‘Free from the tyrannous Spanyard’? Englishmen and Africans in Spain's Atlantic World
2008; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01440390701841018
ISSN1743-9523
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoAbstract Sixteenth-century Englishmen accepted without too much concern that African peoples could be enslaved in the Atlantic world. At the same time, however, their encounters with African peoples in the western Atlantic were remarkably varied, prompting some Englishmen to imagine that England could benefit from a cooperative relationship with oppressed peoples. In Richard Hakluyt's words, the African had been ‘bredde as a slave’ by the Spanish but would ‘think himself a happy man’ when he was ‘made free … and quietly and courteously governed by our nation’. This article examines whether or not there was any basis for Hakluyt's claim by considering the divide between the rhetoric and the reality of late sixteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic colonialism and the relationship between English interlopers in Spain's Atlantic world and its African inhabitants. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was presented at the Triangle Early American History Seminar and at the John Carter Brown Library. Valuable insights were tendered on both occasions by several people in attendance, including especially John Wood Sweet, Peter Wood and Seth Rockman. I would also like to thank Ronald Hoffman, Philip Morgan and Ira Berlin for helping me articulate the ideas that inform this work and, finally, Jane Mangan and Elizabeth Mancke for their careful reading of the essay as it neared completion. The research and writing of this article in its final stages was supported by the John Carter Brown Library. Notes 1. Hakluyt, “A Discourse.” On early Spanish expeditions, see Markham, Early Spanish Voyages. 2. Appleby, “War, Politics and Colonization,” 55–78; Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 116–222. 3. On the Portuguese, see Coates, Convicts and Orphans. I would like to thank Kris Lane for bringing this work to my attention. 4. Hakluyt, “A Discourse,” 142–143; Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” in Original Writings, Vol. 2: 318. On English concerns about the relationship between English bodies and the environment, see Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates”; Chaplin, Subject Matter. 5. See, especially, Ira Berlin's seminal article, “From Creole to African.” 6. The literature is vast, but see especially Jordan, White over Black; Vaughan, “The Origins Debate”; Shore, “Enduring Power of Racism.” For a pointed critique of the idea that race has causative value, that it is an ideological product of historical forces and cannot in and of itself be determinative, see Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology.” 7. On the European side, see Hatfield, “A ‘very wary people in their bargainging’.” P. E. H. Hair, more than anyone else, has been responsible for helping scholars appreciate both the subtle nature of the English evidence and the diversity of English experiences in early West Africa (see, e.g., Hair, “Attitudes to Africans”). On African power and influence in this arena, see Thornton, Africa and Africans; Northrup, Africa's Discovery of Europe. 8. The definitive work in this vein is Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, who opens his work with a chapter evocatively titled ‘Dreams of Liberation’ and argues that ‘the Cimarron alliance’ reveals ‘the English view of themselves and their role in the New World’. Morgan adds, further, that the ‘alliance seems to have been untroubled by racial prejudice’ and suggests ‘a camaraderie that went beyond the mutual benefits of the alliance’ (see also Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 119–128). 9. While there were perhaps forty expeditions to Guinea before 1600, there were at least 94 to the West Indies, involving 280 vessels, between 1562 and 1603 (Hair, “Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages to Guinea”). The American numbers are extracted from the work of Andrews (The Spanish Caribbean and Elizabethan Privateering). According to Andrews, extant records likely reveal only half of the total number of actual voyages and ships during this era (see, also, Andrews, “English Voyages to the Caribbean”). 10. The first documented Africans in an English settlement arrived in Bermuda, but the arrival of ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ in Jamestown continues to fascinate scholars (see Thorndale, “Virginia Census of 1619”; McCartney, “An Early Virginia Census Reprised”). While this issue is important, it can also be a red herring in the effort to understand better English perceptions and the role of Africans in the Anglo-Atlantic world. 11. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 14. 12. King, Lectures upon Jonas, 179. Girolamo Benzoni's work was published in Italian in 1565, Latin in 1578 and French in 1579. No English version appeared until Samuel Purchas included a small fragment of the work in his Hakluytus Posthumus [hereafter HP] in 1625. 13. Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies, 7. 14. The Drake Manuscript, f. 57, 97–97v, 98–98v, 10–100v, 106–106v. 15. Hawkins, Observations, in Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 339. 16. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations [hereafter PN], Vol. 9: 407. 17. Coke, Institutes, 116. 18. More, Utopia, 91v. 19. Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce, 6–7. 20. Jobson, The Golden Trade, 89. 21. On the English fears of enslavement in a broader context, see Guasco, “Settling with Slavery,” 236–253. 