Istwa Nou

Across the 1560s John Hawkins ran a string of voyages to the Sierra Leone coast and on to the Spanish settlements of the Caribbean mainland. Spain had reserved the American trade to itself and forbade its colonists to deal with foreigners. The colonists wanted labour, Hawkins had it, and they paid in silver and gold. Spanish officials protested and at times resisted with force, and the ships kept arriving. Hawkins sailed with the quiet approval of the English crown, which risked no money it had to admit to and took a share of what came home. That arrangement, a private merchant carrying the exposure and a state supplying cover and legitimacy, is how northern Europe entered the Atlantic slave trade and how it went on operating for two centuries. England arrived late and arrived with the pattern already worked out. Within eighty years English colonists were growing sugar in Barbados with African labour, and the improvised scheme of a Plymouth captain had become a national industry.