Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  Late in the summer of 1610, Dederi Jaquoah and his father King Caddi-biah received one of John Davies’s ships at River Cestos. The Abigail of Southampton, captained by Roger Newse, arrived laden with silks, satins, taffetas, velvet, thread, ribbon, broadcloth, cottons, linen, hats, brass basins (used in the process of hat-making), brass axes, kettles, rings, bugles, iron, wines and aquavitae; the stock-in-trade of John Davies and his partner, the mercer Isaac Kilburne.35 The merchants of Cestos were keen to buy these goods, exchanging them for rice, meleguetta pepper and ivory. However, this voyage was unlike the others in one important respect: when the Abigail departed for England, Prince Dederi Jaquoah was amongst its passengers.

  Prince Jaquoah may not have had a particularly pleasant voyage to England. When the Abigail returned home, Davies complained to the authorities of the Trinity House at Deptford about the conduct of Captain Roger Newse, his pilot Thomas Addison, the master’s mate John Addison and various other crew members, including the boatswain and the gunner. They had not done their best ‘towards the performance of the voyage, as they ought to have done’ and had ‘been very turbulent, factious and mutinous’. Mutiny was not uncommon, and the ‘turbulence’ natural to sea voyages, where men were confined in a small space under often difficult conditions, was exacerbated as long journeys into uncharted territory became increasingly common. The year after the Abigail’s voyage, Captain Henry Hudson learnt this to his cost after his crew mutinied and set him adrift in the icy waters of the Canadian bay which thereafter bore his name.36 By 1631, the Admiralty court was receiving complaints daily regarding ‘disobedient and mutinous mariners’ who conspired ‘to depose a master who does not conform to their wishes and put another of their choosing in his place’. The ringleaders sheltered their identities by use of the ‘pernicious phrase one and all’ or by a ‘Round Robin’, where all the mutineers’ names were written in a circle so that the ringleader could not be detected.37

  The Abigail’s crew seem to have stopped short of full mutiny, or at least there cannot have been an uprising against the captain, since he was named amongst the offenders. Davies instead accused them of breaking the terms of the charter-party, the original agreement made before they put out to sea, which usually included the safe delivery of the cargo amongst its requirements. Was Davies unhappy with how Newse and the others had conducted their trade at River Cestos? Did he object to the fact that they’d returned with Jaquoah aboard? Whatever they had done, or failed to do, the Trinity House decided that the accused would not be paid their wages and stated that they deserved a greater punishment than it was in the House’s power to inflict. Was there tension during the voyage between these ‘mutinous’ mariners and the rest of the company, who had ‘carried themselves well’?38 These disagreements, both during and after the voyage, gave Jaquoah a rude introduction to English culture, or the lack of it.

  On the same day that Trinity House passed this judgment, New Year’s Day 1611, Dederi Jaquoah was christened at St Mildred Poultry. The parish register records the baptism of ‘John Jaquoah, a king’s sonne in Guinnye’:

  Dederi Jaquoah about the age of 20 years, the son of Caddi-biah king of the river of Cetras or Cestus in the country of Guinea, who was sent out of his country by his father, in an English ship called the Abigail of London, belonging to Mr John Davies of this parish, to be baptised. At the request of the said Mr Davies and at the desire of the said Dedery, and by allowance of authority, [he] was by the Parson of this church the first of January, baptised and named John. His sureties were John Davies haberdasher, Isaac Kilburne mercer, Robert Singleton churchwarden, Edmund Towers, Paul Gurgeny and Rebecca Hutchens. He showed his opinion concerning Jesus Christ and his faith in him; he repeated the Lord’s prayer in English at the font, and so was baptised and signed with the sign of the Crosse.39

