Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  On their arrival at Guatulco, the English found a court in session in the town hall. Three African men stood accused of plotting to set the town on fire. Drake took the judge, his officers and the defendants aboard his ship. The judge and his officials were released after he had written a letter commanding the townspeople not to resist the English. One of the three Africans wanted to stay in Mexico, and so he was set ashore, promptly fleeing into the woods ‘to save himself’. The other two remained with Drake for the time being.81 However, by the time Drake left Guatulco on 16 April only three African men remained aboard: Diego, the Cimarron from Paita and one of those taken from the Guatulco courtroom.82

  There was also Maria, the ‘proper negro wench’ whom Drake had seized from Zarate’s ship. The only description of Maria’s time aboard the Golden Hinde states that she was ‘gotten with child between the Captain and his men pirates’.83 This brief mention in the anonymous narrative of the voyage preserved in the British Library’s Harley manuscripts suggests that she served as a means, as some historians have callously commented, of easing the tedium of the sixty-eight-day voyage across the North Pacific.84 It is just possible she was already pregnant when she joined the voyage. She was taken from Zarate’s ship on 4 April 1579 and described in the anonymous account as ‘very great’ with child thirty-six weeks later.85 Childbirth usually takes place at around forty weeks, and women rapidly gain weight in the third trimester, which begins in the twenty-ninth week of pregnancy.86 So, Maria must have been between twenty-nine and forty weeks pregnant in mid-December. This means that the father could have been one of Zarate’s crew, but, as the anonymous account asserts, the balance of probability is that the father was one of the sixty men aboard the Golden Hinde when Maria arrived. These were Drake himself, ten ‘gentlemen adventurers’, forty seamen, some boys and a few foreign sailors, Diego and the two other African men. At this stage in the voyage the surviving gentlemen included Drake’s brother Thomas, his cousin John, John Hawkins’s nephew William, Francis Fletcher the preacher who was nominated by Francis Walsingham, and John Doughty, brother of the captain executed at Port St Julian. We know little of the rest of the crew other than their names.

  There was little privacy on the ship. The higher status men slept in the armoury; the seamen slept on the gun deck, a cramped, dark space with a low ceiling. Drake’s was the only cabin. At Port St Julian, Drake is reported to have made a speech insisting that ‘the Gentleman . . . haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the Gentleman’, but it seems unlikely that Maria would have been shared between the different social tiers of the crew.87 Moreover, it is hard to imagine Drake, who took great care to assert his authority, sharing a woman with any of his men. Either she was his alone or he left her to the crew. One argument against Drake being the father of Maria’s child is that there were no children from either of his two marriages. Infertility would not have prevented him from using Maria, of course, but it would mean that someone else was responsible for her pregnancy.

  Whoever the father was, Drake, as the ship’s captain, was ultimately to blame for how Maria was treated. His attitude towards her stands in stark contrast to his ostentatiously godly ways on the voyage, leading prayers twice a day. It was also quite at odds with his reported behaviour the year before at Cape Blanc, off the coast of Mauretania. There, he was offered ‘a woman, a Moore (with her little babe hanging upon her dry dug [nipple], having scarce life in herself, much less milk to nourish her child), to be sold as a horse or a cow and calf by her side’. This, we are told, was a ‘sort of merchandise’ in which Drake ‘would not deal’.88 If so, his scruples had evolved since his earlier adventures with his cousin John Hawkins. Drake himself was aware that some of his actions were hypocritical, telling one of his Spanish prisoners that he must think him a ‘devil who robs by day and prays by night’, but he expressed no remorse for his treatment of Maria.89

  Other English ships took African women aboard in this period. The log of the Red Dragon recounts a similar episode on the Guinea coast in 1586. After dinner on 30 October, the ship’s captain led his men to a town at the lower point of the river. All the men of the town ran away ‘and we took a Woman and brought her aboard’.90 The entry records nothing more, save that this was a Sunday. More than one hundred years later, Captain Woodes Rogers did his best to defend himself from ‘the censorious’ when accounting for an experience strikingly similar to Maria’s aboard his voyage.* In October 1709, an African woman aboard his ship ‘was delivered of a Girl of a tawny Colour’, though ‘she had not been full 6 Months amongst us, so that the Child could belong to none of our Company’. ‘Lewdness’ was not countenanced aboard his ship and this woman and her companions had only been taken aboard ‘because they spoke English and begged to be admitted for laundresses, cooks and seamstresses.’91 One wonders if the innocent need protest so much.

