Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  114 TNA, SP 12/275, f. 160; CSPD, 1598–1601, p. 481.

  115 Isom–Verhaaren, Allies with the Infidel.

  116 TNA, SP 12/275, f. 152; CSPD, 1598–1601, p. 478.

  117 Zemon Davis, Trickster’s Travels, p. 65.

  118 Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. Pory, I, p. 3.

  119 Matar, Britain and Barbary, pp. 27–8, 40.

  120 Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred’s Poultry’, p. 124, n. 10 first pointed out the possibility that the former woman was Fillis.

  121 Rosemary Lane (formerly Hogg Lane; the street was named Rosemary Lane in the early seventeenth century, and renamed Royal Mint Street in 1850) was situated a little to the north east of the Tower of London, about half a mile south east of St Botolph’s Church. The death of an individual in the street was not unique. In the period 1583–1625 covered by the parish clerk’s memorandum books 13 men and 12 other women died in the street. Fifteen of these 25 were described as poor, and eight as vagrants. Two died in Rosemary Lane itself: just a few weeks before Mary the ‘Blacke Moore’ was buried, on 22 October 1623, ‘a poor man . . . whose name we could not learn’ was found there dead, and the year before, on 13 December 1622, ‘a poor woman, being a vagrant, who died in the Street in Rosemarie Lane, was buried’.

  122 She may have been the same ‘Mary Peter Blacamore woman’, who appeared before the London Bridewell Court on 9 June 1619, brought in by the Constable from Holborn, accused of vagrancy. She was described as ‘an old guest’, which suggested this was not her first stay in the prison, and as ‘unruly’: BCB, VI, f. 127r.

  Chapter 7

  1 The word ‘maafa’ was used to refer to the slave trade by Marimba Ani in his 1998 book Let the Circle Be Unbroken. See also Dagbovie, African American History Reconsidered, p. 191.

  2 LMA, MS 04429/1 (St Mildred Poultry, 1 January 1611). See also Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, p. 111. These are their names as recorded in the London parish register when Jaquoah was baptised. They might well have been spelt or pronounced quite differently at home.

  3 Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, pp. 273, 290, 294–5.

  4 Villault, A relation of the coast of Africa called Guinee, pp. 77. Towerson, noted the ‘very high trees all along the shore’ in 1555: Hakluyt, VI, p. 182; Jean Barbot also mentioned the large trees, adding that the eastern bank was covered with mangroves: Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, p. 264

  5 Hakluyt, VI, p. 158.

  6 Zeguebos was the name recorded by Pacheco Pereira in 1507: Hair, ‘Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea Coast’, p. 257 and ‘An Ethnolinguistic Inventory of the Upper Guinea coast before 1700: Part II’, p. 227. De Marees, Description and historical account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, ed. Van Dantzig and Jones, p. 14, n. 5; Massing, ‘Mapping The Malagueta Coast’, p. 350; Dalby & Hair, “Le langaige de Guynee”: A Sixteenth Century Vocabulary from the Pepper Coast’, pp. 174–91.

  7 Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, pp. 264–9.

  8 Europeans In West Africa, 1450–1560, ed. Blake, I, p. 167.

  9 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Tale, lines 580–582; O’Connell, The Book of Spice, pp. 121–125; De Marees, Description and historical account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, ed. Van Dantzig and Jones, p. 14, n. 4.

  10 Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold, p. 9.

  11 Hakluyt, VI, p. 147.

  12 Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, p. 276.

  13 Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, pp. 12–13, 20–22.

  14 Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold, pp. 85–6.

  15 Ibid., pp. 2–3, 107, 125–6, 157, 169; Centers, ‘Fourteenth Century Normans in West Africa’; Hakluyt, VI, p. 238. This trading contact with Guinea may explain the presence of an African servant in Sir William Wynter’s London household (see Chapter 4).

  16 Hakluyt, II, p. 700. Morgan, ‘Hawkins, William (b. before 1490, d. 1554/5)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This is the first known English voyage to Guinea that set out from England. English merchants resident in Spain and Portugal may have travelled to Africa earlier. See Ungerer, The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, p. 28.

  17 Tong, ‘Captain Thomas Wyndham’, pp. 221–228; Thomas, H., The Slave Trade, p. 154; Hakluyt, VI, pp. 145–154.

  18 Hakluyt, VI, pp. 158, 163–4; Slack, ‘Judde, Sir Andrew (c.1492–1558)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  19 Appleby, ‘Towerson, William (d. 1584)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  20 The merchants were William Brayley, Gilbert Smyth, Nicholas Spycer and John Daricott of Exeter, John Younge of Colyton, Devon, Richard Dodderidge of Barnstaple, and Anthony Dassell and Nicholas Turner of the City of London. Their remit covered the entirety of the coastline of modern–day Senegal, from St Louis to Bakau: TNA, C 66/1312, ff. 41–43 (Patent Rolls, 3 May 1588); Calendar of Patent Rolls, 30 Elizabeth, ed. Neal, p. 84; Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade, p. 139.