  Dederi Jaquoah was christened John, after John Davies, just like Edward Swarthye had taken Edward Wynter’s name. Like Mary Fillis, he had learnt the Lord’s Prayer, and the parish clerk emphasised his desire to be baptised. His ‘sureties’, or godparents, included some of Davies’s associates in the Guinea trade, Isaac Kilburne and Edmund Towers. Kilburne had done business with John Davies since about 1600 and the two were friends. Unfortunately, their ‘old familiarity and acquaintance’ did not survive the strains of their professional dealings. Kilburne was later to wish he had never known Davies, ‘a man of most subtle cunning disposition intending only to defraud’, full of ‘subtle devices and malice and plots’.40 Edmund Towers had been John Davies’s resident factor in Guinea, sending him advice as to which goods were ‘best vendible’ there.41 We do not know where exactly in Guinea Towers lived. Could it have been River Cestos? He may have spent the year there on a ‘factory ship’, a vessel from which merchants’ factors traded, or hired from the King a warehouse or lodge fashioned from mud and straw, or banana trees leant up against one another.42

  Davies’s long career of trading to West Africa meant Dederi Jaquoah was not the first African to be associated with him in London. In 1597, the register of Davies’s parish church, St Mary Woolchurch Haw, recorded that ‘a blakmore belonging to Mr John Davies, died in White Chapel parish, was laid in the ground in this church yard sine frequentia populi et sine ceremoniis quia utrum christianus esset necne nesciebamus (without any company of people and without ceremony, because we did not know whether he was a Christian or not)’.43 When the clerk records this African as ‘belonging’ to Davies, this does not mean that he owned him. At the time, the word ‘belong’ could merely signify membership of a household. In 1568, the Returns of Aliens, a poll tax on foreigners, recorded that Peter Martin, a Spaniard, ‘belongith to the Spanish Ambassador’. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Duke Orsino asks Lady Olivia’s servants, ‘Belong you to the Lady Olivia, friends?’ and the Clown answers: ‘Ay, sir; we are some of her trappings’.44 Nonetheless, it is perplexing that although this man was part of Davies’s household, the parish authorities did not appear to know him well enough to judge whether he was a Christian. Nor do we know what he was doing in Whitechapel, about a mile east of Davies’s home, and there is no record of his death in the register of the parish church, St Mary Matfellon.45

  St Mildred, Poultry, in the 1560s.

  Jaquoah was neither the first nor the last black man to arrive in London from Africa on an English merchant ship during this period. In 1555, a group of five Africans from Shama in modern-day Ghana had arrived with Robert Gainsh and John Lok. Of the five, sometimes erroneously cited as the first Africans to come to England, we know the names of three: Anthony, ‘Binne’ (or ‘Binny’) and George.46 Two unnamed African men were brought to London by Anthony Dassell in 1592. A few years after Dederi arrived in England, a South African named Coree stepped off an East India Company ship, the Hector, on her return from Bantam in western Java in 1613. She had been part of the Company’s eighth voyage to the East Indies since its incorporation by Elizabeth I in 1600. Following in the wake of the Portuguese and the Dutch, the East India Company was making a killing importing black pepper, spices such as cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon, medicinal drugs, aromatic woods such as sandalwood, perfumes and silks. The profit made by subscribers to the eighth voyage was an eye-watering 221%. Investment grew and by 1620 the Company had established more than twelve factories in the East Indies, employing more than two hundred factors. It had also built seventy-six of its own ships in its two purpose-built shipyards on the Thames at Deptford and Blackwall.47 As we will see in the next chapter, Company ships were soon bringing both Africans and East Asians back to England from the East Indies.

  Like Dederi Jaquoah, the other Africans who were brought to England by merchants at this time were high status. One of the five who came to London in 1555 was the son of ‘the Captain’ of the town, and the fact that the others had gold with them suggests they were also from wealthy families.48 The men who arrived with Anthony Dassell in 1592 were described as: ‘two chief young negroes . . . sons to the chief justice of that countr
y’.49 Coree was later observed wearing a ‘perfum’d Cap’, which may also have indicated high status. This was part of a wider trend of African nobility visiting Europe. As early as 1487, Bumi Jeleen, the ruler of Senegal, sent his nephew as his ambassador to Portugal. In 1508, King Afonso of Kongo sent his son Henry to study with the order of St John the Evangelist in Lisbon.50 He went on to become the first sub-Saharan Catholic bishop (and the last for more than two hundred and fifty years). In 1600, the ruler of the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri, in modern-day Nigeria, sent his eldest son to Lisbon, where he received a Christian education and was christened, and returned eight years later with a Portuguese wife, and a priest to help him establish a Catholic state.51 So when the St Mildred’s Poultry baptism register asserted that Jaquoah was ‘sent out of his country by his father . . . to be baptised’, it was not without precedent.

