A decade before Martin Frobisher had opened the north parts of the North American continent to Englishmen, John Hawkins had surveyed the southern tip at Florida, and upon his return had represented this fair and favoured region, then to indefinite bounds included among Spain’s American possessions, and in a corner of which France for more than a year had maintained a slender foothold, as ripe for England to venture in and colonize. His was the first account in detail of Florida by an Englishman, and it was the germ from which fruitage later developed in Raleigh’s schemes.
Hawkins’s were purely trading voyages, and he was a fighting trader, demanding the open market for his wares at the point of the sword when it was denied him by representatives of foreign governments. His wares, too, were more or less fought for. The most profitable of them were Negroes seized on the African coast and bartered into slavery in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main—along the north coast of South America. He was the first (or his father before him as some historians 198say) to bring the African slave trade into English commerce, and to plant Negro slavery in America. Discovery was only an incident in the pursuit of his trade. Yet what he accomplished in this direction was of no slight import, since it opened the way to others of loftier aims. While his fame is tarnished by the blotch of traffic in human beings (in his day, we must remember, deemed by the godly and godless alike as not an unrighteous traffic), it is enduring by virtue of heroic deeds, and his place is fairly with the great English captains of the sea who had part in the beginnings of America.
SR. John Hawkins.
John Hawkins, born in Plymouth in or about 1532, was the son and grandson of notable mariners, and so well born to the sea. His grandfather, John Hawkyns, had served in Henry the eighth’s navy; his father, William Hawkyns, shipbuilder and merchant, had been one of the principal sea-captains of the west parts of England, and was the first Englishman to carry on a trade with Brazil. Hakluyt informs us that William Hawkyns was “for his wisdome, valure [valour], experience, and skill in sea causes much esteemed, and beloved of K. Henry the 8.” His Brazilian voyages comprised “three long and famous” ones, made in his own “tall and goodly shippe” of two hundred and fifty tons, the “Paul of Plymouth,” between the years 1530 and 1532. He sailed first to the coast of Guinea where he traded with the Negroes for elephants’ teeth and other commodities of the region, and thence crossed to Brazil, where he “used such discretion and behaved 199himself so wisely with those savage people that he grew into great familiarity and friendship with them.” His greatest exploit, or that which won him largest attention, seems to have been the bringing to England on a visit one of the kings of the country, leaving behind as a pledge of his safety and return a member of the ship’s company—Martin Cockeram, a Plymouth man. The savage monarch was brought over on the second voyage and his appearance created great astonishment in London and at court when he was presented to King Henry at Whitehall, as well it might. For, as Hakluyt describes, “in his cheekes were holes made according to their savage maner, and therein small bones were planted, standing an inch out from the said holes, which in his own Countrey were reputed for a great braverie. He had also another hole in his nether lip, wherein was set a precious stone about the bigness of a pease [pea]. All his apparel, behaviour, and jesture were very strange to the beholders.” He remained in London for nearly a year, and then, satiated with his entertainment, embarked for his home in Master Hawkins’s care, on the latter’s third voyage to Brazil. But it was his fate to sicken and die at sea. Thereat Master Hawkins was much troubled, fearing that the life of Cockeram would be forfeited. But when he arrived at port and told his story, the savages were “fully persuaded” that their prince had been honestly dealt with, and freely gave up the hostage. Cockeram returned with his captain none the worse for his sojourn here, and lived to spin, long years after, among his fellows at 200home in Plymouth, rare sailors’ yarns about the Simple Life among savages.
John Hawkins followed early in his father’s footsteps. His earliest voyages were made when quite a young man to the Canary Islands. How he came to engage in the slave trade between the African coast and the West Indies Hakluyt thus na?vely relates:
“Master John Haukins having made divers voyages to the Iles of the Canaries, and there by his good and upright dealing being growen in love and favour with the people, informed himselfe amongst them by diligent inquisition, of the state of the West India, whereof he had received some knowledge by the instructions of his father, but increased the same by the advertisements and reports of that people. And being amongst other particulars assured that Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that store of Negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea, resolved with himselfe to make triall thereof, and communicated that devise with his worshipfull friendes of London; namely with Sir Lionel Ducket, Sir Thomas Lodge, M. Gunson, his father in law [Benjamin Gonson, then treasurer of the navy], Sir Wm. Winter [also of the navy], M. Bromfield and others. All which persons liked so well of his intention, that they became liberall contributers and adventurers in the action.”
