Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco

to rest amongst the worst),” Saris noted with morbid curiosity, “they are bridled with a bridle made of straw as you would bridle an Horse, and in the cloathes they died in, are dragged through the streetes into the fields, and there cast upon a dunghill, for dogges and fowles to devoure.”⁴⁵ The men who dealt in female slaves were richly valued for the commodities they provided during their lives, but few were willing to accord them (or their memory) with any sense of dignity or honor once they ceased being useful.

      Whatever they may have thought about these subjects at home, English merchants willingly adapted themselves to their local surroundings as part of a larger survival strategy that necessitated flexibility and open-mindedness.⁴⁶ Whether survival depended on slavery is open to debate, but English merchants nonetheless embraced the practice. Englishmen may have acknowledged that slavery was inconsistent with the way things operated at home, but they sometimes accepted that slavery was normative and benign when they encountered it in other places and did not automatically conclude that it was a prime indicator of social degeneracy. Not surprisingly, then, Englishmen abroad were as likely to purchase slaves for their own use as they were to criticize the practice among their hosts. During the tenth EIC voyage under the command of Thomas Best, the commander freely purchased slaves on at least two occasions as his two ships sailed off the northern tip of Sumatra in July 1613, the second time numbering “about 25 or thereabout Indeans, for to suplie the want of our men deceased.” The first generation of English merchants in Japan eagerly and without shame welcomed the opportunity to purchase concubines. Richard Cocks, in a letter to his colleague Richard Wickham, openly bragged that he “bought a wench yisterday” who “must serve 5 yeares” and then either repay back the purchase price or exchange “som frendes for her, or else remaine a p’petuall captive.” Cocks continued with even more shocking details, noting that the girl “is but 12 yeares ould, over small yet for trade, but yow would littell thynke that I have another forthcominge that is mor lapedeable,” or ready for sexual activity. Although not all Englishmen were as crass about the subject, many of them recognized the advantages of buying and owning slaves in the region.⁴⁷

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      Slavery was a global phenomenon, so only its absence in Africa would have been surprising. Few English merchants or mariners actually visited Africa before the last half of the sixteenth century, by which time the practice of slavery had been somewhat altered by the predatory activities of other European merchants and slave traders. Even so, an expansive body of literature was available for public consumption, which allowed literate Englishmen to learn about African practices. Among the most popular works were the medieval travelogues that had originally circulated in manuscript but were subsequently translated into the vernacular during the early modern era.⁴⁸ London printers issued an edition of The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marcus Paulus in 1579, and the most popular work of the day, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, appeared in English, in one version or another, at least six times between 1496 and 1583.⁴⁹ Curious readers could also discover information about Africa and Africans in the recently translated geographical works of classical authors, including Ptolemy (1532, 1535, 1540), Pliny the Elder (1566, 1585, 1587, 1601), Herodotus (1584), and Pomponius Mela (1585, 1590). Moreover, influential Greek and Latin texts such as Ptolemy’s Geographia and Strabo’s De situ orbis continued to be at the heart of university curricula.⁵⁰ Other Europeans, especially the Portuguese, also wrote important texts that shed light on both West and East Africa. English printers published translations of the diplomatic exchanges between agents of Portugal and Ethiopia during the reign of Henry VIII.⁵¹ Several other English translations of Portuguese activities in Africa and the East Indies appeared during the sixteenth century, including Duarte Lopes’s A reporte of the kingdome of Congo (1587). Beyond this large body of material, promoters like Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas compiled, translated, and published numerous narrative accounts that provided detailed information about the people, societies, geography, climate, and commodities of Africa. Large parts of Africa would remain a mystery to even the most intrepid Europeans for a long time to come, but adventurous readers had plenty of information at their disposal during the sixteenth century.

      Collectively, these authors and translators presented Africa as an exotic and mysterious place that was alternately alluring for the spiritual and material rewards it promised and terrifying for what awaited those few individuals unfortunate enough to actually go there. Most important, among the many possible lines of inquiry, classical and medieval authors did not dwell on the subject of slavery. Africa’s defining characteristic was arguably its climate, which authors invariably described as unbearably hot. William Prat’s 1554 translation of Johann Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores described “the lande of Ethiopie” as the “neighbour to the sonne, as before al other to feale the heate.” Boemus also translated “Athiopes” in a way that emphasized the point, claiming that the word derived from the Greek “Atho which signifieth burne and Oph which signifieth take hede, and that because of the approchynge nyghe to the soone [the Sun]. The countreye is continually hote.” As a result, the inhabitants of Africa possessed characteristic features, most noticeably their skin color. As George Abbot observed in 1600, “All the people in general to the South, l[i]ving within the Zona torrida, are not onely blackish like the Moores, but are exceedingly blacke. And therefore in olde time, by an excellency, some of them were called Nigrita; so that to this day they are named Negros, and then whome, no men are blacker.”⁵²

      Figure 1. Detail from the lower-left quadrant of the title page of Historia mundi: or Mercator’s Atlas. Containing his cosmographical description of the fabricke and figure of the world (London, 1635). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

      Africa, numerous authorities reported, was also a land of monstrous races of men. The authoritative text on this subject was Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1601 (although an excerpted version had previously appeared in 1566). In the account of the “Æthyopians,” Pliny described the existence of peoples whose differences could be relatively subtle, like the “Troglodites” who lived in caves and fed “upon the flesh of serpents” and the “Garamants” who were intriguing because they “live[d] out of wedlocke, and converse with their women in common.” Some differences were quite stark: “The Blemmyi, by report, have no heads, but mouth and eies both in their breast. The Satyres besides their shape onely, have no properties nor fashions of men” and the “Himantopodes bee some of them limberlegged and tender, who naturally goe creeping by the ground.” Sir John Mandeville made even more of these characters, including a passing reference to a “monstrously shaped beast” who lived in Egypt that “had the shape of a man from the navel upward, and from there downward the form of a goat, with two horns standing up on its head.” South of Ethiopia, he added, was “a vast country, but it is uninhabitable because of the terrible heat of the sun.” Nonetheless, there you could find “some who have only one foot” that “is so big that it will cover and shade all the body from the sun.” Those who traveled farther, to India and Southeast Asia, might even come across “people whose ears are so big that they hang down to their knees,” “people who walk on their hands and their feet like four-footed beasts,” hermaphrodites, and people who “live just on the smell of a kind of apple.”⁵³

      If classical and medieval sources compelled the English to imagine a world to their south inhabited by strange and monstrous beings, Christianity played no less an important role in how Europeans wrote and thought about Africa (or any other place, for that matter). First, even if English and other European authors were disinclined to explain the physical appearance of African people with reference to the so-called Curse of Ham, a number of writers did associate African peoples with the biblical passage. Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores, which appeared in two separate English translations (in 1554 and 1555), is once again representative. Recounting the origin of the division of the world, Boemus reported that Cham, “by the reason of his naughty demeanour towarde his father” was “constrayned to departe with his wyfe and hys chyldren” and subsequently “lefte no trade or religion to his posteritie, because he none had learned of his father.” If Cham and his descendants were