  The Golden Hinde sailed north along the American coast for six weeks. By early June, all aboard were suffering from the cold ‘pinching and biting air’, struggling through ‘vile thick and stinking fogs’ and ‘congealed and frozen’ rain. Their food seemed to freeze as soon as they took it from the fire and their hands were so numb that they were loath to bring them out from the shelter of their sleeves. They retreated southwards and finally found a protected bay in which to repair the damage the ship had sustained in the last few months. They stayed for some weeks, during which time they had friendly encounters with the native Miwok people. There is some debate about exactly where in California Drake sojourned, but wherever it was he nailed a plate of brass to a post before he left, laying claim to the territory in the name of Queen Elizabeth. This act of proto-imperialism, the first claim laid to American soil by an Englishman, was witnessed by Diego, Maria, and the two other African men still aboard. They may even have been the first Africans to set foot on North American soil in the company of Englishmen, some forty years before the first Africans arrived in Virginia.*

  They then set out west across the Pacific, almost certainly following the charts Drake had seized from Alonso Sanchez Colchero in March, which detailed the trade route of the Manila galleons. They did not sight land again until the end of September, when they arrived at a place they named the ‘Island of Thieves’, now known as the Palau Islands. From there they sailed on to Mindanao in the Philippines, then through the Molucca passage in Indonesia, calling at Ternate and on towards Celebes.†

  Diego died near the Moluccas, in early November 1579. As Richard Hawkins observed, he ‘lived long after’ he was wounded on Mocha Island nearly a year before. Hawkins mentions Diego in the same breath as the trumpeter John Brewer, also wounded at Mocha, who went on to serve as a pilot to Sir Thomas Cavendish in 1586. This has led some to conclude that Diego also made it back to England, but a year’s survival seems long enough to explain Hawkins’s comment.92

  Whatever the exact cause of his death, Diego died a free man. He was Drake’s ‘man’, his servant but not his slave. He had lived for four years as a free man in England and was paid wages on the circumnavigation voyage. He was not the first black circumnavigator, for there were Africans aboard Magellan’s fleet when he made his voyage in 1519–1522.93 In any case, Diego did not make it all the way around the world. Nonetheless, throughout his time with Drake, he proved invaluable. His local knowledge, his aptitude for building, his language skills, and perhaps his talent for subterfuge, made a formidable combination. Having proved his worth during the adventures of 1572–3, he was an obvious choice when Drake set sail once more in 1577.

  Diego was treated well because he was useful to Drake. When Drake or other Englishmen encountered Africans they wished to trade with, or ally with against the Spanish, they approached them with respect. Those with less to offer they were all too happy to exploit or even enslave. Drake’s treatment of Maria was so callous that even his contemporaries remarked on his shameful conduct. William Camden recounted in 1625 that Drake sailed round the world ‘to the admiration and laudable applause of all
people, and without purchasing blame for any other things’ except executing Doughty, abandoning de Silva at Guatulco and ‘for having most inhumanely exposed in an island that Negro or Black-more-Maide, who had been gotten with Child in his Ship.’94

  On 12 December 1579, the by then heavily pregnant Maria was ‘set on a small island to take her adventure’, along with two African men.95 This was ‘Crab Island’ in the Banggai Archipelago, Indonesia, a small, heavily wooded island, with a large population of crabs.96 The manuscript of the anonymous account that describes this episode in the most detail has some perplexing amendments:

  at their departure Drake left behind him upon this Island the two negroes which he took at Guatulco and likewise the negro wench Francesca Maria she being gotten with child in the ship, and now being very great was left here on this Island which Drake named the Ile Francisca after the woman of one of the ii negroes name.97