The first voyage of this enterprise was made in 1562–1563 with a fleet of three ships and a company of one hundred men. Sailing in October he touched first in his course at Teneriffe. Thence he passed down to 201the Sierra Leone Coast, where he stayed “some good time” and collected, “partly by the sword and partly by other meanes,” at least three hundred Negroes, whom he packed in his ships, besides “other merchandises which that countrey yieldeth.” With this “praye” (prey) he sailed over the “ocean sea” bound for Hispaniola—San Domingo. Arriving at the port of Isabella he there disposed of some of the English commodities he had brought out, and a part of his living freight, meanwhile alert, “trusting the Spaniards no further then [than] by his owne strength he was able still to master them.” Thence he went to Porto Plata, where he made his sales, while, as at Isabella, “standing alwaies [always] on his guard”; and lastly to Monte Christi, disposing there of the remainder of the Negroes. In these three ports he took by way of exchange “such quantitie of merchandise that he did not onely lade his owne 3 shippes with hides, ginger, sugars, and some quantitie of pearles, but he freighted also two other hulkes with hides and other like commodities which he sent into Spaine.” Then he returned to England with “much gain to himselfe and the aforesayd venturers” as the outcome of this voyage. The two hulks sent to Spain were seized at Seville as smugglers, under the law of the country against unlicensed trading in the Spanish colonies, and their goods confiscated. These Hawkins valued at twenty thousand pounds. Notwithstanding their loss the balance of the profits remained large.
The second voyage, begun in 1564, was that in 202which Florida was visited. In this venture the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Robert Dudley, afterward the Earl of Leicester, were foremost as investors. Four ships constituted the fleet. These were the “Jesus of Lubec,” as “admiral,” or flag-ship, a fine vessel of seven hundred tons belonging to the queen and lent by her; the “Solomon,” Hawkins’s flag-ship in the previous voyage; the “Tiger,” a bark of fifty tons; and the “Swallow,” a bark of thirty tons. The fleet were well supplied with ordnance, including several “faulcons of brasse”—small brass guns—and a plenty of small arms for the men. The company enlisted numbered one hundred and seventy in all.
They sailed from Plymouth on the eighteenth of October. On the ninth of November they had arrived at Teneriffe; and later in November and through December they were cruising along the African coast in the hunt for Negroes. This time the natives were everywhere hostile and they had to be fought for. The sharpest battle was at a point below Cape Verde. An attack was made upon a town from which Hawkins expected to capture a hundred and more Negroes, men, women, and children, comprising the most of the population. But they fought desperately and only ten were taken while seven of Hawkins’s men were slain and twenty-seven wounded. Farther down the coast the hunt was more successful. By the close of January the ships were at Sierra Leone all laden with “a great company of Negroes”; and on the twenty-ninth of that month they set sail with a crowded freight for the West 203Indies. But they were “only reasonably watered,” and before they had been long at sea there was much suffering among the ships’ companies and the living cargo alike. For eighteen days they were becalmed; afterward they were beset by baffling winds. By mid-February, however, fortune again favoured them, when, as the devout slave-catcher’s chronicler recorded, “The Almightie God who never suffereth the elect to perish,” sent just the right breeze to waft them to their destination.
On the ninth of March they had come to the island of Dominica. Here they landed in search of water. Only rain-water was found “and such as fell from the hills and remained as a puddle in the dale”; and with this they filled for the Negroes. Then they cruised among the neighbouring islands, and along the Spanish Main, but were denied traffic by the Spanish officials at all places. At Burburata, Venezuela, in April, after arguing the point Hawkins brought the governor to terms with a demonstration of his fighting spirit. Landing with a hundred men “well armed with bowes, arrowes, harquebuzes, and pikes,” he marched them in battle array toward the town. Thereupon the governor threw up his hands, as the modern phrase is, and trade was opened without more ado. Here a number of the Negroes were profitably disposed of. Next, in May, they came to Rio del Hacha, now of Colombia. A sharper demonstration was necessary at this place before the Spanish officials would remove the prohibition. When they would listen to no argument, and 204were even unmoved by Hawkins’s “diplomacy” in the audacious pretension that he was “in an armada of the Queens Majesties of England and sent about her other affaires,” and had been driven out of his intended course and into these parts by contrary winds, he sent them the word “to determine either to give him license to trade or else stand to their own harmes [arms].” With this ultimatum he landed again the one hundred men in armour, with two of his “faulcons.” At the first firing of these little guns the officials surrendered with the desired grant. Traffic then proceeded briskly, and within ten days the remainder of the Negroes were bartered off prosperously. This accomplished, the fleet sailed northward, now in search of a good place to take on a supply of fresh water. After beating about Jamaica they passed the west end of Cuba and came into the gulf of Florida: and so the mainland of Florida was reached.
