English readers had the opportunity to learn more about Morocco in 1600, when a Cambridge scholar, John Pory, published his translation of Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa at the behest of Richard Hakluyt. Africanus had grown up and studied in Fez, before being captured by Spanish pirates and presented to Pope Leo X in Rome in 1520. He was freed and baptised by the Pope, who became his godfather, and stayed in Rome for some years, writing his book in Italian in 1526.117 Pory dedicated his translation to Robert Cecil, noting that ‘at this time especially I thought [it] would prove to be acceptable: in that the Moroccan ambassador (whose King’s dominions are here most amply and particularly described) hath so lately treated with your Honour concerning matters of that estate’.118 Africanus’s account was especially detailed in its description of Morocco and the parts of North Africa he knew well. It bristled with information that would be useful to merchants, such as local produce and languages, and to statesmen, such as recent political history and military capability. Of course, by 1600 much of this information was out of date, so Pory did his best to update and expand on the original text. He also indicated that some of his readers may already be ‘as well . . . informed as myself’, suggesting that the English, or at least a small literate elite, were not entirely ignorant of Morocco and other parts of Africa by the close of the century.
When Al-Mansur heard the disastrous outcome of the embassy, he wrote angrily to the Queen that his ambassadors had told him all about her plans to circumvent him and enlist them as mercenaries: ‘We listened with attentive ears until we understood them all, and became alert to all you had plotted’. England’s relationship with Morocco deteriorated further after the deaths of both their rulers. In April 1603, Henry Roberts, English ambassador in Morocco between 1585 and 1589, wrote to James I urging him to conquer Barbary for King and Christ.119
After Millicent Porter’s death, we lose sight of Mary Fillis. By this time she had no doubt learnt enough about making clothes to either be a useful addition to another seamstress’s establishment, or be able to survive on her own account.
There are two burial records for African women named Mary in the parish registers of St Botolph’s Aldgate: in 1623, when Fillis would have been forty-six, and in 1631, when she would have been fifty-four.120 Mary was a fairly common name, so there is no way to definitively identify either woman as Mary Fillis. However, there are no other known records of African women named Mary in the City of London at this time. Both women were described as poor. The first, buried on 4 November 1623, was described as a ‘poor woman being a Blacke Moore, Named Marie, who died in the street in Rosemary Lane’.121 The second Mary, Mary Peters, interred on 16 February 1631, was described as ‘a poor blackamore woman at Tower Hill’.122 Could Mary Fillis have married a Mr Peters? A ‘Christian Peters’ appears in a list of people that received communion at St Botolph’s Aldgate on Easter Sunday 1596, but no other record of him, or a wife, remains.
Whatever her fate, during her lifetime, which might have lasted into the 1620s or 30s, Mary Fillis witnessed the relationship between her native and adopted countries develop and change. She was born at a time of civil war, and probably lived to hear that Morocco had descended into that state once more after the death of Al-Mansur. She witnessed the evolution of a trading partner into a military ally, and the accompanying diplomacy. The excitement of the arrival of the Moroccan embassies in London in 1589 and 1600 might well have prompted curious questions from her neighbours and acquaintances.
As trade and contact with Morocco grew, English merchants had begun to travel further down the west coast of Africa, to Guinea, Benin and, by the early seventeenth century, as far as South Africa, as they passed around the continent on their early voyages to the East Indies. These expeditions created opportunities for Africans to visit England directly from their own continent. The English intended to train them as interpreters and trade factors, but these men had their own agendas. Often of high birth, some were members of African royal families, such as Dederi Jaquoah, Prince of River Cestos, who was christened in London in 1611.
* Three of whom would go on to invest in John Hawkins’s slaving voyages in the 1560: William Chester, William Garrard and Thomas Lodge.
* A summary of the Christian faith in the form of questions and answers, used for instruction.
* ‘Fortunatus, a blackmoore of the age of 17 or 18 years’ was baptised at Cheshunt, near the Cecil house, Theobalds, in April 1570 and buried at St Clement Danes, London, in January 1602.
