Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
traveled. Slavery was characteristic of the exotic and remote regions of the world being encountered for the first time by intrepid Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Locating human bondage in the Russian steppes, the Muslim world, South Asia, China, and Africa was a useful way of emphasizing how England was not only some distance away from these places in geographic terms but also culturally distinctive. Even if these places came in for praise because of their wealth and power, the presence of slavery indicated that the inhabitants of Asia, Russia, the Islamic world, and sub-Saharan Africa lacked the same commitment to the principle of individual liberty that the English liked to claim was the hallmark of the world they inhabited at home. Slavery might also be a measure of the deficiency of a given society or culture. Slavery did not always factor into English characterizations of other nations and peoples, but even its absence was revealing. Perhaps ironically, English writers were seemingly more likely to mention slavery as a significant part of the day-today lives of people who lived in complex, civil societies than they were to consider the subject in settings they perceived to be uncivilized or among a people they categorized as barbarous. One way to read the rather minimal evidence of slavery in Ireland, for example, is to suggest that slavery was less a measure of incivility and savagery than it was glaring proof that a given society was corrupt, that a civilization had sullied itself. The same could be said of Africa where English observers, in their more reflective moments, were more likely to characterize slavery as a questionable trading practice of the less-than-honorable Portuguese rather than a fully rationalized domestic institution. When the English encountered people who willingly embraced an irrational, predatory system of slavery that reduced human beings to mere commodities, it reinforced an emerging exceptionalist worldview in which Englishness was buttressed by liberty while foreignness, strangeness, or corruption was indicted by institutional slavery.
It is also striking, considering the rapid development of the transatlantic slave trade and the emergence of scientific racism in subsequent decades, that early English impressions of slavery in Africa during this period were not especially distinctive in a comparative context. In the absence of any systematic English involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and as outsiders trying to break into a market largely controlled by the Portuguese, there were more reasons to embrace Africans as potential allies than to denigrate them outright and some logic to insisting that the English were not interested in the slave trade. To be sure, anti-black prejudice was on the rise in the Anglo-Atlantic world and the early stirrings of a racialized national consciousness was certainly in evidence even in the last half of the sixteenth century. But the pursuit of economic gain that underlay every English voyage to coastal West Africa played a larger role in conditioning the English to think and act in certain ways and helps explain why mariners might have been eager to point out the rather more positive qualities to be found in African societies and peoples. Interestingly, it was despite English activities in Africa rather than because of them that the English nation as a whole was increasingly inclined to associate African peoples with slavery. This occurred, however, because of circumstances in another part of the world: Spanish and Portuguese America, particularly the West Indies. In the Iberian Atlantic world of the early modern era, Englishmen thought of African peoples primarily as slaves, and English privateers, smugglers, and pirates—to the degree that it would further their mercenary aims—were perfectly content to engage them on that level.
CHAPTER 3
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Imaginary Allies: Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World
In conversation with the Englishman, I told him that England must be good country as there were no slaves there; and he said to me that it was true, they were all freemen in England; whereupon I said that John Hawkins had been engaged in a slaving voyage, and had brought the slaves here to New Spain, and I asked him, how he accounted for this?
—Juan Gelofe, 15721
As it made its way down the Atlantic seaboard in the direction of the Canary Islands, the large English naval squadron must have been an impressive sight. The year was 1595 and the 28 ships and roughly 2,500 men sailing under the divided command of two aging knights—John Hawkins and Francis Drake—represented England’s first large-scale assault against Spain in six years. But as impressive as it surely was to witness, it was a familiar scene. English ships under the command of the nation’s most renowned captains routinely sallied forth to punish the Spanish and cripple their ability to continue prosecuting the now decade-old Anglo-Spanish War by plundering the West Indies. The English were practiced pirates and privateers and had conducted similar expeditions throughout the previous decades, although they typically did so with far fewer men and ships and with a greater commitment to secrecy. Perhaps that would have been a good idea here, for this last great privateering expedition of the sixteenth century would prove to be disastrous in the end. The English would reap few rewards; Drake and Hawkins would both perish; and many ships, soldiers, and sailors would never make it back to England.
The expedition began with a preliminary and fruitless assault on the Canary Islands in early October. With little to show for its efforts, the English fleet then headed across the Atlantic. During the initial planning stages, the English schemed to attack Panama, a familiar strategy by the 1590s, but Elizabeth was reluctant to commit the necessary resources and was worried about robbing the British Isles for an extended period of time of the ships that would defend the shores from another attempted Spanish invasion. Drake and Hawkins were therefore tasked with a less risky and less time-consuming mission: assaulting San Juan de Puerto Rico where, rumor had it, they might capture a crippled Spanish silver ship. But, as in the Canaries, the English once again failed to achieve their objective. Rather than return to England empty-handed, Drake (in sole command after the death of Hawkins off Puerto Rico in November) decided to try to salvage his reputation and do damage to Spain elsewhere. As a man who had faced adversity in the West Indies many times before, Drake was confident that he knew the solution to his present problem. Arriving off the northern coast of South America at Rio de la Hacha in December, Drake steeled himself and his men and determined to relive past glories and yet again embarrass the Spanish on their own turf. To do so, he realized, the English interlopers would need help from those people who had done so much in the past to help the northern Europeans amass wealth and undermine Spain’s ability to defend its American territories. To snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, then, Drake went looking for his old friends, his African allies.2
Englishmen and Africans had been working together in the West Indies, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, for more than thirty years. Thousands of Englishmen sailing in hundreds of ships had passed through the Caribbean since mid-century, during which time they had repeatedly sought out Africans, free and enslaved, for the help they could provide as military allies, translators, intermediaries, and guides. When practicable, the English also took profitable advantage of Africans as hostages and slaves. African agents provided the English with valuable information about Spanish defenses, weak spots in the colonial armor, places where goods could be bought and sold, where ships sailed and provisions might be found, and how to exploit both the land and sea to their greatest advantage. Of course, most Englishmen knew and accepted that the vast majority of black-skinned people in the Americas were enslaved and were primarily of value in the region for their labor. When the English bought and sold Africans or took them hostage and ransomed them back to their owners, they became willing participants in (and endorsers of) the transatlantic slave system. But African peoples were more than simple objects of exchange in the global struggle for power among European nations. Numerous African peoples were actually free inhabitants of Spanish cities and armed for colonial defense. Other Africans, most notably cimarrones (cimarrons), were free by virtue of having run away or rebelled and could be found (though not easily) in the more remote regions of the Spanish Main and, especially, Panama. Africans were everywhere in Spain’s Atlantic world and without them this massive expanse of land and water would have been incomprehensible and largely inaccessible to English merchants, mariners, and privateers. Not surprisingly, then, when Drake was lost in the waning months of 1595 he turned to Africans to lead his expeditionary force out of the morass.
After the English managed their first victory at Rio de la Hacha, the commander had little doubt about how to proceed. First, a member of Drake’s personal entourage, Thomas