Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
Purchas’s volumes because they were an especially visible sign of the degeneracy he believed inundated the Mediterranean world and much of the east. Eunuchs were not merely men who had been castrated; they were agents of sexual depravity. The Withers account, for example, was preceded on the printed page by the record of the English cleric Edward Terry, who journeyed to India in 1616 to serve as Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain in the English Embassy. Like numerous other European witnesses, Terry mentioned eunuchs in passing as royal attendants, guards, and even high officials. But among his varied observations, Terry noted at one point that nobody lived “in the Kings house but his women and Eunuches, and some little Boyes which hee keepes about him for a wicked use.” At once, this comment reads as both a passing reference to the luxury in which a local ruler lived and a resounding condemnation of his detestable personal proclivities.37 Eunuchs repelled, then, not simply because they had been physically altered, but because they were emblematic of a widespread phenomenon that reflected a broader understanding of Islam, the exotic lands to the east, and slavery.
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As Terry’s account implies, the English were quick to identify the Mediterranean as the epicenter of bondage and captivity in the world, but there were other newly encountered places that were easily characterized in like terms. The presence and roles of slaves in these less familiar, and decidedly less menacing, societies reinforced the familiar conventions that human bondage often resulted from warfare and represented a kind of perpetual captivity involving a complicated interplay between indiscriminate and potentially brutal treatment and generous opportunities for the enslaved either to exercise power through their bondage or to reclaim their lost liberty. These ideas, however, were often based on imperfect and incomplete information. Because few Englishmen traveled to either south or southeast Asia before 1600, Richard Hakluyt had little in the way of firsthand observations or written narrative accounts before he published the final edition of the Principal Navigations. Samuel Purchas, however, was able to extract liberally from a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English narratives and therefore included significantly more material on Asia in his volumes.38 The English sources were a particularly rich body of material that Purchas acquired directly from the English East India Company (EIC) in 1622. The EIC had been founded in 1600 and English ships and merchants began to show up in the southeast Asian archipelago soon thereafter. Before the EIC reformed in 1613 as a joint-stock company, at least twelve separate expeditions voyaged to the region. English ships also sailed to India in 1608 and Sir Thomas Roe established the first formal embassy to the Mogul court in 1615. As a result of these contacts, Samuel Purchas had a variety of sources to draw on by the time his multivolume work was published in 1625.39
English ships and merchants were lured beyond the southern tip of Africa by the same promise of rich rewards in valuable commodities that dared them to chart the Russian interior and broach the Mediterranean market during the late sixteenth century. And just as they had difficulty avoiding the subject of human bondage in these regions, English observers took notice of the nature and character of slavery further east. Considering their precarious and decidedly dependent status in the region, the accounts authored by early English merchants in the Indian Ocean and Asia are particularly interesting because these Englishmen were not in the market for slaves, as their countrymen would later be in Africa.40 Equally important, unlike the accounts written about slavery in the Mediterranean world, the English who plied their trade in the Indian and Pacific Oceans were not necessarily worried that they might themselves be enslaved.41 For this reason, the handful of English reports about the presence and use of slaves in this arena are generally characterized by a much more matter-of-fact tone than those that emanated from the Mediterranean, where the slaves that interested English commentators the most would prove to be their fellow countrymen (particularly during the seventeenth century). Still, English observers did not shy away from drawing often negative conclusions about the indigenous slave systems of south and southeast Asia.
In Java, for example, the English factor Edmund Scot commented on the tenuous existence of slaves whose masters “may execute them for any small fault.” Javan elites often kept large numbers of Chinese slaves, so many that “[t]he Gentlemen of this Land are brought to bee poore, by the number of their Slaves that they keepe, which eate faster then their Pepper or Rice groweth.” Scot also made at least passing reference to concubinage of a sort found in the Mediterranean world when he observed that for every wife that a free Javan married “he must keepe ten women-slaves.” Scot sympathized with the plight of slaves in Java, who suffered under masters some Englishmen characterized in the harshest terms. Javans were, in Scot’s opinion, “idle” and “much given to stealing, from the highest to the lowest, and surely in times past, they have beene Man-eaters, before the Traffique was had with them by the Chynasses.” An earlier account reprinted by Purchas, however, presented a less flattering 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