view of the Chinese. Among their vices was the tendency of those who “finding their family too numerous sell their Sonnes and Daughters as Beasts, for two or three pieces of Gold (although no dearth provoke them) to everlasting separation and bondage [so that] the Kingdome is full of Slaves, not captived in warre, but of their owne free-borne.”42
Although Scot characterized the Chinese as the most common slaves in Java, other English accounts made it clear that just as all the nations of Asia enslaved, all the people of the region were subject to enslavement. As with accounts about slavery in the Mediterranean world, just how (precisely) individuals became slaves did not elicit extended consideration. Purchas did include an account of the voyage of François Pyrard de Laval to the East Indies in 1601 who noted blithely, “Slaves are such as make themselves so, or such as they bring from other places.” More commonly, European observers noted only who was enslaved rather than how he or she had been enslaved. Peter William Floris recorded in his journal that one ruler in Siam, “a mightie Kingdome and ancient,” had “amongst other Slaves, two hundred and eightie Japanders.” In Patania, also on the Malay Peninsula, they were “richest in Slaves of Javonians.” David Middleton, an energetic captain in the service of the East India Company, described the slaves of “Pulaway” (Pula Ai), an island off the coast of Sumatra, simply and unhelpfully as “Blackes.”43 Slaves in Asia were not delineated by any one national, racial, religious, or cultural characteristic. They were, on the whole, merely the unfortunate victims of random predation or unlucky to have been on the losing side in a larger conflict. Sometimes the only thing that can be said with certainty is that they were generally outsiders.
Slavery was also part of the fabric of life in Japan, at least according to John Saris, who sailed there in the service of the EIC in 1613. Saris was among the small group of Englishmen who established a trading outpost on the small island of Hirado, located in the southwestern part of Japan. Although he departed after only a short stay, he did relate that slaves in Japan were valued primarily for the prestige they imparted on their owners, including the English. Even before the English had formally set up their factory, William Adams (whose own misfortune had led to his abandonment in Japan a decade earlier) bragged in a letter written in 1611 that he had managed to do so well for himself that “th’Emperor hath geven me a living, as in England a lordshipp, w’th 80 or 90 husbandmen that be my slaves or servauntes.” Adams seems to have been deeply interested in ingratiating himself with local elites and his newly arrived countrymen, but Saris also commented somewhat favorably on the honorific value that slaves could bestow on their masters when he commented that, “[a]ccording to the custome of the countrey, I had a slave appointed to runne with a Pike before me” when he moved about the countryside. Whether Adams’s husbandmen or Saris’s pikeman were indeed slaves seems less important than the fact that the two Englishmen chose to characterize them as such for their intended audience of English readers.44
As much as Adams and Saris were impressed by their slave retinues, they and others were much more intrigued by female slaves. Saris related the tale of three men who were executed for stealing a female slave. Indeed, most of Saris’s references to human bondage in Japan were to female entertainers and the men who shopped them to the nobility. The existence of sexual slavery in Japan was difficult for English observers to ignore, but Saris was equally interested in the men who facilitated the industry. “These women are the slaves of one man,” Saris recounted, “who putteth a price what every man shall pay that hath to doe with any of them.” These male purchasers, however, were complicated figures. “When any of these Panders die (though in their life time they were received into Company of the best, yet nowe as unworthy to rest amongst the worst),” Saris noted with morbid curiosity, “they are bridled with a bridle made of straw as you would bridle an Horse, and in the cloathes they died in, are dragged through the streetes into the fields, and there cast upon a dunghill, for dogges and fowles to devoure.”45 The men who dealt in female slaves were richly valued for the commodities they provided during their lives, but few were willing to accord them (or their memory) with any sense of dignity or honor once they ceased being useful.
Whatever they may have thought about these subjects at home, English merchants willingly adapted themselves to their local surroundings as part of a larger survival strategy that necessitated flexibility and open-mindedness.46 Whether survival depended on slavery is open to debate, but English merchants nonetheless embraced the practice. Englishmen may have acknowledged that slavery was inconsistent with the way things operated at home, but they sometimes accepted that slavery was normative and benign when they encountered it in other places and did not automatically conclude that it was a prime indicator of social degeneracy. Not surprisingly, then, Englishmen abroad were as likely to purchase slaves for their own use as they were to criticize the practice among their hosts. During the tenth EIC voyage under the command of Thomas Best, the commander freely purchased slaves on at least two occasions as his two ships sailed off the northern tip of Sumatra in July 1613, the second time numbering “about 25 or thereabout Indeans, for to suplie the want of our men deceased.” The first generation of English merchants in Japan eagerly and without shame welcomed the opportunity to purchase concubines. Richard Cocks, in a letter to his colleague Richard Wickham, openly bragged that he “bought a wench yisterday” who “must serve 5 yeares” and then either repay back the purchase price or exchange “som frendes for her, or else remaine a p’petuall captive.” Cocks continued with even more shocking details, noting that the girl “is but 12 yeares ould, over small yet for trade, but yow would littell thynke that I have another forthcominge that is mor lapedeable,” or ready for sexual activity. Although not all Englishmen were as crass about the subject, many of them recognized the advantages of buying and owning slaves in the region.47
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Slavery was a global phenomenon, so only its absence in Africa would have been surprising. Few English merchants or mariners actually visited Africa before the last half of the sixteenth century, by which time the practice of slavery had been somewhat altered by the predatory activities of other European merchants and slave traders. Even so, an expansive body of literature was available for public consumption, which allowed literate Englishmen to learn about African practices. Among the most popular works were the medieval travelogues that had originally circulated in manuscript but were subsequently translated into the vernacular during the early modern era.48 London printers issued an edition of The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marcus Paulus in 1579, and the most popular work of the day, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, appeared in English, in one version or another, at least six times between 1496 and 1583.49 Curious readers could also discover information about Africa and Africans in the recently translated geographical works of classical authors, including Ptolemy (1532, 1535, 1540), Pliny the Elder (1566, 1585, 1587, 1601), Herodotus (1584), and Pomponius Mela (1585, 1590). Moreover, influential Greek and Latin texts such as Ptolemy’s Geographia and Strabo’s De situ orbis continued to be at the heart of university curricula.50 Other Europeans, especially the Portuguese, also wrote important texts that shed light on both West and East Africa. English printers published translations of the diplomatic exchanges between agents of Portugal and Ethiopia during the reign of Henry VIII.51 Several other English translations of Portuguese activities in Africa and the East Indies appeared during the sixteenth century, including Duarte Lopes’s A reporte of the kingdome of Congo (1587). Beyond this large body of material, promoters like Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas compiled, translated, and published numerous narrative accounts that provided detailed information about the people, societies, geography, climate, and commodities of Africa. Large parts of Africa would remain a mystery to even the most intrepid Europeans for a long time to come, but adventurous readers had plenty of information at their disposal during the sixteenth century.
Collectively, these authors and translators presented Africa as an exotic and mysterious place that was alternately alluring for the spiritual and material rewards it promised and terrifying for what awaited those few individuals unfortunate enough to actually go there. Most important, among the many possible lines of inquiry, classical and medieval authors did not dwell on the subject of slavery. Africa’s defining characteristic was arguably
