ish, which, though it included casualties, reached a peaceful, if not equitable,
resolution. Much more problematic was, it seems, an encounter with the Por-
tuguese, who were themselves heading toward Barbary and who, when they
spied the English, “shot off their great ordinance in [the English venturers’]
hearing” ( 6 : 140 ). The English “escaped their handes” “by God and good prov-
idence,” but the message of the encounter and the narrative is clear: “here by
the way it is to bee understood that the Portugals were much offended with
this our new trade into Barbarie, and both in our voiage the yeere before, as
also in this they gave out in England by their marchants, that if they tooke us
in those partes, they would use us as their mortall enemies, with great threates
and menaces” ( 6 : 140 ). Adding insult to injury, the unmentioned irony of this
episode is the fact that one of the English ships was actually “a Portugall Car-
avel bought of certaine Portugals in Newport in Wales” ( 6 : 138 ).^43
The accounts of West African ventures are similarly overshadowed by a
preoccupation with the “Portugals,” who have already left their marks on the
landscape before the English ever arrive.^44 In Richard Eden’s record of a “sec-
ond voyage” to Guinea in 1554 , for example, the landmark Cape de las Barbas
takes its bearings from the fact that “there use many Spaniardes and Portugals
to trade for fishing” ( 6 : 157 ); and, in this case as in others, the place name it-
self betrays Iberian roots. During that venture too, the English also stopped
to trade their cloth at the well-known “Castello de mina,” headed at that time
by the Portuguese captain “Don John” ( 6 : 160 ). A subsequent narrative on
William Towerson’s first venture down the Guinea coast ( 1555 – 56 ) suggests
that, in negotiating with the “Negroes” (one who spoke Portuguese) in the
“towne of Don John,” the English had to undo the damaging precedent set
by “the Portugals” who previously “took away a man from them,” “spoiled
their boates,” and “destroyed” “halfe of their towne” ( 6 : 196 ). Similarly, the ac-
count of Towerson’s second voyage (in 1557 ) pivots on the reiterated contrast
between the Negroes’ fear of “the Portugals” “who did much harme to their
Countrey” and their embrace of the English, who promised to—and then
did—“defend them from the Portugals” ( 6 : 218 ).
Even more telling is the earliest and most widely known of the Guinea
narratives, Richard Eden’s record of the first ( 1555 ) voyage, which circulated
first as an appendix to his translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the new
worlde( 1555 ) and which includes “A briefe description of Africke.” Although
that “description” purports to give Africa its due, the account’s focal point
nonetheless is the unavoidable, if also uncontainable, presence of the Por-
tuguese, for whom Eden becomes a somewhat ambivalent advocate. In
Imperialist Beginnings 55