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Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

P.E.H. Hair
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This essay investigates the attitudes to Black Africans, specifically those of Guinea, as evidenced in the pre-1650 primary sources on Anglo-African relations. Two 1980s studies by scholars working within the field of English literature have investigated English attitudes of the period to Africans in general and have expounded what are apparently popular as well as academically-received conclusions, as follows. Contact with Africans and with the existing Atlantic slave trade, building on older ideas of the meaning of “blackness” and the inferiority of non-Christians, led the pre-1650 English to create a stereotype of barbarous and bestial Blacks which served to justify the enslavement of Africans and English slave-trading. Both studies are based in the main on an analysis of English drama of the period, with passing reference, for instance, to the Othello controversy. Historians are bound to have reservations about the extent to which imaginative literature can inform on historical process and collective attitudes, perhaps not least in respect of the category of theatrical drama, especially when the drama is presented, as in this period, to a tiny segment of a national society. As it happens, these particular studies, while exemplary in their fashion, can be criticized for too limited a critical investigation of the primary non-imaginative sources, resulting in minor errors of fact and, more important, general statements about Anglo-African contacts less than wholly valid. They also treat their subject too narrowly, tearing out what they see as a “racist” stereotype from the context of English cultural relationships in the period, which, in the time-honored and universal way of cultural self-protection, inevitably tended to discriminate against all non-English ways and manners, overtly or covertly.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 26 , January 1999 , pp. 43 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1999

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References

1 The essay was written in 1994 as a contribution to a volume edited by P.D. Harvey of Osaka University, to be entitled Rethinking Cultural Encounter: The Diversity of English Experience 1500-1700, which in 1998 had its publication abandoned. I am indebted to Paul Harvey for inviting me to write on the topic and regret the demise of what seemed to me a very necessary scholarly initiative, although other individual contributions will no doubt also appear separately. Since writing the present essay the view criticized has been resumed, even more stridently, in Vaughan, Alden T. and Vaughan, Virginia Mason, “Before Othello; Elizabethan Representation of sub-Saharan Africans,” Willinm and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997), 19–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which should be set against the present essay.

2 Tokson, Elliot H., The Popular linage of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston, 1982)Google Scholar; Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge, 1987).Google Scholar It should be noted that both studies extend to a somewhat later date than the present essay. But they frequently assert that conditions existed “from the first,” and their limited attention to chronological discrimination weakens their argument. Note that hereafter in the present essay the term “African” often stands in for “Black African”: excluded are the “non-black” inhabitants of North Africa, Egypt, and the Horn.

3 See “A Note on Terms Used for Africans by the English”, appended at the end of this essay

4 See, for instance, Laslett, Peter, “The Wrong Way Through the Telescope: a Note on Literary Evidence in Historical Sociology,” British Journal of Sociology, 29 (1976), 321–22.Google Scholar In a totally different period from that discussed here, the age of Chaucer and Lackland, a similar conclusion has been reached. “With literature, more than elsewhere, there is a very real danger of opinions and interpretations being imposed on the material rather than drawn out of it” Swanson, R.N., Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), 260.Google Scholar Imagine present-day film or television drama being considered in the future a prime source for knowledge of contemporary events.

5 Instances of cultural self-protection, linked to severe moral discrimination, are not difficult to find in the camp of the present-day form of political correctness.

6 Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black (Chapel Hill, 1968)Google Scholar, chapter 1 and part of chapter 2 (see the statement on pp. ix-x). Jordan moves from judicious comment on detail to swingeing generalizations, e.g. “the Negro's savagery … fascinated Englishmen from the very first. They knew perfectly well that Negroes were men, yet they frequently derided the Africans as ‘brutish’ or ‘bestial’ or ‘beastly.’ The hideous feature, the cannibalism, the rapacious warfare, the revolting diet (and so forth page after page) …” (ibid., 28). The trick consists of following up the vague “frequently” with the generic “Africans” (all Africans? everywhere? hence on all occasions?) and so enshrining the highly selective list that follows. As a matter of historian's procedure, the footnotes of chapter 1 mix a tiny minority of references to primary sources (not always the original editions) with an overwhelming majority of references to secondary sources, imaginative literature, and latter-day “interpretative” theses.

