic entente with Islamic forces but also in terms of seeking to barge into the colonial banquet. By the 1580s Sir Francis Drake had arrived at Roanoke on the North American mainland with hundreds of slaves in tow that he had captured in his attacks on various Spanish colonies; these included indigenous Americans and Africans alike.29 This escapade also included a vehement attack on St. Augustine, Florida, the Spanish settlement that was to bedevil Georgia and points north in the eighteenth century. There he took away hundreds of the enslaved, dropping them off in North Carolina.30 This barbarous episode forms the prelude to the story that will be told here about the seventeenth century and the onset of an apocalypse, whose reverberations continue to vibrate. In short, enslaved Africans arrived in North America under the English flag decades before the notionally accepted date of 1619 and, if one counts the European trade generally, decades before the 1560s when the Spanish arrived in Florida.31
Sir Francis’s venturesome journey, like that of Hawkins years earlier, was both a way to bring Spain down a peg,32 while leeching parasitically onto Madrid’s booming wealth,33 and feeding proliferating mercantile interests that by the end of the seventeenth century had managed to bring the monarch down a peg by way of their “Glorious Revolution.” The aristocracy may have been distracted, oblivious to the rising political strength of merchants given the profits of Sir Francis’s journeys, which by one account garnered an eye-watering 4,700 percent return,34 some of which flowed into the pockets of various dukes and earls. (Admittedly, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, some aristocrats by lineage became merchants by currency.)
At this juncture, England could well be viewed as a piratical nation—or more formally, engaging in the primitive accumulation of capital—by plundering Spain of precious metals and enslaved Africans alike. This involved intensified militarism and grandiose levels of violence, which could be glorified as a defense of the Almighty. Unsurprisingly, the sails of Columbus’s vessels carried the sign of the cross. But as the foundations of capitalism were established, the need for piracy, at least in the traditional sense, declined, along with religiosity.
Correspondingly, the population of a fattened England and the Low Countries almost doubled between 1500 and 1800. The English and the Dutch both had the Spanish in their crosshairs. And, ultimately, Madrid was not able to withstand the dual musket shots. The Dutch may have been the biggest loser, however, of this three-cornered conflict. After all, this sea-hugging nation was shipping three times as much by value as the English by 1650, the zenith of Holland’s global influence. By that point, London’s naval expenditure began to assert itself more forcefully, eventually consuming nearly a fifth of the entire national budget, which served to insure that English vessels would not endure the fate so often endured by those of Spain under assault by Sir Francis Drake and his minions.35
Spain, in sum, was battered by Sir Francis Drake’s forces, as Madrid was compelled to consider the implications for both Cuba and Florida early on.36 By mid-1587, Spain had failed to enter the Chesapeake,37 a response to the real fear that Londoners were arriving in droves just north of St. Augustine. “I have been unable to learn anything further or more definite,” Madrid was told, “except from certain Negroes who ran away from Francis Drake.”38