  What was the motivation behind these baptisms? African rulers were impressed by Europeans’ ability to navigate oceans when out of sight of land, and by the deadly power of their firearms. On a practical level, they may have converted in order to obtain weapons; the Portuguese refused to sell firearms to non-Christians. But the Africans might also have believed that Christianity imbued the weapons with a special spiritual force. In 1515, three Portuguese missionaries journeyed to Benin in the hope of converting Oba Ozolua and his people. Ozolua, who was at war, told his visitors that he needed time to contemplate the ‘deep mystery’ of their faith. He took them with him on his campaign, subjecting their Christian faith to trial by combat. Successful in battle, the Oba finally agreed that the missionaries could baptise his son and some of his highest-ranking noblemen.52 The situation at River Cestos a century later was a little different, as the English did not bring missionaries with them. This, together with the Protestant insistence on a Christian education before baptism, explains why the prince would have to travel to England to convert.

  Clearly, there were other advantages to visiting their trading partner’s homeland. Jaquoah would be able to learn more about the market for meleguetta pepper and ivory, and bring back useful commercial knowledge. It was just this sort of industrial espionage that English merchants had suspected the Moroccans of in 1600, and such fears were raised again after Coree the Saldanian returned to South Africa in 1614. He informed his countrymen that the brass they so admired was ‘but a base and cheap commodity in England’ and after that the English no longer had ‘such a free exchange of our brass and iron for their cattle’. The merchant John Milward subsequently complained that ‘They demanded ably for their Cattle, which we thought proceeded from Coree, who had been in England, and (as we suppose) acquainted them with our little esteem of Iron and Copper’. Coree also explained about guns to his countrymen. Where once just one gun ‘would cause a multitude of them to fly’, by 1617 John Jourdain, a captain in the East India Company, lamented that Coree, ‘understanding our manner, hath made them so bold’ that they ‘did not greatly care’ when they saw one.53 Such a change of attitude disrupted the English objectives. Edward Terry, a ship’s chaplain, commented that it would have been better if Coree had never seen England, and Edward Blitheman, the Company man who met Jaquoah at River Cestos on the same trip, wrote of the Saldanian that ‘it had been good in my opinion either he had been hanged in England or drowned homeward’.54

  Travelling to London also gave Africans the opportunity to learn English. At this time, much of the trade between English and Africans relied heavily on the use of signs. In 1555, William Towerson reported that two of the King’s servants at River St Vincent, south-east of River Cestos, ‘made us signs that if when we had slept we would come again into their river, we should have store of Grains’. Towerson and other merchants made some effort to learn a few key words and phrases, such as ‘Have you enough?’, give me bread’, ‘hold your peace’ and ‘you lie!’, but it cannot have been easy for the English and Africans to understand each other.55 The East India merchants at the Cape of Good Hope were particularly flummoxed by the Khoi Khoi language. Sir James Lancaster reported in 1601 that:

  their speech is wholly uttered through the throat, and they cluck with their tongues in such sort, that in the seven weeks which we remained here in this place, the sharpest wit among us could not learn one word of their language; and yet the people would soon understand any sign we made to them.

  They resorted to using sounds: a ‘Language, which was never changed at the confusion of Babel. . . Moath [Moo] for Oxen . . . and Baa for Sheepe: which Language the people understood very well without any Interpreter’.56 Gabriel Towerson, William Towerson’s son and the Captain of the Hector, wanted to take Coree to England because once he had learned some English, he would be able to tell them more about his country, revealing things ‘which we could not know before’.57 The advantage cut both ways.

