Mainwaring had not entirely left off his piratical ways. Pett recorded in his diary that:
Towards the whole of the hull of the pinnace and all her rigging and furniture I received only £100 from the Lord Zouche, the rest Sir Henry Mainwaring cunningly received in my behalf without my knowledge, which I could never get from him but by piece-meal, so that by the bargain I was loser £100 at least.40
This said, Pett himself was a notorious thief, one of a handful of men who treated the Royal Navy as their private slush fund. Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Navy official, had amongst his papers a list of items Pett was said to have stolen. Pocketing things along the course of one’s duties was accepted practice, a perk of the job, only penalised when it got out of hand.41
John Anthony had a useful patron in Mainwaring. The former pirate found favour with James I, who made him a gentleman of the bedchamber, and knighted him in 1618. Mainwaring dedicated his discourse The Beginnings, Practices and Suppression of Pirates to the King, advising his majesty that the only way to stop this criminality, which he estimated had grown tenfold since the end of Elizabeth’s reign, was to ‘put on a constant immutable resolution never to grant any Pardon, and for those that are or may be taken, to put them all to death, or make slaves of them’.42 Evidently Mainwaring was confident that his rehabilitation in the eyes of the King was complete. The suggestion also shows that slavery was by no means conceptualised in racial terms at this time, but was a perfectly plausible fate for errant Englishmen. Mainwaring saw plenty of Englishmen reduced to slavery during his time in North Africa; in the mid-seventeenth century there were 35,000 Christian slaves in Algiers alone.43
Lord Zouche had ambitious plans for his new pinnace. An exciting new business opportunity presented itself: the tobacco trade. There had long been a market for tobacco in England, but the Spanish had monopolised the trade; the only supply came from their colonies in the West Indies. This might go some way to explaining King James I’s hatred of smoking, which in his Counterblast to Tobacco (1604) he described as ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless’.44 But in 1612, John Rolfe pioneered the cultivation of Spanish tobacco, or Nicotiana tabacum, in the new Virginia colony. The native Nicotiana rustica was judged ‘poor and weak, and of a biting taste’, but Rolfe managed to acquire some seeds of the Spanish variety from Trinidad or Venezuela. The first shipment was brought to England by Captain Robert Adams aboard the Elizabeth in July 1613, and was a great success. In 1617, 20,000 pounds of tobacco were shipped to England, and double that the following year.45 Such was the profit that the colony concentrated on the crop to the exclusion of all else. When Rolfe visited England on a promotional trip with his wife Pocahontas in 1617 he heralded tobacco as ‘the principal commodity the colony for the present yieldeth’.46
In the autumn of 1618, the Silver Falcon was being prepared for its voyage to Virginia. William Warde, the Mayor of Dover, oversaw the day-to-day business on Lord Zouche’s behalf and sent regular progress reports to him at his home in Philip Lane, Hackney.47 The projected itinerary was ambitious. They intended to leave certain people in the country to plant tobacco and corn and to exchange commodities with the English colony, to ‘discover and trade with the savages for furs’ and other merchandise and to ‘fish upon the coast of Canada, and carry the said fish being salted into Virginia’.48
It was a risky business. Just that summer, the Governor of Virginia, Lord De La Warr, and thirty of his men had perished en route to the colony.49 According to William Camden they had died at sea shortly after being ‘splendidly entertained’ at a feast hosted by the Spanish governor of the island of St Michael’s in the Azores, ‘not without suspicion of poison’. The news of De La Warr’s death had ‘discouraged some that promised to adventure money’ in the Silver Falcon and ‘deterred others that offered to go in person’.50 Zouche, a member of the Virginia Company since 1609, was out of pocket himself, having invested £100 in De La Warr’s voyage.51 Although being poisoned by Spaniards in the Azores was not a common fate – if indeed it happened at all – there were many other hazards to deter would-be adventurers. As well as storms, pirates and shipwreck, a host of diseases threatened seafarers. Chief among them was scurvy, which Sir Richard Hawkins (son of John) called ‘the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners’; he had seen 10,000 men ‘consumed of this disease’ during his twenty years at sea. After just six weeks at sea, a lack of vitamin C could result in lethargy, aching joints, swelling and bruises, which would soon progress to bleeding and rotting gums, teeth falling out, old wounds reopening and eventually fatal internal haemorrhaging.52
John Anthony, with his long experience at sea, was not deterred. Nor was the principal investor in the voyage and part-owner of the ship, Jacob Braems, who was taking quite a gamble on the venture, claiming that he had had to invest more than he ‘intended or could well spare’ to make up for others dropping out.53 Braems was a merchant from Sandwich, where he held the position of Customer, and he also operated in Dover. His family was of Flemish origin. His great-grandfather Jasper had come to England from Cassileberg near Dunkirk during Queen Mary’s reign. One of his ancestors was said to have been secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor for the province of Flanders.54 As well as setting out the ship, Braems also undertook to pay all the men’s wages on their return. The other investors ranged from Lord Zouche, who apart from providing the ship itself invested £200 in the enterprise, to more minor players, such as the ship’s steward, Francis Augur, who ventured ‘victuals, goods and commodities’, including twenty hogs, men’s and women’s clothes, embroidered gloves and soap. Braems estimated the entire cargo to be worth between £900 and £1,100.
