A ‘very wary people in their bargaining’ or ‘very good marchandise’1: english traders' views of free and enslaved africans, 1550–1650

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. M.J. Lok, ‘The second Voyage to Guinea … in the yere 1554’, in R. Hakluyt (ed.), The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 2nd edn., 12 Vols. (London: Bishop, Ralph Newberie and Robert Barker, 1598–1600; repr. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons and NY: Macmillan, 1903–5), Vol.6, p.173 (hereafter Principal Navigations); Hakluyt, ‘The first voyage of … sir John Hawkins … made to the West Indies 1562’, in ibid., Vol.10, p.7. 2. R. Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds and Thomas Dassel’, in Principal Navigations, Vol.7, pp.98–99. 3. The work of Julius Scott and Jeff Bolster, though focusing later and in a different context, provides powerful evidence for the significance of word of mouth communication in spreading relevant information among poor, non-literate and indeed enslaved populations dispersed over long distances. Sixteenth-century commercial and diplomatic activity connecting English and Iberians provided avenues for the spread of this information, particularly considering English interest in Spanish and Portuguese American activities. W.J. Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); J.S. Scott, ‘The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution’ (PhD thesis, Duke University, 1986). 4. For Lisbon, see P.E.H. Hair and J.D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553–1565: The New Evidence of their Wills. Studies in British History, Vol.13 (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario, and Lampeter, UK: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p.5. 5. The first three decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera's De Orbe Novo (1511–30) were translated by Richard Eden and published in London in 1555 as The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, José de Acosta's Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies (Seville, 1590) was translated by Edward Grimston and published in London in 1604, excerpts of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's Historia general y natural de las Indias (1547–57) were translated by Richard Eden and published with Martyr's Decades in 1655, and in 1583 English translations of Bartolomé de las Casas' Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) and Among the Remedies (1552) were published together in London as The Spanish Colonie. 6. W.D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p.61. In the 1640s Richard Ligon defined the word pickaninny as one that enslaved women in Barbados used for their own children and that English colonists learned from those women. A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1970), p.48. 7. Principal Navigations, Vol.10, p.6. Much English knowledge about the Caribbean came from Spanish literature. K.R. Andrews, ‘Latin America’, in D.B. Quinn (ed.), The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1974), vol.1, p.234. 8. Although few of the English traders mentioned the enslavement of Africans in their writing, the references that do exist clearly indicate an acceptance of such slavery and an assumption that readers would be familiar with its existence. R.S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), p.13. 9. Hakluyt's editorial choices likewise reflect his interest in promoting England's overseas commerce. R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.178–9. 10. English mariners and merchants also met free and enslaved Africans in the Iberian peninsula and in the Mediterranean, as is clear (though his concern lies elsewhere) in the recent work of David Northrup.Northrup, Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. pp.1–10. 11. See Jordan, White Over Black, pp.3–43; K.M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp.38–41; The William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter WMQ) (Special Issue: ‘Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World’, 3rd ser., 54 (1997), especially D.B. Davis, ‘Constructing Race: A Reflection’, pp.7–18; A.T. Vaughan and V.M. Vaughan, ‘Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans’, pp.19–44. 12. P.E.H. Hair, ‘Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650’, History in Africa, 26 (1999), pp.43–68. 13. Hakluyt and Englishmen in general viewed the world they were discovering in terms of commerce and its physical characteristics as merchandise. See W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), esp. pp.20–23. 14. For this transition in Portuguese African trade see J.H. Sweet, ‘The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought’, WMQ 3rd ser., 54 (1997), pp.143–166, 161. 15. P. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp.143–9. Peasants were sometimes also depicted as black from their association with earth and manure, p.139. 16. Medieval Europeans in fact explained peasants' position as labourers with the Biblical story of Ham, later used as an explanation for the enslavement of Africans. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, pp.86–104. 17. J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp.43–71. See also P.D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.57–9. 18. Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds’, p.96; Towerson, ‘The second voyage made by Maister William Towrson to the coast of Guinea’, in Principal Navigations, Vol.6, p.218. 19. Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds’, p.97. 20. Vaughan and Vaughan, ‘Before Othello’, pp.21–4. 21. E.C. Bartels, ‘Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa’, Criticism 34 (1992), pp.517–38. See pp.522–3, for the persistence of classical and medieval imagery in Hakluyt. 22. The very different situations leading to Indians' forced labour in Spanish America made objections among Spanish and English observers more likely than were objections to enslavement of Africans. The 1583 translations of Bartolomé de las Casas' Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) and Among the Remedies (1552) made more widely available these works that were primarily concerned with Spanish treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean and Latin America. English unwillingness to accept Spanish enslavement of Indians reflects both their reading of Las Casa's explicit objections to it and the impossibility of separating Indians from the context in which they had been free. Both Las Casas and the English could more easily accept the enslavement of Africans in Spanish America than they could the enslavement of Indians because the geographic distance between Africa and the Americas and the impact of the transatlantic slave trade allowed them to separate enslaved Africans from free Africans and thereby begin to see Africans in an American context as Aristotle's ‘natural slaves’. Las Casas therefore saw Africans only in a degraded situation. The English who saw or read about both Africans and African Americans likewise distinguished between the two. More basically, the fact that Europeans acquired African slaves through purchase, never having witnessed their transition from freedom to slavery made it easier to accept their status. Although Las Casas criticized the enslavement of Africans in The History of the Indies, it was not translated into English until 1875. E.S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), p.7, n.7. 23. J.H. Sweet argues that medieval stereotypes (from Europe and from the Muslim world) were indeed crucial to Iberian images of Africans. Sweet, ‘Iberian Roots’, p.155. The English in turn learned from Iberians, but within those negative assessments were important distinctions. P.E.H. Hair and R. Law note that early English trade in Africa occurred within the interstices of Portuguese African trade and often depended upon Portuguese defectors. P.E.H. Hair and R. Law, ‘The English in Western Africa to 1700’, in N. Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol.1: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.241–63, esp. pp.246–7. 24. Bartels, ‘Imperialist Beginnings’, pp.523–4; cites Principal Navigations, Vol.6, pp.187, 191. 25. Emily Bartels notes that the accounts contained little information about African social lives and much material about English traders’ negative experiences. ‘Imperialist Beginnings’, p.529. Given the mercantile interests of traders and seamen, it is not surprising that their writings indicate so little interest in African society and culture. The trading difficulties they focused on instead were what required explanation if accounts were to be of use. 26. Indeed, John Thornton argues that if the field was not level, the advantage went to the African traders in this period. Africa and Africans, pp.7, 18, 21, 36–42, 57–71. 27. Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds’, p.98. 28. See, for example, Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds’, pp.92–4, 98; W. Towerson, ‘The first voyage made by Master William Towrson Marchant of London, to the coast of Guinea … in the yeere 1555’, in Principal Navigations, Vol.6, p.184. 29. Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds’, p.93. 30. Rainolds, ‘The voyage of Richard Rainolds’, p.95. See also his description of French–West African trade, Ibid, p.91. 