7
Dederi Jaquoah, the Prince of River Cestos
‘Father, the English have arrived.’ King Caddi-biah smiled at his son. ‘Yes, I know. Go to them, entertain them well, and perhaps we will get what we want.’ Prince Dederi Jaquoah put on his cap and set off down river in his canoe with a handful of his men to greet the visitors. The English, sweating in their linen and hose, took them aboard their ship and received their gifts of fruits, rice, ivory tusks and grains of paradise. ‘A-quio!’ began one of the merchants, before resorting to English, spoken in the slow and deliberate tone of a man not sure if he would be understood. ‘My name is Edward Blitheman. I am a merchant of the East India Company. We have stopped here to refresh ourselves on our long journey to the Spice Islands of the East.’ The Prince smiled and held out his hand. ‘Hello Mr Blitheman. I am John Davies.’ The Englishman gaped on hearing his mother tongue fluently spoken and seeing the hand proffered in greeting as it was at home. The Prince smiled again, in a welcoming fashion, but privately enjoying the man’s discomfiture and amazement. ‘I spent two years in London, sir. With Mr Davies at the Stocks.’ ‘Davies? The Haberdasher? The Guinea merchant? Well, that explains why your English is so good.’ ‘He taught me well’, replied the Prince. ‘Now, my good sir, your General must come ashore and meet my father. The King looks forward to welcoming you after your long journey.’
ALONGSIDE THE REGULAR trade to Morocco the English developed in the second half of the sixteenth century, they began making forays further south, to the parts of West Africa they called ‘Guinea’. As a result of this trade, some West Africans were brought to England, later to return home. Were men such as Dederi Jaquoah taken by force or did they come willingly? The idea of English merchants taking Africans away from their homes immediately conjures images of shackled men and women crammed into the confines of a ship’s hold, of the backbreaking monotonous work, physical exploitation and mental persecution if they survived the crossing. The Swahili word maafa, meaning great disaster’ or ‘terrible occurrence’, comes closer to describing the horrific enterprise that killed millions of Africans over three centuries than sanitised terms such as ‘the slave trade’.1
Dederi Jaquoah’s was a different experience. With the notable exception of John Hawkins’s voyages in the 1560s, the Tudor and early Stuart trade with Africa was not about buying and selling people. What then was the nature of the early Anglo-African trade? If those Africans who travelled to England on merchants’ ships were not taken by force, why did they embark on such a long and dangerous journey?
Prince Dederi Jaquoah was born around the year 1591. He was the son of Caddi-biah, King of River Cestos.2 This river meets the Atlantic at the modern-day town of River Cess, south-east of Monrovia in Liberia, in between the states now known as Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. Caddi-biah’s kingdom stretched along the coast from the St John River to ‘Croe’, close to the present-day town of Settra Kru.3 The coastline was flat and heavily wooded, as were the river’s banks: ‘on both sides it is set very pleasantly with Trees, very large and very tall’.4 The narrow entrance to the river was marked by a ledge of rocks to the south-east, and another large rock in the ‘havens mouth right as you enter’.5 The King and his subjects were the most southern of the Kru people, known as ‘Zeguebos’. They spoke a variant of a language called Kra, in which the people (‘bo’) addressed their leader as ‘dabo’.6 The small village where Caddi-biah and his family lived was surrounded by palm and banana trees, and si
tuated just a few miles up the River Cestos on the north-west bank. Dederi’s mother would have been one of his father’s many wives. As he was growing up, Jaquoah wore a cap to signify his princely status.7 He ate the typical children’s porridge made of boiled yams, and learnt how to navigate a canoe and catch the plentiful mullet, loach, pike, sardines, sole and other fish that frequented the river. One fish had a dart on its tail that was used to make arrowheads.
This late-seventeenth century map of River Cestos, drawn by French trader Jean Barbot, shows ‘The King’s Town’, home to King Caddi-biah and his son Dederi Jacquoah.