  21 Gregory was also to pay Don Antonio his cut of the profits. Scott, English, Scottish and Irish Joint–Stock Companies, II, p. 10; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 34 Elizabeth, ed. Neal, p. 45.

  22 McDermott, ‘Howard, Charles, second Baron Howard of Effingham and first earl of Nottingham (1536–1624)’ and Hicks, ‘Stanhope, John, first Baron Stanhope (c.1540–1621)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  23 Hair, ‘Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650’, p. 46.

  24 Pieter Van Den Broeke’s Journal of Voyages to Cape Verde, Guinea and Angola, ed. La Fleur, p. 4.

  25 William Rutter called at River Cestos in the Primrose on 3 April 1562: Hakluyt, VI, pp. 258–261; a voyage was proposed to River Cestos for ivory and pepper in 1582: CSPD, 1581–1590, p. 59. TNA, SP12/154/24.

  26 Jobson, The Golden Trade, pp. 88–9.

  27 The English resumed the slave trade c.1641 in which year the Star delivered a cargo of Africans to Barbados: Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, p. 119; Voyages: The Trans–Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Voyage 21876. See further discussion in Chapter 3.

  28 Hakluyt’s account talks of Hawkins’s dealings with the king of ‘Castros’ in 1567. This was misidentified as Cestos by Walter Rodney, in his A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, p. 53. See Massing, ‘The Mane, the Decline of Mali, and Mandinka Expansion towards the South Windward Coast,’ p. 52 and Hair An ethnolinguistic inventory of the Upper Guinea coast before 1700, Part I’, pp. 49, 61.

  29 Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, p. 115; Knutson, ‘What’s a Guy like John Davies Doing in a Seminar on Theater History?’, nn.1–2, notes online at: http://ualr.edu/rlknutson/davies.html (accessed 3 April 2017).

  30 Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, pp. 121, 266–7; Blake, ‘The English Guinea Company, 1618–1660’, p. 17; TNA, C2/Jas I/D10/61 (Court of Chancery, Davies vs. Kilburne, 15 October 1622).

  31 Knutson, ‘What’s a Guy like John Davies Doing in a Seminar on Theater History?’ p. 2, n. 4, notes online at: http://ualr.edu/rlknutson/davies.html (accessed 3 April 2017).

  32 Pieter Van Den Broeke’s Journal of Voyages to Cape Verde, Guinea and Angola, ed. La Fleur, p. 48.

  33 Blake, ‘The farm of the Guinea Trade in 1631’, pp. 92–3; Porter, ‘The Crispe Family and the African Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, p. 58; Blake, ‘The English Guinea Company, 1618–1660’, p. 17.

  34 Blake, ‘English Trade with the Portuguese Empire in West Africa, 1581–1629’, p. 324; TNA, HCA 14/39, no. 85.

  35 The port books for the 1610 voyage do not survive, but it seems likely that the cargo was similar to those recorded on the Abigail in January 1608: Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, p. 117; TNA, E 190/14/4 (Port book, London overseas outwards, 25 December 1607–25 December 1608).

  36 McDermott, ‘Hudson, Henry (d. 1611)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  37 Trinity House of Deptford Transact
ions, ed. Harris, p. 151; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, p.234. Scammell, ‘Mutiny in British Ships, c.1500–1750’, p. 349.

  38 LMA, MS 30045/1, f. 9v (Corporation of Trinity House, Transactions, 1 January 1611); Trinity House of Deptford Transactions, ed. Harris, p. 7.

  39 LMA, MS 04429/1 (St Mildred Poultry, 1 January 1611).

  40 Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, p. 122; TNA, C 2/JasI/K7/12 (Court of Chancery, Kilburne v Watts, 9 July 1622); TNA, C2/Jas I/D10/61(Court of Chancery, Davies vs. Kilburne, 15 October 1622).

  41 See Towers’ testimony in the High Court of Admiralty: HCA 1/47/290; Knutson, A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, p. 117.

  42 Blake, ‘The English Guinea Company, 1618–1660’, p. 24; Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, p. 268.

  43 LMA, MS 07644 (St Mary Woolchurch Haw, undated, between entries for 24 April and 20 May 1597).

  44 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 5, Scene 1; Returns of Aliens, ed. Kirk and Kirk, III, p. 385. See also The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘belonging, vbl, n.’, OED Online.

