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  Jacques Francis was not the last African to live in Southampton in the Tudor era. By the end of the sixteenth century, a number of Africans were living in the households of English merchants and townspeople. We know this because they were subject to an ‘alien’ poll tax of 8d a head, levied on any foreigner living in England. The tax returns for Southampton show that between 1594 and 1611 there were as many as ten Africans resident, in twelve different households, the majority of which were those of wealthy merchants, within the parishes of Holy Rood, St Laurence, St Michael and St John. Four of the men with African servants served as Mayor of Southampton, two were members of Parliament and two had connections with the Dolphin Inn: John Sedgewick was the innkeeper in the 1580s, while John Jeffrey had become the owner before 1611. Three of the Africans were recorded by name: Joane, maid to Lawrence and Mary Groce; Maudlin, who lived in the household of John Andrews; and Michael, servant to Mayor Thomas Holmes. In July 1591, Michael and another African, servant to Thomas Heaton, were accused of theft by an alehouse keeper, Dennis Edwards. They were sent to prison on suspicion of cutting and stealing a cable from his ship. No further charge was made against them, and they were ‘punished in the stocks and so freed’, despite protesting their innocence.51

  As the numbers of Italian merchants in Southampton dwindled, English merchants began to take over the long-distance trades, traversing the seas as never before. From 1558 there was regular trade with Morocco, and from 1530 voyages began to venture further down the coast of West Africa, and across the Atlantic to South America and the Caribbean. This brought more Africans to English shores. Where before they came via southern Europe, they now began to travel directly from Africa and the Atlantic world as a result of English privateering, which is why Africans begin to appear in Southampton records again in the 1590s. One Englishman who made a career of seizing Spanish ships and raiding Spanish ports around the world was Sir Francis Drake. His exploits are well known, but few know the role played by Africans in his successes against the Spanish, or that some returned to England with him. Diego, who was to meet Drake in Panama, was one such man . . .

  * The latter ship was to be put to entirely different work in the 1560s, when Elizabeth I lent it to John Hawkins for his slaving expeditions.

  * Approximately £6 18s 10d. Maravedis were Spanish copper coins worth one sixth of a penny.

  3

  Diego, the Circumnavigator

  Diego ran headlong through the gunshot towards the boats on the beach. ‘Are you Captain Drake’s?’ he cried. He had to get on board. He had heard there were no slaves in England and if he joined the English they might take him there. He knew some of their countrymen traded in slaves, but he was willing to stake everything on this chance of freedom. Nothing could be worse than staying with his Spanish master. He could not join the runaway slaves in the mountains. He had betrayed them once too often. Francis Drake was his only hope. ‘I must join you,’ he shouted, ‘let me aboard.’ A bullet whistled past his head in answer. ‘I have important information. You are in great danger!’ Again they shot at him. ‘Listen! If you don’t take me aboard you will all die.’ They fired at him once more. ‘There isn’t much time. Let me aboard!’ At last they relented, and as his feet hit the deck he felt elated. A handful of English sailors pressed around him. They demanded to know what he had to say. ‘You must send word to your Captain,’ he said breathlessly. ‘He must retreat. If you do not depart before daybreak you face certain death.’ A few men were dispatched to warn Drake and his raiding party. Diego sank to the deck in relief.

  THE FIRST ENSLAVED Africans arrived in the Spanish colonies within a decade of Columbus’s 1492 voyage. From the beginning, they resisted: one of the Africans brought to Hispaniola in 1502 managed to escape to the mountains. He became the first of many Cimarrons: the name given to those who escaped their Spanish masters and established settlements in the hinterland.1 By the time Englishmen such as Francis Drake arrived more than half a century later, there were many Africans, both enslaved and free, living in Spanish America. Drake had participated in some of John Hawkins’s slaving voyages in the 1560s, so why didn’t he attempt to enslave Diego when their paths crossed?

