Black Tudors Page 6
What were the ‘certain instruments’ that Corsi’s team used? Leonardo da Vinci had designed various underwater breathing devices for the Venetian State in the early sixteenth century, one of which he claimed would allow a man to stay submerged for four hours. But, fearful of the ‘evil nature of man’, he refused to test or even reveal his designs, in case they were used ‘as a means of murder at the bottom of the sea, by breaking the bottoms of ships and sinking them altogether with the men in them’.30 The development of modern diving equipment only began in the nineteenth century. In 1818 a young diver named John Deane was present when a fire broke out at a farmhouse near Whitstable in Kent. He seized a helmet from an old suit of armour and used a pump and hose to supply it with oxygen while he saved the horses from a burning barn. He and his brother Charles Anthony patented his invention and later developed it into a diving helmet. In 1836 they would use their invention to rediscover the wreck of the Mary Rose.31
One useful piece of equipment available to Corsi’s team, at least in a rudimentary form, was the diving bell. This captured a pocket of air as the divers descended, allowing them to breathe from this reserve at certain intervals instead of returning to the surface. Guglielmo de Lorena and Francesco de Marchi had deployed such a device in 1535 to explore and retrieve items from Caligula’s pleasure barges, submerged in Lake Nemi near Rome.32 As well as the diving bell, divers used a technique where they tied two large stones together with cord and slung them over their shoulder as they entered the water. This weighed them down sufficiently to reach the depths, and could be discarded when they wanted to return to the surface. As divers came up and down several times in a session, they required a good store of such stones and cord in their boat. Regular diving from an early age would naturally improve their ability to see underwater. Glass or bamboo goggles were available, although these became less useful at greater depths as the water pressure pressed them painfully against the face.33
The testimony of Domenico Paza, a 31-year-old from Verona who found himself aboard Corsi’s salvaging boat, provides us with an insight into how Francis and his team brought the tin to the surface. Corsi had tied a rope around a piece of tin, Paza had given it a tug and the rope had broken. The angry Corsi chastised Paza for having ‘done ill to meddle with that which [he] had taken in hand’.34
Three of the fifteen witnesses in the case questioned Francis’s testimony when they were recalled to give further evidence in late May and early June 1549. Antonio de Nicolao, a 32-year-old Venetian sailor resident in Southampton, declared Francis was ‘a morisco, born where they are not christened, and slave to the said Peter Paulo [Corsi]’, and that ‘no credit nor faith ought to be given to his sayings, as in other strange [foreign] Christian countries it is to no such slave given’. Niccolo de Marini, the Genoese merchant who had lost goods aboard the sunken ship, pronounced Francis ‘a morisco . . . [who] had been for the space of three years slave and bondman to the said Peter Paulo and an infidel born, and so is commonly reputed and taken of all men knowing him’. At the end of his testimony he emphasised that ‘no faith ought to be given to the sayings of the same Blackemore for that he is slave to the same Peter [Corsi] and an infidel born’. Finally, Domenico Milanes, factor to (and possibly a relative of) fellow Florentine, Angelo de Milanes, said Francis was ‘a gynno [Guinean] born where they are not christened and hath been for these two years slave and bondman to the said Peter Paulo [Corsi] wherefore he thinks that no credit should be given to his sayings or depositions’.35 These three statements are so similar that they sound like they had been planned in advance; that the men got together and discussed how to pour doubt on Francis’s unhelpful testimony. There are three interesting issues here: first, what was Francis’s geographical origin, second, what was his religious status and finally, was he enslaved?
Unfortunately, the description of Francis as a ‘morisco’ doesn’t give us any further information about precisely where he came from. The term was only rarely used to describe individuals in Tudor England but it occasionally appeared as a place name. Thomas Elyot, discussing the Roman occupation of North Africa in his Book named the Gouernour (1531), commented that Roman ‘Numidia, Libya, & such other countries, now be called Barbary & Morisco’.36 ‘Morisco’ was also used to signify Morocco in a 1597 London parish register, as we shall see in Chapter Six. However, Francis himself testified that he was born on an island off the coast of Guinea, not Morocco.
