John Hawkyns’ early career of pillage and plunder embodied the avaricious character of the early English slave trade. In The Queen’s Slave Trader (2004), Nick Hazlewood records that the lure of great fortune significantly motivated Hawkyns’ voyages across the Atlantic. However, key elements from Hawkyns’ life suggest that he was not rapacious, but rather, a glory-seeking warrior-pirate. He was a warrior who enjoyed perilous adventures and capturing slaves for the sake of the conquest. Understanding Hawkyns this way, reveals the “pioneering” nature of early English slavers at sea.

This essay primarily draws from evidence in Hazlewood’s book: a well-researched account of Hawkyns’ life as a slave trader and naval officer. The book gathers details relevant to understanding Hawkyns, from his familial history and hometown (Plymouth, England), to each of his three slave voyages from 1562 to 1569. Hazlewood incorporates Hawkyns’ personal accounts; those of his crew; and Spanish and Portuguese records of their encounters with him. The book lacks African accounts of John Hawkyns. Broadly, Hazlewood’s biography helpfully illustrates the violent, cruel nature of Hawkyns’ life in Elizabethan England. But more, it reveals Hawkyns’ expert navigation of both English society and the high seas, both as slave trader and admiral.

To be sure, profit motivated Hawkyns to set sail. Had his first slave voyage failed, it is hard to imagine Elizabeth I and William Cecil backing him with the same enthusiasm that they later displayed (p.86). But three types of evidence show Hawkyns emphasising factors beyond the financial: his worldview; why he went on slave voyages; and his ambitions.

Hawkyns enjoyed “the thrill of the kill,” Hazlewood notes (p.67). But he also took pleasure in hunting slaves, as if the hunt were sport. Hawkyns use of the word “prey” to describe his captured slaves is one such piece of evidence (p.69). This contrasts with the well-known view of slaves as commodities in the Atlantic slave trade[1], and from the general view of slaves as being obediently subordinate to their master.[2] Hawkyns himself never owned a slave, despite hunting many; nor did he attempt to establish trade with African kingdoms to commodify slavery, despite the Portuguese showing this was possible a century earlier (p.32). Yet, not only could he exert more power than the Portuguese, but he also demonstrated his diplomatic prowess with the Spanish. He seized over sixty thousand ducats and nine hundred Africans from raids on traders, five ships from the Portuguese when pillaging Santo Domingo, and tortured the Portuguese on multiple occasions (pp.67, 106, 205), whilst the Spanish made “numerous references to Hawkyns’s good conduct on Hispaniola” (p.80). Thus, Hawkyns had demonstrable ability to commodify and gain even greater profit from the slave trade, but did not do so, preferring to hunt for slaves and marching on African villages instead (p.200). In other words, Hawkyns seems to have viewed his captured slaves as trophies.

Hawkyns’ description of West Africans as a “subhuman species” reinforces his game-like view of these raids and captures (p.63). Moreover, when he became Treasurer of the Royal Navy, Hawkyns missed “the thrilling demands of the sea,” (p.320). Hawkyns seems also to have found avenues to enrich himself in the post. Cecil writes that Hawkyns profited from abusing his power: that Hawkyns was “half in the bargain” with “the shipwright and storekeeper at Chapman's Deptford yard” (p.321). All this further points towards Hawkyns’ desire for the enjoyment he gained from the voyages he went on and the pillaging he did then.

This inherent pleasure in cruel capture and pillaging does not seem to be limited to Hawkyns. Hazlewood writes that “the prospect of snaring Africans on the coast produced an adrenaline rush” on-board (p.101), shedding light on the mentality sailors had in these slave raids.

The second point to note is the unnecessary nature of Hawkyns going on slave voyages. Hawkyns had ample financial means to avoid taking on one of the “most uncomfortable professions possible” (p.315). His birth into one of the wealthiest families in Plymouth likely secured for him both the potential of an extremely comfortable future, as well as the right contacts to succeed socially, and even a pardon after he killed a barber (p.3).