7 A further limitation is geographical: only Guinea is discussed, not the whole of Black Africa. Up to 1598 Anglo-African contacts occurred solely on the Guinea coast, not extending even to the Angola coast. By 1650 they had extended to southeast Africa, principally because of East Indian voyages calling at Table Bay and Madagascar, although these contacts were much less intensive than those with Guinea. The primary sources used correspond. I have myself noted that “writers on the ideology of the Atlantic slave trade will doubtless claim that Purchas (1625), by his moralizing comment on Angolan customs and Hottentot physique, helped to produce an image of the Black African which made seventeenth century English acceptance of involvement in slaving easier” Hair, P.E.H., “Material on Africa … in the publications of Samuel Purchas, 1613-1626,” HA 13 (1986), 122.Google Scholar The comment is omitted in an abbreviated version published in Pennington, L.E., ed., The Purchas Handbook (Hakluyt Society, London, 1997), 194–218.Google Scholar However, a major point of the present essay is the dating of regular English slaving and this began in Guinea: southeast Africa and Madagascar were very seldom involved in the Atlantic trade and Angola was outside the pre-1650 English reach. As it happens, my concentration on Guinea responds to the same concentration in Jordan, Tokson, and Bartheleemy.

8 For an explanation and justification of this term see Hair, P.E.H., “Outthrust and Encounter: an Interpretative Essay” in Clough, Cecil H. and Hair, P.E.H., ed., The European Outthrust and Encounter: The First Phase c.HOO-c.1700 (Liverpool, 1994), 43–75.Google Scholar

9 For instance, the cleanliness of Fula women on River Gambia offering bowls of milk was contrasted favourably with that of Irish women doing the same (Jobson, Richard, The Golden Trade: or a Discovery of the River Gambra (London, 1623), 112.Google Scholar An edition of Jobson by David Gamble and P.E.H. Hair is in preparation for the Hakluyt Society. An exposition of the English attitude to the Celtic Irish and examples of the tendency to compare exotics with these Irish can be found in Quinn, D.B., The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966).Google Scholar It is of some relevance, as evidence of the range of contemporary cultural discrimination, that, according to Eden, when things went wrong on the first English voyage in the 1550s the renegade Portuguese pilot was abused as a “whoreson Jew” (Eden, Richard, ed., Decades of the newe worlde or west Indies (London, 1555), ff. 346v, 347v–48Google Scholar = Hakluyt, Richard, Principall Navigations … (London, 1589Google Scholar; facsimile reprint, ed. D.B. Quinn and R.A. Skelton, [London, 1965])—(hereafter Hakluyt 1589), 86, 87. At that date Jews were still banned from living in England.

10 Hakluyt actually copied Eden via an intermediate editor: Hair, P.E.H., “Guinea,” in Quinn, D.B., The Hakluyt Handbook (2 vols, single pag., London, 1974), 199.Google Scholar

11 For Towerson see Alsop, J.D., “The Career of William Towerson, Guinea Trader,” International Journal of Maritime History 4 (1992), 45–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Hakluyt 1589, 520. In this case the lack of detail may be because the account was written fifty years after the event.

13 The term “neutral,” and the later assertion of the present essay that certain references to Africans were “neutral,” repeat points made in Andrews, K.R., Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Marine Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (London, 1984), 114–15.Google Scholar

14 That the English dealt in other commodities is perhaps less surprising now that current research appears to have established that slaves only became the major commodity of Afro-European trade in Guinea (by value) in the later seventeenth century: Eltis, David, “The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa,” JAH 35 (1994), 237–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Hakluyt, Richard, Principal Navigations (3 vols.: London, 1598–1600Google Scholar, reprinted 12 vols, Glasgow, 1903-05, with index, and marginal insertion of the original pagination, as cited below) (hereafter Hakluyt 1598).

16 Hawkins led three voyages and inspired a fourth led by Lovell, about which little is known: Portuguese sources, however, assert that Lovell obtained slaves in Guinea: Williamson, J.A., Sir John Hawkins (London, 1927), 124.Google Scholar Apart from these voyages and the 25 direct voyages, a dozen or so long-distance voyages touched Guinea, accounting for the previously stated total of “under fifty.”