King Caddi-biah, and his fathers before him, were well accustomed to trading with Europeans. It was the Portuguese who gave the river the name we now know it by in 1461. According to the Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira, writing in the early sixteenth century: ‘the name is due to the fact that the negroes of this country come to the ships to sell pepper (which is very good and very plentiful here) in baskets, which they do not do elsewhere on the coast where this pepper is sold’.8 Cestos is the Portuguese for ‘basket’. These baskets were also used as a unit of measuring quantities of pepper. This was meleguetta pepper (aframomum melegueta) or ‘grains of paradise’. Quite different to the black pepper (piper nigrum) native to South-East Asia, this spice, a member of the ginger family, was widely used in Europe. In England it was thought to revive stale wine and ale, and to have medicinal qualities. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘jolly lover’ Absalom chews it with liquorice to freshen his breath before visiting Alison, the carpenter’s young wife.9 The plentiful meleguetta pepper gave its name to the whole coast. The Portuguese called it the Meleguetta Coast, the French Meleguette, and it was later anglicised as the ‘Grain Coast’.10 As one English merchant explained in an account of 1553, at ‘the great river of Sesto’, he found for sale:
the grains of that country, which is a very hot fruit, and much like unto a fig as it groweth on the tree. For as the figs are full of small seeds, so is the said fruit full of grains, which are loose within the cod, having in the midst thereof a hole on every side. This kind of spice is much used in cold countries, & may there be sold for great advantage, for exchange of other wares.11
A century later, the French merchant Jean Barbot commented that the meleguetta pepper pods that grew on the River Cestos were ‘the largest of all this part of the pepper coast’.12
It must have been quite a shock the first time Jaquoah’s countrymen saw the pale Europeans. When Alvise Cadamosto, a Venetian merchant in Portuguese employ, went ashore on the Senegal River in 1455 ‘some touched my hands and limbs, and rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh’. In many African cultures, for example the Kongolese, white was the colour of the underworld. In their cosmology, the world of the living and the world of the dead were separated by water, and so the fact that the Europeans arrived from across the sea, together with their white skin and their powerful weapons, gave an impression of ghosts, evil spirits or wizards. To some, the threat they posed seemed more visceral. The Gambians believed that ‘Christians ate human flesh, and . . . only bought blacks to eat them’.13 These fears were coupled with fascination and the desire to acquire European goods and technologies. Over time, it became clear that the Europeans were more or less human, and could be useful trading partners.
The people of River Cestos began a regular trade with the Portuguese in meleguetta pepper, ivory and slaves. It did not take long for the Cestos merchants to realise the value of their goods to the strangers, and they quickly raised their prices. Pacheco complained in 1505 that one alquier of meleguetta pepper now cost five or six manillas, where previously it had been one. The price of one slave also rose, from two metal shaving basins to four or five.14
For almost a century, the Portuguese enjoyed a monopoly on the African trade. By 1530, however, French and English traders were beginning to frequent the coast. In the time of Louis XIV, the French claimed that merchants from Dieppe and Rouen had in fact discovered this area, naming River Cestos ‘Petite Dieppe’ in 1364: a fabrication intended to justify that King’s desire for territory in West Africa. For the kings of Cestos, new customers meant more bargaining power. The French merchants did their best to ingratiate themselves by offering better gifts than the Portuguese. Although the Portuguese had no trading forts in the River Cestos area, they fiercely defended their monopoly, resulting in regular confrontations with the newcomers. In 1557, the people of River Cestos witnessed three French ships attack and burn a Portuguese caravel, killing the entire crew, apart from one African, who they set ashore. He was found there by the English a year later. In 1568, the Mary Fortune, a ship owned by Sir William Wynter, was sunk by the Portuguese near the river.15
The people of River Cestos met their first Englishman when John Hawkins’s father William made a series of voyages to Brazil, via Guinea, in the 1530s. Hakluyt relates that en route to Brazil ‘he touched at the River of Sestos, upon the coast of Guinea, where he trafficked with the Negroes, and took of them Oliphant’s teeth [ivory], and other commodities which that place yieldeth’.16 In 1553, Thomas Wyndham called at River Cestos but did not trade there, preferring to press on to the Gold Coast and, eventually, as far as Benin in modern-day Nigeria. This decision was made against the wishes of the Portuguese pilot Antonio Anes Pinteado, who was guiding the English ships along the coast. Pinteado feared that it was too late in the season to continue, and that they should make for home, but Wyndham cursed him as a ‘whoreson Jew’ and threatened to ‘cut off his ears and nail them to the mast’ if he did not take them to Benin. Wyndham’s insult may have had some basis in truth; if Pinteado was a Jewish converso, it would explain why he had been forced to flee Portugal and offer his services to the English. Once they arrived at Benin, the men began to die of fever at the rate of four or five a day. Before long, both Captain Wyndham and his Portuguese pilot lay among the dead. Of the one hundred and forty men who set out, only forty survived the voyage and yet they returned with enough gold (150 lbs) and meleguetta pepper to encourage further voyages.17