22. “Primrose Journal,” in Keeler, Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage, 202 n.3; Hakluyt, PN, Vol. 9: 445–465; Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean, 141–144; Andrews, Last Voyage, 107 n.1; Wright, Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 172, 212; Quinn, “Turks, Moors, Blacks and Others.” There is no mention in the records from either Santo Domingo or Cartagena of any English galley slaves, although there were Germans, Frenchmen, Turks, North African Moors, Spanish convicts and blacks. The English Privy Council ordered the return of the ‘100 Turkes brought by Sir Francis Drake out of the West Indies’ (Dascent, Acts of the Privy Council). Richard Hakluyt recorded the voyage of Laurance Aldersey to Egypt in 1586 in which he carried 20 Turkes ‘which were to goe to Constantinople, being redeemed out of captivitie, by Sir Francis Drake in the West Indies’ (Hakluyt, PN, Vol. 6: 40). 23. “Primrose Journal,” 199. 24. The Holy bull and Crusado of Rome (London, 1588), cited in Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 384. 25. Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 93; Purchas, HP, Vol. 19: 295–296. 26. Wright, Further English Voyages, 204, 173, 212. 27. “Primrose Journal,” 179–210; Bigges, A Summarie and True Discourse; Hakluyt, PN, Vol. 8: 342. 28. Most historians have adopted the view that Drake intended to leave the Africans and Indians in Roanoke, but not in slavery. According to Quinn (The Roanoke Voyages, Vol. 1: 251), Drake arrived at Roanoke with numerous ‘negro domestic slaves to whom he promised their freedom’. Kupperman (Roanoke, 88) suggests that Drake ‘rescued a very large number of slaves and Indians from Spanish clutches’ and that he intended ‘to offer the three hundred to five hundred others to the colony, probably as a labor supply’. Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom, 34–35, 41–42) argues that Drake arrived at Roanoke ‘with his load of Indians and Negroes freed from their Spanish oppressors’ and laments that the failure of Roanoke ‘ended the first attempt to join the planting of English gentle government in North America with the liberation of the Caribbean and South America from Spanish tyranny’. 29. Thevet, The New Found Worlde, 90r (citations from the first English translation by Thomas Hacket). George Best, as a part of his contemporaneous effort ‘to prove al partes of the world habitable’ famously argued otherwise when he claimed to have ‘seene an Ethiopian as blacke as cole brought into England’ without suffering ill effect (Best, A True Discourse, 19–35). 30. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 129–134. 31. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 14–18. Menéndez de Avilés estimated that Hispaniola contained 30,000 Africans, but only 2,000 Spanish, and that similarly incendiary racial disparities existed in Puerto Rico, Cuba and most of the major circum-Caribbean ports (Lyon, The Enterprise of Florida). 32. Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 50, 69. 33. Restall, “Black Conquistadors”; Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty; Voelz, Slave and Soldier. 34. Oxenham's deposition (20 October 1577), in Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 171–172, 176, 177. 35. “Primrose Journal,” 188–189. A similar off-hand comment regarding the presence of black slaves appears on page 191. One of the other main sources for this expedition, hereafter known as the “Leicester Journal,” contains the simple remark that ‘the generall and most of his Captens with 700 men went into the Illand. They went in the night from Saint Iacomo having 2 or 3 Moores for there guides’ (also in Keeler, Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage, 148). 36. Andrews, Last Voyage, 94, 190, 220, 207; Purchas, HP, Vol. 16: 59, 193; Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 264–265, 269. 37. Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 278. 38. The phrase ‘go-between’ comes from Greenblatt (Marvelous Possessions, 119–151). 39. Hakluyt, PN, Vol. 11: 222; Purchas, HP, Vol. 16: 102–103. 40. Taylor, Troublesome Voyage, 209. Further details may be found in Donno, An Elizabethan in 1582. 41. Upon their arrival in Santiago, the English came across a hospital in which they found ‘abowt 20 sicke persons all Nigros, lyinge of verie fowle & fylthie Diseases’. Had not Drake's fleet subsequently suffered from a dangerous fleet-wide epidemic, the incident may not have even made it to print. Regardless, diseased Africans proved to be crucial to events as the expedition played out, as a Spanish observer later claimed that ‘many of [Drake's] men have died’ and that they ‘carried off 150 negroes and negresses’ (“Primrose Journal,” 187; Wright, Further English Voyages, 212). 42. These men may have been acquired during one or two of Drake's earlier expeditions to the Caribbean; they doubtless facilitated communication between the English and Spaniards, as well as the Cimarrones. According to Spanish sources, Drake acquired one individual in 1573 from among the Cimarrones in Vallano (Panama). This, of course, aroused much speculation among Spanish officials, who imagined that ‘under the protection of this negro, who must be a chieftain amongst the negroes of that region, [Drake] could carry his booty, by land, to the shore of the North Sea’ (Nuttall, New Light on Drake, 102). 43. Hakluyt, PN, Vol. 6: 284, Vol. 10: 184–185. 44. Andrews, English Privateering Voyages, 234, 249. 45. Andrews, “English Voyages to the Caribbean,” 248. 46. Andrews, English Privateering Voyages, 189. 47. The African who had been with the expedition since its departure out of England is not accounted for in this account (‘Extract from the Declaration of John Drake’, in Nuttall, New Light on Drake, 31–32; Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, 201). If Drake had been concerned about criticism upon his return regarding the condition of the black woman, he was partly justified. William Camden later wrote that Drake had ‘most inhamanely’ left the ‘Black-more-Maide who had been gotten with Child in his Ship’ to her own fate on a deserted island (cited in Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, 201). 