Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  Despite what William Towerson and others had learned about the negative effects kidnapping Africans had on trade, Coree the Saldanian was brought by force from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, to England by the East India Company in 1613. The Europeans called Coree’s home ‘Saldania’ at this time, after the Portuguese Antonio de Saldahna who landed there in 1503. Edward Terry, who was not on the voyage but met Coree when he travelled to South Africa a few years later, recounted that Captain Gabriel Towerson’s decision was made ‘very much against both their [the Africans’] minds’. The other man who was taken aboard the Hector alongside Coree was apparently so upset that he died shortly after they put to sea, ‘merely out of extreme sullenness though he was very well used’. In May 1614, Captain John Saris visited Saldania and found that ‘the Naturalls of this place are very treacherous at the present, making signs unto us of the forcible carrying away of two of their people’.67 The East India Company merchants would have to learn William Towerson’s lesson all over again; relations improved only after Coree was returned to the Cape.

  Jaquoah spent ‘two years in England with Mr Davis at the stocks’, from the autumn of 1610 until the summer of 1612.68 This was not a reference to their daily activities, but an address; the Stokes (or Stocks) market specialised in selling fish and meat. The market was situated at the junction of Lombard Street and Cornhill, on the site of the present-day Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, immediately adjacent to Davies’s parish church of St Mary Woolchurch Haw and across the road from St Mildred’s Poultry, the church where Jaquoah was baptised. John Davies and his second wife Margaret had been married since May 1587. They had no children.69 By the time Dederi Jaquoah came to live with them in 1610, Davies was about fifty years old, and his wife was probably not much younger; she died at the end of June 1612, around the same time that Jaquoah returned home.70

  What would it have been like to be the guest of a London merchant for those accustomed to life on the Guinea coast? The five men who arrived in 1555 presumably stayed at the houses of either Robert Gainsh or John Lok, where they were, according to William Towerson, ‘well used’. They were ‘tall and strong men, and could well agree with our meats and drinks’ although ‘the cold and moist air doth somewhat offend them’.71 In 1592, Anthony Dassell, who was living in the parish of Holy Trinity the Less, Little Trinity Lane, kept the two Africans he had brought from Guinea at his ‘own house at ... great charges’, where they were ‘courteously used and well entertained for the honour & credit of our Prince and Country’.72

  One wonders whether Jaquoah was as homesick as Coree, who, having learnt a little English, ‘would daily lie upon the ground, and cry very often thus in broken English, “Coree home go, Saldania go, home go”’.73 Coree spent six months at the London house of the Governor of the East India Company, Sir Thomas Smith, in Philpott Lane ‘where he had good diet, good clothes, good lodging with all other fitting accommodations’. He even had a suit of armour made for him in brass, ‘his beloved Metal’, which was much admired in Saldania.74 Edward Terry noted that Coree and his countrymen were so taken with it that ‘if a man lay down before them a piece of gold worth two pounds sterling, and a piece of brass worth two pence, they will leave the Gold, and take the brass’.

  Coree may have met some Native Americans whilst he was in London. Smith was also Governor of the Virginia Company, and two Virginians, ‘out of Sir Thomas Smith’s house’ were buried at the local church of St Dionis Backchurch in late October and early November 1613.75 This was not the first multi-racial household in England. Africans lived alongside Native Americans in the Ralegh home during Manteo of Croatan and Wanchese of Roanoke’s stay in 1584, and that of Prince Cayowaroco of Guyana and a handful of other men from the New World in 1594–6.76

  The visitors would have been provided with English clothes to keep them warm, as well as to satisfy the English sense of propriety. The Native Americans living with Ralegh were ‘clad in brown taffeta’.77 When an African arrived at Saltram Hall, Devon, in 1628, Sir James Bagg insisted he should be ‘handsomely clad’.78 Clothes could make a big difference to the way foreign visitors were perceived. In 1501, two men from Newfoundland appeared before Henry VII ‘clothed in beasts’ skins and ate Raw flesh and spoke such speech that no man could understand them ... in their demeanour like to brute beasts’. But within two years they were seen at Westminster Palace ‘apparelled after English men’ so that the anonymous observer had to admit that he ‘could not discern [them] from English men till I was learned what men they were’.79

