by Hugh Thomas
Another expedition, the next year, of Captain John Lok, who returned from West Africa with gold, ivory, and Guinea pepper (malaguetta), also brought back to England some Africans, from a village between Cape Three Points and Elmina, as showpieces, but these men were sent home eventually. The voyage was financed by sober merchants of the City of London, many of whom had become interested in trade in Morocco as the Portuguese began to withdraw from there: indeed, by the mid-sixteenth century the English controlled much of the country’s external commerce. Even Queen Mary was interested. The success of Lok’s expedition led to several other journeys—for example, two of a similar nature led by Captain William Towerson between 1555 and 1558, though, again, they do not seem to have been concerned with slaves.
These English voyages greatly disturbed the Portuguese and so, in 1555, a special ambassador, Lope da Sousa, was dispatched by a worried and elderly King João III to remind Queen Mary of the papal grants of Portuguese monopoly in Africa, and so prevent any further English interlopers from going to Guinea. The Privy Council in London accordingly forbade such undertakings. But that prohibition did not even last for as long as the loyal Catholic Mary was on the English throne. The Portuguese governor of Elmina is found writing home to Lisbon in April 1557 asking the king of Portugal to be sure to send a fleet every year to help him protect the castle against these intolerable foreign ships, whose captains “glut the whole coast with many goods of all kinds,” even buying half of the available gold from the region of Elmina.2 These successes of the French and the English were due to the low prices for their goods which they could offer in comparison with the Portuguese. The latter built new small forts at San Sebastián da Shama and at Accra, to the west and east respectively of Elmina, in order to prevent further Northern European trading. But they were ineffective.
Under Queen Elizabeth, more English captains set off to Guinea: for example, there was Richard Baker, whose journey is said to have inspired Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner; there was even discussion of founding an English trading post; and then, in 1562, Captain John Hawkins initiated the English slave trade. No doubt his father, by then dead, had passed to him useful information about currents, geography, people, and markets.
John Hawkins decided to go to Africa at a time when the Spanish government seemed to be beginning to crack under the weight of too many commitments: “and being, among other particulars, assured that Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that [a] store of Negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea,” Hawkins resolved “to make trial thereof.”3 That positive assurance derived from a previous visit to the Canary Islands. His backing was at least as distinguished as that available to slave traders of Lisbon; for he gained the support of his father-in-law, Benjamin Gonson (treasurer of the navy), Sir Thomas Lodge (lord mayor of London, governor of the Russia Company, and a trader to both Holland and “Barbary”—that is, Morocco and North Africa), Sir William Winter (master of the ordnance of the navy), and Sir Lionell Duckett (later lord mayor): “all which persons liked so well of his intention that they became liberal contributors and adventurers [that is, investors] in the action.”
The queen, Elizabeth, approving Hawkins’s expedition, expressed the pious hope that the slaves would not be carried off without their free consent, a thing “which would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers.” In so speaking, she amply demonstrated her ignorance both of Hawkins’s intentions and of conditions in Africa.
Hawkins sailed with three ships from England in 1562. He stopped at the Canary Islands, where he picked up a pilot, then went to the river Cacheu and there or subsequently, in the river Sierra Leone, he captured at least three hundred blacks, partly, as he said, “by the sword, and partly by other means.” In fact, he seized most of his slaves from six boats already packed by Portuguese lançados and ready to be sent to the Cape Verde Islands.
Hawkins then sailed across the North Atlantic to the north side of Hispaniola, specifically to Isabela, Puerto de la Plata, and then Monte Cristi. He pretended that he had to careen his ships and that he could only pay for services rendered by selling slaves. This subterfuge eventually enabled him, in those shabby tropical cities, after some tortuous negotiations, to exchange the slaves for “hides, ginger, sugars, and some quantity of pearls, but he freighted also two other hulks with hides and like commodities,” which he sent for sale to the mainland of Spain. This commerce was illegal by Spanish law, and set the scene for many subsequent acts of smuggling: “and so, with prosperous successe and much gaine to himself, and the aforsayde adventurers,” he returned to London in September 1563. He had been away nine months. He lost the merchandise in the hulks, for they were confiscated in Spain. But all the same, his City friends “made a good profit.”
