world,” ultimately the Navigationsexposes the unevenness of England’s efforts
and the uncertainty of its aims. And importantly, the representation of Africa
is especially fragmented and unfocused, its landscape not only split between
north and west but also embedded within other defining geographies. Here,
in a text that aims to prove and promote England’s superiority as a global
presence, Africa lies tellingly in the margins, its pertinence to England’s over-
seas explorations subordinated by other priorities. Moors, though neither the
only nor the primary “African” subjects within the Navigations, come into its
story explicitly in accounts of Barbary. To look across Hakluyt’s narratives on
Africa, west as well as north, is to see Africa’s displacement within England’s
imperialist fantasies and the Moor’s place outside them.
***The dark continent. In 1878 , Henry Stanley (of Stanley and Livingstone) en-
titled an account of his African expedition Through the Dark Continent, and
his coinage has been commonly appropriated to give Africa a black face much
earlier. And with good reason. If the designation of the “dark continent” did
not explicitly enter the public discourse until the nineteenth century, the idea
of Africa as the great, unfathomable icon of darkness surfaced long before.^9
Up to the fifteenth century, rumor had it that “any Christian who passed
[Cape] Bojador”—the farthest south explorers had gone on the West African
coast—“would infallibly be changed into a black, and would carry to his end
this mark of God’s vengeance on his insolent prying.”^10 The “insolent prying”
continued nonetheless, and step by step, from 1415 onward, Portuguese
mariners made it beyond that first awesome obstacle and around the next, the
Cape of Good Hope, presumably in much the same color they started in. But
European exploration of Africa’s interiors and some parts of the coast was sub-
stantially limited well into the eighteenth century. We need only look at the
maps Europe produced in the mid-sixteenth century, which demarcate myri-
ads of coastal ports but leave the rest of the continent blank, filling it in only
with black and white figurines of generic warriors and kings that convey no
geographic or ethnographic information.^11
Yet significantly, when the English began their expeditions to Africa in
the mid-sixteenth century, they were not sailing in the dark. Nor did they set
out with a scheme to colonize or civilize a “dark continent.” Rather, they were
following the unpredictable, economically oriented lead of the Portuguese,
who had claimed a veritable monopoly over the trades there by the 1490 s,
Imperialist Beginnings 47