As they ranged along this coast pursuing their quest for several days, dropping anchors at night wherever they happened to be, the voyagers observed the luxurious country with keen interest. They found it “marvellously sweete with both marish and medow ground, and goodly woods among.” As they sailed onward Hawkins in his shipboat explored the creeks and estuaries, and frequent landings were made from the fleet on the green shores. Sorrel was seen growing “as abundantly as grasse,” and about the habitations of the natives were “great store of maiz [maize: Indian corn] and mill, and grapes of great bignesse,” tasting 205much like the English grape. Deer were “in great plentie, which came upon the sands before them.” There were quantities of “divers other beasts, and fowle, serviceable to the use of man”; and luscious fish with strange creatures of the waters. The natives were observed apparelled in deer skins, hand-painted, “some yellow and red, some blacke and russet, and every man according to his own fancy.” Their bodies were also painted, “with curious knots or antike worke.” The colours were picked into the flesh with a thorn. When arrayed for war their faces were daubed with “a sleighter colour” to give them a fiercer show. Their weapons were bows and arrows of hard wood and reeds. The arrows were of great length, feathered, and variously tipped: with viper’s teeth, or bones of fishes, flint stones, occasionally with silver. The women’s apparel, besides painted deer skins, comprised “gowns of mosse,” long mosses, “which they sew together artificially.”
Hawkins was impressed with the spaciousness as well as the richness of the region ready for the white man’s cultivation. As he put it: “The commodities of this land are more then [than] are yet knowen to any man: for besides the land itselfe, whereof there is more then any king Christian is able to inhabit, it flourisheth with meadow, pasture ground, with woods of Cedar and Cypress and other sorts as better can not be in the world.” There were of “apothecary herbs, trees, roots, and gummes great store.” Turpentine, myrrh, and frankincense were abundant. As for the 206precious metals, the natives wanted neither gold nor silver, for both were worn for ornament; but where they were to be obtained had not yet come to light. It was thought that the hills would be found to yield them, when sufficient people, Europeans, were here to abide. Life could easily be sustained in this land with its plenty of maize, which made “good savoury bread and cakes as fine as floure [flour].”
The voyagers penetrated to the “River of May,” now St. John’s River, coming to the seat on its banks of Laudonnière’s colony of French Huguenots. They had been established here for fourteen months, and were now in a wretched condition. The fleet anchored off their port, and Hawkins and his chief men going ashore were “very gently entertained” by Laudonnière and his captains. The Frenchmen gave a pitiful account of the extremities to which the colony had been put for food. They had brought out a scant stock of provisions expecting to receive fresh supplies from France by ships that were to follow them with recruits. But these had not arrived. From two hundred strong at the beginning the colonists were now reduced by death and desertions to about half that number. They had early exhausted all the maize that they could buy of the natives. New supplies were got in return for the service of a number of their soldiers with a king of the Floridians in a tribal war. But the relief thus obtained was only temporary. When this supply had gone they resorted to acorns and roots. The acorns “stamped [crushed] small and often washed to take 207away the bitterness” were used for bread; the roots as vegetables. Many of the roots albeit the sort that “served rather for medicine than for meats alone,” they found to be “good and wholesome.” They must, however, have had rich drink with this dull food, for Hawkins noted that during the fourteen months here they had made twenty hogsheads of wine from the native grapes. In the midst of the colony’s distresses a rebellion arose. Some of the soldiers turned upon Laudonnière, seized his armour, and imprisoned him. Then taking a bark and a pinnace they set off, “to the number of fourscore,” on a piratical cruise. They went “a roaming” to Jamaica and Hispaniola, spoiling the Spaniards. Having taken the caravels laden with wine and “casair [cassava], which is bread made of roots, and much other victuall and treasure,” the marauding crew hovered about Jamaica, with frequent carousals on shore. At length their revels were cut short when a ship that had come out from Hispaniola bore down upon them. Twenty were taken prisoners, “whereof the most part were hanged, the rest sent to Spain.” Some twenty-five escaped in the pinnace and returned to the colony. Upon landing they were thrown into prison, and four of the ringleaders were “hanged at a gibbet.” Other troubles had come upon the colony through the enmity of natives, hitherto friendly, who had been robbed of maize by some of the colonists when nothing was left to barter for it. For such offences several Frenchmen had been seized by the Floridians and slain in the woods. When 208Hawkins’s fleet appeared the colony had not more than forty soldiers unhurt and “not above ten days’ victuals” in store.
Hawkins relieved their immediate wants with provisions and other comforts and offered to convey them back to France. The generous offer was declined with expressions of gratitude, and instead Laudonnière arranged for the purchase of one of his ships, stocked with provisions, to make the home voyage independently. Then with mutual exchange of good wishes Hawkins departed for his homeward voyage.
