the Atlantic and sold into slavery. John Lovell attempted to sail in his former commander’s wake two years later when he left Plymouth with three ships, but he lacked Hawkins’s skill, or good fortune, and only managed to acquire and sell a few slaves. Lovell’s small fleet was largely dispirited and none-the-wealthier when it returned to England in 1567.74
The most notorious English expedition to Africa during the sixteenth century was the final slave-trading expedition launched and led by John Hawkins in 1567. This massive expedition was a grand scheme and represented a serious commitment to the slave trade on the part of Hawkins, numerous investors, and Queen Elizabeth herself. By contemporary standards, the fleet was impressive, consisting of six ships, including two royal warships. In a letter from Plymouth drafted shortly before his departure, Hawkins confidently assured Elizabeth that he would return from the West Indies laden with “gold, pearls and emeralds, whereof I doubt not but to bring home great abundance to the contentation of your highness and to the relief of the number of worthy servitures ready now for this pretended voyage.” Departing Plymouth in October, the fleet reached Cape Verde in mid-November and proceeded to try to “obtaine some Negros,” but they “got but fewe, and those with great hurt and damage to our men.” Hawkins continued down the coast to Sierra Leone and prepared to give up on his grand scheme, having procured fewer than 150 slaves, when “there came to us a Negro, sent from a king, oppressed by other Kings his neighbours, desiring our aide, with promise that as many Negros as by these warres might be obtained, aswell of his part as of ours, should be at our pleasure.”75 After a disappointing start, then, things appeared to be looking more positive for the English slave traders.
Having learned the painful lesson that he could not simply dispatch his men to the coast to waylay random Africans without great difficulty, Hawkins prepared to work in consort with an African ally. Together, they attacked and set fire to a village housing approximately 8,000 people. As the inhabitants fled for their lives, Hawkins and his men managed to capture “250 persons, men, women, & children, and by our friend the king of our side, there were taken 600 prisoners, whereof we hope to have had our choise.” Hawkins was disappointed, however, when “the Negro (in which nation is seldome or never found truth) … remooved his campe and prisoners, so that we were faine to content us with those few which we had gotten our selves.” Thus, with perhaps 500 Africans on board, the English fleet set sail for the West Indies in early February. After a difficult journey, they arrived in the West Indies and “coasted from place to place, making our traffike with the Spaniards as we might, somewhat hardly, because the king had straightly commanded all his Governors in those parts, by no meanes to suffer any trade to be made with us.” By the end of July, the English ships were ready to depart, but in August, off the coast of Cuba, they were caught in “an extreme storme which continued the space of foure dayes.” Initially, they sought safe harbor in Florida to repair their ships, but another storm forced them westward and compelled Hawkins to seek relief at San Juan de Ulloa on the coast of Mexico near Veracruz. There, however, they soon found themselves trapped by the newly arrived Spanish flota. The two sides initially maintained an uneasy peace. Unfortunately for the English, the Spanish viceroy, Don Martín Enríquez, had no intention of allowing the privateers to go unchallenged. Within days, the Spanish attacked and devastated the English force. Two ships, the Judith and the Minion, managed to get past the Spanish fleet and safely out to sea, but three other ships were destroyed and a majority of the men were abandoned to their fate in New Spain. Of the roughly 400 men who set sail with Hawkins in 1567, only about 100 returned to England in 1568.76
Figure 2. Sketch of the arms and crest (a bound African slave) granted to Sir John Hawkins in 1568. “Miscellaneous Grants 1,” fol. 148r. By permission of the College of Arms, London.
With the notable exception of these four slave-trading expeditions during the 1560s, few Englishmen went to Africa to participate in the transatlantic slave trade before the mid-seventeenth century. Hawkins’s voyage was such an unmitigated financial and diplomatic disaster that there was little in it to suggest that it was worth imitating. Hawkins was even compelled to draft a very public defense of his enterprise upon his return in which the duplicity of the Spanish and bad weather featured most prominently among the list of explanations for the voyage’s failure.77 In subsequent decades, therefore, only a small number of English merchants attempted to profit from the transatlantic slave trade. In 1587, two English ships were granted safe passage by the Portuguese government to trade textiles into the Azores where they were to acquire wine that would be used for the purchase of slaves in Guinea or Angola, which would then be exchanged for sugar in Brazil. Illicit trading in black slaves was also sporadic during the early decades of the seventeenth century, though English merchants often had other more pressing interests in Africa.78 When the Company of Adventurers of London trading to Gynney and Bynney was formed in 1618, the corporation was primarily interested in the gold trade. Although the company established a fort on the Gambia River and sponsored three voyages between 1618 and 1621, the business venture was largely unsuccessful. Eventually, the company was reorganized under the leadership of the London merchant Nicholas Crispe and granted a new monopoly as the Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea and it proceeded to establish additional outposts in Sierra Leone and along the Gold Coast. Even then, gold and lumber were more likely than slaves to be listed as the desired commodities.79 Hawkins’s disaster was a hard-learned lesson and the English government and its merchants were not quick to forget it—the slave trade was dangerous.
But if Englishmen found the slave trade to be impractical for a host of economic and geo-political reasons, they did not necessarily find slavery to be particularly disagreeable. Before 1600, a few English observers commented on the practice of slavery in both its domestic and transatlantic manifestations without passing judgment, much as their countrymen had done in other parts of the world. William Finch, a resident English merchant for a brief time in Sierra Leone early in the seventeenth century, was intrigued by a local ruler who “hath power to sell his people for slaves (which he proferred unto us)” but chose not to comment further on the subject. In describing the coastal trading activities of the “many Spaniards and Portugals resident by permission of the Negroes,” Richard Rainolds recorded their practice of buying iron from French and English ships and then trading it “for Negros; which be caried continually to the West Indies in such ships as come from Spaine.”80 For the English, slavery was a characteristic feature of Africa, as it was throughout much of the world. In an era when Englishmen were inclined to argue that much of the world beyond the shores of the British Isles was epitomized by slavery, the presence of human bondage in Africa was predictable.
After 1600, largely as a result of Samuel Purchas’s translation and publication of numerous Dutch sources, much more information was available about the nature of slavery in coastal West Africa. Richard Hakluyt had seen to the English translation of Linschoten’s Itinerario soon after it had appeared in 1596, but he included little of it or anything else from Dutch sources in his Principal Navigations. This omission was largely a result of timing. The Dutch East India Company was not founded until 1602, at which time a number of Dutch authors began producing remarkably detailed accounts of Africa, India, the East Indies, and the Americas. Purchas therefore had at his disposal not only Linschoten, but a 1602 description of the Gold Coast by Pieter de Marees and an account of Benin possibly authored by Dierick Ruiters.81 On Benin, then, Purchas was able to note that the Portuguese were very familiar with a certain river “not because of any great commoditie that is therein to be had; but because of the great number of slaves which are bought there, to carry to other places … to labour there, and to refine Sugar.” In even more detail, Purchas continued, “[T]hey are very strong men, and can labour stoutly, and commonly are better slaves than those of Gabom, but those that are sold in Angola are much better.”82 With the possible exception of Andrew Battell, no English eyewitness commented as extensively as Dutch and Portuguese authorities on the precise nature and operation of slavery in Africa, but English readers were largely unaware of many of these works before the early seventeenth century.
The