17 Although the poem uses a mythological framework. Baker's voyages were real and I therefore treat his work as non-imaginative. Probably as a result of his unhappy experiences in Guinea, particularly an affray with Africans on his first voyage, Baker adopts a jaundiced tone, using stronger language about things African than any other account. He not only disliked every natural history aspect of Guinea but any suspect African was a “fiend,” “naked slave,” “blacke beste,” or “brutish black gard,” and Africans in general were “a brutish blacke people:” Baker, Robert, The Travails in Guinea of an Unknown Tudor Poet in Verse, ed. Hair, P.E.H. (Liverpool, 1990), 28, 30)Google Scholar; on Baker's attitudes, see ibid., 11-12. This was despite several references to good treatment he received from Africans. Perhaps the mythological framework demanded villains who were barely human. Hakluyt dropped Baker's poem in his second edition, but probably for reasons other than the strong language. Baker offers rich pickings for those who care to argue that marked derogation of Africans was a general feature of English attitudes even at an early date, contrary to the argument of the present essay.

18 For a lengthier discussion of the Guinea material in Hakluyt, see Hair, , “Guinea”, 197–207.Google Scholar For Baker's poem, see Hakluyt 1589, 130-42; Baker, Travails. For additional material on the Hawkins voyages see Hortop, Job, Travailes of an Englishman (London, 1591)Google Scholar; Williamson, , Hawkins, 491–534Google Scholar (British Library, Cotton MS Otho E. VIII, unfortunately fire-damaged); Hair, P.E.H., “An Irishman Before the Mexican Inquisition,” Irish Historical Studies 26 (1970), 2–10.Google Scholar For additional material on the Fenton voyage see Taylor, E.G.R., The Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton (London, 1959)Google Scholar; Donno, Elizabeth Story, An Elizabethan in 1582 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Hair, P.E.H., “Sources on Early Sierra Leone: 14, English Accounts of 1582,” Africana Research Bulletin 9/1–2 (1978) 67–99.Google Scholar For the limited material from other voyages see Hair, P.E.H., “Sources on Early Sierra Leone: 21, English Voyages of the 1580s—Drake, Cavendish, and Cumberland,” Africana Research Bulletin 13/3 (1984) 62–88Google Scholar; and for archive material on the English trade to Senegal, see Costa, Mario Alberto Nunes, “D. António e o trato Inglês da Guiné (1587-1593),” Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa 8 (1953), 683–797.Google Scholar A little more about the course of the voyages of the 1550s and 1560s can be learned from the wills in Hair, P.E.H. and Alsop, J.D., English Seamen and Traders in Guinea 1553-1565: The New Evidence of their Wills (Lewiston, NY, 1992)Google Scholar, but almost nothing about Anglo-African relations. A few Portuguese documents relating to one of the voyages are included in A. Teixeira da Mota and Hair, P.E.H., East of Mina: Afro-European Relations on the Gold Coast in the 1550s and 1560s (Madison, 1988).Google Scholar

19 The printed calendars of state papers contain occasional references to Guinea voyages and the original archive documents are sometimes fuller. But in this category of material the vast collection of unpublished and partly unstudied records of the High Court of Admiralty in the Public Record Office, London (hereafter PRO, HCA) provides the fullest source.

20 Anglo-African trade in Guinea in the early seventeenth century has not yet been thoroughly investigated, but it appears that, although the purchase of gold was always sought, dealings were mainly in more commonplace commodities such as hides and timber: Blake, J.W., “The English Guinea Company, 1618-1660,” Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, 2/3 (1945–1946), 14–27Google Scholar; idem., “The Farm of the Guinea Trade in 1631” in H.A. Cronne et al., eds. Essays in British and Irish History (London, 1949), 85-105; idem., “English Trade with the Portuguese Empire in West Africa, 1581-1629” in Congresso do Mundo Português, 6/1 (Lisbon, 1940), 313-35; Porter, R., “The Crispe family and the African trade in the Seventeenth Century,” JAH 9 (1968), 57–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Purchas, Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes … (4 vols.: London, 1625Google Scholar; reprinted 20 vols, Glasgow, 1905-07, with index, and marginal insertion of the original pagination, as cited below) (hereafter Purchas 1625). For the material in Purchas see Hair, “Material on Africa.”