The tragic end of the hapless Huguenot colony was not far off. When shortly after Hawkins’s departure, Laudonnière and his people were about to embark on the ship bought from him, sails were descried of the long-looked-for French fleet approaching their port. These welcome ships brought out Ribault to take the command, with emigrants in families, implements of husbandry, domestic animals, and every supply for a well-equipped colony. New life and hope were instilled into the colony by the new comers. Then suddenly the terrible Pedro Menendez de Aviles burst upon them with an invading army of Spaniards and destroyed them with awful massacre, “Not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans,” as he proclaimed, only a few escaping, Laudonnière and Le Moyne, the artist of the colony (to whom we are indebted for the first drawings of American natives and scenes), among these, to tell the tale. And then, two years afterward, Menendez’s act was avenged by the fiery soldier of Gascony, Dominic 209de Gourgues, with massacre of Spaniards in Florida, “Not,” as he in turn proclaimed, “as unto Spaniards but as unto Traitors, Robbers and Murderers.” All this as told in the accounts of Laudonnière and others reproduced by Hakluyt, constitutes one of the saddest and bloodiest chapters in early American history.
Hawkins’s return voyage was tempestuous. Contrary winds beset the fleet and so prolonged the passage that their provisions ran short. Relief was had, however, on the banks of Newfoundland by a large take of cod; and farther along when two French ships were met sufficient supplies for the remainder of the voyage were bought from them. Home was at length reached on the twentieth of September, when the fleet arrived at Padstow, Cornwall. Commercially it had been a most prosperous voyage, for it had brought “great profit” not alone to the venturers but “to the whole realme.” In addition to the gains from the unholy traffic in human beings Hawkins brought his ship home freighted with “great store” of gold, silver, pearls, and other jewels. Accordingly the chronicler reverently closes his account with the pious and doubtless sincere prayer, “His Name therefore be praised for evermore Amen.”
A third voyage was soon planned, to be made over the same course, with a second visit to Florida. In this Francis Drake, a young kinsman of Hawkins, later destined to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, had part. It ended in disaster through conflict with a Spanish fleet in the Gulf of 210Mexico, but its consequences were large in after performances, especially of Drake.
The fleet assembled for this third voyage comprised six ships. The “admiral” was again the “Jesus of Lubec,” commanded by Hawkins. Young Drake had charge of the smallest of the lot—the “Judith,” a staunch little craft of only fifty tons. The others were the “Minion,” the “William and John,” the “Angel,” and the “Swallow.” Hakluyt gives us Hawkins’s signed narrative of the adventure under a title foreshadowing its unhappy nature: “The third troublesome voyage made with the Jesus of Lubeck, the Minion, and foure other ships, to the parts of Guinea, and the West Indies, in the yeeres 1567 and 1568 by M. John Hawkins.”
The fleet left Plymouth on the second of October. After only a week out the first trouble came with a dispersion of the ships in an “extreme” storm, which raged for four days and with such damage to the “Jesus” that Hawkins felt obliged to turn her back homeward. Soon afterward, however, the wind veered and the weather cleared, when she was returned to the outward course. The other ships were met at the Canaries, where repairs were made. Again in sailing trim the hunt for Negroes was begun along the African coast. As before, the natives were found ready to fight for their liberty. Arrived at Cape Verde, Hawkins landed one hundred and fifty men, expecting to make a large catch here. But a battle ensued in which many of the English force, Hawkins among them, were 211hurt, and several mortally, by the natives’ envenomed arrows; and only a few captures were made. Similar luck followed down to Sierra Leone, scarcely one hundred and fifty Negroes having been got together. Since this number was too small profitably to take to the West Indies, and it was now quite time to get away, Hawkins decided to give over further quest and to go to the “coast of the Mine” (the Gold Coast) in the hope of obtaining enough gold for his merchandise at least to meet the expenses of the voyage. But just as this decision was reached it was overruled by an unexpected opening to more captures. A messenger from a Negro “king” at war with neighbouring “kings” came aboard the flag-ship asking the Englishmen’s aid in his war, with the promise that all the natives he might capture should be “at their pleasure” as well as those taken by them. The proposal was eagerly accepted and one hundred and twenty men were sent ashore to join the king’s forces. The allies began an assault upon a fortified town of eight thousand inhabitants. It was, however, so strongly impaled, and so valiantly defended, that they could not prevail against it. Six of the English were killed and forty wounded in this attack, and reinforcements were called for. Thereupon Hawkins himself took a hand. An assault now opened both by land and sea, Hawkins with the king leading the land attack. Shortly the frail little houses, covered with dry palm leaves, were set afire and the inhabitants put to flight. So the town fell. Hawkins and his men captured two hundred and fifty 212of the fleeing people, men, women, and children, while the king’s men took six hundred. Of the king’s lot Hawkins was expecting to take his pick, when, lo! during the following night the artful monarch secretly moved his camp and stole away with all of his prisoners............