then “the Rancheria, and the towne of Rio de la Hacha were burnt cleane
downe to the ground, the Churches and a Ladies house onely excepted, which
by her letters written to the Generall was preserved” ( 10 : 235 ). Drake’s com-
pany departed, taking with them the captured Spanish and “Negros.” Accord-
ing to an additional account, written by a Spanish captain (Miguel Ruiz
Delduayen) who fought against Baskerville, the English also captured two
Negroes at Nombre de Dios, where there were two Negro settlements, Santi-
ago del Principe and Santa Cruz la Real.^27
It seems highly likely that these two groups of Negroes were indeed the
“blackmoores” Elizabeth originally selected for deportation. But if these are
the facts of the Negroes’ history at the moment that they become part of the
Baskerville venture, the crucial question is not just why Elizabeth targeted
“black” subjects for deportation in 1596 , but why she chose these particular
black subjects. Why deport ten West Africans who had just been brought or
captured from Spanish domains in the New World? Why scapegoat as “black-
moores” figures designated as “Negroes” in the contemporary accounts that
tell their story? Why, that is, select a target group so precisely and then repre-
sent them so obscurely?
To invoke the Baskerville expedition—which Kenneth Andrews has de-
clared “one of the worst conceived and worst conducted major enterprises of
the entire sea-war”—was not in and of itself especially advantageous.^28 Al-
though the English repeatedly attacked Spanish holdings across the West In-
dies, these conflicts did little to tilt advantage one way or another. As Andrews
argues, the “unfortunate voyage” neither signaled “the recovery by Spain of
general control in the Caribbean” nor prompted “any significant decline in
the numbers of English ships frequenting the West Indies after 1595 .”^29 The
head of the Spanish fleet, Don Bernardino Delgadillo de Avellaneda, in fact,
used the events as evidence of England’s cowardice, accusing the English
mariners of fleeing Spanish attacks at sea and attributing Drake’s death to
well-placed despair (and not to the dysentery that actually killed him).^30 This
“Libel of Spanish Lies” was troubling enough to prompt one of the English
captains, Henry Savile, to craft an exaggerated mistranslation of the Spanish
text and to record his own version of the conflict, the one proving the Span-
ish liars and the other, the Spanish fleet ultimately “in greate distresse might-
ily beaten and torne.”^31 Seconding Savile, Baskerville produced his own
bombastic rebuttal, daring the Spanish general to meet him in “any indiffer-
ent kingdome of equall distance from either realme,” since “the kingdomes
wherein we abide are enemies” and “there is no meanes in either of them” for
Too Many Blackamoors 105