roste it, eating his owne fleshe by p[urposebefore h]is eyes, a terrible
kinde of death. The others [in other places] doe not thus eate them, but
kill them owte of h[and at the] first and cutt them of by the loynes and
eat the[ir flesh as] we wolde befe or mutton, the which oure owne
menne [did witness] as hereafter I will declare.^52We cannot be sure, of course, why Hakluyt chose the other documents over
this. The account details a fight that broke out during the expedition, be-
tween the likely author, one of Hawkins’s officers, and a third officer, whom
Hawkins almost then put to death, and Hakluyt may have been hesitant to
expose this internal violence.^53 Still, though we can only speculate, it is pos-
sible, and significant, that the imperialistically minded Hakluyt may have by-
passed an ideological opportunity to produce the subjects targeted for slavery
in their darkest light, choosing rather to expose the “horrible cruelities” of the
Spanish who seem to matter more.
To be sure, within these New World records (more than in the African
narratives in the section on the South and Southeast), specters of disease and
blackness darken the Guinea coast. But these figures work as contrast to make
the New World seem a comparatively habitable and desirable place. We know,
of course, that disease was a real concern for the venturers traveling to Africa
as well as to the Americas, where such “African” diseases as malaria and yel-
low fever would be transported and would threaten England’s efforts to main-
tain a New World labor force.^54 In the accounts where Guinea is the
destination (and not the pit stop), disease does figure; but it is Africa’s heat,
rather than its contagion, that appears to be the biggest health risk. Indeed,
part of what makes Wyndham impatient with Pinteado’s extended stay in
Benin is that the men waiting on shore were dying “sometimes three & some-
times 4 or 5 in a day” ( 6 : 150 ). According to Eden, the English died because
they, “partly having no rule of themselves, but eating without measure of the
fruits of the countrey, and drinking the wine of the Palme trees,...and in
such extreme heate running continually into the water, not used beforeto such
sudden and vehement alterations (then the which nothing is more dangerous)
were thereby brought into swellings and agues” ( 6 : 150 ; emphasis added).
Here, as elsewhere, the problem is not inherent to the place, but to the
English outsiders, who have not acclimated to Africa’s heat.
The New World narratives, in contrast, associate West Africa with
disease, but in a way that effectively disinfects the New World landscape.^55
Consider, for example, the account of Anthony Shirley’s ill-fated voyage of
60 chapter two