The Elizabethans (4 page)

Hawkins’s coat of arms tells his story quite shamelessly. All Elizabethans who were not already gentlemen or gentlewomen – or aristocrats born – aspired to rise. They wanted to formalise their ‘gentle’ status, and for this, a coat of arms, supplied by the College of Arms, the heralds, was necessary. William Garvey, Clarenceux King of Arms, granted Hawkins his coat, having decided that Hawkins was ‘lineally descended from his ancestors a gentilman’ of ‘courageous worthe and famious enterprises’.
⁴

The coat of arms consists of a shield, with a seashell in the top left-hand corner – symbolic of his maritime life; and a rampaging lion of gold (or) pacing the waves – symbolic no doubt not merely of Hawkins’s prowess at sea, but of Elizabethan aspirations to make the country rich by sea-power. It is the crest of the coat of arms that is so arresting: it is a naked black person of indeterminate sex with golden earrings, bound with rope. Hawkins knew that his wealth and his practical maritime skill derived from his years, as a young man, of sailing to the Canaries, and to West Africa. At first he contented himself with stealing slaves who had already been captured by Portuguese traders. Soon he was penetrating into West Africa and making raiding parties himself, capturing Africans and transporting them, either to mid-Atlantic slave markets or to the Caribbean, where they could be sold direct to Spanish and Portuguese buyers. He pursued this gruesome trade, not with the mere connivance of his monarch; Queen Elizabeth actually invested in the enterprise and gave him the largest ship in the Royal Navy, the
Jesus of Lübeck
, to transport the slaves to the New World.

Neither Hawkins himself nor his English contemporaries invented slavery. It is an institution as old as humanity – anyway as old as urban humanity. Nor did they invent the modern Atlantic slave trade, which began when a young Portuguese tax official called Lançarote de Freitas imported 235 West African slaves to the Algarve in August 1444.
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Those who today bask in the holiday sunshine of the Canary Islands perpetuate his memory every time they buy a ticket to Lanzarote. The Portuguese themselves – we must further acknowledge – did not invent the slave trade. It was fully alive in West Africa when they went there. Hugh Thomas, modern historian of the slave trade, opines that in fifteenth-century West Africa ‘slaves seem to have been the only form of private property recognised by African custom’.
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Thomas also reminds us – and it is a useful mental corrective that is necessary, to keep sixteenth-century slave traders in perspective – that, compared with the slave trading that went on in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘the slave trade to the Americas in the 16th and early 17th centuries – until the 1640s, when sugar took over from tobacco in the Caribbean plantations – was still on a fairly small and relatively human, if not humane, scale. It was probably still smaller in many years than the Arab trans-Saharan trade in black slaves.’
⁷
In the whole of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries some 70,000 slaves were brought to Portugal. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, 175,000 African slaves were imported to the British Caribbean and in the same period some 350,000 Africans were trafficked to Brazil.
⁸

Against these truly gruesome numbers, and the hundreds of thousands of human beings forcibly transported from West Africa to Barbados, Jamaica and South Carolina during the eighteenth century, the Elizabethan traders were dealing with tiny numbers. But the later slave trade followed the early pioneers.

John Hawkins’s involvement with the slave trade was tangential. If he could have made the same sort of money, on his expeditions, trading in pearls or hides or parrots as he did with his dubiously acquired slave cargoes, he would doubtless have done so. But the crest on his coat of arms cannot lightly be forgotten. He was not yet thirty when he had made voyages to the Canary Islands and learned ‘that negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that they might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea’.
⁹

In consideration of Ireland, the ‘Difficulty’ was convoluted. Nearly all the problems of Ireland in modern times stemmed from their Elizabethan origins – from the Elizabethan belief that if the Irish were recalcitrant, they could be replaced on their own soil by planters. And yet the paradox is that peace came to Ireland towards the close of the twentieth century because the Irish themselves, though for un-Elizabethan reasons, accepted two of the key Elizabethan propositions: the necessity of the rule of law, and the effectual discarding of Roman Catholicism.