  Francis Drake had heard tales of Africa and Africans from an early age. He grew up in the Plymouth household of his kinsman William Hawkins, alongside his sons William and John. William Hawkins senior, ‘a man for his wisdom, value, experience and skill in sea causes much esteemed and beloved of King Henry the Eighth’, was a pioneer of trade to Guinea and Brazil in the 1530s. He returned from these voyages with cargoes of Brazil wood, ‘elephants’ teeth’ (ivory), ‘grains of paradise’ (meleguetta pepper, a much-prized spice) and no doubt some tall tales. His son, John Hawkins, initiated the English slave trade in 1562, having heard from merchants in the Canary Islands that ‘Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that store of negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea’. Over the next decade, Hawkins would be responsible for the transportation of an estimated 1,500 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.2 Drake encountered the harsh realities of this trade at close quarters, as he sailed on John Lovell’s slaving voyage in 1566–7 – a venture sponsored by Hawkins – and went on to serve as Captain of the Judith on the last of Hawkins’s slaving ventures the following year.3

  Initially, the Spanish used Native Americans as a labour force in their colonies, but the importation of African labour became increasingly practical and desirable as the local population succumbed to Old World diseases, and writers such as Bartholomé de las Casas objected to their enslavement.4 The first enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic arrived in Hispaniola in 1502. By 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, more than 370,000 individuals had already been transported to the Spanish Americas from Africa.5 Later, once the British dominated the transatlantic slave trade, they were responsible for wrenching more than three million Africans from their homelands over the course of the long eighteenth century.6 Sickeningly, the uncertainty about the exact figure is in part due to the discrepancy between numbers embarked and numbers disembarked: a stark statistical reminder of how many died in the crossing. But in the Tudor era, the English had not yet taken to this abhorrent trade in earnest; not due to any superior moral feeling, but simply because they did not have any colonies of their own to provide markets for enslaved Africans. Hawkins was the only English merchant to attempt the trade before the 1640s, and he was an interloper, selling to the Spanish Caribbean.

  The Spaniards did not take kindly to Hawkins’s efforts. They caught up with him in September 1568, off the coast of Mexico at San Juan de Ulúa; in the ensuing battle the English lost five of their seven ships. This was such a disaster, both personal and financial, that it put Hawkins and his countrymen off the trade in slaves for the next seventy years.7 So many provisions were lost in the fray that Hawkins was forced to put almost one hundred of the men from his ship, the Minion, ashore on the beach near Tampico, abandoning them to the mercy of the Mexican Inquisition.8 He asked Drake to take some of them home on the other surviving ship, the Judith. But, as Hawkins later complained, Drake ‘forsook us in our great misery’, and set off for England on his own. The events at San Juan de Ulúa left Drake hungry for revenge.9 He began a series of raids on the Spanish colonies, plundering ports and seizing ships. It was during one of these attacks, in the summer of 1572, that he met Diego.

  Diego lived in Nombre de Dios, a small unfortified town of some one hundred and fifty to two hundred houses on the Atlantic coast of Panama. He was enslaved in the household of Captain Gonzalo de Palma, the High Admiral and Captain General of the town.10 Like most Africans brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish at this time, he was probably from Senegambia, the region of West Africa that lay between the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Prisoners of war, they were sold to Portuguese and Spanish merchants, and shipped across the Atlantic. Some were employed in rural areas on farms, sugar plantations and in silver and gold mines. Those who lived in
ports, towns and cities worked in every conceivable service role: dockworkers, cooks, carpenters, seamstresses, cobblers, blacksmiths and laundresses, to name a few. Indeed, one Spanish official noted that ‘we cannot live without black people; it is they who are the labourers, and no Spanish person will work here.’11

  Nombre de Dios was where the Spanish treasure fleet docked every year to collect silver that had been brought from Peru. The treasure first travelled by ship from Lima to Panama City, on the Pacific coast, and was then carried across the isthmus of Panama by mule-train to Nombre de Dios, whence it was shipped to Seville.12

  At three o’clock in the morning of 29 July 1572, under a bright moon, Drake and his men attacked the town.13 By the shore, twelve men waited aboard four pinnaces; smaller, lighter vessels, so named because they were originally made of pine: the Lion, the Minion, the Bear and a fourth unnamed vessel, to ensure a safe retreat. Out of the darkness, a figure appeared on the shore:

  one Diego, a negro . . . came and called to our pinnaces to know whether they were Captain Drake’s? And upon answer received continued entreating to be taken on board, though he had first three or four shot made at him, until at length they fetched him.