  The original text, in which the island is named ‘Francisca’, after a woman named ‘Francesca’, makes more sense than an island named ‘Francisca’ (a feminine form) after an unspecified man. Neither of the men is named at any other point in the narrative and there is some confusion over their identities: John Drake’s testimony contradicts this account, reporting that one African came from Paita, the other from Guatulco. On the other hand, the woman is named Maria earlier in this narrative and also by John Drake in his recollections some years later.98 If any of these individuals, or the island, were truly named Francis or Francesca, it might have been in tribute to Francis Drake. Could Maria have been baptised on the voyage and renamed after the Captain? Could bearing the feminine form of Drake’s first name reflect a tie between the two? The altered text reduces the importance of the woman. Had the island been named after her, it might suggest Drake felt some level of affection for her.

  Why was Maria abandoned on Crab Island? The cynical answer is that, being heavily pregnant, she was no longer of use to a ship full of lustful sailors. Perhaps these supposedly pious Christians finally began to think of the consequences of arriving in Plymouth with such evident proof of sinful behaviour on the voyage. A kinder interpretation would be that Maria was left on the island because Drake feared that she and her child would not survive the long journey home.99 There is, however, no evidence for this. The episode is not mentioned in the account of the voyage published by Richard Hakluyt in the first edition of his Principal Navigations in 1589, or in the version of events published as The World Encompassed by Drake’s nephew, also Sir Francis Drake, in 1628. The only other explanation of the events we have is that given by John Drake, when he was examined on 24 March 1584 by Alonso Vera y Aragon in Santa Fé in modern-day Argentina. He had fallen into Spanish hands after a calamitous series of events, which began with what became known as the ‘troublesome voyage’ of Edward Fenton. In 1582, John Drake was chosen to command the Francis (named for his cousin) as part of Fenton’s voyage to the East Indies. The fleet broke up on the coast of Brazil, after its commanders could not agree on a route or strategy. John Drake took the Francis up the River Plate in search of provisions, but the ship hit a rock and was wrecked. He and his crew survived, only to be held captive by the local Charrúa people for the following thirteen months. John Drake and three others eventually escaped in a canoe and crossed the river to Buenos Aires, where the Spanish received them with some sympathy until John Drake’s relationship to their hated enemy, Francis, was revealed. He was then handed over to the Inquisition for questioning.100

  Was John Drake a reliable witness? He was recalling events that had taken place seven years earlier, when he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen. He might also have wanted to portray his cousin in the most positive possible light. According to him, ‘they left the two negroes and the negress Maria, to found a settlement, leaving them rice, seeds, and means of making fire.’101 The presence of the two African men makes the idea of forming a settlement slightly more plausible. Maria was not left alone on the island, and may therefore have stood a better chance of survival. That said, the three may have come from completely different parts of Africa and might not have had a common language, though they may have been able to communicate in Spanish or rough English.

  Crab Island was a welcome refuge for the English; they rested there from mid-November until their departure on 12 December. It was well-supplied with delicious land lobsters or crayfish ‘of such a size that one was sufficient to satisfy four hungry men at a dinner’.102 Whether it was a suitable location for permanent settlement is more doubtful. It lacked its own water supply, which meant Drake and his men had to make regular trips to the neighbouring island. The English thought this larger island was inhabited, though John Drake said that they did ‘not know by what people, because [they] never saw them nearby’.103 Whether this was good or bad for the castaways depended entirely on the attitude of the native people. If they were friendly, they might provide much help, but if they were hostile, the Africans would be entirely at their mercy. They had been left with food, but not weapons. Ultimately, the idea that they would be able to survive and ‘found a settlement’ seems optimistic. William Camden’s use of the word ‘exposed’ certainly suggests that back in England it was assumed Maria was left there to die.

  A few decades later, a story seemingly mirroring Maria’s plight could be seen on the London stage. It was that of the ‘damned witch Sycorax’, mother of Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Sycorax, a native of Algiers, ‘was hither [to the island] brought with child, /And here was left by th’ sailors.’ According to Prospero, Caliban was ‘got by the devil himself/Upon thy wicked dam’.104 Of course, it’s far more credible that the sailors who abandoned her were responsible. Caliban survives, only to be enslaved by Prospero: a reminder of how vulnerable the four Africans would be should any other people, whether Europeans or local inhabitants, encounter them on the island.