22 There were several accounts of this voyage containing material on Guinea, some also published by Purchas, some unpublished until recently: see Hair, P.E.H., ed., Sierra Leone and the English in 1607: Extracts from the Unpublished Journals of the Keeling Voyage to the East Indies (Freetown, 1981)Google Scholar; idem., “Hamlet in an Afro-Portuguese Setting: New Perspectives on Sierra Leone in 1607,” HA 5 (1978), 21-42.

23 The original 1623 print of Jobson has 164 quarto pages (but Hakluyt and Purchas have folio pages). Purchas included in his own 1625 publication, curiously, a summary of Jobson's book.

24 Jobson, , River Gambra, 112.Google Scholar

25 See “A Note on English Slaving” at the end of this essay.

26 A Dutch source alleged that when in 1606 Dutch and English vessels captured a Portuguese vessel in Senegal, the English took the 90 slaves that were aboard—presumably to trade, but probably only with other European vessels nearby (“Historische … aenteyckeningh, Van't gene Pieter van den Broecke op sijne Reysen …,” 2, in [Commelin, Isaac], Begin ende Voortgangh van de Vereenighde Nederlantsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Amsterdam, 1645).Google Scholar Other instances of English privateers seizing slave ships must have occurred: two instances in the West Indies in 1592 are evidenced (Hakluyt 1598, 3: 567, 570); Andrews, K.R., English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588-1595 (Cambridge, 1959), 197, 218.Google Scholar One instance is noted by Jordan, (White over Black, 59Google Scholar), who does not add, however, that the English then “landed” the slaves (in fact, as they also did in the other instance), retaining only fifteen, perhaps to work aboard ship. On a few other English Caribbean voyages in the 1590s, slaves were captured at Spanish settlements and subsequently ransomed (Andrews, , English Privateering Voyages, 234, 278, 384Google Scholar). In 1585-86 a large number of slaves at Cartagena deserted to Drake who carried them to Virginia and perhaps a handful to England: Quinn, D.B., Explorers and Colonics: America, 1500-1625 (London, 1990), 198, 204.Google Scholar

27 For the latter see Hair, P.E.H., “Sources on Early Sierra Leone: (10) Schouten and Le Maire, 1615,” Africana Research Bulletin, 7/2 (1977), 56–75.Google Scholar Jordan uses a quote from De Marées to illustrate English attitudes without reminding the reader that he is citing a translation of a Dutch account (Jordan, White over Black, 33n70).

28 Leo Africanus via the English translation is much deployed in the North American works to illustrate derogation of Blacks (e.g., Jordan, , White over Black, 70–71Google Scholar), without, however, always making it clear that the discriminations and prejudices were basically those of the Islamic world arising from its much earlier contact with Black Africans. Black Muslims were more or less treated as equals but utter contempt was shown for African “kaffir” (“heathen”), who, if they resisted conversion, however indirectly, could be be enslaved.

29 Jobson, , River Gambra, 1623, 196.Google Scholar

30 Eden, , Decades, f. 355vGoogle Scholar = Hakluyt 1589, 94.

31 Eden, , Decades, f. 347Google Scholar = Hakluyt 1589, 86; Hakluyt 1589, 106, 118; Hakluyt 1598, 2/2/130.

32 Hakluyt 1589, 645; Taylor, , Fenton, 108–09.Google Scholar

33 Hakluyt 1598, 2/2/189; Jobson, , River Gambra, 61.Google Scholar

34 For instance, in Finch's 1607 account of Sierra Leone (Purchas 1625, 1/4/414) and in Jobson's account of the Gambra (Jobson, , River Gambra, 74Google Scholar).

35 It was unusual to contact “certen wild Negroes not accustomed to trade” (Hakluyt 1589, 114). For instances of Portuguese hostility see Teixeira da Mota/Hair, Ensi of Minn. Even Baker recorded African willingness to trade; for instance, “… NIEGROS came aboord / With weights to poise their gold so fine / … / demanding traffike there” (Baker, , Travaiis, 37Google Scholar).

