Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Chapter 1. The Nature of a Slave: Human Bondage in Early Modern England

C h a p t e r 1 The Nature of a Slave: Human Bondage in Early Modern England Such as have made forfeit of themselves By vicious courses, and their birthright lost ’Tis not injustice they are marked for slaves.1 In late 1583 Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, dispatched a thirty-year-old Oxford cleric named Richard Hakluyt to France to search out information that could be used to promote royal support for the development of English colonies abroad. Walsingham, who had been a backer of Martin Frobisher’s voyages of discovery during the 1570s and would give aid to John Davis during the 1580s, was one among a growing number of luminaries who believed that England needed to accelerate its overseas activities . Elizabethan England faced an array of challenges. Nearby, colonization efforts in Ireland had recently entered a much more violent stage as the English struggled to put down a series of local rebellions, particularly those that had plagued the Munster Plantation during the previous fifteen years. England’s northern frontier was hardly more secure as the apparent machinations of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Catholic allies encouraged the view that Elizabeth’s grasp on the throne was tentative, at best. The Catholic threat to Tudor rule in England was especially vivid across the English Channel, where thousands of Protestants had recently been killed by rampaging Catholic mobs during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. The revolt of Dutch Calvinists against the Spanish Habsburgs may have loomed even larger as English shipping and, especially, its woolen industry were hamstrung by a 12 Chapter 1 surge in piracy and the closing of traditional trading ports like Antwerp. And, of course, there was Spain, with whom England would soon enough be at war because of all of these things. Walsingham was but one among many English leaders who believed that England was endangered and it was therefore with a great sense of urgency and a desire to ensure England’s very survival that he commanded Hakluyt to learn all he could about the world beyond the western horizon.2 Despite outward appearances, Hakluyt was an obvious choice for the job. As the namesake of his older and more renowned cousin, young Hakluyt was already connected to a group of people urging the nation to take a more active role in the Americas and throughout the world. During the 1570s, he had begun to gather information about the Northwest Passage from foreign authorities, including the celebrated mapmakers Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator. In 1581, Hakluyt engaged both Walsingham and Sir Francis Drake, who had only recently returned from his circumnavigation, in discussions about establishing a lectureship in navigation. A year later, he made an even bigger mark when he published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, a collection of accounts edited and translated by Hakluyt himself designed to promote overseas colonization.3 Hakluyt may have been working in the shadows of other writers, translators, and editors, such as Richard Eden and Richard Willes, and may not have been as celebrated as some of his contemporaries, such as John Dee and Sir Philip Sidney, but he was nonetheless a man on the rise.4 Upon returning from his fact-finding mission in 1584, Hakluyt sat down and composed “A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted” or, as it is more commonly known, “A Discourse of Western Planting.” Hakluyt’s “Discourse,” which he presented to Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth in October, precisely detailed the need for a more comprehensive overseas policy based on the acquisition and settlement of permanent colonies in the Americas. He claimed that colonization was the only way to stem the tide of Spanish expansionism, that it would project Protestant Christianity into a region where the Catholic Church presently exercised a spiritual monopoly, and that it would generate innumerable economic and demographic rewards. Central to Hakluyt’s argument was the idea that North American colonies would be the engine of England’s rise to national greatness, just as overseas conquests had aided Spain’s emergence as a global power during the previous century. The Nature of a Slave 13 Considering Spain and Portugal’s grip on the Americas, just how England could dislodge the Catholic powers would seem to have been...