The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls

I absorbed this read with great interest. The subject of slave-trading has been too painful for me to tackle it head-on but here I got into it because I am interested in Elizabethan personalities. The thing that shocks me in the book is how matter-of-fact the trading really was. This fact-based account puts the reader into the then-contemporary perspective of humans as just another commodity to be dealt for profit and a highly lucrative one at that. The rewards for successful trading were enough to turn the Queen, Elizabeth, into a profiteer. In fact, we see an Elizabeth in denial after she has waxed moral in her view of the abduction of Africans. She says they should be asked to volunteer. (Which is ridiculous on the face of it.) Of course, Hawkyns only saw the green light to GO. One cannot view Elizabeth in any ideal sense after this: there is no Gloriana or Astraea in this book. The business of the Queen is business; Queen and country are one. There isn't much of a biography of Hawkyns in the book. At least, insofar as a biography fleshes out the nuance of the character. What we get is a very competent individual who is able to make both military and financial decisions in quicktime. The depth of the book is focused on the ambivalence of Hawkyns in matters of religion. This is, in my opinion, is what places the story into it's deeper historical context. The English, as other Europeans, who were destined to fight bloody civil wars in the next century, were obsessed with the outer manifestations of Christianity (ritual, plastic images, etc. or not) and had lost any real sense of Christian teachings. In this book, we lose any ability to condemn Hawkyns as an individual; we are overwhelmed by the brutality of the times. I think the author, Nick Hazlewood has done quite a good job here.

Attempts to analyze the historical sociology of capitalism and slavery too often deal in abstractions. And the morality of power politics, and economic globalization, as with Marx, tends to be sublimated into the account by value-free laws of history, etc,... All well and good, but. This account of a one vignette of the early gestation of the Atlantic slave trade, in England, speaks more eloquently by its plain account of actual people, at the moment of the crystallization of a dreadful circumstance. Significant is the detail of Queen Elizabeth, quoted early on as denouncing the traffic in human beings, succumbing to royal patronage once the immense profits possible became clear. While one can practically hear the ghost of Marx snorting with contempt, the plain fact of the matter is that there is an ethical history possible, and there was nothing inevitable in the way slavery, almost extinct in Europe, made a comeback in the early modern period. It is not utopian, as this portrait makes clear, to consider that politicians, instead of being untrustworthyfrom the word go, might actually not succumb to terrible temptations and enter in league with poor devils like the Hawkins portrayed here, basically a capitalist thug, soon a courtier. The portrait of John Hawkins gives a fine-grain series of images of one of the great and classic failures of economic globalization, and the terrible legacy and bitterness that it led to.

Nick Hazlewood has written an engrossing book that gives us a rare and in-depth look into the opening salvos of the English slave trade through the voyages of Sir John Hawkyns (also spelled John Hawkins), the first English trader. Hazlewood supplies a brief biography of the Elizabethan mariner but focuses on Hawkyns' three major slave-trading voyages starting from 1562, from his departure from England to his actual acquisition of slaves in West Africa, through to his transactions in the New World and return to England. This book is a must-have for those interested in the early Age of Exploration and the nature of early trans-Atlantic commerce, but it is of far greater significance and value for a general audience since it provides a rare glimpse into the little-known details of the wretched commerce in human beings that took place as the Americas were being settled. Treatments of the African slave trade often leave a reader wondering about the mindset and nature of the participants who were profiting from it, and Hazlewood provides us with a "you are there" feeling. He has clearly done his homework here, consulting primary literature in both English and Spanish archives to reconstruct the means by which Hawkyns acquired his slaves in West Africa, the "currency" exchanges which took place to seal the deal, the wretched and horrendous conditions on the slaving ships, and the nature of Hawkyns' eventual transactions in the Caribbean and Spanish outposts in America. What emerges is that Hawkyns was a remarkably shrewd and ruthless businessman, able to secure such an extraordinary profit margin from his deals that even Queen Elizabeth I-- initially opposed to the human commerce-- became a crucial investor in Hawkyns' slave-trading schemes, providing ships and resources for raising his crews and launching further voyages. Hazlewood also casts Hawkyns' commerce within the broader context of 16th-century European seafaring, demonstrating how Hawkyns' actions-- viewed as smuggling by Spanish authorities-- in many ways constituted the root of the conflict that would flare between the Spaniards and English (leading to the Spanish Armada attack and a 16-year war between the two countries) later in the century. The reader is treated to an in-depth look at Hawkyns' fateful third voyage in 1567, in which his ships were attacked by a Spanish squadron off Veracruz. Hazlewood provides perhaps the best description in any recent book of the clash at Veracruz and its aftermath, both for Hawkins and his unfortunate crew members who were seized by the Spaniards. The book does drag somewhat in its later chapters but is not at all a chore to read, and Hazlewood's evocative style ensures that readers have a concrete tableau of the events that were transpiring, rather than merely an abstract depiction of them. For what would become the United States as well as for Britain, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was integral to their history. Indeed, Americans are well