Nobody's Slave (36 page)
Authors: Tim Vicary
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #United States, #African American, #Historical Fiction, #African, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense
The slave trade is an ugly business, and John Hawkins does not come out of it well. Hawkins made three slave-trading voyages, and financed a fourth, transporting hundreds of African slaves in miserable conditions across the Atlantic. To him this was trade, nothing more. He was clearly not ashamed of it, because he commissioned his own coat of arms, the top half of which consists of an African slave, bound by a rope. The incident at Rio de la Hacha, where he betrayed the trust of the runaway slave Alberto, is also true. The slave was returned to the Spanish governor, who had him hanged drawn and quartered.
His cousin Francis Drake seems to have had a slightly different attitude, which I have hinted at in this story. Drake was clearly a man of action, seldom troubled by guilt, but on several voyages he got on well with the Cimarrons, and one of his longest-serving seamen was an escaped black slave called Diego, who volunteered to join him at Nombre de Dios in 1573, and stayed with him until he died on the
Golden Hind’s
round-the-world voyage six years later.
The Africans involved in these events have left no written records, so their story is harder to get right. This is a pity because they were, in fact, the majority of the people crossing the Atlantic at this time. There were more African slaves in New Spain than there were Spanish colonists; so no wonder the Spanish were afraid when they escaped! A few weeks before Drake raided Nombre de Dios, some Africans did the same thing; but they were less interested in silver and gold than in freeing other slaves, particularly women!
The battle for Conga really took place, much as I have described it. Hawkins was approached by two African kings, who asked for his help. It’s difficult to know exactly what this war was about; there was a bewildering variety of ethnic groups in Sierra Leone at this time. It may just have been a power struggle between different kings of the Mani tribe, which had successfully invaded much of the country over the previous twenty years. However, the Sumba are described as a particularly aggressive group who were sometimes allied to the Mani, and sometimes separate; so I chose to make them the aggressors, and the Mani the defenders, in my version of the story.
One particular incident in the battle troubled me a lot. Several historians describe how the African victors, having conquered the town, indulged in a cannibal feast in the burning ruins. But this is not mentioned in the accounts in Hakluyt, so I became suspicious; was this an appalling racist slur, which the historians had just made up? Sadly, the answer turns out to be no. The evidence is in a first-hand account by one of the English sailors, in the
Cotton MSS, Otho E. VIII,
in the British Library, transcribed in an appendix to James A. Williamson’s 1927 biography
Sir John Hawkins: The Time and The Man.
Other sources describe the Sumba as deliberately using this behaviour to terrify their enemies.
So this, too, really did happen, and I mention it briefly, in chapter 13. It makes the Sumba seem horrible, but as Francis points out to Tom, it hardly reflects well on the Englishmen either, since the slavers were the cannibals’ friends.
No one has a monopoly of virtue.
Tim Vicary York, England, July 2012
Tim Vicary is the author of over 25 books, including legal thrillers, historical novels and graded readers for foreign learners of English. He lives in the English countryside near the historic city of York, in the north east of England. You can find out more about Tim on his
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You might like to read another of Tim Vicary's historical novels. To see them online, just click on one of the links below.
Cat & Mouse
The Blood Upon the Rose
The Monmouth Summer
Tim Vicary has also written a series of Legal Thrillers, about a tough barrister called Sarah Newby. The first three books in the series are:
A Game of Proof
A Fatal Verdict
Bold Counsel
