- According to that record, disaster and disease struck almost the moment
the English reached Cape Verde: there, their “General fell exceeding sicke”
“most unfortunately,” while the men, in seeking water, “had many skirmishes
with the barbarous Negros” ( 10 : 267 ). With what sounds ominously like his
last breath, Shirley advocated moving on, not because he feared the Negros
but because, “finding the cost of Guynea most tempestuous, hee saw in rea-
son that the bay of Æthiopia would be [their] utter overthrow, and infect [the
company] all to death” ( 10 : 268 ). After “departing from [that] contagious filthy
place,” the English went only as far as São Tomé ( 10 : 268 ). Again they “were
enforced to beare up & take some other course,” the narrator explains, be-
cause the “men fell sicke, and the coast was contagious alwayes raging & tem-
pestuous”; as well, “the water falling from the heavens did stinke, and did in
6 houres turne into maggots where it fell” ( 10 : 268 ). Once the party leave West
Africa and head for the West Indies, however, their troubles seem to be over.
Admittedly, a stay on the island of “Fuego” “yeelded [them] nothing but mis-
erable infection” ( 10 : 271 ); and while they were en route to Dominica, every-
one on board “fell generally downe” with a “disease...so vile that men grew
lothsome unto themselves, franticke and desperately raving” ( 10 : 272 ). Yet the
account nonetheless codes the turn to the west as a trajectory from extraordi-
nary sickness to extraordinary health. Not only did Shirley “[begin] to recover
strength” almost the moment the ships “were departed from this vile coast of
Guyny” ( 10 : 269 ). As well, when the English landed “at Dominica,” “with all
our men sicke and feeble,” the narrator reports, “wee found there two hote
bathes, wherein our weake men washing themselves were greatly comforted:
and the Indians of this place used us with great kindnesse, so that we were all
perfectly well before we departed from this place” ( 10 : 272 ). In Jamaica too,
the narrator adds, the company found unparalleled fertility and healthfulness,
with no other stop in the Indies proving “a more pleasant and holsome
place” ( 10 : 274 ). Where Africa brings disease, the New World brings the
cure—ironically, even in Dominica, “an Island of the Canybals” ( 10 : 25 ). The
comparison, it seems, reveals and conceals all.
Notably too, the blackness that would become Africa’s distinctive trade-
mark takes it most explicit definition in the New World accounts—in what
has become an important signpost for scholarship on race, George Best’s “true
discourse” on the search for the Northwest Passage (and ultimately for
Cathay).^56 Just as the emphasis on West Africa’s contagion serves to disinfect
the New World’s terrains, so does Best’s inscription of blackness work to
whiten the West. In explaining why Africans are black, Best recounts the story
Imperialist Beginnings 61