his work for the company and putting his own and what remained of Booker’s affairs in order.6 Delays kept him tied down at the fort for over a year, with the result that he was not able to be with Hope for the birth and christening of their daughter, Elizabeth. This failing he lamented publicly to his coworkers in the many toasts he drank to the health and safety of his wife and child.7 When he finally did set out for England, he stopped over and spent several months in Lisbon, primarily to sell off some of Booker’s estate and his own personal property and trade goods to contacts he had among English and Portuguese merchants who resided there. Sadly, when at last on the final leg of his homeward voyage, he died at sea in December 1695 without ever having made out a will.8
When the news of William’s death reached them, Hope Heath was about twenty years old, well into her second year in England, and baby Elizabeth had just had her first birthday. A storm of wild accusations and outlandish charges was soon to erupt and further complicate Hope’s already difficult circumstances. Her circle of English acquaintances centered on the contacts and associates of Booker and her husband, and they all had interests, as did she, in seeing to the administration of the estate Booker had amassed on the Guinea Coast. To that end, the merchant Humphrey Dyke, executor of Booker’s original will, had already presented a copy of the codicil to it in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) in August 1695. But when news of the death of William Heath arrived, William’s brother, Samuel, filed a bill of complaint against Dyke and three others, including Hope. All of them, he claimed, were conspiring to defraud him of his right to inherit his brother’s personal property. Referring to Hope as “Sparnissa, alias Hope Booker,” he charged that she had lived with William Heath as his hired servant, not as his wife.9 Dyke then appeared again before the PCC, this time to present evidence of the legality of Hope and William’s marriage, the legitimacy of Elizabeth as their daughter, and thus the right of Elizabeth to inherit. The court ruled that the marriage and daughter were indeed legitimate and also granted Dyke the authority to administer the personal estate of William Heath.10
In records of the defendants’ official answer to Samuel Heath’s complaint, there appears a section that is of special interest, as it was framed by Hope Heath herself. In the section, she outlined her own specific concerns and objections. As written in the court documentation, she insisted on registering her proper English name, Hope Heath. And she understandably took great offense at the statement that she had been William’s hired servant, which she firmly denied as an untrue and scandalous claim. Her most important point, however, centered on the nature of her relationship with William Heath and the evidence that Dyke had presented in court, which demonstrated the legality of her marriage and daughter.11 That evidence, in fact, also provided stunning proof of Samuel Heath’s mendacity. William’s devotion to his wife and daughter was spelled out clearly and eloquently in letters written by William to Hope, to his family, and to Humphrey Dyke, and these were shown in court along with specimens of William’s handwriting. More damning to Samuel, however, were four letters that had been written to Hope herself, addressed to her as Mrs. Heath, wife of William. Three of them were from William and Samuel’s sister, Dorothy, and one was from Samuel’s own wife, Elizabeth.12 In other words, the Heath family was well aware of William’s marriage to Hope and had formally acknowledged it in writing. Whatever thoughts and sentiments had moved Hope to preserve these family letters, she could not have envisioned how sadly and annoyingly useful they would turn out to be.
Hope Heath’s story highlights several important themes in early modern African and Atlantic history that are central to this book. Here we see the direct intervention in an English court of a seventeenth-century Euro-African woman and recently freed slave who was actively pursuing her own economic and legal interests.13 She had managed to secure the annuity that was bequeathed to her by Booker along with an untold amount in personal property and bills of exchange through various of her merchant contacts. Her literacy in English was a key to her success, but so too were aspects of her character that had been noted by others, such as her respectability, well-mannered bearing, and sharp intelligence.14 And on July 12, 1696, almost one year to the day before her second marriage, Hope was baptized at St. Mary’s, the parish church in Leyton. Describing her as “Hope Heath a Black mayd about 21,” the record suggests that she was a practicing Christian and had some understanding about the importance of the Anglican Church and its centrality to English law at the time.15 Hope stands out as a particularly poignant example of the various forms of mixed Euro-African identities people created for themselves as they lived and worked within the multicultural social networks of Atlantic commerce.
Hope’s childhood experiences of captivity and enslavement illustrate some of the special particularities of early modern Atlantic history, a history that was marked by people’s increasing geographical mobility as well as their considerable social fluidity, even for some of the unfree. To sharpen and bring home these features more fully, a recurring motif in this book about individual people and their daily lives is the role played by contingency or happenstance in shaping them. Lives as they are lived seem and are in many ways highly unpredictable and even, at times, contradictory. A focus on particular people’s lives and careers also takes us inside the complex social worlds of Euro-African trade, allowing us to see how it was organized and carried out on the ground and how it worked on a day-to-day basis. More specifically, the focus here is on global Anglo-African commerce at a particular time and place on Africa’s Guinea (western) coast. This book presents one richly detailed example of what were many and varying local histories in the early modern Atlantic basin.
My main sources for writing this history are archival primary sources—records of the RAC, especially for the period 1672 to 1713, when the company held a monopoly on England’s trade in Africa.16 Many scholars have tapped into this archive for writing histories of the company itself, British economic history, British trade and colonization, precolonial Africa, and Atlantic trade. Company correspondence, for example, provides useful details about matters of concern between its officials in London and their many far-flung employees. Three volumes of letters between London and the Guinea Coast between 1681 and 1699 have been transcribed, edited, and published by Robin Law, making these sources available to scholars around the world.17 Less well known are all sorts of other business and accounting records kept by the RAC. They, too, have been used by some scholars, albeit infrequently and rather selectively. These are the records that have been especially important in my research for this book, both as a counterweight to the London-centered views that predominate in the company correspondence and as a vehicle for gaining access to the myriad roles, interests, and experiences of individual people on the West African coast, especially Africans, who took part in Atlantic commerce. This African side—Africans’ involvement as captives and also as merchants, landlords, suppliers of exports and provisions, laborers, artisans, interpreters, seamen, porters, consumers, and providers of information and services—still needs to be spelled out for particular times and places all up and down the Guinea Coast.18
My geographical focus is Upper (or northern) Guinea, where the RAC took over and maintained a massive trading sphere around its three forts and many outstations. It was a huge, socially complex, dynamic zone of commerce, intercommunication, and cultural change as well as a supplier to the transatlantic slave trade and trade with Europe. Recognizing that the slave trade was part of a much larger multilateral and intercontinental commercial system utterly transformed and enriched my understanding of it, especially for this time and place. Seen from the vantage point and perspective of the Upper Guinea Coast, and situating it in the longer-term context of world history, the Guinea trade represents both a continuation of older historical patterns and the ushering in of totally new ones.
This West African coast, called Guinea by Europeans, was the final coastline of Africa to be opened up to international maritime commerce. The Guinea Coast was renowned among European sailors for its seemingly impossible navigational barriers. Its constant southwesterly winds and ocean currents appeared to preclude voyages of return, so no one dared sail south very far beyond the Canary Islands. It was not until the 1430s, after much investment and experimentation, that Portuguese mariners discovered how they could sail their ships down the Guinea Coast and