36 Hakluyt 1589, 116.

37 Ibid., 104; Baker, , Travails, 26.Google Scholar

38 Eden, , Decades, 155, 359vGoogle Scholar; “they browght with them certeyne blacke slaves … wherof sum were taule and stronge men” = Hakluyt 1589, 96. Hakluyt adds a marginal note to Eden's statement: “5 Blacke Moores brought into England”; cf. Hakluyt 1589,107-08 “The English in anno 1554 tooke away 5 Negroes,” 110; “did take away the Captaine's sonne, and 3 others … with their gold” (therefore they were traders and Eden's description of them as “slaves” must be rhetoric), 114-15, 117, 124, 126. See “A Note on the Kidnapping of Africans” at the end of this essay.

39 Hakluyt 1589, 96. It is only fair to point out that trading on Gold Coast was exceptional in two respects. First, local trading methods were abnormally sophisticated as a result of centuries of trading with merchants from the north and of more than a century of trading with the Portuguese. But secondly, the Portuguese presence was strong (the lure of gold had attracted the English there, although overall they preferred to trade in regions far from Portuguese bases); and Portuguese hostility to the English meant that the African response wavered between a desire to trade with the English and a desire to avoid Portuguese reprisals, which made for a perhaps exceptional degree of caution and suspicion in Anglo-African relations. I regret that in this present essay there has been insufficient space to draw attention to the varieties of culture among the very many ethnicities of the Guinea coast, differentiations which undoubtedly to some extent influenced both European reactions to individual groups encountered and the groups' individual responses.

40 Hakluyt 1589,105.

41 Ibid., 106.

42 Ibid., 117.

43 Ibid., 96, 102,126, 128.

44 Hair, “Drake, Cavendish and Cumberland”: “our Captaines thinking it not good to give any thing for that which they might take freely” (Hakluyt 1589, 794). This lowprincipled attitude came from commanders unconnected with the Guinea trade and hence uncaring about African reprisals on later shipping.

45 Hakluyt 1589,132-34, or Baker, , Travails, 27–30.Google Scholar

46 Hakluyt 1589, 522. For some comment on the Hawkins voyages when in Guinea and their slaving methods, see Hair, P.E.H., “Protestants as Pirates, Slavers and Proto-Missionaries: Sierra Leone 1568 and 1582,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970), 202–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is possible that the reference to “the sword” was in fact never intended to apply to violence against Africans but to violence against the official Portuguese. Hawkins may have thought he was revenging the attacks on English vessels, and on their traders when ashore, by the Portuguese authorities during the previous decade. However, in the sourse of this particular voyage, which in Guinea was mainly productive at Sierra Leone, Hawkins probably had dealings only with the unofficial Portuguese. Although these dealings may have included an element of threat, or as the unofficial Portuguese later claimed, violence, the exiguous sources do not confirm any clash with the official Portuguese, and indeed it is difficult to see how occasion could arise for this at Sierra Leone, where there was no official Portuguese base.

47 Williamson, , Hawkins, 84Google Scholar, drew attention to statements in a “Book of Complaints” presented by the Portuguese crown to the English government to the effect that Hawkins had robbed Portuguese ships of some 900 slaves (on my examination of the same source, 600 slaves). Undoubtedly the Portuguese witnesses exaggerated the losses—and possibly distorted the episodes—but since Hawkins took only 300 slaves to America, his direct slave dealings were most likely only with Portuguese.

48 Hakluyt 1589, 528, 553; Williamson, , Hawkins, 150-51, 503–05.Google Scholar

49 The evidence is in the “Books of Complaint” presented by the Portuguese to the English crown (Public Record Office, London, State Papers, Foreign, Elizabeth (S.P.70), vols. 95, 99). The “Books” have never been published but for a minor analysis, and a discussion of whether Hawkins traded, see Hair, P.E.H., “Sierra Leone in the Portuguese Books of Complaint, 1567-1568,” Sierra Leone Studies n.s. 26 (1970), 2–10.Google Scholar For evidence that the Afro-Portuguese traders were not robbed, at least on one recorded occasion, see Hair, , “Protestants,” 204.Google Scholar

50 The evidence is in the records of the Mexico Inquisition which tried many of Hawkins' men captured in Mexico: for the unpublished records see Hair, “Irishman.”