  Although Africans might choose to visit England for various reasons, sometimes the choice was taken out of their hands. William Towerson admitted in 1556 that the Africans brought from Shama by Robert Gainsh and John Lok had been taken by force. When he called at the town, ‘none of them would come near us; being as we judged afraid of us: because that four [actually five] men were taken perforce the last year from this place’. Towerson made further efforts to negotiate, but was attacked by the Africans, in concert with the Portuguese, ‘whom before they hated’. He decided to ‘go from this place, seeing the Negroes bent against us’. On his second voyage, Towerson attempted to repair the damage he had done by returning three of the men, one of whom was named as George. Though the people were very glad to see the trio, who then facilitated trade, they still demanded to know where the other two were. Towerson did his best to reassure them that ‘Anthonie and Binne’ would be brought home on the next voyage.58

  The best thing for English merchants to do was to leave some of their own men behind when they took Africans away. In 1582, when Edward Fenton set out on his abortive voyage to the East Indies, which was to call at the West African coast, he was given instructions to ‘settle . . . a beginning of a further trade’, by bringing back ‘some few men, and women if you may’ from his travels, leaving Englishmen ‘for pledges, and to learn the tongue and secrets of the Countries’.59 But not all English trading expeditions needed to learn from Towerson’s mistakes. When William Hawkins brought a Brazilian king to London in 1531, he left behind one of his crew, Martin Cockerham of Plymouth, to reassure the people of their King’s return. The King met Henry VIII at Whitehall, and stayed in England for almost a year before setting off for home with Hawkins.60 Unfortunately he died on the return voyage, but Hawkins managed to persuade the Brazilians to allow Martin Cockerham to re-join his countrymen. On a smaller scale, we saw in Chapter Three how John Drake exchanged men with the Cimarrons the first time they met.

  The Portuguese, Spanish and French had made such exchanges for years.61 In 1483, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão left four missionaries at the mouth of the Congo River and took four Kongolese hostages back to Lisbon in exchange. He had these men taught Portuguese so that they could act as interpreters, before returning them two years later. They were welcomed home ‘as though they had seen them resuscitated from under the earth’.62 Columbus brought native Americans back to Spain with him in 1493, ‘to learn the Spanish tongue, to the intent to use them afterwards for interpreters’.63 A century later, the merchant Anthony Dassell declared there was ‘no nation better welcome to ye negroes nor so well beloved’ than the French. This ‘proceedeth chiefly by bringing negroes with them into France & returning them again to the increasing of further love and Amity’.64 Certainly, an exchange of hostages was more conducive to friendship than the seizure of Africans and something both sides could use to their advantage. In January 1577, Walter Wren reported that the people of Cape Verde refused to release the Englishmen who were living with them until the English returned three of their people who had been taken in an English ship three weeks before.65

  The question of whether Africans came to England willingly or by f
orce was raised again in a case before the High Court of Admiralty in 1592. Don Antonio of Portugal accused the London merchant Anthony Dassell of bringing ‘two Negroes out of the said Country [Guinea] against their wills and contrary to the proclamation and commandment of the king of the said coast of Guinea’.* In his defence, Dassell claimed that the young men had ‘of themselves made suit to come, and voluntarily came to see England’. The trip could well have seemed like a great adventure to the chief justice’s sons; curiosity causing them to flout their King’s commandment. Julius Caesar, the Judge of the Admiralty Court, examined the men himself and found ‘by them’ that they came to England ‘by consent of their friends to see the country’. Dassell insisted that he fully intended to take the two men home, to foster greater trust in his African trading partners. Certainly, antagonising the people he wished to do business with would jeopardise his future trading prospects. His agent, Richard Kelly, said as much: ‘by such indiscreet dealing it is greatly to be feared that the trade into those parts will be very much hindered’. Kelly himself refused to return to Guinea unless ‘some order be taken for the safe bringing back of the said two Negroes into the said country’.66