48. For the evidence of those who returned with Lovell, see Robert Barrett's testimony, cited in Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, 473, n.73. For those who returned with Hawkins in 1568, see P. E. H. Hair's discussion in “Protestants as Pirates,” 220. 49. Hakluyt, PN, Vol. 10: 191. 50. Wright, Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 264, 269, 283. 51. For those who returned with Baskerville, see the reference in the Acts of the Privy Council of England [hereafter APC] (1596–1597), Vol. 26: 16, that one Edward Banes should ‘take of those blackamoores that in this last voyage under Sir Thomas Baskerville were brought into this realme the nomber of tenn, to be transported by him out of the realme’. 52. [Hortop], The travailes of an English man, 18. 53. Great Britain, Public Record Office, PC 2/21, f. 304; also in APC, Vol. 26: 16. 54. PRO, PC 2/21, f. 306; also in APC, Vol. 26: 16–17. As evidence of the failure of this plan, Elizabeth issued another royal proclamation in 1601 expressing her discontent with the ‘great number of Negroes and blackamoors which … are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain’. She therefore issued a ‘special commandment that the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty's realms’ (Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, Vol. 3: 221–222). 55. On the honour imparted by slaveholding, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 56. “Leicester Journal,” 169. Harry Kelsey contends that the restrictions on slaveholding were an outgrowth of the much larger problems incurred by the practice of taking female slaves for sexual partners. According to his sources, Englishmen engaged in an ‘unrightous intercourse’ with captured African and Indian women. This scandalous behaviour, Kelsey suggests, may have been the root of the tensions that existed among the English (see Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake, 270–271). 57. Wright, Further English Voyages, 7, 2. William Hawkins, brother to John, led an expedition of seven ships to the West Indies, which included stops in the Cape Verdes, Margarita and Puerto Rico, that returned in 1583. With him upon his return was apparently a man named ‘Bastien’, about whom little is known beyond his death and burial in December of that year (Cruwys, Register of Baptisms, 292). 58. Wright, Further English Voyages, 230, 229, 181. 59. Andrews, Last Voyage, 217, 207, 209. 60. Andrews, Last Voyage, 211–212. The two Cimarrón communities were actually somewhat small. The town of Santiago del Principe numbered fewer than thirty houses, while Santa Cruz la Real was home to about a hundred people. And although both settlements were supposedly loyal to the Crown, Spanish authorities never ceased to be wary. A 1587 report on the defenses in Panama, for example, remarked that ‘there is no trust or confidence in any of these Negroes, and therefore we must take heede and beware of them, for they are our mortall enemies’. It may be significant that this observation fell into English hands and was published in the final edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. As Kenneth Andrews (Last Voyage, 193 n.2) notes, Drake probably had access to this document before his departure in 1595. 61. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru; Bowser, “Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society,” 357–379; Palmer, Slaves of the White God. For a sense of numbers and patterns of manumission in Spain's two most important urban centres in the Americas, see especially Bowser, “The Free Person of Color,” 331–368. 62. Africans typically constituted anywhere from 5–10 per cent of the population in the major Iberian cities throughout the sixteenth century. Some 6,327 Africans (out of a total population of 85,538) were counted in Seville in 1565; more than 35,000 blacks resided in Portugal during the mid-sixteenth century, many of whom could be found in Lisbon or the Algarve (Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 158–161; on Portugal, see Saunders, A Social History; on the English presence, see Croft, “English Trade with Peninsular Spain,” and “Trading with the Enemy”). 63. As early as 1474, Ferdinand and Isabella appointed a man of African descent named Juan de Vallodolid, more popularly called ‘El conde negro’, judge and official leader of Seville's black community. Free blacks also formed a religious brotherhood and operated a hospital to serve the African community in Seville. In 1472, a group of free blacks in Valencia received a license to form a religious brotherhood, which they named the cofradía of Nuestra Señora de Gracia (Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 107–113, 154–170; Pike, “Sevillian Society,” 344–359; Gual Camarena, “Una cofradía de negros libertos”). 64. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico; Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz; Herrera, “Por que no sabemos firmar”; Pastor F., “De Moros en la Costa a Negros de Castilla.” 65. This characterisation of opportunities that existed for the enslaved within the Iberian world is consistent with the controversial thesis of Tannenbaum (Slave and Citizen). On the continuing relevance of Tannenbaum, see De la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-making in Cuba.” 66. Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 318. 67. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession. For a characterisation of the British and Spanish colonialism that emphasises basic similarities, and the importance of specific contexts in which events occur, see Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael GuascoMichael Guasco is in the Department of History, Davidson College
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