  Diego warned the English that their raiding party was in great danger. The town was full of people. What’s more, about eight days earlier, the King had sent some one hundred and fifty soldiers to guard Nombre de Dios against the Cimarrons. This wasn’t actually true; Spanish sources show that no reinforcements were sent to the town until after news of Drake’s attack.14 Diego must have been exaggerating the danger in order to persuade the English to leave the port, with him aboard, forthwith. But they believed him, and sent some men to warn those ashore. His information ‘agreed with the report of the Negroes’ whom they had taken at the Isle of Pines a week earlier; the English routinely interrogated Africans they encountered to gain intelligence of this kind. This particular group had been set ashore on the mainland so ‘that they might perhaps join themselves to their countrymen the Cimarrons, and gain their liberty’. But Drake took care to leave them far enough from the town that they could not warn the Spanish of his approach.15

  The main account of the adventure, Sir Francis Drake Revived, compiled for Drake by the preacher Philip Nichols in 1593 from the notes of Drake himself and some of his crew, takes pains to portray Diego as insisting on being taken aboard but this impression is contradicted by a Portuguese pilot who met the African some years later. He reported that Diego had been taken prisoner by Drake from a frigate near Nombre de Dios.16

  It is not unthinkable that an African might want to join the English at this time. In 1572, there were no English colonies. Those who boarded English ships would, if they survived the considerable dangers of the voyage, be taken to England, where rumour had it that all men were free; something spoken of across the Atlantic world. It was in the same year that Diego joined Drake that the Wolof Juan Gelofe and the English sailor William Collins had their conversation in a Mexican silver mine. In response to Gelofe’s comment that there were no slaves in England, Collins confirmed ‘it was true, that there they were all freemen’.17 Spanish officials sang the same tune: in 1586 Pedro de Arana wrote to the Spanish House of Trade from Havana, commenting that in Drake’s country ‘negro labourers’ were free. Diogo, an African taken to England by an English pirate in 1614, later reported to the Portuguese Inquisition that when he laid foot on English soil, ‘he immediately became free, because in that Reign nobody is a slave.’18 Such talk might well have reached Diego’s ears, and encouraged him to seek out Drake’s ships.

  The Nombre de Dios raiding party did not meet with much resistance, but neither did it meet with much treasure. The Spanish fleet had already been and gone that summer. In Sir Francis Drake Revived, Nichols claimed that there was ‘a huge heap of silver’ in the Governor’s House and ‘more gold and jewels than all our four pinnaces could carry’ in the King’s Treasure House. The English would have made off with these riches if Drake had not suddenly fainted from loss of blood following a leg wound.19 Faced with losing their leader or the treasure, Drake’s men supposedly chose loyalty over silver and gold. This fabrication was far less embarrassing than admitting that they’d simply got their timing wrong.

  In the aftermath of their failed raid, Diego was able to offer the English new hope. He knew how they could get their hands on enough gold and silver to assuage the sting of defeat. This was tempting enough to allow the English to disregard the fact that Diego had seriously exaggerated how many soldiers were guarding Nombre de Dios. Diego proposed that the English seek out the escaped Africans who had been attacking Nombre de Dios. They had set up their own settlements, known as palenques, in the mountainous hinterland, often intermarrying with native peoples. The Cimarron community in Panama was well established by the time Drake arrived. They had three main palenques, one near the future town of Portobello, one in the mountains of the Cerro de Cabra near Panama City and a third some fifty miles southeast of the city.20 Such runaway communities developed across the Spanish Americas from the earliest years of the Empire.21 One Spanish bishop complained in 1571 that three hundred of the thousand Africans who arrived in the area annually escaped ‘to the wilds’, while another official estimated that there were 3,000 Cimarrons in the area by May 1573. The Cimarrons had regularly attacked Spanish settlements for fifty years or so, partly to liberate enslaved Africans to augment their numbers, partly to seize supplies, food and wine. Spanish attempts to hunt them down were treated with contempt. Informed that one Esteban de Trexo was on his way to find them in 1570, they erected a gallows beside the road he was to take and hung knives from it, signalling that they would hang de Trexo and decapitate his men.22

