Istwa Nou

John Hawkins put together the first English slaving voyage in 1562 after talking with residents of the Canary Islands, who told him that planters on Hispaniola wanted captives and would pay well for them. He carried that intelligence to London and raised money on it. Sir Lionel Ducket and Sir Thomas Lodge were among the merchants who backed him, drawn by the returns being reported out of the Guinea trade. Hawkins sailed with three vessels, the Salomon of 120 tons, the Swallow of 100 tons and a small bark called the Jonas of 40 tons, carrying about a hundred men between them. Everything the English trade later became is present in that small fleet: private capital, a crown that looked away, a route to the African coast and a buyer in the Spanish Caribbean. The island those buyers were sitting on is the island this timeline is about. English slaving began as a scheme to sell people into Hispaniola, and Hispaniola is where it was aimed from the first day.

On the voyage he afterwards called unfortunate, John Hawkins joined a local king in an attack on a town in Guinea said to hold eight thousand people. His men went in with fire and weapons, overran the defenders, and took losses of their own, several killed and many wounded. The immediate haul was 250 prisoners. Overnight the allied king removed his own share, and Hawkins made up the number by other means, finishing with somewhere between 400 and 500 people in the hold. He then set course for the West Indies to sell them, along with the rest of his merchandise, and recover what the expedition had cost. Two things are worth keeping from this. An English gentleman sailing with royal favour was personally burning African towns in the 1560s. And he was doing it as the junior partner of a ruler who out manoeuvred him in the dark and kept the pick of the prisoners. The trade was never one side simply acting upon another.