travelers, merchants, soldiers, sailors, and others began to explore and learn more about distant lands, exotic cultures, and often mysterious peoples, they were struck by the seemingly countless ways human beings could be treated as brute beasts and cheap commodities. In many places, slavery was not so much contemplated as it was merely noted; in certain arenas, however, English travelers and writers could not resist the temptation to register a profound sense of disgust and horror at the sufferings of the enslaved. On the one hand, a fuller awareness of the prevalence of human bondage and the important role that slavery played throughout the world facilitated an emerging sense of English exceptionalism. On the other hand, slavery’s pervasiveness on the global stage presented Englishmen with new challenges, new possibilities, and a new opportunity to define the relationship between Englishness and slavery.
CHAPTER 2
______________
Slaves the World Over: Early English Encounters with Slavery
England stepped purposely onto the global stage during the second half of the sixteenth century as its merchants, sailors, emigrants, bureaucrats, and adventurers fanned out across the globe in search of new lands, new trade routes, and new commodities. The English had not been well represented among the first wave of Europeans who pushed out into the Atlantic world during the early stages of long-distance navigation and global exploration during the late fifteenth century. That, however, changed dramatically during the Elizabethan era. In the opening pages of the 1589 edition of his Principall Navigations, Richard Hakluyt boasted that “in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world” and “in compassing the vaste globe of the earth more than once,” the English “have excelled all the nations and people of her earth.”1 If Hakluyt’s patriotism inclined him to overstate the case, little doubt remained about the rapidly escalating English interest in the affairs of the world. Even if they stayed at home, where they might discover many of the same new worlds in published accounts or witness foreign lands and strange peoples on stage or experience rare and unusual items as consumers, countless Englishmen were beginning to see themselves as part of an expanding and diverse world in motion. But as much as English eyes were captivated, in the words of Richard Willes in 1577, by “the different manners & fashions of divers nations, the wonderfull workes of nature, the sightes of straunge trees, fruites, foule, and beastes, [and] the infinite treasure of Pearle, Golde, [and] Silver,” the English had reasons to be cautious.2 As more wary observers were quick to recognize, the world beyond England’s shores promised great rewards, but the potential dangers were many. Not least among these was slavery, a subject that never ceased to impress English authors and publishers or, apparently, simultaneously fascinate and horrify English readers.
It would have been difficult for perceptive travelers and careful readers in the early modern era to avoid the conclusion that slavery was a universal institution. Many works that appeared in print during the late Tudor and early Stuart eras spoke to the subject in a rather matter-of-fact fashion. When Jean Bodin’s Six Books of a Commonweale appeared in English in 1606, many Englishmen were already aware of the writings of the French jurist from the Latin and French editions of his previous works. Bodin treated slavery as a widespread human institution that began “immediately after the general deluge” before it diminished for a time but was “now againe approved, by the agreement and consent of almost all nations.” Regardless of religious or governmental considerations, slavery existed everywhere. From the West Indies, whose people “never heard speech of the lawes of God or man” to places characterized by greater degrees of civility or where Europeans expected to find “the holiest men that ever lived,” slaves were ubiquitous. Like many of his contemporaries, Bodin concluded that human bondage—in all its possible manifestations—was the likely condition of a majority of the world’s peoples. Of course, this depiction shocked no one in England, many of whom claimed that they lived in a land largely untouched by slavery even as they recognized that their situation was exceptional in that regard.3
Similar conclusions could be gleaned from another French author, Pierre Charron, whose treatise Of Wisdom was translated into English by Samson Lennard in the early seventeenth century (and subsequently reprinted eight other times before 1700). Charron declared that “the use of slaves … is a thing both monstrous and ignominious in the nature of man.” Charron noted that the “law of Moyses hath permitted this as other things, … but not such as hath beene elsewhere: for it was neither so great, nor so absolute, nor perpetuall, but moderated within the compasse of seven yeeres at the most.” Charron recognized, as most Englishmen did also, that different types of slavery existed, but that, in essence, slaves “have no power neither in their bodies nor their goods, but are wholly their masters, who may give, lend, sell, resell, exchange, and use them as beasts of services.”4 From the perspective of the enslaved, human bondage must have seemed completely arbitrary, involving as it did the total loss of self-determination, dehumanization, and emasculation. From a comfortable remove, however, slavery was more unfortunate than tragic, a comprehensible institution if only because it was so common.
But the English did not need the French to tell them about slavery. English authors were equally capable of lamenting the continued presence of human bondage and the plight of the enslaved. Slavery’s pervasiveness could easily be gleaned from some of the more important geographical and historical works of the day, especially the multivolume collections issued by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas between the 1580s and 1620s. Hakluyt and Purchas sought to celebrate past English achievements and ongoing overseas activities, as well as to promote English expansionism. There were, however, important differences between Hakluyt’s late sixteenth-century volumes (1582, 1589, and 1598–1600) and the even more extensive collections published by Purchas a generation later (1613, 1614, 1617, and 1625). Hakluyt devoted himself to memorializing English accomplishments and urged his countrymen to pursue evermore distant and potentially profitable voyages of discovery. He was particularly excited about the potential wealth that might be drawn from American enterprises, although the future development of large-scale plantations was arguably less important in his publications than the broader themes of commerce, exploration, and English national greatness.5 Purchas borrowed from and extended Hakluyt’s scholarly enterprise, but his selections and emendations indicate that he was both a less discriminating editor and more beholden to a particularly overweening theological perspective. Protestant providencialism, perhaps even more than any sense of English patriotism, weighed heavily on Purchas’s otherwise richly detailed and varied collections and they are not necessarily the better for it.6
Regardless of their differences, Hakluyt and Purchas presented material that revealed the depth and breadth of slavery throughout the world. Indeed, in the opening pages of his Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, printed in four large volumes in 1625, Purchas reflected on the subject of bondage in religious, philosophical, and historical terms. “Christians,” he noted as a kind of operating premise to his larger work, “are not their own.” “Hee then that is Christs, is a new Creature, to which, bondage or freedome and other worldly respects, are meere respects and circumstances.” Slavery, at least as far as the Anglican cleric Samuel Purchas would have it, needed to be understood in metaphysical terms before it could be fully appreciated as a physical condition or secular institution that bore down upon the nameless and numberless masses. Englishmen needed to appreciate their indebtedness to God—“[H]ee that denieth himselfe and his owne will, puts off the chaines of his bondage, the slavery to innumerable tyrants, [and] impious lusts”—before they could come to terms with the worldly slavery endured by so many individuals and nations.7 Whether they did as Purchas asked, however, Englishmen encountered slavery wherever they traveled, used its presence to shape their conception of newfound peoples and places, and continued to think more carefully about how—as Englishmen—they were unique in their national antipathy for human bondage.
* * *
If slavery was a global phenomenon, the English did not have to travel far to find it. On the European continent, particularly in those lands that bordered
