More on John Hawkins
(Note: This is an addendum to this yearly listing, for 1562 CE, the year in which Hawkins inaugurated England’s entry into the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.)
English-WP tells us of John Hawkins that: “He styled himself ‘captain general’ as the general of both his own flotilla of ships and those of the English Royal Navy, and to distinguish himself from those Admirals that served only in the administrative sense and were not military in nature. “ Actually, he seems to have shifted fairly easily between being a private government contractor and being a government official — like so many in the U.S. empire today.
During the early years of his engagement in the shipping and trading of enslaved Africans, Hawkins was operating as a Crown-licensed “privateer.” His very first (1562) slaving voyage took the enslaved Africans from what was described as “Guinea” to the Spanish-controlled island of Hispaniola — today’s DR and Haiti.) The Spanish colonists there came to rely on his supplies because (a) they had already worked most of Indigenes of the island to death through their use of the encomienda system of enslavement of the locals, and (b) the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas prohibited them from sailing to anywhere in Africa. The Spanish (both sides of the Atlantic) liked to keep a monopoly on all the trade they engaged in; but Hawkins was allowed to trade with them on payment of 7.5% tax.
This interesting page about Hawkins on the website of the Royal Museums Greenwich has a very short, and not perfect, video about his early life in which the narrator says that after he explained to Queen Elizabeth how his slave-trading project would work, “she was initially appalled by the idea, wondering what would become of the Africans and what would become of their souls. When Sir John explained the profits to her, her morals went to one side”, and she provided her support for the project.
The RMG web-page has a short explanation of the role of the (Crown-backed) privateers and a little about the role Hawkins played later in his life as Treasurer of the Royal Navy. From a quick reading about him my first impression is that he started out as a sort of freewheeling government contractor, doing not just slave-trading but also some harassing and looting of the large ship convoys on which the Spanish were hauling back to the motherland the gold, silver, and other booty they were looting from Americas. Eventually, the Spanish got really riled, and 26 years later they would seek to end the English harassment once and for all by overpowering England with their Spanish Armada. But by then, guess what, Hawkins had long slipped back into his role as a government official and had built and equipped the now much more capable English Navy.
Anyway, in all the seas we’ve looked at so far, the distinction between pirates, privateers, and “legit” (and also usually well-armed) trading ships is a very slippery one…