In 1564, fired by success, Hawkins set out on a second voyage; he was supported by one or two of those who had helped him before (such as Gonson and Winter), but also by three influential noblemen, Lords Pembroke, Leicester (the queen’s favorite), and Clinton, as also by Benedict Spinola, one of those ubiquitous Genoese merchants to be found in every prosperous European city in the sixteenth century. The queen must have approved this ruthless combination of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, for she herself sent a ship with Hawkins, the seven-hundred-ton Jesus of Lübeck, which her father had bought years before from the Hanseatic League. The time seemed specially favorable for another impertinent journey to the Spanish empire, for there had just arrived in England a refugee French Huguenot, Jean Ribault, who had tried unsuccessfully to establish a colony in what is now Port Royal, South Carolina.
The new expedition again made for the river Sierra Leone, probably went also to Ceberro (Sherbro) Island, to the south and, every day, went onshore: “to take the Inhabitants, . . . burning and spoiling their townes.” This was a most unpopular action with the Portuguese, since at that time they were in the habit of negotiating carefully for all their slaves. Hawkins once again seized some blacks from Portuguese ships; he also traded with two monarchs, and set off for the West Indies, this time with four hundred African captives. He sailed to the Venezuelan coast, where he eventually sold his slaves, first on the pearl island of Margarita, then at Borburata—near the modern Puerto Cabello—at Curaçao, an island off the mainland which had recently been occupied, and at both Rio de la Hacha and Santa Marta, on the Guajira peninsula in the modern Colombia, where the Spaniards were duplicitous and the English arrogant. Once again Hawkins tried to excuse himself by saying that the only way that he could pay for anything was to settle his account in slaves. He returned home, after paying the right taxes, via the new temporary French colony in Florida, “with great profit to the venturers of the said voyage, as also to the same realm, in bringing home both gold, silver, pearls and other jewels”: fifty thousand ducats’ worth in gold, according to Guzmán de Silva, the Spanish ambassador in London, to whom Hawkins boasted that he had made a profit of 60 percent. The adventurer was later knighted: he took as his crest a black female African.
There were soon rumors of a third Hawkins voyage. Guzmán de Silva tried to prevent it by complaining personally to Elizabeth. The queen thanked the ambassador, but what Guzmán called “the greed of these people” was great, and several of the queen’s council themselves took shares in the new expedition. In the event, however, Hawkins delayed and Captain John Lovell of Plymouth set off from London (the ships loaded by Hawkins), seized some Portuguese ships stocked with slaves off Cape Verde, in Hawkins’s style, and then sailed to the north coast of South America, where he sought to sell them at Rio de la Hacha. But though Lovell made common cause with a French pirate and slaver, Jean Bontemps, and though they both seized Borburata, after the usual pretense of an accident needing repair, the trade was bungled, and it would seem that Hawkins got nothing.