As well as the ‘sufferings and danger incident to actions of this Nature’ there was also the threat of the ‘cruelty’ of the ‘Virginian Monopolists’. Braems feared that they might put an embargo on the voyage, or not allow them to trade in tobacco or sassafras, ‘a kind of wood of most pleasant and sweet smell, and of most rare virtues in physic for the cure of many diseases’, which were the main commodities they hoped to obtain.55 Outlining his project to Lord Zouche, Braems attempted to circumvent the Virginia Company’s strictures by promising that if the voyage resulted in ‘any extraordinary benefit which may seem any way hurtful to the Company or Colony’, he and the other adventurers would make a compensatory payment. In closing with the hope that ‘this intended voyage may be so prosperous as our desires and purposes therein are honest and lawful’, the merchant protested too much.56
The voyage was further delayed when the ship’s Captain, Thomas Andrews, died during the winter of 1618–9. His brother-in-law, Walter Upton, was mooted as a possible replacement, but Lord Zouche impressed on Warde that a ‘man of experience and sufficiency’ was needed. As it happened, Upton was more than happy to remain at home. Eventually, a gentleman of London, John Fenner, was appointed, and encouraged to invest in the voyage himself.57 The ship’s master was to be Henry Bacon, who had just returned from Guiana with Sir Walter Ralegh. Lord Zouche granted the Silver Falcon a warrant to travel to Virginia on 15 February and the ship duly set sail from Dover on 2 March 1619.58 There were twenty-five men on board; John Anthony was one of them.
What might John Anthony have expected to find on the other side of the Atlantic? The Virginia colony had been established twelve years previously when Jamestown was founded in 1607. Life there was precarious. Many of the early settlers were gentlemen or skilled craftsmen, not accustomed to, or willing to perform, the hard labour required to plant and harvest corn. During the ‘starving time’ of 1609–10, the colonists resorted to eating snakes, rats and dogs. Some even turned to cannibalism, feeding ‘on the corpses of dead men, and one who had gotten insatiable, out of custom to that food, could not be restrained until such time as he was executed for it’. Another man ‘murdered his wife, ripped the
Child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food’. There were two hundred people in Jamestown in October 1609; in May 1610, there were only sixty and by 1615, 900 men and women had died in the colony. As well as hunger, there was disease; many succumbed to dysentery and malaria. Others were the victims of Native American arrows, or worse. In December 1607, a labourer named George Cassen was captured, stripped naked and tied to a tree. His fingers were cut off one by one, the skin was scraped from his head and face, and finally he was disembowelled and burnt.59 Despite such horrors, the Virginia Company continued to promote their enterprise and encourage new settlers and investors.