  Drake’s biographers have often sought to minimise the damage of this episode to his reputation, or rather ignored it altogether.105 In the late nineteenth century, a prominent naval historian tried to dismiss the anonymous narrative which details Maria’s treatment as full of ‘the kind of vulgar slanders a dissatisfied seaman would naturally invent’.106 However, these ‘slanders’ were confirmed by Camden, and while the whole affair does not appear in the official accounts of the voyage, John Drake records, if not Maria’s rape then at least her abandonment, heavily pregnant, which rather implies the former. Maria’s story sounds a note of caution to any who try to use the tale of Diego and the Cimarrons to paint a picture of equality between English and Africans in either Drake’s mind or his world. Equality may have existed to some extent among men, but invariably the lot of women at sea was to be exploited.

  On future voyages Drake brought more Africans back to England, including Edward Swarthye, who returned with Drake after he raided the Spanish Caribbean in 1585–6. After his arrival in England, Swarthye found work as a porter in a gentleman’s house in Gloucestershire. He later became the first African in English history to whip a white man.

  * On the same voyage, Captain Woodes Rogers rescued Alexander Selkirk – thought to be the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

  * Africans had already come to North America with the Spanish, such as Juan Garrido and Esteban Dorantes, who travelled through Florida, Texas and Arizona in the 1520s and 1530s.

  † Today, the island of Sulawesi.

  4

  Edward Swarthye, the Porter

  Sir Edward Wynter had a reputation for violence. In his youth he had killed a man in a duel, fought against the Spanish Armada, raided the Caribbean with Francis Drake and spent four years imprisoned in France after seeking to ‘follow the wars’ on the continent. Yet as he approached forty, in the winter of 1597, he was serving as a Justice of the Peace in Gloucestershire. Still, all was not peaceful at home. Wynter had summoned one of his servants, John Guye, to appear before him in the Great Hall of White Cross Manor, where a small crowd of local men had gathered. At first they exchanged on
ly words; Wynter accused Guye of gross negligence. But when Guye did not appear to be the least bit contrite, Wynter called for his porter, Edward Swarthye. On his master’s command, Swarthye took up a rod and brought it down hard and fast on Guye’s back. Guye cried out in pain. The assembled company looked on in shock as a man of good standing was soundly whipped. Sir Edward struck a few blows himself before it was over. As Guye limped away, he ‘bade him depart like a knave’, dismissing him from his service for good. Edward Swarthye looked down at the rod in his hands, then back at the man he had dined with every day in that very hall. In the future he would have to turn him away from the gate. He gripped the rod very tightly, and the colour drained from his dark skin. For Edward Swarthye had another name. His alias was ‘Negro’: he was a Black Tudor.

  IN WILLIAM BLAKE’S lurid 1796 engraving ‘The Flagellation of a Female Samboe Girl’, a near-naked woman hangs by her arms from a tree while two men lurk behind her, whips in hand. Horrific scars cover the entire back of Peter, a slave from Louisiana, in a photograph published in Harper’s Weekly in April 1863; his master’s cruelty writ large upon his flesh.1 When asked about the relationship between Englishmen and Africans in the past, it is images such as these that come to mind. Our conception of their relationship is firmly rooted in the idea of the white master and his black slave. The fact that Edward Swarthye whipped John Guye in Gloucestershire in 1596 shows that it was not ever thus. His experience forces us to question whether the development of racial slavery in the English colonies was inevitable. In his story, we glimpse a time before racism became a dominant prejudice in British society. The whipping was considered shocking, even ‘unchristian like’, by those that witnessed it, but not for the same reasons that we might find it so today.2 It was acceptable, even normal, for a Tudor gentleman to inflict corporal punishment on his servant, but the people of Lydney were stunned when such a well-educated, high-status servant was publicly humiliated. From a modern perspective, it is far more surprising that a black man was allowed to publicly whip a white man. How then did Edward Swarthye end up whipping John Guye at White Cross Manor in 1596? And how did an African man end up working as a porter in rural Gloucestershire?