In 1531-2, however, came the first Englishman to the Guinea Coast. "Olde M. William Hawkins of Plimmouth," father of Sir John Hawkins, "a man for his experience and skill in sea causes much esteemed, and beloved of King Henry . . . armed out a tall and goodly called the Paule  of Plimmouth," and whilst engaged in voyaging to Brazil "he touched at the river of Sestos upon the coast of Guinea, where he and took of them elephants' teeth and other commodities that place yieldeth." "Olde Mr. William Hawkins," however, seems to have kept his hands clean from taint of the Slave Trade. It was left for his son to be the first Englishman who is known to have trafficked in human beings.

Within five-and-twenty years of the date of William Hawkins' voyage began a series of English trading ventures to West Africa; the efficacy of Papal Bulls was no longer a thing to be reckoned on. In 1553 the ships Primrose  and Lion, with a pinnace called the Moone  as tender, were fitted out in London for a voyage to Guinea, "all well furnished as well with men of the lustiest sort to the number of seven score . . . having also two captains, the one a stranger called Anthonie Anes Pinteado, a Portugall . . . a wise, discreet, and sober man, who for his cunning in sailing, being as well an expert Pilot as a was sometime in great favour with the King of Portugal, and to whom the coasts of Brazil and Guinea were committed to be kept from the French, to whom he was a of the Sea."

Unfortunately the relations between the two captains were far from friendly. Captain Windham, the leader of the expedition, was a man of violent and overbearing temper, one with boundless scorn of foreigners and of all things foreign, a man, indeed—as the old chronicle puts it—"whom few or none adorned." Almost from the start he seems to have laid himself out to thwart and to browbeat Pinteado, whose offence of being a foreigner apparently justified Windham amply in his own eyes for bullying of the vilest character.

At Madeira the ships fell in with a Portuguese galleon, heavily armed and full of men, sent out specially to intercept them. She made, however, no attempt to interfere with the English ships; discretion was the better part of valour, especially as the English craft individually were probably quite equal to tackling the "Portugal."

After Madeira began Pinteado's "sorrow." Windham's behaviour became more and more brutal, and finally he seems to have disrated the Portuguese captain. At the river Sestos they "might for their of that country, which is a very fruit, and much like unto a fig as it on the tree." But Captain Windham would have none of this pepper; he had a soul above mere ordinary trade—only gold dust would satisfy him. With which end in view he took the ships farther along the coast near to Elmina, and then, still dissatisfied, wished to push on yet farther. It is ever the distant prospect that looks the more enticing. Pinteado, to whom the coast was familiar, knowing that at this time of year it was particularly unhealthy, strongly advised Windham to go no farther; but the latter, flying in a rage, called Pinteado "a dirty Jew," with "other opprobrious words," threatened to cut off his ears and nail them to the mast, and finally compelled him to pilot the ships to Benin.

Here the ships' boats were sent up the river fifty or sixty leagues, "where with Pinteado were conducted to the King's Court," and arrangements were made under which the King undertook to provide, within thirty days, lading sufficient for both vessels. Meantime the crews "having no rule of themselves, but eating without measure of the fruits of the country and drinking the wine of the in the night from the cut of the branches of the same, and in such extreme heat running continually into the water . . . were thereby brought into swellings and agues, in so much that the later time of the coming on caused them to die, sometimes three and sometimes four or five in a day." This state of affairs did not tend to mollify a temper ever simmering, ever ready to boil over, and, the thirty days having expired without sign of the promised cargoes, Windham sent to Pinteado and the others directions to leave the King's Court and to come on board ship without delay. They "returned answer that already great store of pepper was gathered," and that they "looked daily for more." Thereupon Windham, in uncontrollable temper, peremptorily ordered them to come down at once. The merchants, unwilling to lose their cargo when delay of a few days would complete it, sent down Pinteado to reason with Windham. Worse choice of an ambassador could hardly have been made, even had he arrived in time to remonstrate.

But "in the mean season, Windham, all raging, up Pinteado's cabin, spoiled such provision of cold stilled waters and suckets as he had provided for his health, and left him nothing, neither of his instruments to by, nor of his apparel, and in the meantime falling himself died also. Whose death Pinteado coming aboard lamented as much as if he had the dearest friend he had in the world. But of the mariners and other officers did spit in his face, some calling him saying that he had brought them there to kill them; and some drawing their at him, making a to slay him.