31. W. Wren, ‘The voyage of M. George Fenner to Guinie, and the Islands of Cape Verde, in the yeere of 1566’, in Principal Navigations, Vol. 6, pp.266–284, esp. pp.271–3. Emily Bartels offers a different interpretation of this passage, arguing that Wren's decision to explain the English ship's kidnapping of three Africans after he described his own crew's difficulty indicates Wren's attempt to make the strongest possible impression of African hostility. However, in my observation, early modern English writers usually ordered their narratives following the sequence in which they themselves understood what was happening. Bartels, ‘Imperialist Beginnings’, p.527. 32. Towerson, ‘The first voyage, pp.177–211’; ‘The second voyage made by Maister William Towrson to the Coast of Guinea’ in Principal Navigations, Vol.6, pp.212–31; ‘The third and last voyage of M. William Towrson to the coast of Guinie’, pp.231–252. See Bartels, ‘Imperialist Beginnings’, p.524 for a different interpretation. 33. Towerson ‘The third and last voyage’, p.252. 34. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp.10–11. 35. Hakluyt, ‘yyhe first voyage of sir John Hawkins … made to the West Indies 1562’, in Principal Navigations, Vol.10, pp.7–8. 36. Hawkins, ‘The third troublesome voyage … to the parts of Guinea, and the West Indies, in the yeeres 1567 and 1568', in Principal Navigations, Vol.10, pp.64–74, quote p.65. 37. Hawkins, ‘The third troublesome voyage … to the parts of Guinea, and the West Indies, in the yeeres 1567 and 1568', in Principal Navigations, Vol.10, pp.65–6. 38. Hawkins, ‘The third troublesome voyage … to the parts of Guinea, and the West Indies, in the yeeres 1567 and 1568', in Principal Navigations, Vol.10, p.66. 39. Hawkins, ‘The third troublesome voyage … to the parts of Guinea, and the West Indies, in the yeeres 1567 and 1568', in Principal Navigations, Vol.10, pp.66–7. 40. See C.A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); and P.J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). 41. Philips, ‘A discourse written by one Miles Philips’, in Principal Navigations, Vol.9, pp.422–3. 42. Philips, ‘A discourse written by one Miles Philips’, in Principal Navigations, Vol.9, p.423. 43. Long before they established their own North American and Caribbean colonies, English people understood that slavery played a role in American colonization. My arguments thus suggest that in one sense Oscar and Mary Handlin were correct: for the English, racism followed slavery. O. and M.F. Handlin, ‘Origins of the Southern Labour System’, WMQ 3rd ser., 7 (1950), pp.199–222. However, rather than placing that process within Virginia, I argue, rather, that it was a longer-term development that began (for the English) in the sixteenth century and for which Virginia provides us not with a place of origin, but rather, with one locale among many in which we can observe a gradual process. 44. Edmund Morgan's contention that Drake cast himself as a liberator of the Cimarrons can only be understood in terms of tyrannical Spanish control over the territory of Panama, not Spanish control over the status of the Cimarrons. In that sense, Drake could not have liberated the Cimarrons because they were already free. American Slavery, American Freedom, pp.10–14. 45. Enslaved Africans did not become central to English colonies until changes in the slave trade, the economic situations in individuals colonies, and the employment situation in England made the purchase of enslaved Africans more economical for planters than the purchase of indentured servants. 46. Drake left three of the Africans at St. Augustine, where one of them reported that he intended to take the rest to Roanoke. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp.34–6. 47. Quoted in D.W. Meinig Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p.145. 48. A.T. Vaughan, ‘Blacks in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade’, WMQ, 3rd ser., 29 (1972): pp.474–8. The names of Africans which appeared in the census were: Angelo, John Pedro, Antoney, Isabell, William (the son of Antoney and Isabell), Antonio and Mary. 49. Vaughan, ‘Blacks in Virginia’, pp.474–6. 50. Even as late as 1692, a factor for the English Royal Africa Company reported that ‘Here is no Resisting the Country’. Hair and Law, ‘The English in Western Africa’, 262, citing R. Law, ‘“Here is No Resisting the Country”: The Realities of Power in Afro–European Relations on the West African “Slave Coast” ’, Itinerario 18 (1994), pp.50–64. In 1752 the Board of Trade acknowledged that ‘in Africa we were only tenants of the soil which we held at the goodwill of the natives’. Hair and Law, ‘The English in Western Africa’, p.261. 51. Ligon, History of Barbados, pp.12–13. 52. Ligon, History of Barbados, pp.46, 52, 113. 53. Her interpretation of the contrasts in Ligon's depictions of African women in Cape Verde and Barbados differs from mine. See J.L. Morgan, ‘“Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,’ WMQ 3rd ser., 54 (1997), pp.167–92.

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