some of the most exotic—probably already cliched—myths and figures com-
monly ascribed to Africa in classical texts (and prominently invoked in Oth-
ello’s travel history): among them, the Guineans “in old time called Æthiopes
and Nigritae, which we now call Moores, Moorens, or Negroes, a people of
beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth, and so
scorched and vexed with the heat of the sunne, that in many places they curse
it when it riseth”; the Troglodytica, who dwell in caves, eat snake meat, and
“have no speech, but rather a grinning and chattering”; the Anthropophagi,
who “are accustomed to eat mans flesh”; the Blemines, who have “their eyes
and mouth in their breast”; and the Satyrs, “which have nothing of men but
onely shape,” along with Prester John, who seems in this context relatively real
( 6 : 167 – 70 ). If the marvelousness of these figures does not give their veracity
away, Eden admits that much of his knowledge, which “is to be understood,”
comes from someone or somewhere else—an anonymous “they” or classical
texts written (and he stresses written) by Pliny, Solinus, Gemma Phrysius, and
others ( 6 : 167 ). In this, the exotic Africans are much like America’s “Savages,”
who, as Karen Kupperman has argued, are at their “cultureless” savage worst
in accounts by armchair, and not actual, travelers.^46 Even so, within accounts
of New World travels, there is rarely such a gap between details of the venture
and depictions of the indigenous people.^47 In Eden, the myths not only sup-
plement but also displace the “real” natives, as if knowledge of the West
Africans is ultimately tangential to England’s exploits.^48
Even in accounts where English forays into West Africa are embedded
within New World enterprises as a pit-and-provisions stop for the way west,
representations of the natives appear ancillary, although eventually, as slaves,
these “Negroes” would become central to England’s colonial “success.” En-
gland’s principal competitor in the New World was, of course, Spain, and the
group of narratives on the West is as preoccupied with the Spanish as the
group on the South and Southeast is with the Turks and Portuguese. The
Navigationscontains an especially large number of records on John Hawkins’s
experimental slaving ventures, including three reports on his third expedition
(of 1567 – 68 ), one written by Hawkins himself, and one each by Miles Philips
and Job Hortop, two men who were “set on land by sir John Hawkins in 1568
in the bay of Mexico” and who then lived in captivity under the Spanish.^49
These narratives do describe the forceful “taking” of “Negroes,” quite often
maneuvered around conflicts with the Portuguese. But even in these accounts,
which James Williamson has taken to be “propaganda, written with an eye to
English relations with Spain and Portugal,” the focus is on the New World
58 chapter two