  Appearances could be swiftly altered, but communication was another matter. The English were hardly proficient in non-European languages. For Africans such as Dederi Jaquoah, it could take several months to learn English well enough to act as a useful interpreter and trade factor. The five Africans who arrived in London in the summer of 1555 ‘were there kept till they could speak the language’, the idea being that ‘then they should be brought again to be a help to Englishmen’ in Guinea.80 The first three left London in September 1556, so it had taken them about a year, or more if we count their months on board ship, to become fluent. When Lupold Von Wedel, a German visitor to London, met Manteo and Wanchese at Hampton Court on 18 October 1584, ‘nobody could understand their language’.81 But just two months later they were able to convey information to potential investors about the ‘singular great commodities’ of their homeland.82 Jaquoah was in London for two years. When he was baptised in January 1611 he had been in the country for a few months and was able to ‘repeat the Lord’s Prayer in English at the font’. The fact that the record specifically states that he recited the prayer in English suggests he did not speak in that tongue throughout the ceremony. According to the parish register he ‘showed his opinion concerning Jesus Christ and his faith in him’, so it seems he was not completely fluent in English, and we can only guess what signs he used to communicate his faith.

  How did Dederi Jaquoah and the other African ‘students’ in London learn English? In 1584, when Thomas Hariot taught Manteo and Wanchese for eight months at Durham House, he developed a phonetic system to facilitate the mastery of any language. It was entitled An universal Alphabet containing six and thirty letters whereby may be expressed the lively image of man’s voice in what language soever: first devised upon occasion to seek for fit letters to express the Virginian speech, 1585. This was the first attempt to devise a non-alphabetic system to represent the sounds of a language. A fellow scholar who saw it said the sinuous characters looked ‘like Devils’.83 Was this system used by Dederi’s teachers? It was designed more for recording foreign languages than teaching English; Dederi probably had to pick up the language piecemeal during his two-year stay in the Davies’ household. The tuition available in London was not always first-rate and without regular practice it may have been difficult to retain much of what he learned after he returned home. When the French captain Augustin de Beaulieu encountered Coree at the Cape in 1620, he found that ‘his English was good only when he asked for bread’.84

  No doubt Jaquoah attended church regularly while he was in London, either at St Mildred, Poultry, where he was baptised, or at the Davies parish church of St Mary Woolchurch Haw, across the road. He might well have seen one of the first copies of the King James Bible, which was printed in London in May 1611. The Tempest was first performed in this year, and some critics have suggested that Dederi’s father’s name, ‘Caddi-biah’, inspired Shakespeare to name his character ‘Caliban’.85

  After two years in London, Dederi Jaquoah returned home in the summer of 1612. Other Africans had been delighted to return home and were met with a warm welcome. When George and two of the other Africans returned to Guinea with William Towerson in 1556, the people of Hanta, a town close to Shama, wept with joy to see their people returned, and:

  were very glad of our Negros, specially one of their brother’s wives, and one of their aunts which received them with much joy, and so did all the
rest of the people, as if they had been their natural brethren.86

  When Coree returned to Africa in June 1614, aboard the New Year’s Gift, captained by Nicholas Downton, ‘he had no sooner set footing on his own shore, but presently he threw away his Clothes, his Linen, with all other Covering’, and eagerly ‘got his sheep’s skins upon his back, guts about his neck’, and ‘a perfum’d Cap . . . upon his head.’87 Initially, it appeared he was open to further dealings with the English; he gave Captain Downton a young steer (a castrated bull, good for beef), but on 18 June he went away ‘with his rich armour and all his wealth in the company of his friends’ and did not return.88