The term ‘morisco’ might also have had some religious significance. It was used by the Spanish to describe Moorish converts to Christianity, of which there had been many since the Spanish retook Granada in 1492. In the description of ‘Robert Tego, a Morisco, servant with Thomas Castlyn’, who was living in Vintry Ward, London, in 1567, this is the meaning that makes most sense.37 ‘Castlyn’ suggests ‘Castilian’, so Tego was probably a Moorish convert to Christianity, brought from Spain to England by his master. Jacques Francis was allegedly ‘an infidel’, born ‘where they are not christened’. Certainly there was a substantial Muslim population in West Africa around the time of his birth. But the term ‘morisco’, together with his ‘Christian’ name, suggests that Francis had subsequently been baptised. Quite apart from anything else, the High Court of Admiralty would not have accepted his testimony were he were unable to convince it of his Christian status and swear an oath on the Bible to tell the truth.
There was no reason why Corsi or another European he had met en route to Southampton could not have arranged for Francis to be baptised. The Bible tells of ‘a man of Ethiopia’, treasurer to Queen Candace, who was converted and baptised by Philip on the road to Jerusalem. This example was followed by Europeans throughout the Renaissance period. In 1520, Pope Leo X baptised the writer Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, naming him Leo Africanus. Eighty years later, Africanus’s English translator, John Pory, was so impressed with Portuguese missionary work in Kongo and Angola that he wrote of the ‘exceeding glory’, with which they had ‘no less advanced the honour of their own nation, than the propagating of the Christian faith’.38
So Francis was presumably a Christian by 1549, and the three witnesses were ignoring this in their efforts to discredit the testimony of the only witness who supported Corsi’s side of the argument. It is interesting to consider that Francis might have been born into a Muslim family and later converted either by Corsi or one of his countrymen. He would then have been a Catholic, a status that would become increasingly troublesome for him in Reformation England. With the succession of the young Edward VI in 1547 came evangelical Protestantism and the first Book of Common Prayer in English, use of which was enforced under the Act of Uniformity from 9 June 1549.39
What of the assertion that Francis was a slave? Antonio de Nicolao claimed that Corsi had offered to sell his lead diver to anybody who wanted to buy him, but none of the people of Southampton stepped forward to buy him that day. Such a transaction would of course have been illegal. In his testimony, de Marini insisted Francis was ‘commonly reputed’ to be a slave and taken as such by all who knew him. Even if this were true, it doesn’t change the fact that it was not legally possible to be enslaved under English Common Law. This was in stark contrast to the laws the Italians were familiar with at home. In Venice, the Senate had decreed in 1489 that anyone who killed a runaway ‘Ethiopian or saracen’ slave would be immune from prosecution for murder.40 We can sense Antonio de Nicolao’s confusion in his pains to point out to the court that ‘in other strange countries’ the right to testify ‘is to no such slaves given’. However, Francis was not a slave in England.
This clash of jurisdictions is a common theme when members of foreign merchants’ households appear in English courts. When the Venetian Filippo Cini tried to sell his servant Maria Moriana to a Genoese merchant for £20 in Southampton in the 1470s, she protested her freedom. Not to be thwarted, Cini made her sign a document she was unable to read, certifying that she owed him £20, before having her thrown into prison. She petitioned the L
ord Chancellor, asking him to redress this gross injustice, but his response does not survive. Cini thought that he could treat Maria as a slave in England, as he could at home in Italy, but she was aware that he could not. More than a century later, Hector Nunes, a Portuguese physician and converso (the name given to former Jews ostensibly converted to Christianity), also appeared to believe the laws on slavery were the same in England as in his native land. He had illegally purchased an ‘Ethiopian Negar’ from a Cornish mariner in 1587, but was soon afterwards forced to acknowledge that the Common Law of England did not allow him to compel the man to ‘tarry and serve’ him.41
Although slavery was illegal, it may still have been practised, especially in foreign households, where they were used to other customs. In 1537 Diego Sanchez, a Spaniard living in the parish of St Benet’s in the City of London, named ‘Johan [Joan] my slave’ in his will. She may not have been of African origin, as her ethnicity is not mentioned, and, as we’ve seen, Africans were not the only peoples to be enslaved in Europe. Sanchez left instructions that Johan should serve his wife, Eleanor de la Palma, for two years after his death, after which time she would be freed, and given clothes and four ducats of gold. Johan’s two daughters, Agnes and Mary, who had been fathered by Sanchez, were left a dowry on their marriages of 10,000 maravedis each.* This was to be paid in ‘household stuff’, which would be ‘a remembrance to them to pray for me’.42 Sanchez does not appear to have lived very long in London, where he says he is living ‘at this present time’, and he makes his provisions ‘if God do take me out of this present life in this Realm of England’. He also had the will written in Spanish so his heirs and friends could read it. It appears Sanchez brought Johan with him from Spain, and continued to treat her as a slave in England. Nothing existed in English law that could have compelled Johan to continue to serve Sanchez’s wife after he’d died, but she may have done so. She is the only person known to be described as a slave in a Tudor will, no doubt because the will was made by a Spaniard resident in London. As we shall see in Chapter Ten, when Englishmen and women mentioned Africans in their wills, they appeared not as slaves, but as beneficiaries.