Turning to the careers of the great Elizabethan privateers and seafaring men, we are confronted at once by the problem of slavery. There is no escaping the horrible fact, whatever aspect of early Atlantic history we explore. From the very beginning, the European experiment of crossing the Atlantic was tainted by the readiness of Europeans to treat the lives of the indigenous populations of the Americas with contempt, and to use slave labour as a way of enhancing their wealth, whether in mines or plantations. Christopher Columbus himself has been described as ‘a product of the new Atlantic slave-powered society’.
¹⁰
He lived for a while on Madeira with its many slaves, and he married the daughter of Bartolomé Perestrello, a fellow Genoese, who was the protégé of Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese prince who drove forward the origins of the modern Atlantic slave trade.

Shakespeare’s Caliban in
The Tempest
snarls:

This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,

Which thou tak’st from me.

Prospero odiously counters this with:

Thou most lying slave,

Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee –

Filth as thou art – with humane care.
¹¹

It would be comforting to say that all-knowing and all-feeling Shakespeare
sees
quite how odious Prospero’s behaviour to Caliban really is, but this would be sentimental. The sad truth is that Shakespeare probably saw no more harm than did Sir John Hawkins or Sir Francis Drake in a European addressing a member of an enslaved race in this way.

The ‘Difficulty’, with both the question of Ireland and of the seafarers, is one of perspective. The Irish story, from the beginning, was one of unrelenting tragedy of which the Elizabethans themselves were aware. Spenser saw that, short of genocide – the replacement of the population of the island with people who were not Irish – the only alternative was English withdrawal from Ireland, with all the subsequent loss of national security when/if Ireland were in turn taken over by the French or the Spanish. Our difficulty, as moderns, is to avoid anachronistic declarations of
blame
of the Elizabethans, while not wishing to whitewash the enormity of the Irish conflict.

With the Atlantic story, the problem of perspective is surely a little different. The establishment of English colonies in the Caribbean and Virginia, and the subsequent history of the English-speaking peoples, would not have been possible without the piratical activities of Hawkins and Drake in the early decades of the reign, and their subsequent enlargement and strengthening of the Royal Navy. Although the abhorrent slave trade is something that cannot be ignored as we relive the story, the ‘difficulty’ here is in making it central to the story. That is our ‘difficulty’ of perspective. The slave trade would have been part of transatlantic history if Hawkins and Drake had never left England. Without them, however, there would not have been an English-speaking civilisation in America. For it was they, in their piratical lives – albeit in a tiny way initially – who challenged and broke the Portuguese and Spanish domination of the Atlantic and of the New World.

In 1493 the second of the Borgia popes, Alexander VI, opened a map of the world and drew a line across it. On one side of the line there was to be Portuguese dominion; on the other side of the line, Spanish. The division set a line 270 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, a key place for slave markets off the Guinea Coast of West Africa. The papal division was hotly contested between the Spanish and Portuguese for centuries. When John Hawkins made raids on the Cape Verde Islands in 1564, the Portuguese would have seen nothing more than a spectacularly bold individual in charge of a pirate operation. Quarter of a century later, Portuguese-Spanish domination of the Atlantic had been broken. Spain, ambivalent in its attitude towards Elizabethan England at the beginning of the reign, had become its implacable foe.

Richard Hakluyt, the geographer and chronicler of early English exploration, tells us that old William Hawkins of Plymouth had ‘made the voyage to Brasill . . . in the yeere 1530’.
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William’s son John had a great seagoing exemplar in his father, the Mayor of Plymouth, and evidence from the size and wealth of his father’s house that there was money to be made as a privateer. Even while Mayor of Plymouth, old William (he had a son William, as well as John) was summoned before the Privy Council to answer charges of piracy. He did not appear, and was eventually sentenced by the Admiralty Court to imprisonment unless he returned the plunder to a French ship that he had robbed.

