endpoint, where Negroes seem unusually like Indians and the status of both
obscured by narrative scrutiny of the Spanish.^50 Miles Philips, for example,
centers on the unhappy afterlife of Hawkins’s final expedition, when he, Job
Hortop, and others were forced “to serve as slaves to sundry gentlemen
Spaniards” ( 9 : 416 ). Philips does draw attention to the Negro slaves who were
also serving under the Spanish, distinguishing their enslavement from the
servitude of the Indians: the Spaniards, he declares, “are all of them attended
and served by Indians weekely, and by Negroes which be their slaves during
their life” ( 9 : 422 – 23 ). These distinctions fall by the wayside, however, as he
emphasizes rather the “cruell handling” and “persecution” effected by the
Spanish and the Spanish Inquisition, his main preoccupation. Specifically,
he presses “Indians and Negroes” into a single group of subjects, kept “in such
subjection and servitude” and abused by such “horrible cruelties” that they
alike “doe daily lie in waite to practise their deliverance out of that thraldome
and bondage, that the Spaniardes doe keepe them in” ( 9 : 423 , 430 ). And in de-
scribing his own appointment as “overseer” to a group of “Negroes and Indi-
ans” working in the mines, he overlooks the differences between them to
stress the difference between the English and the Spanish, explaining that
while the Indians and Negroes would, if they could, flee the Spanish, they
work overtime for the English because of “our well using & intreating of
them” ( 9 : 423 ). It is the Spanish who become the distinctive bogeymen, and as
they do, Negroes “which be slaves during their life” are merged with Indians
who serve “weekely.” Philips’s narrative is as long as it is ideologically com-
plex, but what is particularly striking here is that even in an account which
involves African slaving, not only is the place of African subjects neither sta-
ble nor distinctive; it is also not (yet) central.
There was another available record of the venture, which Hakluyt likely
knew but did not include—an account probably written by one of Hawkins’s
officers and containing at least four times as much description of the activity
in Guinea as the other three accounts combined.^51 In it, the Guinea natives
exhibit a particularly vicious cannibalism, which might “justify” their capture
and enslavement. Not only are they accused of eating “[very barbarously each]
other”; the narrator also reports that
among these negros there is a greate [feast whenever] the soldiers have
taken any of them, eve[n one man. They] binde him to a stake and
make a fyre hard [by and rou]nd abowt it, and the miserable creature
[while he is yet] alive they will with their knives cutt of his...laces andImperialist Beginnings 59