One strong indicator that Jacques Francis was not enslaved is that various witnesses in the High Court of Admiralty case make reference to him being paid wages. Antonio de Nicolao described Francis and the other divers as ‘poor labouring men . . . seeking their living about in sundry places where they may get it having but little of their own’.43 This description does not sound like that of enslaved men. The men, though poor, seem to have had the freedom to work for whom they pleased. Nicolao himself had observed them doing other work during the times of the year when the weather prohibited diving. Perhaps they worked in the docks, loading and unloading goods? Even if Francis had ‘little of his own’, the possession of anything at all, and more importantly, the fact that he was earning his living, shows that he was not enslaved.
Domenico Erizzo testified that in October and November 1547 he had seen Corsi ‘walk up and down in the street ... in a long gown being in variance with a servant of his for that he denied to pay his wages’.44 This is further evidence that Francis and the other divers were, at least in theory, receiving wages. Corsi had told the mayor of Southampton that he had stolen the tin because the wages he and his servants were being paid were too low. This raises the possibility that the fight in the street was because his servants wanted more money and he was driven to the theft to satisfy their demands. Our interpretation depends on how we imagine the balance of power between Corsi and his divers. Given their unrivalled skills, Corsi’s team were actually in a pretty strong negotiating position should they have wished to make demands of their master; he would find it difficult to replace them.
Others might have regarded him as a slave, but how did Francis see himself? He gave evidence ‘of his own free will’. According to John Tyrart, the court interpreter, Francis asserted that he was a ‘famulus’ to the Venetian. Famulus meant a servant or attendant, a member of someone’s entourage or household, in contrast to servus, meaning slave.45 Tyrart, and by extension, the court, accepted and recorded this term when Francis used it to identify himself. While Francis may not have had a clear idea of his status in England before the court case, the experience of testifying showed him that he was considered free in the eyes of the law. It’s quite possible that this understanding began to dawn on him the day that Corsi offered to sell him in Southampton and got no response.
That Francis was allowed to testify in an English court of law is powerful evidence that he was not considered a slave. Enslaved or unfree people have been prevented from testifying throughout history, partly due to the concern that they would be forced by their circumstances to say whatever their masters told them to say. Roman law stated that slaves could not give evidence unless it was taken under torture. The villeins or serfs of medieval England could not give evidence in court. As late as the 1530s, the Duke of Suffolk was brought before the Court of Chancery to represent one of his villeins from his Suffolk manor of Frostenden, the man not being allowed to speak for himself. In the early years of the American colonies Africans were able to give testimony, but once their slave status was confirmed this right was removed. In 1732, the state of Virginia declared that black men and women ‘are people of such base and corrupt natures that their testimony cannot be certainly depended on’.46
Yet English courts were to depend on the testimony of Africans on more than one occasion in the century following Francis’s appearance. As we shall see in Chapter Four, Edward Swarthye, like Francis, gave evidence in support of his employer. But not all African witnesses did. In 1609 the pirate William Longcastle, ‘a man of evil fame and little or no substance’, was put on trial in the High Court of Admiralty. His alleged crime was seizing the Susan, of Bristol, off the coast of Morocco. According to the prosecution, Longcastle had come alongside the Susan as she lay close to the port of Safi and invited most of her crew aboard his ship, the Ulysses, ‘to banquet and revel’. While they were being entertained, he captured the ship and made off with her to the West Indies. But the main witness to the crime, Captain Anthony Wye, master of the Susan, was absent at sea when the case came to trial and so it looked as if Longcastle would be acquitted.