51 Yet some of the promoters of the Hawkins voyages had been promoters of the earlier non-slaving voyages. However, Hawkins does seem to have considered following the earlier pattern and trading for gold in Gold Coast (da Mota, Teixeira/Hair, , East of Mina, 18–19Google Scholar). On a much longer view (ibid., 33-34) I have suggested that the late sixteenth-century competition in the gold trade and the decline in value of Guinea gold led to slaves becoming the major export commodity, but it appears that for the English this came about only in the later seventeenth century.

52 When at Sierra Leone in 1582 the Fenton voyage made contact with local Africans only through the local Afro-Portuguese with whom it was trading: the expedition was presented by the latter with two black slaves and later seized four more from a Portuguese vessel, allegedly in part repayment for a debt, but did not buy any (Hakluyt 1589, 650, 653, 655). Since the instructions for the voyage required Fenton to bring back individuals from the countries visited for training as agents (ibid., 646), it is just possible that this was why the Blacks were removed.

53 Eden, , Decades, 358.Google Scholar

54 Hakluyt 1589, 101-02.

55 Baker, , Travails, 26.Google Scholar

56 Perhaps Towerson's extraordinary comment that some women “lay the same [their breasts] upon the grounde and lie downe by them” (Hakluyt 1589, 102), implied an experience of horizontal intercourse.

57 Williamson, , Hawkins, 509.Google Scholar However, echoes of the same invasion and story were picked up by Hawkins' men on the previous voyage (when they did not encounter the alleged cannibals) and reported in Hakluyt 1589, 526; as they were by Finch at Sierra Leone in 1607 when he noted that in the interior were “man-eaters who sometime infest them” (Hakluyt 1589, 526; Purchas 1625,1/4/415): see Hair, , “Protestants,” 216.Google Scholar

58 Baker, , Travails, 38.Google Scholar

59 Hakluyt 1589, 525. In 1590 the English noted that the French were “courteously entertained of the Negros [in Senegal], as if they had bene naturally borne in the countrey. And very often the Negros come into France and returne againe, which is a further increasing of mutuall love and amity” (Hakluyt 1598, 2/2/189).

60 E.g., Hakluyt 1589,144 (“although the people were blacke and naked, yet they were civill”); Hakluyt 1598, 2/2/129.

61 Hakluyt 1589, 104.

62 Ibid., 101. The Pepper Coast was less visited than the Gold Coast and the English shore party had explored a little, hence the surprise and anxiety of the villagers at the arrival of aliens. The English never warmed to African music-making; Jobson, , River Gambra, 58Google Scholar, spoke of an all-night “hethenish noise.”

63 Hakluyt 1589, 114, 115.

64 Ibid., 108-09, 553; cf. 563. Curiously, the manuscript account of the Hawkins voyage does not make or support the complaint. In the 1560s one English captain was allegedly “betraied by the Negros” (Hakluyt 1598, 2/2/56).

65 Purchas 1625, 1/4/414; Jobson, , River Gambra, 42, 65-66, 106.Google Scholar Jobson's latter comment is noted by Jordan, , Black over White, 34Google Scholar, followed by Tokson, , Popular Image, 16Google Scholar; but I do not agree that Towerson makes much of this or draws any prejudicial conclusions—although the conclusions he did draw were undeniably curious ones, first, that this increased their libido and so demanded polygamy, and secondly (if I interpret correctly a delicate allusion), that the men's wives were hurt by the large male organ.

66 Jobson, , River Gambra, 69-71, 84-101, 139-47, 159.Google Scholar

67 Ibid., 47. Towerson spoke of Africans on part of the Pepper Coast being “so wilde and idle, that they give themselves to seeke out nothing” (Hakluyt 1589, 102)—that is, they failed to offer him substantial quantities of pepper.