  45 Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, pp. 115, 124, n.14.

  46 Hakluyt, VI, pp. 176, 217–8, 225, 245. Lok and Gainsh had taken the Africans in 1554, arriving with them in London in 1555. They have been cited as the ‘first’ Africans to come to England by: Little, Negroes in Britain, p. 166; Scobie, Black Britannia, p. 5; Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833, p. 6; and Walvin, Black and White: the Negro and English society 1555–1945 (1973), p. 7.

  47 Farrington, Trading Places, pp. 10–22. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company, pp. 21, 209.

  48 Hakluyt, VI, pp. 205, 207.

  49 TNA, HCA 24/59, ff. 29–46; TNA, REQ 2/353/44; BL Lansdowne MS 158, ff. 131–137.

  50 Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, pp. 26, 38.

  51 Northrup, ‘Africans, Early European Contacts and the Emergent Disapora’, p. 52.

  52 Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, p. 33; Blake, Europeans in West Africa, p. 124; There is some confusion as to which Oba was ruling at this time and whether the war was with the Idah or the Uromi: Bradbury, ‘Chronological Problems in The Study Of Benin History’, pp. 263–28; Ekeh, ‘Benin, The Western Niger Delta, and the Development of the Atlantic World’, p. 20, n. 36.

  53 Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652, ed. Raven–Hart, pp. 64, 70, 84, 88.

  54 Edward Blitheman to Sir Thomas Smith, 20 February 1615: Letters Received by the East India Company ed. Danvers and Foster, II, p. 331.

  55 Hakluyt, VI, pp. 185, 187.

  56 Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652, ed. Raven–Hart, p. 23.

  57 This Gabriel Towerson was the tenth child of William Towerson (d. 1584) who conducted some of the voyages to Guinea discussed earlier. Alsop, ‘Towerson, Gabriel (bap. 1576, d. 1623)’, Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography.

  58 Ibid.; Hakluyt, VI, pp. 205, 207, 218; Alsop, ‘The career of William Towerson, Guinea trader’, pp. 45–82. For a detailed analysis of the Guinean merchants’ interactions with Towerson, see Smith, C. L., Black Africans in the British Imagination, pp. 29–48. Binne had returned by June 1558; see n. 94 below. Anthony probably returned too. An African of that name is mentioned in the account of William Rutter’s voyage of 1562: Hakluyt, VI, p. 260. Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, p. 67, quote Archivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, CC–1–106–11 in which a Portuguese agent reported in 1562 that the English vessels had carried back to Guinea two Africans who had been in London when King Philip was there. Philip had been in England from June 1554 until August 1555 and again from March to July 1557 (Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor, pp. 95, 191, 207, 312).

  59 The Troublesome Voyage of Captain Edward Fenton, ed. Taylor, p. 56.

  60 Vaughan, A.T., Transatlantic Encounters, pp. 11–12.

  61 MacGaffey, ‘Dialogues of the deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic coast of Africa’, p. 253.

  62 Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, pp. 20–21.

  63 Vaughan, A.T., Transatlantic Encounters, p. 13.

  64 TNA, HCA 24/59, ff. 29–46; TNA, REQ 2/353/44; BL Lansdowne MS 158, ff. 131–137. See also APC, 1592, pp. 128–9, 131–2.

  65 Hakluyt, VI, p. 273.

  66 TNA, HCA 24/59, ff 49–51; TNA, REQ 2/353/44; BL Lansdowne MS 158, ff. 131–137. Ungerer, ‘The presence of Africans in Elizabethan England and the performance of Titus Andronicus at Burley–on–the–Hill, 1595/96’, pp. 19–55. Richard Kelly also appears in an account of the voyage of Richard Rainolds and Thomas Dassell to Guinea in 1591 in Hakluyt, VII, pp. 90–99.

  67 Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652, ed. Raven–Hart, pp. 54, 83; Laughton, ‘Saris, John (1580/81–1643)’, rev. Trevor Dickie, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  68 Edward Blitheman to Sir Thomas Smith, 20 February 1615: Letters Received by the East India Company ed. Danvers and Foster, II, p. 329.

  69 Isaac Kilburne referred to Davies ‘not having any [children] of his own’ in October 1622: TNA, C2/Jas I/D10/61(Court of Chancery, Davies vs. Kilburne, 15 October 1622). Knutson, ‘What’s a Guy like John Davies Doing in a Seminar on Theater History?’, n.2.