When the Silver Falcon sailed there were no Africans living in Virginia. The first arrived in August 1619, when John Rolfe bought twenty at Point Comfort, near Jamestown, from the Cornish privateer Captain John Colyn Jope of the White Lion. Jope had, in concert with Daniel Elfrith of the Treasurer, captured the Africans off the coast of Mexico from a Portuguese ship called the São João Bautista, which was coming from Angola.60 Although the first Africans to arrive in Virginia had been enslaved by the Portuguese, and purchased by Rolfe, once in the colony their status, and that of those who arrived soon after, remained undefined. Jack, an African who arrived in Charles City County, Virginia in about 1636, possessed a contract proving his status to be an indentured servant, not a slave.61 Anthony Johnson, a black man living with his wife Mary on Virginia’s Eastern shore in the 1650s, was a free man and owned his own slaves.62 Legislation clearly identifying Africans as slaves was not passed in the colonies until the 1660s. Some of these measures forbade inter-racial marriage and asserted that baptism did not confer freedom, which suggests that, before these laws were passed, marriages had taken place between English and Africans, and that converting to Christianity might have set some Africans free.63
In the early days of the colony, some of the Africans in Virginia had travelled there from England. John Phillip, the other African who sailed with Mainwaring, told the Virginia court in 1624 that he had been christened in England twelve years previously.64 In 1667, a man named Fernando asserted that he had lived in England for many years before coming to Virginia.65 The Africans listed in the early ‘musters’ of the inhabitants of Virginia in February 1625, such as ‘Antonio, a negro’ who arrived on the James in 1621, ‘Mary, negro woman’ on the Margaret & John, in 1622 and ‘John Pedro, negro’ on the Swan in 1623, may have also come directly from England.66
On average it took eleven-and-a-half weeks to sail from England to Virginia, so the Silver Falcon should have arrived there in June 1619.67 Had the voyage been completed as intended, John Anthony, a free man employed as a sailor, would have been the first African to arrive in an English colony in mainland North America.*
But the Silver Falcon never reached Virginia. ‘Near the Bermudas they met with a frigate of the West Indies and had trucke with her’, exchanging their goods for ‘upwards of 20,000lb weight’ of tobacco.68 Bermuda, some seven hundred miles south-east of Virginia, had been settled by the English since 1609, when the Sea Venture was shipwrecked there en route to the new colony, an episode that inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest.69 By 1619 it had a total population of just under a thousand, including at least forty Africans, most of whom had been brought to the island by privateers sponsored by the Earl of Warwick, one of Bermuda’s major landholders.70 The Silver Falcon does not seem to have called at the island itself. Given it was provisioned for a much longer voyage, perhaps there was no need.
While Braems claimed the tobacco was acquired in a fair trade, one Francisco de Conynge, of Seville, alleged it had been stolen from a Spanish ship. This was not a far-fetched accusation, despite Braems’s assertion that they had a ‘contract of the merchants and others of the company of the said frigate’ with details of the legal exchange of goods. Bermuda was becoming a popular base for attacking Spanish ships passing the island on their way back to Europe. In 1613, the Duke of Medina Sidonia (who had commanded the Spanish Armada in 1588) wrote to Philip III that the Spanish should uproot the English from the island because it was an ideal place ‘from which to overrun everything on the route of the fleets and armadas, because . . . everything that comes from the Indies must pass to the south or the north of it’. By 1620, the island was ‘much frequented with men of war and pirates, with whom the inhabitants there are grown in great liking, by reason of the commodities they bring unto them’. One Bermudan minister even commended the ‘robbing of Spaniards’ because they were ‘limbs of the Antichrist’.71 At only 40 tons the Silver Falcon was much smaller than the usual transatlantic trading vessels, which typically weighed 100 tons or more. Braems’s choice of a small ship suggests piratical activity may have secretly been on the agenda from the start.72
While Braems insisted that tobacco was the only commodity the Silver Falcon had brought back from Bermuda, some of his investors claimed she returned ‘richly laden with tobacco, plate, pearls and other rich goods worth some £40,000’. They were sure they had been cheated of a huge profit from these glamorous goods, which must have been sequestered in some remote port in the west of England.73 Plate, or silver, and pearls were typical West Indian cargoes found on Spanish shipping. Considering the commodities the Silver Falcon had aboard when she left Dover, it is scarcely believable that such a valuable haul could have been obtained in a fair trade.