"Then he perceived that they would needs away, desired them to tarry that he might fetch the rest of the that were left at the Court, but they would not grant his request. Then desired he them to give him the ship's with as much of an old as might serve for the same, promising them therewith to bring the rest to England. But all way in Then wrote he a letter to the promising them if God would lend him life to return for them with all haste to fetch them. And thus was Pinteado kept ashipboard against his will, thrust among the of the ship, not used like a man, nor yet like an honest boy, but glad to find favour at the hand.

"Then departed they, leaving one of their ships behind them, which they her. After this, within six or seven sailing dyed also Pinteado, for very pensiveness and thought that him to the heart. A man worthy to serve any prince, and most vilely used."

Thus disastrously ended the first of the English voyages to the Guinea Coast, a voyage redeemed only by the fact that one hundred and fifty pounds weight of gold dust was brought back. "Of seven score men that sailed scarce forty reached Plimmouth," and even of that forty, many died after landing. What befell the unfortunates who were abandoned to their fate in Benin City, we do not read. Probably they, too, perished in no long time. It is an ill climate for Europeans.

Undeterred, however, by the evil fate of Windham's expedition, Captain John Lok, with three "goodly shippes," the Trinitie, of one hundred and forty tons, the Bartholomew, of ninety, and the John Evangelist, of one hundred and forty, dropped down the Thames one October day in 1554, bound for the same regions that had proved so cruel to the first voyagers. Though the venture began with a stroke of ill luck,—one of their two was lost, with all her crew, ere the English coast faded out of sight astern,—yet there ended adverse fortune, and the record of trade done along the Gold Coast was highly satisfactory, in spite of trouble with the Portuguese, who near Elmina fired upon the English boats. hundred pound weight and of gold of two and also six and thirty buts of and about two hundred and fifty Elephants' teeth," constitute a cargo of no mean value. Some of the tusks were "as as a man's thigh above the knee, and weighed about four score and ten pounds weight apiece," but "they of an hundred and five and twenty pounds." It is quaintly recorded that "these great teeth or tusks grow in the upper jaw downward, and not in the nether jaw upward, wherein the Painters and Arras workers are deceived."

To those voyagers of old, an Elephant ("which some call an Oliphant") was an exceeding strange beast, regarding which many wondrous beliefs are related, such as that "they are made tame by drinking the of barley." It is a thing also not generally known to students of natural history of the present day, that the elephants "have continual against Dragons, which desire their blood, because it is very and therefore the Dragon lying as the Elephant (being of exceeding length) about the hinder legs of the Elephant, and so staying him, his breath, or else whereunto he cannot reach with his down on the serpent, being now full of blood, and with the poise of his body breaketh him: so that his blood with the blood of the Elephant out of him mingled together, which being is congealed into that substance which the Apothecaries call Sanguis Draconis, (that is) Dragon's Blood, otherwise called Cinnabaris, although there be another kind of Cinnabaris commonly called Cinoper or Vermilion, which the painters use in colours." Doubtless the "Dragons "were Pythons, but pythons certainly gifted with even more than the proverbial wisdom of the serpent. The belief in a cunning which would prompt a snake to slay an animal so huge and powerful as the elephant by mooring him fore and aft, so to speak, and slowly sucking the breath and the life-blood out of him through his trunk, is indeed remarkable.

Captain Lok during his voyage was not at all favourably impressed by the negroes. "They are," says he, "a people of beastly living, without a God, religion, or common wealth, and so scorched and vexed by the heat of the that in many places they curse it when it Yet this very heat, of which complaint is thus made, appears to be turned to account by the natives, for we are told that they are thereby saved some trouble in the baking of their bread. "They says the writer of the account of Lok's voyage, two stones with their hands as much as they think may suffice their family, and when they have thus brought it to of water and make thereof a very thin dough, which they upon some part of their houses where it is baked by the so that when the master of the house or any of his family will it." The birds of the air must have mourned the day when that form of baking was abandoned.

The from which those negroes made bread appears to have been somewhat brobdingnagian, for we read that "they have very faire whereof is two handfuls in length, and as big as a great Bulrush, and almost inches about where it is biggest. The stem or straw as the little finger of a man's round also and very white, and somewhat shining like that have lost their colour." This no doubt was a kind of maize.

