a fair challenge.^32 Even in its afterlife, “this last voyage of Sir Thomas
Baskerville” does not appear to have been England’s finest hour.
Significantly, however, the Negroes from the Baskerville campaign came
to England as prisoners of the Anglo-Spanish war, and it was that political po-
sition, I would argue—more than, say, any presumed African identity, her-
itage, or history—that made them especially useful to the queen. For within
accounts of the voyage, it is the dividing line of war, more than of culture,
race, or color, that defines encountered Negroes—and defines them signifi-
cantly as allies to the Spanish. Admittedly, this alliance may have been uneasy,
if not also forced, at least for some Negroes who may have been “runaway
slaves.”^33 There was a settlement of “freed Negroes” living near Nombre de
Dios, who, according to Spanish sources, had come “to serve [the Spanish] in
this war under the banner of their captain Juan de Roales who is also one of
them.”^34 But the Spanish seem to have been nonetheless suspicious of their
loyalty. Writing of the Negroes of Santa Cruz “imployed in your majesties ser-
vice,” the Spanish surveyor Juan Bautista Antoneli cautions that “there is no
trust nor confidence in any of these Negroes, and therefore we must take
heede and beware of them, for they are our mortall enemies.”^35 In addition,
both English and Spanish accounts raise the possibility that Negroes from
these territories willingly left with Baskerville in order to escape Spanish rule.
The Spanish governor, Contreras, writes to the Spanish king that Drake took
“ 100 Negroes and Negresses from the pearl station, who for the most part
joined him voluntarily.”^36 In a narrative which was not published until the
nineteenth century, Thomas Maynarde, who sailed with Drake, states that
among their “many prisoners Spaniards & negroes” were “some slaves re-
pairinge to us voluntarily.”^37 Apparently, before the Baskerville venture, the
English had considered forming an “alliance with the Negros.”^38 That plan
never materialized in any full-scale way, but the English do admit relying on
the “intelligence of som negros” during the venture and, in one instance, in-
clude a Negro, along with “three English men” and “a Greeke,” as their own
military casualties.^39
Yet whether the Negroes served the Spanish—or joined the English—vol-
untarily or by force, what matters above all else to both English and Spanish
witnesses is the fact that Negroes, “subjugated” alongside “freed,” by and large
“rallied to [the Spanish] majesty’s service with loyalty, hard work and energy”
against the English.^40 The English captain John Troughton reports fighting
against “some Spanyardes & negros” at Nombre de Dios.^41 English narrators
otherwise pay little attention to the “negroe towne,” whose labor force Spanish
106 chapter four