Even more suspiciously, instead of returning to her home port of Dover, the Silver Falcon now docked at Flushing in the Netherlands in mid-June 1619. Flushing, or Vlissingen, was one of the principal ports of the Dutch state of Zeeland. Situated on the island of Walcheren, at the mouth of the River Scheldt, it controlled the approach to Antwerp. The town had been held by the English from 1585 to 1616 as part of their alliance with the Dutch against Spain, so English mariners were familiar with the port, and many English people lived there. Braems denied that he had planned to have the ship dock in Flushing. He was backed up by his younger brother, Arnold, who was adamant the decision had been made ‘by the advice, consent and direction of the Master and company then in her’ and not Braems, for he was ‘not at Dover when the said ship passed by to Flushing, but was at London or in his way to Dover, not then knowing any thing of the said ship’s return’.74 Their cousin, Daniel Braems, kept to the family script, confirming that Jacob had indeed been at his house in London at the time. If this were so, had Captain Fenner and the ship’s master, Henry Bacon, turned to piracy and absconded to Flushing to avoid the difficult questions that would surely await them on their return to Dover? Or had Braems agreed this itinerary with Captain Fenner, in an effort to sidestep the ‘Virginia Monopolists’ whose interference he feared at the voyage’s outset? Whatever the truth of the matter, once Braems learnt that the Silver Falcon was in Flushing, he hurried across the Channel to meet her.
Flushing, where the Silver Falcon mysteriously docked in 1619.
Braems’s factor in Flushing, John Vandhurst, paid the customs required for the ship to be unloaded. Thomas Lawley, an English merchant based in Holland, agreed to buy half the tobacco on board for seven shillings a pound, but would not pay for it until he had sold it on.75 Lawley, Vandhurst and Braems then made a bargain with some merchants of Amsterdam, who agreed to purchase the tobacco at eight shillings and sixpence a pound. They looked set to make a fine profit, and Braems boasted that his investors would have a tenfold return on their investment.
Unfortunately for Braems, Lord Zouche was incensed when he heard that his pinnace had gone to Flushing ‘contrary to my order and the command I gave’. He immediately dispatched the Mayor of Dover, William Warde, to find the ship and ‘see what goods she hath and to get into your hands and bring on with you to Dover so much thereof as ye shall think fitting in your discretion’. Accompanied by Thomas Fulnetby, the lieutenant of Deal Castle, who had also invested in the voyage, Warde tracked down the wayward vessel and confiscated one hundred and fifty rolls of the best tobacco on Zouche’s behalf. W
hen the Amsterdam merchants found out, they backed out of their deal with Braems. Even though he offered them ‘the value of the said 150 rolls of tobacco and one thousand pounds Flemish more to hold their said bargain’, they ‘utterly refused so to do’.76
To make matters worse, before Braems was able to sell any of the Silver Falcon’s cargo to anyone else, it was arrested, on a procuration sent from Spain, as ‘stolen goods’, after Jacob Dragoboard claimed ownership on behalf of Francisco de Conynge of Seville. Braems suffered a further blow in 1621 when, ‘after the peace expired between the Hollanders and the Spaniards’, the ‘officer of the States of the Netherlands did attach and arrest . . . the ships lading as Spanish goods’. The tobacco, much of it ‘rotten, spoiled and nothing worth’, lay under embargo in a Flushing cellar, while the English, the Spanish and the Dutch disputed its ownership. As Daniel Braems put it, Lord Zouche’s ‘taking and carrying away of the said tobacco’ was a ‘great hindrance and loss’ and ultimately led ‘to the overthrow of the gain of the said voyage’.
Jacob Braems was not only taken to court in The Hague. In England, his investors were far from happy, despite his attempts to pay them off. Over the next few years, he became embroiled in legal proceedings in the Chancery Court at Dover – where the case was presided over by none other than Sir Henry Mainwaring – as well as the High Court of Admiralty and the Exchequer Court in London.77
By mid-September 1619, John Anthony had returned to Dover aboard the Silver Falcon. The dispute between Lord Zouche and Jacob Braems, which would have a significant bearing on his future, grew increasingly bitter, and was not to be resolved overnight. Zouche ordered William Warde ‘to seize and make stay of all such wines, pepper, currants, tobacco and other merchandises’ found in Jacob Braems’s cellar ‘bought or exchanged for the goods or merchandise which were brought into Flushing which were in the pinnace called the Silver Falcon’ and ‘to seize and make stay of the said pinnace itself called the Silver Falcon which lieth in your harbour’.
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