  On 10 July 1614, a fleet of three East India Company ships, the Samaritan, the Thomas and the Thomasine, under the command of Captain David Middleton, stopped at River Cestos, en route to Bantam.89 Edward Blitheman, assistant to Mr Bailey, the principal merchant on the Thomasine, wrote to Sir Thomas Smith that they had met ‘an Indian’ (an indigenous person) who ‘spoke very good English and had formerly been two years in England with Mr Davis at the stocks and is known by the name John Davis, being as we perceived the king’s son of that place’.90 Why was Prince Dederi now referring to himself not merely by his baptismal name, John, but actually as ‘John Davis’? Perhaps it was an attempt to foster better relations with potential trading partners. Jaquoah appears to have started a tradition. Some seventy years later Jean Barbot noted that the King of Cestos, whom he called ‘Barsaw’, also used the name Peter, for ‘’tis customary with the Blacks of note on this coast to take a European name’. King Barsaw/Peter was described by Barbot as ‘an old man of 65 or 66’ in 1681, so he could have been Dederi Jaquoah’s son and heir, born a few years after his return from London.91

  After his time in London, Jaquoah was well equipped to engage in trade with visiting English merchants. He invited Captain Middleton to his father’s court and showed him their stores of ivory. ‘A great quantity more’ could be procured, Jaquoah told him, if the Englishman so desired. King Caddi-biah gave Middleton ‘very kind entertainment’. We can get some idea of what this visit might have been like from the account of French merchant Jean Barbot, who visited the King of Cestos in 1681, and sketched a picture of their meeting. He and his party were received in the Meeting Hut in the King’s village, where Barbot was ‘melting all the time as if I were in an oven’. The King, flanked by some twenty men, was ‘sitting on his heels, as they do in that land’, smoking a pipe and wearing a flowing white robe and a ceremonial headdress made of straw ‘decorated with goats’ horns, small porcupine tails and other trifles’. Barbot presented the King with two iron bars, a bundle of glass beads, two flasks of brandy and a few knives. In return he received a large basket of rice and two hens, which the French immediately killed and cooked on the spot ‘so that the alliance . . . could be sealed’.92

  King Caddi-biah and his son made ‘great proffers and promises of trade’ if Middleton ‘would stay there with his ships’, but Middleton decided not to trade on this occasion and the fleet set sail again the next morning. Middleton was on a tight schedule for the East Indies, and was keen to make progress southwards while the weather was fair. ‘Had not the time of the year been so precious,’ Blitheman reported, Middleton might well have tried to trade some of the ‘petty commodities,’ such as ‘knives, coarse felts of all colours, looking-glasses, scissors, iron etc.’ he had on board for the ivory and meleguetta pepper available at River Cestos. However, as well as the time of year, Middleton also took into consideration how expensive it was to service the fleet, concluding that ‘the charge of the fleet would have eaten away all the profit’ he could have made by trading there.93

  Barbot’s sketch of his meeting with King Barsaw or Peter of River Cestos, c. 1681. The hens on the right were shortly afterwards killed and cooked to seal the trading agreement.

  Although Jaquoah was unsuccessful in persuading the English to trade in 1614, his language skills and familiarity with the English and their commercial needs would stand him in good stead over the years. Other Africans who had learnt English in London used it to communicate and trade with English merchants once they returned home. Those who had come to London in 1555 were instrumental in facilitating trade on William Towerson’s voyages. In January 1557 at Cape de Tres Puntas, the most southerly tip of modern-day western Ghana, the locals were wary of the English and kept their distance until ‘we sent George our Negro a shore, and after he had talked with them, they came aboard our boats without fear’ to trade. George seems to have been so keen to help the English that after they returned him home he followed them for at least ninety miles in a small boat, and ‘when he came, the Negroes and we soon concluded a price’.94 The cooperation continued: when Towerson called at their coast again in June 1558, George and ‘Binny’ (who had, as promised, been returned) came to see him with two pounds of gold to trade.95