William died in 1554. His son William became prosperous trading with the Canaries – mainly in sugar and Canary wine. John Hawkins, his brother, was twelve years his junior. In 1556, when he was twenty-four, John Hawkins seized a French ship, the
Peter
, and sailed with it to the Canaries, trading English textiles for Canary sugar with a family of Canarian merchants, the Solers. On their way home they sailed into the harbour at Santa Cruz, stole a Spanish merchant vessel and sailed it home to Plymouth.
¹³

It was another family of Canarian merchants, the Pontes, who offered John Hawkins the chance to sail the slave coasts of Africa and thence to the ports of the Indies.
¹⁴
He set out from Plymouth in October 1562 with four small ships – the largest of them was the 140-ton
Salomon
. He kept his crew to a minimum, 100 men or fewer, aware of the dangers of overcrowding and sickness on a slave ship. This first trip to the West Indies was not without its hazards, but it was spectacularly successful from a commercial viewpoint. There was a second expedition, no less profitable, in 1566. At Sierra Leone, Hawkins managed to capture some half-dozen Portuguese ships, laden with slaves. He loaded one of the ships with cloves, wax, ivory, sugar, wine and coins, and this vessel was sailed home to England by Hawkins’s young cousin, Francis Drake. Hawkins sailed off to the Indies with ships laden with African goods, Canary sugar and wine, and the 400 slaves. Crammed in the holds of the ships and fed on beans and water, the slaves suffered horribly. Nearly half of them died on the journey. Hawkins hastily sold as many of the survivors as possible at bargain prices to the Spanish on the Caribbean island of La Española. He was playing a dangerous game, trading on a Spanish island without a licence. Amazingly, in exchange for most of his remaining slave cargo, Hawkins sweet-talked his way into the confidence of the Spanish officer from Santo Domingo in charge of the case. Having loaded
three ships
with gold, silver, pearls, ginger, sugar, hides and other goods, Hawkins had more than he could transport to London. Even when he lost one of the vessels at Seville – it was seized as contraband – his return to Plymouth caused a sensation. The sheer scale of the booty brought handsome profits to his London investors. Another voyage was immediately planned.

This was the third ‘troublesome . . . sorroweful voyadge’ (Hakluyt’s words) of Hawkins as a slave trader. Hakluyt wrote a somewhat ‘improved’ version of the tale, though quite unapologetic about the object of the voyage – which was an adventure by Englishmen who had decided ‘that Negroes were very good merchandise’.
¹⁵
The Cotton MS account of the voyage is a desperate attempt at self-exculpation – but for the moral turpitude of the slave trade, a turpitude to which Hawkins and his men were blind, not for the disaster of losing the Queen’s ship. The manuscript of Hawkins’s frantic account was bought by Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631) and survived (just) the fire in that antiquary’s library. (It was the fire in 1731 in Ashburnham House, Dean’s Yard, Westminster, where Cotton’s priceless collection was then housed, that nearly destroyed our only copy of
Beowulf
!) The charred edges of the frantically written (dictated to a secretary?) pages make the manuscript itself one of the most exciting objects in the British Library. Here in the middle of modern London is this extraordinary account of Elizabethan Englishmen, afloat on the Atlantic Ocean, an utterly alien group of individuals, performing deeds of extraordinary baseness, and bravery. Unlike Hakluyt and the subsequent generations of English patriots, we would also wish to set beside this account the Spanish version of the ‘troublesome voyage’ – which sees the Elizabethan hero as ‘Don Juan Hawkins, the enemy of God and of Our Christians’. The Ponte family, Canary merchants, were prime backers, and Queen Elizabeth herself was now an investor. She let Hawkins use one of the largest ships in her navy, the
Jesus of Lübeck
.

Henry VIII had bought the 700-ton ship from the Hanseatic League in 1545, but she had been sadly neglected during the reigns of Edward VI and Queen Mary. Ships built from newly felled timber ‘began to rot from the day they were launched,’
¹⁶
and it was probably for this reason that the
Jesus
was in such a poor state. There had been talk of scuppering her in King Edward’s reign, so Elizabeth’s offer of the ship to piratical Hawkins need not be seen as too recklessly generous. As for the moral ambivalence of the Queen – what a good example there was of it, when she expressed the hope that when he did find slaves in Africa, they would not be carried off without their consent, a thing ‘which would be detestable and call down the vengeance of heaven upon the undertakers’.
¹⁷
She cannot really have supposed that Africans would have walked aboard a slave ship willingly, but no left hand was more adept than Queen Elizabeth’s at ignoring the gestures of the right. The
Jesus of Lübeck
had capacity for carrying an enormous human cargo – she was built to house a crew of 300 men.