thing” which may be “supplyed from some other place by sea” ( 7 : 244 – 45 ); to
Queen Elizabeth’s letters patent to Ralegh, licensing him to “discover, search,
finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreis, and
territories, not actually possessed of any Christian prince” ( 8 : 290 ) and to “sub-
due,” “possess,” and colonize them ( 8 : 291 ); to Ralegh’s earnest fantasy, ex-
pressed in his “discoverie of...Guiana,” that “whatsoever prince shall
possesse it [Guiana], that Prince shall be Lord of more golde, and of a more
beautifull Empire, and of more Cities and people, then either the King of
Spain, or the great Turke” ( 10 : 355 ).^60 Take us to whatever part of the mainland
or islands they will, the narratives give England an urgently reiterable, and
distinctively American, mission: to discover and claim.
To view the accounts of Barbary and Guinea next to these New World
stories is to notice how comparatively unfocused and undirected Hakluyt’s
representation of Africa is—how open-ended the place and how uncertain the
prospects of this inconsistently “dark continent” even in the face of New
World ventures that would determine and overdetermine England’s future
there. Clearly, within the Navigations, Africa is neither unified nor commod-
ified for material or ideological consumption; rather its landscapes appear in
the margins of the imperialist drive through which Hakluyt would construct
a globally engaged and empowered England. It may well be the nature and
ease of negotiations with the English that, in places, determines whether
Moors figure synecdochally as “cruel hands” holding captive English in “mis-
erable servitude,” or as “emperors” and “kings” treating their English trading
partners with “great honour and speciall countenance” ( 6 : 293 , 294 ). It may
well be that blackness here codifies “Negroes” as accursed. But if these repre-
sentational strategies betray the imperialist vision that underlies and pervades
the collection, they, along with the other matter of Africa, inhabit only the
peripheries of that vision, whose focus is decidedly elsewhere—on the Por-
tuguese, Turks, and Spanish and the enticing prospects to the east and west.
If we turn back to the stage, to Titusand its story of Roman conquest,
with Africa’s displacement within England’s imperialist history in mind, we
may be better able to understand the Moor’s otherwise surprising but signal
invisibility. Tituscomes at imperialist politics through a classical past that En-
gland sometimes embraced as its own. But if Shakespeare’s dramatic fiction
stands at a distance from contemporary developments, from the “navigations
and discoveries” that Hakluyt was promoting as a cornerstone of an imperial
English nation, its interest in the consequences of conquest do not. Though
Hakluyt partitions the world into discrete, differently valued domains, press-
Imperialist Beginnings 63