  Despite his disappearance after returning to South Africa in 1614, Coree acted as a mediator for English merchants in later years. He welcomed Walter Peyton of the Expedition to the Cape in June 1615, taking some of the Englishmen to see his house, wife and children. There, they saw his suit of armour, which he kept in pride of place. Peyton credited Coree for a change in the locals’ manner towards the English, remarking that they were ‘nothing so fearful of us nor so thievish as in former times’. Coree also appeared to have taught his countrymen a little English, as they chanted the phrase ‘Sir Thomas Smith English Ships’ repeatedly and ‘with great glory’. Some of the people ‘desired to go for England with us, because they esteemed Coree to have sped so well, returning rich with his suit of copper’. Indeed, Coree himself spoke of returning to England with one of his sons when the East India Company ships called at the Cape ‘homeward bound’. But by the time the fleet returned, in January 1617, the atmosphere had changed and Coree had moved his family further away ‘for more security from strange Ships’. Peyton believed the Dutch had scared him away, as they were wont to eschew trade altogether and send raiding parties of one hundred men to capture cattle. Nonetheless, Coree continued to play a key role in trading negotiations whenever the English called at the Cape until he met his death at the hands of the Dutch in 1627, when he refused to provide them with ‘fresh victuals’ out of loyalty to, or at least familiarity with, the English.96

  Englishmen continued to visit River Cestos after Blitheman’s visit of 1614. At some point in the mid-seventeenth century they established a factory, or trading post, there but this was abandoned by 1667. A French visitor observed ‘about three leagues [nine miles] up the River the English had formerly a house, but there is nothing of it left but the Walls’.97 If Barbot is to be believed, the English had abandoned this lodge ‘when they failed to find enough trade to support the agents.’98

  John Davies continued to trade to West Africa after Dederi Jaquoah’s return home, but he did not send his ships to River Cestos. He became the leading figure in the Guinea trade, establishing the first English factory on the African coast, at Sherbro, in Sierra Leone, in 1618, the same year that he formed the Gynney and Bynney Company, which promoted three unsuccessful voyages to the Gambia over the next three years. In 1620, Davies was granted a monopoly of the redwood trade with Sierra Leone.99

  River Cestos was not particularly popular with the East India Company either. Blitheman had praised it as ‘a convenient place for trade’ because it ‘lies very little out of the ordinary course’. ‘Elephants’ teeth and grain’ were ‘to be had in great abundance and for small trifles’, and ‘there is very good refreshing for men that shall stop there, for they may water there in a great river’. However, his arguments did not hold sway with his employers. Instead, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, became the preferred ‘refreshing point’, hosting twenty-five English fleets in the first twenty years of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, Madagascar became the main pit stop.100

  As English traders became more established on the African coast, and more permanent trading forts or settlemen
ts were set up, the need to bring Africans to England to learn the language diminished. In 1633, the Guinea Company established a factory on the Gold Coast at Wiampa, and the local kings granted them the use of the port of Warracoo. The King of Aguema sent them one of his sons ‘for a pledge’ and the Prince travelled to England twice with the Guinea merchants, eventually returning to become a factor at their base, the Castle of Cormantine, established two years earlier. The most prominent merchants involved in the Guinea Company at this time were Humphrey Slany and William Cloberry, so presumably the prince stayed with one of them, but as yet no record has been found of him in London. Not long afterwards, the King of Aguema sent the English another of his sons, named Asheney. However, rather than travel to England, Asheney lived at Cormantine for three or four years and learnt to speak English there.101 As more permanent trading forts or settlements were set up abroad, this became the standard practice.

  These permanent bases would alter the balance of power on the African coast and the nature of the African trade was to change dramatically. The first known English voyage to transport enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, after Hawkins’s last slaving voyage in 1568, was that of the Star, which arrived in Barbados with ‘a cargo of Negroes’ in 1641. By this time, a new market for enslaved African labour was developing in England’s nascent colonies in America and the Caribbean. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the English established colonies in Virginia (1607), Bermuda (1612), New England (1620), St Kitts (1622), St Croix (1625), Barbados (1625), Providence Island (1630), and Nevis, Antigua and Monserrat (1628–1632).102 These early settlements were small, and in constant danger of being wiped out either by disease or attacks from native peoples, such as the Virginia Massacre of 1622, or the Spanish, such as on Providence Island in 1641. However, between 1630 and 1642 there was a huge wave of migration, inspired by religious dissent and widespread promotion of the colonial ideal.103 As the new territories developed it became clear that they would be reliant on crops that could only be harvested by intensive labour. At first, small numbers of enslaved Africans were supplied to the colonies by privateers who captured them from Spanish or Portuguese ships, but as demand increased, English merchants started importing enslaved Africans themselves.