  Diego, a canny operator, volunteered to help the English make contact with the Cimarrons, amongst whom, he assured them, Drake’s name was ‘most precious and highly honoured’. It was a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. There was just one small problem: Diego told the English that he had betrayed the runaways so many times that they would kill him if they set eyes upon him again. However, if Drake promised to protect him, he would ‘adventure his life’.23

  What sort of betrayals was Diego talking about? He knew where the Cimarrons lived, and what they thought of Drake, but he was not at this time living as part of the Cimarron community. One can only imagine that on one or more occasion he had fled de Palma’s household to join the Cimarrons, but then had the misfortune to be recaptured by the Spanish and forced to reveal their whereabouts and plans. Such a life cannot have been easy. No wonder he was willing to chance joining the English in the hope of finding a way out.

  Diego’s offer to lead the English to the Cimarrons was not immediately taken up. The English returned to the refuge on the Isle of Pines that they called Port Plenty, where they had left the rest of their ships, then sailed on to Cartagena, in modern-day Colombia.24 However, it became clear that news of Drake’s presence in the area had spread. The element of surprise lost, they decided to lie low for a while, and retreated to a quiet spot in the Sound of Darien. This was an area Diego knew, and he helped set up the camp there, assisting in the erection of lodging houses and a building for public meetings. His experience in local methods of building proved useful again a few weeks later, when the English returned to Port Plenty. There, they built a number of storehouses to protect themselves from attack, some on islands and some on the mainland, separated by distances of thirty or sixty miles, so that if any were taken, there would be others to fall back on. Diego’s talents were of great help. He had, the English observed, a ‘special skill in the speedy erection of such houses’.

  Diego led Drake’s brother John to the Cimarrons. His earlier fears, perhaps exaggerated for effect, that they might kill him on sight, had dissipated. Instead, he facilitated a successful negotiation with the Cimarron leader, Pedro. They agreed to meet again the next day, 14 September, at a river halfway between the two camps. As security, two Englishmen were left behind, in exchang
e for two Cimarrons, who returned with the English to Port Plenty.

  When these two Africans arrived in the English camp they confirmed what Diego had originally reported. They told Drake that the Cimarrons were delighted at his arrival. They knew he was a great enemy of the Spaniards, and had heard tell not only of his recent attack on Nombre de Dios, but also of his previous raiding voyages. They would do their utmost to assist him in any enterprise he had in mind against their mutual foe.

  The alliance that Diego had inspired was taking shape. Drake resolved to set out with his brother and the two Cimarron emissaries that very evening to meet his new allies. The rest of the fleet was to follow the next morning. When they met, the English offered the Cimarrons entertainment and ‘received good testimonies of their joy and good will towards us’. This was all well and good, but, as Diego knew, the English wanted more than friendship. Drake cut to the chase. He asked his guests ‘what means they had to furnish him with gold and silver’. They answered apologetically that the stores of gold that they had taken from the Spaniards (out of spite rather than avarice) were not accessible. They kept this gold sunk at the bottom of various rivers, but the waters were now too high for them to retrieve it. If the English wanted to capture treasure from the Spanish, they explained, they would have to wait five months. Once the rainy season was over, the Spanish would set out across the isthmus from Panama City to Nombre de Dios with a mule-train laden with gold and silver. Of course, it was in the Cimarrons’s interest not to hand over any treasure at this point. Far better to enlist the Englishmen’s help in their next attack.25