  70 LMA, MS 07644, (St Mary Woolchurch Haw, 29 June 1612) The next day Davies paid £1 2s. 6d. ‘for breaking the ground in the middle Ile for Mrs Davis and for the knell and peales’ LMA, MS 1013 (St Mary Woolchurch Haw Churchwardens’ Accounts, 30 June 1612).

  71 Hakluyt, VI, p. 176.

  72 BL Lansdowne MS 158, ff. 131–7.

  73 Terry, A voyage to East–India, pp. 20–21.

  74 ‘Smythe, Sir Thomas (c.1558–1625), of Philpott Lane, London and Bounds Place, Bidborough, Kent’, The History of Parliament.

  75 A third Virginian, named Abraham, was buried at St Dionis Backchurch in 1616. Vaughan, A. T., Transatlantic Encounters, pp. 52, 93.

  76 Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, ed. Adams, p. 210, n. 444; TNA, SP 12/262/104 (Declaration of John Hill of Stonehouse, Plymouth 1597); CSPD, 1595–1597, p. 381. See also Beer, Bess: The life of Lady Ralegh, p. 124; Vaughan, A.T., ‘American Indians in England (act. c.1500–1615)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Vaughan, A.T., Transatlantic Encounters, pp. 11–12, 22–24, pp. 30–33, 35. Lee, ‘Caliban’s Visits to England’, pp. 337–9.

  77 Von Bulow, ‘Journey through England and Scotland Made by Lupold von Wedel in the Years 1584 and 1585’, p. 251; Ford, ‘Wedel, Lupold von (1544–1615)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  78 Sir James Bagg to Edward Nicholas, 18 January 1628, TNA, SP 16/334/50; CSPD, 1636–1637, pp. 177–179; Matar Britain and Barbary, p. 122.

  79 Vaughan, A.T., Transatlantic Encounters, p. 11.

  80 This was what William Towerson told the Guinea traders who asked after them: Hakluyt, VI, p. 200.

  81 Von Bulow, ‘Journey through England and Scotland Made by Lupold von Wedel in the Years 1584 and 1585’, p. 251. Von Wedel himself acquired an African servant during his stay in England – see his entries for 24 and 28 April 1585 on p. 269.

  82 Salmon, ‘Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and the origins of Algonkian Linguistics’, p. 149; Vaughan, A.T., Transatlantic Encounters, p. 23.

  83 Ibid., p.22. Salmon, ‘Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and the origins of Algonkian Linguistics’, pp. 151, 145; Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Barber, p. 126n. The alphabet itself survives in two copies, one at the British Library, (BL Add MS 6782, f. 337) the other in the library at Westminster School. For a reproduction, and analysis of the letters, see Stedall, ‘Symbolism, Combinations, and Visual Imagery in the Mathematics of Thomas Harriot’, pp. 381–4.

  84 Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652, ed. Raven–Hart, p. 99.

  85 Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry’, p. 111.

  86 Hakluyt, VI, pp. 218–9.

  87 Terry, A voyage to East–India, p. 21.

  88 Bef
ore Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652, ed. Raven–Hart, p. 64, 66.

  89 An account of this voyage was included in Samuel Purchas’s 1625 compendium of voyages, but it omitted events prior to the arrival at the Cape of Good Hope in October 1614. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrims, pp. 524–527; Makepeace, ‘Middleton, David (d. 1615)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Richard Rowe, master of the Thomas, to the East India Company, 21 February, 1615: Letters Received by the East India Company ed. Danvers and Foster, II, pp. 333–4.

  90 Edward Blitheman to Sir Thomas Smith, 20 February 1615: Letters Received by the East India Company ed. Danvers and Foster, II, p. 329.

  91 Barbot, A Description of the coasts of North and South–Guinea, p.132; Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, pp. 271, 284–5, n. 22.

  92 Barbot on Guinea, ed. Hair, Jones and Law, I, pp. 266, 268.

  93 Edward Blitheman to Sir Thomas Smith, 20 February 1615: Letters Received by the East India Company ed. Danvers and Foster, II, p. 329.

  94 Hakluyt, VI, p. 217, 225. At this point, George appears to have been left behind in Shama due to a skirmish with the Portuguese.

  95 Binne had returned at some point since his absence was noted in January 1557, perhaps even with Towerson himself, who refers to ‘our Negro’ a little earlier in his account of the 1558 voyage: Hakluyt, VI, pp. 240, 245.

  96 The sources disagree about whether Coree’s armour was made of copper or brass. Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652, ed. Raven–Hart, pp. 72, 75, 88, 114. L. E. Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early–Modern England (2001), p. 90.