68 Purchas 1625, 1/4/415.

69 Hakluyt 1589, 526.

70 Hair, “Hamlet;” Hair, , “Sierra Leone and the English,” 22, 34.Google Scholar

71 Hakluyt 1589, 106.

72 Hakluyt 1598, 2/2/129. The latter are the now renowned “Afro-Portuguese ivories,” and one carved tusk appears to have been brought back by the English: for the artefact, see Hart, W.A., “A Re-Discovered Afro-Portuguese Horn in the British Museum,” African Arts 26/4 (1993), 70-71, 87–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., “A Reconsideration of the Rediscovered ‘Afro-Portuguese’ Horn,” African Arts 27/1 (1994), 92-93.

73 Jobson, , River Gambra, 152–55.Google Scholar

74 Baker, , Travails, 26Google Scholar; cf. 39; Hakluyt 1589, 526.

75 Purchas 1625, 1/4/414.

76 Ibid. “[T]hey have some Images, yet know there is a God above.”

77 Hakluyt 1589, 527.

78 The account of Gold Coast by De Marees, extracts from which were published by Purchas, might be examined in this light. But the exercise requires a wider range of material than merely literature on Africa.

79 Eden began his Guinea material with a verbal assault on the Portuguese for their attempt to monopolize the Guinea import/export trade (Eden, , Decades, ff. 343–43vGoogle Scholar). Towerson quoted an African for the view that the Portuguese at Mina were “bad men” (Hakluyt 1589, 107). Baker had to admit that the Portuguese, although “christened men,” treated his party worse than the Africans (Baker, , Travails, 39–40Google Scholar). The account of the 1590 voyage to Senegal denounced at great length the local Portuguese for their treachery and described them as “banished men or fugitives, for committing most hainous crimes and incestuous acts … of the basest behaviour …” (Hakluyt 1598, 2/2 192). Jobson, , River Gambra, 34–41Google Scholar, was scathing about the “Portingales” and “Molatoes” of the Gambia.

80 Ibid.

81 Eden, , Decades, ff. 344, 346v, 355v.Google Scholar

82 Hakluyt 1589, 96.

83 Ibid., 189, 643B; Purchas 1625, 1/4/414-415.

84 Note Purchas 1625, 1/2/89, a Dutch source.

85 Cf. Hair, P.E.H., Jones, Adam and Law, Robin, eds., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot (2 vols.: London, 1992)Google Scholar, index s.v. “Mores”

86 See note 16 above.

87 Winwood, R., Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Elizabeth ami James I (3 vols.: London, 1725), 2:381–82.Google Scholar

88 Blake, Correcting, “English Guinea Company,” 17Google Scholar, from PRO, HCA 1.47.

89 Porter, Correcting, “Crispe Family, 61Google Scholar, from PRO, HCA 13.49.

90 For instance, the voyage of the “Content” with 113 slaves in 1647 (PRO, HCA, 13/72).

91 Sluiter, Engle, “New Light on the '20. and Odd Negroes' arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997) 395–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar There are several earlier and pre-1640s instances of English vessels taking aboard slaves as part of the cargo of a captured foreign ship, usually Portuguese or Spanish (see note 26 above), and even an instance occurring in the Indian Ocean. I hope to discuss this feature in a later paper on the evidence for English slave-trading in Africa in the early decades of the seventeenth century, but can state that many of the references commonly given are dubious or inaccurate.

92 Porter, , “Crispe Family,” 66, 68, 74.Google Scholar

93 Appleby, John C., “A Guinea Venture, c.1657: a Note on the Early English Slave Trade,” Mariner's Mirror 79 (1993), 85–66Google Scholar;” idem., “‘A Business of Much Difficulty’; A London Slaving Venture, 1651-1654,” Mariner's Mirror 81 (1995), 3.

94 For an instance see da Mota, Teixeira/Hair, , East of Mina, 20.Google Scholar

95 Hakluyt 1598, 3: 52; Jordan, , White over Black, 15.Google Scholar

96 Lee, Sydney, “The American Indian and Elizabethan England” in Boas, F.S., ed., The Elizabethans and Other Essays (London, 1929), 273Google Scholar; Tokson, , Popular Image, 1.Google Scholar

97 Hakluyt 1589, 145.

98 Hair, , “Protestants,” 220.Google Scholar

99 Costa, Nunes, “D. António,” 767, 772, 774.Google Scholar