Lok thought that the Senegal and the Niger were one and the same river, and he says of the former that "It is furthermore and very strange that said of this river; and this is that on the one side thereof the inhabitants are of high stature and black, and on the other side of brown or colour, and low stature, which thing also our men confirm for true." It is the fact that the Senegal does sharply mark the boundary between "dry, bare waste of northern desert, the home of wandering tribes of brown skinned men, and the fixed dwelling places, the towns and cornfields of the negroes who dwell upon its southern bank." Hist. Geog. Vol. iii.")?>

Of the many strange things touched upon in the account of Captain Lok's voyage, it is interesting to note that he, like Sir Walter Raleigh in Guiana near half a century later, mentions a race of men in the interior of the country without heads, with eyes and mouth in their breasts. These people were called "Blemines," and they answer very well to the description given by Raleigh of the Ewaipanoma, of whom he says that "though it may be thought a fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true."

In talking of the country in the interior, to the East of Benin, mention is made of an island called Meroe, in which island in days of old, women reigned. "Josephus writeth that it was sometime called Sabea, and that the Queen of Saba came from thence to Jerusalem to hear the wisdom of Solomon." East of this again lies the empire of Prester John, "whom some call Papa Johannes."

Of the derivation of the word "Africa," we read also that it was so named by the Greeks "because it is without For the Greek letter Alpha or A for indeed although in the stead of winter they have a cloudy and tempestuous season, yet it is not also, and somewhere such scorching times to live as it were in furnaces, and in manner already halfway in or Hell."

Strange lore of the sea, too, we find in the account of this voyage. Mention is made of certain parts of the ocean in which Lok's vessels found themselves, where they saw of water which they call spouts, falling out of the into the sea," some of them as as the great pillars of churches, insomuch that sometimes they fall into and put them in great danger of drowning. Some that these should be the cataracts of heaven, which were all opened at Noe's floud. . . . But I think them rather to be such fluxions or eruptions as Aristotle in his de Mundo saith to chance in the sea . . . Richard Chancellor told me that he heard Sebastian Cabot report, that (as as I remember) either about the coasts of Brasile or Rio de Plata, his was suddenly lifted from the sea and cast upon

Although in this second English voyage to the Guinea Coast the mortality amongst the ships' crews was on no such formidable scale as had been the case during Windham's voyage, yet even Lok lost many of whom died on reaching the colder weather experienced between the Azores and London. The voyage was very long drawn out, which might have given the men a fair chance of becoming gradually but probably they were saturated with African fever, and the chill northern air killed them as frost in autumn kills flies. We know, too, how appalling were the arrangements for the sick on shipboard in days even later than those. It had taken the ships seven weeks to reach the Coast from London on the outward voyage; homeward bound from the Coast to the Thames they were at sea for twenty weeks,—"the cause whereof they say to be this: That about the coast of Cabo Verde the is ever at the East, by reason whereof they were enforced to out of their course into the at the West to bring them home." Were a sailing vessel in our day to make the unusually tardy passage of one hundred and forty days even over the long twelve thousand mile waste of waters that stretches between Port Phillip Heads and England, many a face would lengthen as day followed day and still she continued unreported. One hundred and forty days between Cape Coast Castle and the Thames is phenomenal, and must have entailed an enormous amount of suffering in those scurvy-smitten days, when every ship was a hotbed of that fell disease. It was no unusual thing then, and even up to the end of the Eighteenth Century, for whole crews to be stricken down by this one loathsome disease, and its ravages generally amongst seamen were incredibly great. In the Eighteenth Century, in all the naval battles during the Seven Years' War, it was found that of a total of nearly 136,000 casualties, little over 1500 were due to the actual fighting, but that close on 134,000 men died of disease, or were "missing." And the disease chiefly responsible for this vast total was Scurvy.

One of Lok's vessels on this trip brought away with her four negroes, who were said to have been taken for the purpose of having them taught English, so that in the future they might act as interpreters. It does not appear, however, that their consent was asked. Towrson reported a year later that on a certain part of the coast the natives were hostile because "that the last M. Gaynsh did take away the Captaine's [Chief's] and three others from the place with their and all they had about them; which was the cause that they became friends with the Portugals, whom before they hated." The men were, however, restored to their homes in 1557, though the fate of "their golde" is not recorded. They are said to have been "tall and strong men, and could and moist air doth somewhat offend them. Yet doubtless men that are in hot Regions may better abide