Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
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 relative silence of English observers on the subject of slavery in Africa is perhaps not surprising considering the prevalence of what can only loosely be characterized as generic anti-slavery rhetoric in the early modern Atlantic world. Whenever and wherever the English found themselves in competition with other Europeans, they often strove to describe themselves in the most flattering terms possible. By claiming that others were the real practitioners of both slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, propagandists buttressed the dignity of the English nation by highlighting their own supposed commitment to liberty. Yet, it is also important to remember that English criticisms of slavery were rooted in the understanding by the English of the practice as epiphenomenal. Under what circumstances Africans were enslaved, or perhaps how they were treated by other Europeans, was of greater import than slavery itself. Although it dates from a slightly later period, the most famous example of a theoretically English anti-slavery critique was authored by the early Stuart merchant Richard Jobson, who, when offered “certaine young blacke women” while in West Africa, claimed that the English “were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.”83 Jobson was not alone in his protestations. His near contemporary, Sir Thomas Roe, similarly objected to the purchase of slaves during his tenure in India. On at least two separate occasions, Roe reported, he was given the opportunity to purchase slaves. In both cases, even though he acknowledged that he could not only better their condition but quite likely save the lives of the enslaved, he asserted that he was willing to pay ransoms, “but I would not buy them as slaves.” From the perspective of the sellers, Roe could do whatever he wanted with his slaves, including setting them at liberty. But Roe was so determined to avoid the perception that the English bought and sold slaves that he insisted the king be informed “that I had offered to redeeme the Prisoners for charities sake, if after his Majesty would consent to their liberty, I was ready to send him money; but to buy them as slaves, though for an houre, I would not, they should never come nor be manumised by mee, but that I desired his Majesty to pardon them upon my redemption.”84 Although something of a formality, Roe’s stance reflected the desire of some Englishmen to remain above the fray.
Of course, Englishmen did buy and sell human beings because, in truth, slavery was considered perfectly defensible under appropriate circumstances, such as when people were captured in a just war. But slavery seems to have offended English sensibilities when it appeared to be rationalized by purely commercial principles. Slavery, as the jurist Sir Edward Coke allowed in the early seventeenth century, had been “ordained by constitution of Nations, That none should kill another, but that he that was taken in battell should remaine bond to his taker for ever, and to doe with him, and all that should come of him, his will and pleasure.” There were, however, important conditions. Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas More had characterized slavery as a practical and beneficial institution in his Utopia, but he had also been careful to emphasize that the Utopians “neither make bondemen of prisoners taken in battayle, oneles it be in battaylle that they fought themselves.” In his 1601 Treatise of Commerce, John Wheeler, secretary of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, lamented that “there are some found so subtill and cunning merchants, that they perswade and induce men to suffer themselves to bee bought and sold, and we have seene in our time enow, and too many which have made merchandise of mens soules.”85 Jobson’s and Roe’s protestations, in this light, reveal less an English disdain for human bondage under all circumstances than a certain queasiness with the idea of buying and selling human beings.
Other early English criticisms of slavery were equally elliptical and tended to focus on the behavior of other Europeans rather than condemn human bondage outright. English writers were more likely to castigate the Spanish and Portuguese for their treatment of African peoples than they were to express any criticism of slavery itself. The Portuguese, in particular, were frequently derided. As Robert Baker recorded in a mini-epic poem laced with classical references, Africa could be a dangerous place for the English not just because of the climate or the indigenous inhabitants but also because of the rapacity of other European traders. Baker