along the way.39 He was soon followed by James Langton, who traveled to Hispaniola where he encountered unwelcome “well armed” Africans. Undaunted, he carried off four or five slaves from an estate.40
Sir Francis Drake’s encounter in Roanoke coincides with evidence about a rise of the number of Africans in England itself. By 1596 the Privy Council, at the request of Queen Elizabeth, issued a directive ordering the removal of all Africans from England. At the same time, there was a rise in the number of enslaved Englishmen in the Mediterranean and North Africa in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Arguably, the increase in the number of discontented and oppressed Africans paved the way for London to enter more forcefully the lush profitability of the African Slave Trade, just as seeing more Englishmen forced into bondage—ironically—enhanced the arrival of this ugly reality.41
London was in a bind, however. For just as Spain had challenged English sovereignty most dramatically in 1588—and barely was turned back—there was in 1602 a sudden and enormous increase in London’s Admiralty Court evidence of the coastal pirate trade, which kidnapped men, women, and children for the Moroccan slave markets. This, in turn, led to an increase in naval expenditure, which, in turn again, proved quite useful in overseas expansion.42 According to one account, the enslavement of European Christians exceeded the number of Africans and Native Americans captured for sale by the end of the sixteenth century, with this European trade serving to inspire Europeans not toward abolition but toward utilizing this dirty commerce more profitably than the principal beneficiary at that moment—the Ottoman Turks—by yoking it to an ascending capitalism.43 It is estimated that Algiers held 20,000 Christian captives in 1621, as corsairs from there sailed as far as Iceland, while reportedly Moroccans by 1625 had hijacked forty ships off the coast of Newfoundland.44
In brief, this geographic venturesome of Africans, combined with their increasing presence in the Americas, points to the reality that there was a real contestation for continental control that Europeans, least of all Englishmen, were not destined to master.
As London was moving aggressively to enslave more Africans to bolster its North American settlements, persistent complaints of “hostility” and “violence” and “great wrongs done unto them at seas” were visited upon the English at the behest of Algiers and Tunis particularly,45 not to mention continuing Spanish irritants as Madrid sensed the import of this English incursion into new territories.46
Intriguingly, Charles Sumner, who was to become an embodiment of U.S. abolitionism, complained bitterly in 1853 about the so-called Barbary States, particularly Algiers, which had become a “terror to the Christian nations” as early as the sixteenth century. “Their corsairs became the scourge of Christendom,” he raged, as they “pressed even to the Straits of Dover” as “unsuspecting inhabitants were swept into cruel capacity. The English government was aroused to efforts to check these atrocities,” which at once led to increased naval expenditure, quite useful for the fortunes of settler colonialism, though it diverted energies to North Africa and away from the waters separating Bermuda and Virginia. “In 1620,” Sumner reminded, “a fleet of eighteen ships, under the command of Sir Robert Mansel” was “dispatched against Algiers.” He deplored the “deplorable inconsistency” that then led to London being responsible for enslaving Africans, but more than castigation, Sumner could have gone further to point out what Englishmen learned about enslavement from their captors that was then applied to West Africans or how warfare with North Africans prepared Englishmen to fight West Africans, etc. To his credit, he did note the irony of those being enslaved by North Africans becoming settlers in a slave society that normatively brutalized Africans and indigenes.47
Supposedly, piracy was introduced into Algiers in the sixteenth century by a Turkish pirate, his aid having been sought to repel the Spaniards then in possession of the surrounding vast North African land. The territory then fell to Turkish rule for scores of years. During this period, reputedly 30,000 Christian slaves were said to have been employed in constructing a harbor in Algiers. The dreaded and formidable strength of the pirates only increased in the seventeenth century. The growth of kidnapping and enslaving of Christians did not seem to make London more sensitive to bondage and probably increased naval spending as a deterrent, which was detrimental to Africa and the Americas.48 By the early seventeenth century, it was estimated that more than 3,000 from the British Isles were engaged in involuntary servitude,49 which is probably an underestimate.
EARLY ON, THE LABOR of the colonial settlers was probably six times more profitable than comparable labor at home, thus encouraging moving west across the Atlantic. The settlements offered a protected market for English manufactures, as well as cheap sources of raw materials that stimulated home production. This, in turn, created products that could be exchanged for enslaved Africans to be deposited in the colonies, thus completing a virtual circle—for London.50
It took a while for the new reality of Africans as seen through a London lens to take hold. By the late sixteenth century, those who were to be called “Negroes” were not always represented as “savages”; the recurrent descriptor after the flourishing slave trade necessitated more dehumanizing language. But the trend inaugurated by Hawkins did mean that Africans were often seen as threateningly unpredictable and potentially hostile, which was no surprise since Africans had reason to believe that Englishmen were intrigued devilishly by the possibility of their enchainment. Of course, the long-term entente with the North Africans had contributed at times to a separate assessment of those referred to as “Moors,” since they often appeared in London as diplomats and ambassadors. Yet those called “blackamoore” in London were sufficiently visible in 1596 that Queen Elizabeth proclaimed there were “already to manie”—or too many—in the realm and seized the opportunity to exchange several for English hostages held in Spain and Portugal. The conflation that was “blackamoors” should not lead to the perception that no difference was drawn between, say, North Africans and those further down the coast stretching into Senegambia and the Gold Coast. The former were thought to be calculating and the latter unreasoning.51 Spain, as the common enemy of Morocco and London, in any case, tended to drive the latter two together.52
There was good reason for anger at Spain in Turkey. It was not just that the Iberian Jewish community, fleeing the Inquisition, was racing into the arms of the Ottomans; it was the reality that Turkey was being swamped by specie—coin—from Spanish America, driving indigenous coins with low silver content from circulation, disrupting the economy and placing the local elite in ill humor as the regime borrowed from personal fortunes in compensation. With this crisis, the Jewish population of Turkey, many of whom were prominent in commerce, left for the Netherlands, where they again came into conflict with Madrid, which was seeking to strangle the nation in the sixteenth century.53
There were other factors contributing to London’s venture into mass enslavement of Africans, besides emulation of the Iberians and the riches delivered by cruel exploitation. Joint-stock trading companies were generally unknown in London in the 1500s but numbered in the hundreds a century later.54 This facilitated investment and limited liability, all useful when the time came to take the plunge into what became Virginia.
Then there was the great inflation of the sixteenth century, with the value of money being worth only half as much as a century earlier, which provided an incentive to accumulate new wealth.55 Fluctuating ties to Russia often threatened to cut off England’s lucrative cloth trade to that nation and Ottoman influx blocked London moving further south and east to Persia, providing more incentive to seek new fields of exploitation in the Americas. In any event, as England began to plunder Spain’s colonies, London’s population swelled from 85,000 in 1565 to 140,000 by the early seventeenth century. As a result and culmination of this trend, the East India Company was founded in 1600,56 promising untold riches from a colonial conquest that was to serve as a model for the invasion of what became Virginia.
London’s buoyancy was also a function
