Helen Bell's Reviews > The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls

There have always been people who are prepared to treat other people as commodities. Generally they come from the underbelly of society; people who find themselves able to live with profiting from the misery of others by trafficking them. Yet in the sixteenth century it developed into a gentleman adventurer's trade across Europe, with Spanish, Portuguese and thanks to men like John Hawkyns, increasingly English/British involvement. And with the exception of France expressing a (perhaps partly philosophical) condemnation of the slave trade in 1571, it was largely state sponsored or supported.
I picked this book up hoping to better understand how slavers reconciled their behaviour, but the book wasn't able to clarify this - largely because treating people as commodities was not obviously ever questioned by the key players. What was noticeable was that the attitude of people like Hawkyns spilled over into the way they treated all human beings, summing their value to them personally at any given time and treating them accordingly. Thus there were moments when Hawkyns would be generous to enemies; more than once he let the crew of a plundered ship take their emptied vessel and resume sailing, having more than enough ships of his own. At other times it was who you knew or what you knew that were your protection. After the disastrous battle at St Juan de Ulua, the men Hawkins had rescued from the rest of the English fleet were in danger of starvation on board his one remaining ship, and as a result were borderline mutinous. His solution was to abandon 114 men and boys ashore, with little in the way of food and drink but leaving them with some good to trade, should they reach civilisation. He kept on board his gentlemen companions and the most useful crew members - and his 12 remaining slaves, as valuable as currency on the journey home. Few of the 114 ever made it back; ironically, many of them were cast into slavery themselves.
There is a little light shed on the motivation of the Spanish and Portuguese in starting the trade in slaves from Africa. Having arrived in the Americas the Spanish had set about enslaving the local Indians, only to find they were too delicate to take the ill treatment and the workload they expected of them, and once aware of the invader's intentions, too good at evading capture.
The rights to claim 'new' lands and to control Atlantic trade had been split by successive Popes between Spain to the west and Portugal to the east, and the Portuguese had access to what Spanish settlers sought - hardier slaves from Africa. While they began by hunting and capturing slaves themselves, this rapidly created a local industry of warring tribes fighting and selling captured enemies. It is entirely reasonable to deduce, given the existence of earlier African cultures, that the desire for slaves in the Americas trammelled Africa into a dependence on slavery, much as the market for illegal drugs in first world countries traps nations like Afghanistan into dependence on opium production. Hazelwood details the devastating impact of the slave trade on Africa, reflected in many of the problems that face its nations today, in a succinct but powerful summary in the epilogue.
Finally, I was interested in understanding how Elizabeth I (a character I largely admired, mainly for surviving the complex political intrigues that dogged her entire life) could endorse the slave trade that would in the following centuries drive Britain's wealth, and its shame. Again this book couldn't answer that, so it necessitates reading between the lines. There is no indication that she had a vision of the wealth it would in future generate. England's early forays into slaving seemed to be an accidental by-product of privateers she commissioned to disrupt the hold Spain and Portugal had over trade in the Atlantic. Judging from Hawkyns' experiences it came with a heavy cost as well as a significant profit. It seems likely Elizabeth was motivated more by politics and survival - the two major driving forces in her life. Her own experiences and close escapes, endured since childhood, seem to have hardened her to the suffering of others rather than giving her empathy.
Hazelwood is less forgiving of the key players in the slave trade than most previous biographers of Hawkyns and Elizabeth, and with some justification. While it is easy to say that contemporary attitudes made profiting from slavery tolerable to enlightened and educated people, there is evidence that across Europe there was opposition to slavery even in the sixteenth century. But their voices were too few. In the face of rulers like Elizabeth I, one of the first to speak of black people in England as a problem, 'of which kind there are already here to manie,' and to propose repatriation, it would be decades more before attitudes to slavery saw meaningful change.