Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco

by the natives on the Malagueta Coast, a people Baker dismissed as “slaves” and “fiends more fierce then those in hell.”⁸⁶ Forgetting his misadventures, Baker returned with a second expedition only to find himself part of a group of nine men who became separated from their ships and abandoned as lost along the Gold Coast. Sustained by locals who supplied them with food and fresh water in exchange for their wares, the group eventually found itself in the neighborhood of São Jorge da Mina, a Portuguese trading fort established in the late fifteenth century. For fear of retaliation, English mariners in the past had carefully avoided the Portuguese in Africa and now Baker was forced to contemplate a dilemma. On the one hand, “Our miserie may make / them pitie us the more.” But, on the other,

      Their Gallies may perhaps

      lacke such yong men as we,

      And thus it may fall in our laps,

      all Galeyslaves to be,

      During our life, and this

      we shall be sure to have,

      Although we row, such meate as is

      the allowance of a slave.

      But here we rowe and sterve,

      our misery is so sore:

      The slave with meat inough they serve,

      that he may teare his ore.⁸⁷

      As Baker saw the issue, the English had another option: They could throw themselves on the mercy of the native Africans and see “what friendship they will shew.” Not surprisingly, however, the wayward English were not too keen on taking refuge with the locals:

      But what favour would ye

      of these men looke to have:

      Who beastly savage people be,

      farre worse then any slave?

      If Cannibals they be

      in kind, we doe not know,

      But if they be, then welcome we,

      to pot straight way we goe.

      They naked goe likewise,

      for shame we cannot so:

      We cannot live after their guise,

      thus naked for to go.

      By rootes and leaves they live,

      as beasts doe in the wood:

      Among these heathen who can thrive,

      with this so wilde a food?

      The piercing heate againe,

      that scorcheth with such strength,

      Piercing our naked flesh with paine,

      will us consume at length.⁸⁸

      Determining that their prospects were better with untrustworthy fellow Christians than with naked Africans who lived like animals in an inhospitable climate—and who might choose to make a meal of them—the nine Englishmen rowed toward the fortress. As they neared, however, they were fired upon and forced back out to sea. Fortunately, Baker’s negative assessment of the Africans proved to be as false as his hope that the Portuguese would offer sustenance. Once they were safely away from the Portuguese, the English mariners were met at sea by the son of the local ruler. After Baker recounted the plight of the lost English mariners, the African prince “[h]ad great pitie on us” and subsequently invited the English to come ashore. As they did, their ship was swamped, but the weakened Englishmen were rescued by their benefactors. Here, in strikingly different language from that used earlier in the poem, Baker commented favorably on the king’s son (“a stout and valiant man, / In whom I thinke Nature i’wis [certainly], / hath wrought all that she can”) and the natives’ generosity (“And gave to us, even such as they / themselves do daily eate”).⁸⁹ After several days, however, the African hosts gave up trying to sustain the castaways and left them to their own devices. In the end, Baker and only two others lived long enough to be picked up by a passing French ship.

      The lesson that Englishmen often learned in Africa was simple: There was more to fear from other Europeans in the region than from Africans themselves. William Towerson reported that the natives told him that “the Portugales were bad men, and that they made them slaves if they could take them, and would put yrons upon their legges.” Perhaps even more frightening, Towerson noted that “as many Frenchmen or Englishmen, as they could take … they would hang them.” Walter Wren, who wrote the narrative account of George Fenner’s voyage to Africa in 1566, described a failed attempt to trade with some Portuguese merchants who, in what would prove to be a recurring theme, intended nothing more than “villainously to betray us … although we meant in truth and honestie, friendly to trafike with them.” Richard Rainolds, writing about his trip to Guinea in 1591, made repeated references to the duplicity of the Portuguese and observed that whatever success the English were able to achieve was partly attributable to the fact that the local inhabitants “seemed to be very glad that no Portugall was come in our ship.” The local ruler, he noted, “did esteeme them as people of no truth.” Rainolds was inclined to agree but explained that most of the Iberians “resident in these places be banished men or fugitives, for committing most hainous crimes and incestuous acts.” Not surprisingly, then, “they are of the basest behaviour that we have ever seene of these nations in any other country.”⁹⁰

      By extension, Englishmen frequently authored sympathetic or even admiring comments about the Africans they encountered in Africa. Although the occasional English visitor to coastal West Africa may have dwelled on gross stereotypes that suggested sub-Saharan Africans were inferior or abnormal, most Englishmen before the mid-seventeenth century, as profit-oriented traders, seem to have been comfortable with the notion that Africans in Africa were “gentle and loving,” or “very friendly and tractable.” Francis Petty, who sailed with Thomas Cavendish during his circumnavigation, recounted that they stopped briefly at Sierra Leone on the outward leg of their journey where “they played and daunced all the forenoone among the Negros.”⁹¹ If Englishmen, in general, were ethnocentric and prone to characterize non-Europeans in unflattering ways, Englishmen in Africa were more pragmatic. Virtually every English voyager to Africa was involved in some sort of mercantile endeavor and therefore most written accounts dwell on matters having to do with the actual voyage, navigation, disease, and trade. When they did bother to comment on the nature or character of the local inhabitants, their observations tended to be impressionistic, even if they did take note that the natives were naked, black, and adorned with jewelry or extensive scarification. Even so, English observers rarely elaborated on these matters and often ignored them entirely.

      The message from Africa was decidedly mixed. Just as they had learned elsewhere, the English found slavery to be a characteristic feature of Africa, with an internal logic they typically deemed not worth questioning. Unlike other parts of the world, other European nations were already actively engaged in the appropriation and transshipment of large numbers of indigenous inhabitants to southern Europe and the Americas where the unfortunates were destined to serve out the remainder of their days as slaves. Indigenous slave systems were remarkable and interesting to English eyes, but they did not often elicit much concern because the impact on English efforts to profit from other commercial exchanges was minimal. Some English merchants even bought into the system when they acclimated themselves to their new surroundings. Slavery in Africa was a different matter because, while English merchants may have first appeared in the region to tap into the trade in gold, pepper, ivory, and other regional commodities, the nature of slavery and the slave trade had already been changed by European actors. Slaves were more of a merchantable and potentially profitable commodity in coastal West Africa than in any other place the English visited in the early modern era. Perhaps to their credit, the first wave of English in Africa (John Hawkins apart) distanced themselves from the African slave trade. Their unwillingness to trade in human beings, however, was more an indication of the absence of reliable markets with reliable buyers than a measure of any kind of cultural revulsion to the practice or moral opposition to slavery.

      * * *

      Early modern Englishmen encountered slavery, regardless of whether they