His individual wealth was clearly plentiful before his slave voyages. He received around 10,000 pounds in assets just from dissolving the business partnership him and his brother had in 1559.[3] A country gentleman in Elizabethan England had an income of 50-150 pounds a year, and William Cecil’s salary was 4000 pounds a year.[4] 10k pounds would be equivalent to more than 9 centuries of salary of a skilled tradesman.[5] To compare this to today, the real purchasing power of 10,000 pounds then is 4 million pounds today, and the relative economic status of 10,000 pounds then is 102 million pounds today.[6] Thus, Hawkyns certainly had the financial means to avoid going into the slave trade.

Third is Hawkyns’ ambitions. From a young age, Hawkyns looked down on his social inferiors (p.16), and decamped to London in search of more power and wealth (p.23). To be sure, a good part of his mixing with the political elite was for financial gain, but it is hard to imagine someone so well-off further engaging in political risks and perils at sea just to further himself financially (p.27). What is perhaps more likely, given his later career as an admiral,[7] is that John Hawkyns was in search of glory through political ambition – what Hazlewood calls his “lust for power” (p.16). Moreover, religious ambivalence discounts the possibility he voyaged for Protestantism: he attended church in Spanish territory (p.53), whilst simultaneously keeping with the new “puritanical strain” of Protestantism (p.193). Nor does unconditional loyalty to the Crown fully explain his actions, for he previously serviced Spanish ambassadors, and referred to King Phillip II of Spain as his “old master”.[8] Thus, the clearest explanation for his actions was his political ambitions.

A counterview of Hawkyns is that even if we take into account his search for glory, economic cost was still always on the forefront of his mind. His investors were financially savvy, including Sir William Chester – “the extraordinarily wealthy former lord mayor”, and the Earl of Leicester – “the major license holder for the export of undyed cloth, England’s most significant export commodity” (p.91). He could only have attained these sponsors precisely because he had decamped to London in search of more wealth (p.23); even if he had no need for such wealth, he could still be motivated by greed. And his route was meticulous: he was the first Englishman to profit from the triangular trade (p.312).

However, Hawkyns’ slave voyages pale in proportion and commercialisation to the later English slave trade. Although Hawkyns transported “between fifteen hundred and two thousand slaves”, the Royal African Company would transport “more than five thousand Africans a year” by 1680 (pp.313-4). Moreover, the company maximised its profit through gold discovery in West Africa and territorial rights. Neither of these Hawkyns did, despite both the Portuguese having lost power in Africa by 1557, and his ability to assault them viciously: one Blasius da Veiga, lost “his ship, two hundred African slaves, and all his artillery and weapons” to Hawkyns (pp.35, 66). And even if his actions clearly demonstrate a motivation by wealth, so we should understand this in the context of Elizabethan politics: that he would have been much less likely to attain political power without the appropriate financing. Further, the lack of economic demand for slaves, combined with an outsized degree of risk associated with these early slave voyages, brings in a significantly greater non-commercial element to Hawkyns’ slave voyages.

These observations of Hawkyns as a seeker of glory and adventure, in all its cruelty, may shed some light for us in understanding the early English slave trade. That early era certainly had a commercial element to it, but it was also of a “pioneering” and pillaging nature. Indeed, the clumsy and brutal raids lack the systematic nature of trade with African kingdoms that the Portuguese and the subsequent Atlantic slave trade had as a whole (p.32). Hawkyns’ raids, where whole villages were burnt, showed an interest in short-term gain rather than long-term trade, and demonstrated the whole exploratory nature of the early English slave trade (p.200). That Hawkyns, a competent man with a wealth of seafaring experience found pleasure in this cruel career hunting “prey”, combined with his relatively low financial risk in the operation, made him the model captain for these early English adventures.

References:

[1] Uchendu, Victor (1977). “Slaves and Slavery in Igboland, Nigeria”.

[2] Patterson, Owen (1982). “Slavery and Social Death”.

[3] Morgan, Basil (2004). "Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595)".

[4] Nelson, Walter (Retrieved 2023). “Elizabethan Incomes”.

[5] The National Archives (Retrieved 2023). “Currency converter: 1270-2017”.

[6] MeasuringWorth (2023). "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present".

[7] Morgan, Basil (2004). "Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595)".

[8] Ibid.