Yet this failure whetted Hawkins’s appetite for more profits, and soon his third journey was really under way. The preparations were, of course, noticed by the Spanish ambass
ador, who made his usual complaint. All the same, Hawkins set off with six ships, of which two this time belonged to the queen. The young Francis Drake was on one of the ships (he had sailed with Lovell). The little fleet went down to Africa and, despite setbacks, eventually secured between four and five hundred blacks, partly by kidnapping (“Our general landed certain of our men . . . seeking to take some negroes”), mostly by the customary Portuguese method of negotiation with African rulers. They also seized a Portuguese slave ship which they rebaptized Grace of God. Then they sailed across the Atlantic and, after the usual plea that they had suffered damage in bad weather and needed repairs for which they could only pay in slaves, forced the sale of their captives in several now familiar Spanish ports—Borburata, Rio de la Hacha, and Santa Marta. Hawkins also burned Rio de la Hacha in a pointless act of war. Finally, on their return voyage, they were—genuinely, for once—driven off course by storms, and the expedition put in to Veracruz, the main port of New Spain (Mexico), the only harbor where a ship of the size of the queen’s Jesus of Lübeck could be repaired. Here, in September 1568, they were trapped by a Spanish fleet bringing a new viceroy (Martin Enriquez, later known for having welcomed both the Jesuits and the Inquisition into his dominion). Hawkins conducted himself intemperately, a fight ensued (though England and Spain were not at war), some of the English ships were destroyed, and such money and goods as Hawkins had on board were seized. Two of his ships escaped at night; one of them set down a number of English sailors in Pánuco, in northern New Spain, where they were captured. Several spent years in a Mexican jail, but three were strangled, then burned at the stake. Others were set down in Galicia, in Spain, with similar consequences. Hawkins, with Drake, managed to escape to England, having lost several ships (including the Jesus of Lübeck) and their profits, but not, curiously, their reputations. All the same, the first stage of England’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade had come to a discreditable and bizarre end.
A more tolerant Portuguese attitude towards other Europeans in West Africa soon followed. For example, in 1572, they granted to the English the right to trade peacefully on the coast of Guinea—for gold, not slaves, for the time being. Then, after 1580, the defeated claimant to the throne of Portugal, Father Antônio of Crato, lived in London as an English puppet, and gave his authority to English ships trading in Portuguese-Spanish waters.I But the only consequence in the short term was the issue, in 1588, of a charter to the so-called Sénégal Adventurers in London. They were to have an English monopoly of trade with the Sénégal region for ten years. They did little, seem not to have been engaged in slaving, and sank into obscurity.
In Africa, the Portuguese in these years were complaining less about French and English invasions of their privileges than about the Spaniards, united politically though they may have been. Thus, in 1608, we find the municipality of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands petitioning the Crown to end the practice of allowing ships proceeding directly from Spain and the Canary Islands to go to the upper Guinea coast; and there were other such demands—to no avail. A modest illegal trade in slaves continued to be carried on by Spanish merchants.
After the French and the English, the Dutch made their appearance in Africa. In 1592, a Dutch captain, Bernard Ericks, bound for Brazil, where his countrymen had begun to trade in the 1570s, was captured by the Portuguese, and held for some time on the island of Principe, to the north of São Tomé. Here he learned of the interesting profits which could be earned from the African trade and, once free, he set about establishing a Dutch company, which sent him back to Guinea. Ericks made the journey successfully, “running along the whole Gold Coast, where he settled a good correspondence with the Blacks, for carrying on the trade with them in future times. . . . These people, finding his goods much cheaper and better than what they used to have from the Portuguese [the Portuguese merchants often used goods which they had bought in Amsterdam but raised the price], and being disgusted at the violence and oppression of their tyrannical government, besides their natural love of novelty, provoked the Portuguese to use them worse than they had done before.” Thus the Netherlands entered the history of Africa.4
This adventure by the Dutch was, to begin with, concerned with gold and ivory; then, after the decline of the elephant in West Africa in the early seventeenth century, with gold; and only thereafter with slaves.
Holland had by 1600 been at war for thirty years with Spain and Portugal. King Philip II had sought to prohibit Dutch shipping from entering both Spanish and Portuguese ports. These exclusions acted as a stimulus to Dutch interference in Spanish-Portuguese trade: the Dutch republic was then creating what soon became the largest merchant marine in the world. Amsterdam, its capital, with its gabled roofs, its crowded harbor, its ten thousand ships (the property of sophisticated partnerships), and its merchants sustained by the rich pasturages of the Rhine delta, was becoming the world’s greatest center of finance and insurance. To some extent this trade was directed by Sephardic Jews who had found refuge from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and who knew very well the size, and the nature, of the Spanish and Brazilian markets. Great wealth, too, would soon enable the Dutch to establish the only standing army in Europe comparable to that of Spain.
