Free Bittersweet by Peter Macinnis

fled. It was a seadog-eat-seadog world—that was something Hawkyns knew well, and so did all the Devon men.
    Thomas Wyndham was very much the genuine seadog. He had sailed with Hawkyns’ father and later mounted his own expeditions. In 1552 Wyndham was master of the Lion , when he was forced to land in the Canaries, on a small island between Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, to mend a leak below the waterline. His crew took 70 chests of sugar ashore to lighten the ship, but these chests were seen by islanders who claimed they came from a ship that had just left port, which led to Wyndham being accused of piracy.
    The matter was sorted out easily enough when Wyndham’s men captured the governor, a man he described as ‘a very aged gentleman of seventy’; being thus well placed to negotiate, they made good their departure. A year later Wyndham died on the way home after he had sailed to the African coast with another ship, seeking trade in gold and pepper, but he had shown the way to work. You can negotiate with the Dons, said the Devon men, but you need to get them over a barrel first, if you want the best of the bargain. That was the norm for trade in those times, and if Wyndham had in truth taken the chests of sugar, well, that would not have been unusual either.
    In 1562 John Hawkyns was 30 years old, and he was ready to go trading. He sailed for Africa, planning to go after things like gold dust and ivory, materials which had a ready home market. He sailed for Africa in three ships, with the financial backing of the treasurer of the navy (it helped some that this official was also his father-in-law), two city magistrates, the Lord Mayor of London, a future Lord Mayor and, most importantly, Queen Elizabeth herself. They captured 300 slaves, mainly by taking them from Portuguese ships headed for the Cape Verde Islands and, having annoyed the Portuguese, set out to tweak a few Spanish beards.
    Arriving at Hispaniola, Hawkyns claimed he needed to careen his ships and that he could only pay for this by selling some of the slaves. Then, having opened up the trade to raise careening money, he opened it up a little more and so managed to return to England with a clear profit. That, at least, was the story the two sides told—it is likely that the Spanish colonists, chafing under trading restrictions imposed by the home government, were happy to play along with a neat cover story.
    On his third voyage, Hawkyns sailed with six ships, two of them belonging to the Queen herself. At the Spanish colonial port of Rio de la Hacha, the English fleet fired off a few cannon and took the town. Once they were ashore and safely in charge, two slaves, one a mulatto, the other a Negro, revealed where some Spanish treasure was hidden in exchange for help in gaining their freedom.
    Hawkyns claimed afterwards that because he was an honest trader he took only 4000 pesos from the treasure for each of the slaves he left in the town, and returned the rest. Then, because the loyalties of race and class counted for more than the loyalties of nationality or religion, he handed over the slaves who had so treacherously revealed where the treasure was hidden. The Spaniards, equally keen to respect this assistance from a gallant and honourable adversary, and sensitive to distinctions of either race or guilt, promptly quartered the Negro, and hanged the mulatto, both for treason.
    Once again, the story may be open to some doubt, since the Spaniards claimed the slaves they were forced to buy were old and feeble, sickly and dying. Perhaps the execution of the traitorous slaves was a fiction added to the tale to make it sound better, or perhaps they really were done to death so that the guilty parties would not meet a similar fate.
    Hawkyns’ modern English apologists argue that the slaves he sold were used to extort money from the Spanish and to stimulate trading—so he was not so much trading in slaves as using them so that he could