Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
they could never unsnarle themselves” and eventually “some lived so wildely … that it ware harde to discerne a difference betwixte them and the beastes of the felde.” John Pory noted that most of the inhabitants of Africa, excluding “some Arabians,” were “thought to be descended from Cham the cursed son of Noah,” but he did not elaborate on the subject any further.54 Although there were exceptions, few domestic English authors were willing to embrace the idea that the skin color of Africans was wholly attributable to a curse handed down by Noah.
Second, and more important, Christian Europeans dreamed of Africa because of the potential presence of Prester John. An anonymous fourteenth-century Spanish Franciscan traveler, whose observations survive today as the Book of the Knowledge of All the Kingdoms, Lands, and Lordships that Are in the World, described Prester John as the Patriarch of Nubia and Abyssinia, which were “very great lands” with “many cities of Christians.”55 The origins of the Prester John myth date to the twelfth century when news reached Pope Eugenius III that a powerful Christian king in the East stood ready to assist European Christians in their ongoing struggles against Islam. It was unclear where this fabled king may have been located, but his rumored presence served as a rationale for voyages of discovery and other official missions to both Asia and Africa during subsequent centuries. Three hundred years after he first appeared, Prester John continued to be an enticing, if illusive, figure whose greatest legacy may have been the Portuguese effort to establish direct contact with Ethiopia.56 Other Europeans, however, were also intrigued by stories about “the kynge of Ethiope whiche we call pretian or prest John whom they cal Gian,” a man who, in Johann Boemus’s words, was “of so great a personage and blud, that under him he hath threscoore and two other kynges.”57
There were always serious doubts about the veracity of these legends, but even Henry IV of England had written to Prester John in 1400 asking him to lend his support to the reconquest of the Holy Land. Still, the small chance that there might be a powerful Christian kingdom to the south was too tantalizing to dismiss out of hand. Abraham Hartwell was moved to declare in his 1597 translation of Duarte Lopes’s A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, if “Papists and Protestants” and “all Sectaries and Presbyter-Johns men would joyne all together” they would be able “to convert the Turkes, the Jewes, the Heathens, the Pagans, and the Infidels that know not God but live still in darkenesse.”58 Yet, Prester John increasingly appeared in English sources more as a caricature designed to amuse readers than as the leader of a kingdom that might actually exist. In 1590, Edward Webbe claimed to have visited Prester John’s court, where he encountered “a king of great power” and “a very bountifull Court.” At the same time, he also claimed that at the court of Prester John there was “a wilde man” who was “allowed every day a quarter of mans flesh” whenever someone was executed for “some notorious offence.” In addition, he declared that there was “a beast in the court of Prester John, called Arians, having four heades” that were “in shape like a wilde Cat.”59 Like Webbe, George Abbot linked Prester John with the fantastic rather than the sacred. Drawing from Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, he noted at the end of his consideration of Prester John’s kingdom that Africa “bringeth forth store of all sortes of wilde beastes,” including “newe and strange shapes of beastes.” These new creatures, according to Abbot, were a result of “the country being hot and full of wildernesses which have in them little water.” Thus, “the beastes of all sortes are inforced to meete at those fewe watering places…; where, oftentimes contrary kindes have conjunction the one with the other: so that there ariseth newe kindes or species, which taketh part of both.”60
Before they went to Africa, Englishmen learned about the place and its peoples as best they could from an array of manuscript and printed sources. After the 1590s, it was increasingly likely that English readers could read accounts authored by Portuguese, Dutch, and even English merchants and sailors who had spent considerable time in the places about which they wrote. The Portuguese had been actively engaged in diplomacy, commercial exchange, and religious conversion with West Africans for more than a century before English readers and mariners began to demonstrate any serious interest in the region. Portuguese texts, even when they did not find contemporary English translators, were typically the only sources interested English readers could find before the 1550s and continued to be among the most detailed accounts available to them through the end of the century. Even when the works of authors such as Cadamosto and Barros were not mentioned directly, evidence suggests that English authors and editors like Richard Eden, Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Willes, John Pory, Hakluyt, Purchas, and others relied heavily on Portuguese sources.61 When Portuguese accounts were read alongside some of the recently translated and very rich Dutch sources, especially Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario, which was translated and published in England in 1598 at the recommendation of Richard Hakluyt, English readers were able to learn a great deal about West African polities, the nature of their religious practices, and the wealth of commodities that circulated along the African littoral.62
Dog-headed men and the descendants of the Magi would continue to fascinate Englishmen for years to come, but increasingly the English were reading about an Africa that was of interest because it was “full of Gold and Silver, and other Commodities.” As Englishmen traveled to Africa, George Abbot reported, they “found trafique into the parts of the country: where their greatest commoditie is golde, and Elephants teeth: of both which there is very good store.”63 These items were made available for trade by the numerous sophisticated polities that could be found along the West African littoral. These linguistically and culturally diverse kingdoms ranged in size from a few hundred people to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. Although they could be difficult for Europeans to describe with precision, African societies were dynamic and often as technologically and materially sophisticated as European societies. Active, long-distance trade networks blanketed the continent. Local rulers regulated trade and moderated the commercial activities of merchants. Cloth and iron manufacturing were characteristic features of local and regional economies. There was also slavery. Although it was an institution that existed to serve different needs and was justified by different criteria than the plantation-labor institution that would subsequently come to dominate the Atlantic slave system, slavery was as pervasive in African societies as it appeared to be in other parts of the world. Of course, there was an important difference. Although enslaved Africans were exported out of Africa by European traders in small numbers to start with, and constituted a small fraction of the value of all African exports before the seventeenth century, all Europeans took advantage of the availability of African peoples as commodities both at home and, especially, in their Atlantic world colonies.64
Slavery was nothing new to the inhabitants of Africa; it was not, as one historian notes, “an ‘impact’ brought in from outside.” Rather, “it grew out of and was rationalized by the African societies who participated in it.”65 Not surprisingly, disagreements persist about the relative importance of the institution before the arrival of European ships in the fifteenth century and a number of scholars suggest that slavery was a relatively insignificant social and economic institution until the Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch began exploiting African peoples. Nonetheless, slavery clearly existed in various sub-Saharan African societies as a tribute mechanism, a domestic institution, and, in rare cases, an industrial system. Thus, by the time the English began arriving in small numbers during the late sixteenth century, nothing would have surprised them more than the absence of slavery. Europeans were familiar with the commodity value of African peoples from their dealings with North Africans who had facilitated the trade in sub-Saharan Africans into the Mediterranean and southern European worlds for several centuries before Europeans began sailing southward.66 The English saw slavery wherever they looked. Why should Africa be any different?
English merchants entered the African trade slowly.67 During the 1530s and 1540s, as many as six English expeditions touched base on the eastern Atlantic seaboard of Africa. The most famous of these were the three expeditions to Brazil between 1530 and 1532 launched by the wealthy Plymouth merchant, William Hawkins, during which time the English captain “touched at the river of Sestos upon the coast of Guinea, where hee traffiqued with the negros.”68