The fact that Bernard Ericks had been on his way to Brazil explains much. The Dutch entry into the trade there had begun in collaboration with German merchants from the Hansa ports. By 1600, the Dutch had secured half the carrying trade between Brazil and Europe. Dutch capital was also invested in Brazilian sugar plantations, to which they sold good Italian-made sugar equipment (such as large copper cauldrons, which the Venetians had used in the eastern Mediterranean). Dutch ships had, as we have seen, begun to carry raw sugar from Brazil to refineries in Holland, and then to export the finished product throughout the continent, even to countries with whom the country was at war.
The Dutch enterprise in Africa began seriously in 1599, after which their vessels were relieved of duty if they brought back gold from there. Twenty ships were soon sailing there annually. Similar journeys began to be made to the Caribbean, primarily, in the first instance, to look for salt needed by the Dutch fisheries. By 1600, many Dutch captains were sailing annually on their own Carreira da Mina, often financed by the same men who were founding their great Dutch East India Company. In 1602, the year when that enterprise was registered, there was even a publication: Pieter de Marees’s account of the Guinea coast.
These Dutch merchants were by then well equipped to trade with the coast of Guinea: not only did they carry cheaper, and better, cloth than the Portuguese had usually done, they could offer the East Indian cloth (such as muslin) and Swedish iron ingots, which the every year more sophisticated African traders were known to covet.
In 1600, Pieter Brandt, another enterprising Dutch captain, made an even more ambitious journey. He sailed to Mpinda. He and others who followed him became, because of the quality of their wares, immediately popular there with the Sonyo (a cultivated people then theoretically subject to the kings of Congo). The Portuguese managed eventually to persuade the Sonyo to exclude these interlopers. Brandt then made his way north to Loango Bay. The kings of the Vili, the most powerful rulers in that region, had until then maintained their distance from the Portuguese, though the latter had sometimes bought copper and ivory from them (the copper came from a metalliferous region a hundred miles inland, in the valley of the river Niari).
The Dutch, thanks less to Brandt than to another adventurer, Captain Pieter van der Broecke, soon established themselves precariously on the Loango coast. For van der Broecke had good relations with the king of the Vili. He and his friends bought ivory, for which there was much demand in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, especially among merchants in their fine tall houses on the ‘Herrengracht.
The Dutch trade in slaves was slower to get under way, though a few pioneer voyages had been made in the 1590s, when several merchants of Amsterdam brought slaves there, to be told that they could not sell that ca
rgo in that city—apparently for moral reasons. The same occurred in 1596, when a captain from Rotterdam, Pieter van der Haagen, brought 130 African slaves to Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland. The city council considered the matter and decided, again on moral grounds, that slaves could not be sold in that port. Next year, Melchior van Kerkhove took two ships to “Angola”—then a term meaning anywhere south of Cape Saint Catherine—in order to buy slaves and sell them in Brazil or the Caribbean. But his ships were captured by the Portuguese. Then, in 1605, another Dutch merchant, Isaac Duverne, agreed with planters in Trinidad, Cuba, to carry to them five hundred captives from Angola. But it is not clear whether he did make the purchases in the end.
In 1607, a Dutch West India Company was founded on the model of the already successful East India Company, but at first it failed. An older United Company, meanwhile, turned itself into the Guinea Company in 1610 and, two years later, even built a fortress at Mouri, on the Gold Coast, only about fifteen miles east of the colossal Portuguese castle at Elmina. Mouri soon became the headquarters of the Dutch struggle against the Portuguese. It was renamed Fort Nassau.
Negotiation, as well as war, characterized Dutch aggrandizement. Thus, in 1617, they bought from the Portuguese the strategically useful island of Gorée, on which they built two forts; and on the Rio Fresco, nearby but on the mainland, they built a factory, or deposit for goods. So the Dutch now had excellent access to both Senegambia and the Gold Coast. But they still do not seem to have bought slaves on any regular basis.