However, Longcastle had made a fatal error. He had, in his ‘rashness to surprise and haste to get off’, left an African boy behind at the scene of the crime. Wye took the boy back to England with him, where he left him at the home of a London merchant, Richard Hall, the owner of Longcastle’s ship, the Ulysses. The boy was brought into court and convincingly testified against Longcastle. The pirate, in words that strongly echo the complaints of the Italian merchants in 1549, begged the judges to ‘let the tongue of a Christian and not of a Pagan cut off my life’. It was a plea made in vain, for Longcastle had compounded his error in leaving the boy behind by having had him christened: ‘The Court resolved, that where he desired to have the oath of a Christian, [he] himself, & the Moore had confessed he had made him one’. The boy might have been purchased as a slave abroad, but in England he was free and as a Christian he could testify against his former master. Longcastle and his accomplices were found guilty and sentenced to death. They were executed at Wapping in December 1609.47
In accusing Francis of being an infidel and a slave the Italians were being disingenuous. They attacked him, not because of his heritage but because his evidence in his master’s defence went against their interests. However vitriolic and xenophobic the Italians’ words about Francis were, we must remember they were said in court in a failed attempt to discredit him, and he was not the only witness whose testimony was questioned in this way. In March 1549 an agent of Domenico Erizzo asked the court to disregard the testimony of four others: John Westcott, William Mussen, John Iko and George Blacke. Not only did he accuse them of being unfit witnesses, partial to Corsi, but he also asserted that they were ‘unhealthy, of capricious opinions, living corrupted lives, poor and needy vagabonds’. The l
ist goes on, as if the lawyers were reeling off every conceivable objection to a witness. Most striking are the accusations that these men were ‘vagabonds, wandering through different places and kingdoms all over the world’, who were ‘without faith, infidels and pagans, by no means professing the Christian religion’.48 The latter strongly echoes the accusation made against Jacques Francis and yet his name is not listed in this document. The objections do, however, confirm our suspicions that Iko and Blacke, like Francis, had learnt their diving skills in their native Africa. It is odd that two Englishmen – Westcott, originally from Barnstaple in Devon, and Mussen, a Warwickshire man – are listed alongside the divers, as their accounts supported Erizzo’s own. It may simply be that the objections against all four men were simply lumped together in one document to minimise the cost of the paperwork.
We do not know whether Francis’s testimony was enough to exonerate his master, as the verdict does not survive. In any case, it wasn’t long before Corsi found himself imprisoned for a different offence. In September 1549, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, persuaded Corsi to leave Portsmouth to ‘take certain of his stuff out of the sea’. Corsi and his team duly set off for Arundel Castle, some thirty miles east along the coast. The Duke of Somerset regarded this as Corsi abandoning his work on the Mary Rose and had him committed to the Tower. Corsi was examined by Sir Edward Wotton, who had been on the Privy Council since 1547. Wotton clearly found fault, as Corsi remained incarcerated for the next six months. He was finally released on 26 March 1550, without having to pay any fees for his imprisonment.49 This was a boon as prisoners usually faced a bill for board and lodging.
After his stint in the Tower, Corsi may no longer have been in a position to employ Jacques Francis. Yet his team’s services had been called upon by the King, Erizzo and his fellow merchants, and the Earl of Arundel in quick succession. With such high demand for salvage expertise, surely Francis could name his price? The Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus case had made him enemies amongst the merchant population of Southampton, and even London. That said, his loyalty to his master should have recommended him to other employers. He might even have had international employment prospects. In 1569 Francisco Gonzales, a free African diver living in Seville, requested a licence to travel with his wife to Veracruz in New Spain, where he intended to continue plying his trade.50 Such journeys would have been fraught with dangers, not least the very real threat of enslavement, so it would hardly be surprising if Francis had chosen to remain in England.