The following year, the Trinity, Bartholomew and John Evangelist, under the command of John Lok (an ancestor of the philosopher John Locke), spent a week at River Cestos towards the end of December. Lok bought a ton of meleguetta pepper to take back to England, ivory tusks ‘as big as a man’s thigh above the knee’ and the head of an elephant, which was displayed to the public in the house of Sir Andrew Judde, a wealthy merchant and former Lord Mayor of London. The head was ‘of such huge bigness’ that it provoked much wonder, and even religious contemplation. One observer ‘beheld it, not only with my bodily eyes, but much more with the eyes of my mind and my spirit, considering by the work, the cunning and wisdom of the workmaster’.18
Such strange new treasures clearly inspired London’s merchants and investors. Three further voyages set out to West Africa in 1555, 1556 and 1558, under the command of William Towerson.19 Over the following decades, the English made several other journeys to the area, resulting in the establishment of the first Guinea Company in 1588, when Elizabeth I granted a group of merchants from London and Devon the exclusive right to trade with West Africa for the next ten years. Don Antonio, the claimant to the Portuguese throne, was in London and the English took full advantage of his presence; as ‘King of Portugal’, Antonio could authorise trade to Africa. The patent specified that Don Antonio was to receive 5% of the merchants’ profits, one-third of goods seized from any interlopers and a quarter of their prize goods.20 A separate right to trade to Sierra Leone, the region immediately to the north-west of River Cestos, was granted to Thomas Gregory of Taunton and his associates in 1592.21 Six years later the Lord High Admiral Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, who had commanded the fleet that defeated the Armada, and the courtier Sir John Stanhope, negotiated an extension of the right to trade to Guinea. In the same year Hakluyt dedicated the second edition of the Principal Navigations, which included accounts of voyages to Guinea,
to Nottingham.22 It has been estimated that the English made fewer than fifty voyages to Guinea before 1600, rising to one hundred and fifty by 1650.23 By then, they were being overtaken by the Dutch, who only began trading to Africa early in the seventeenth century, but sent some two hundred ships there between 1599 and 1608 alone.24 ‘Guinea’ being such a vague term, it is not always clear where exactly the English called, but at least some of these voyages included a stop at River Cestos.25
With the exception of the four Hawkins-sponsored voyages of the 1560s, the English Guinea trade in this period was not a slave trade. In 1620, Captain Richard Jobson was offered the chance to buy some young female slaves on the Gambia River, but refused. He told the African merchant, Buckor Sano, that the English were ‘a people who did not deal in any such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes’.26 This was largely true for the Tudor period, and remained so for the first four decades of the seventeenth century.27 The enslaved Africans Hawkins procured to sell in the Spanish Caribbean during the 1560s came from Sierra Leone. Dederi Jaquoah and his father would not have known the English as slave traders.28
At around the time Jaquoah was born, a merchant named John Davies began trading to Africa from London. A haberdasher, specialising in hats, buttons, ribbons and other paraphernalia, he became a member, or freeman, of the Haberdasher’s Company on 21 February 1584. Just three days later, his master John Best died and ten days after that Davies married Best’s daughter Marie at St Mary Woolchurch Haw. The marriage lasted only two years, as Marie died in June 1586. Davies remarried the following year, taking as his wife Margaret Fynn, the daughter of a fishmonger.29 By the early 1590s, he had moved on from being a ‘retailing haberdasher’ and begun investing in overseas trade and sponsoring privateering voyages. Despite the fact that his ships were often attacked, meaning he was continually in debt, he managed to continue to live ‘in the world with good credit and reputation’.30 In 1600 he was authorised, alongside a gun founder named Thomas Browne, to export the Queen’s old and unserviceable cast iron ordnance.31 The people of River Cestos ‘were very eager for old or new iron’ and so their river may have been among the ‘places remote and unknown’ where Davies sold the ordnance.32 By 1607 Davies was the leading figure in the Guinea trade, with a particular interest in importing redwood (used for the dyeing of cloth) from Sierra Leone.33 Two years later, the Earl of Nottingham granted him permission to send the ship Resistance to ‘the parts beyond the seas, namely Guinea, Binney [Benin] and Brazil’.34
Black Tudors Page 19