ABSTRACT
In total, the 1589 edition of e Principal Navigations contains accounts of ten separate English voyages6 between 1553 and 1588 solely to that part of Africa known to contemporaries as Guinea – an area comprising the sub-Saharan, West African coastline and interior, stretching roughly from Sierra Leone in the west to the Cameroon river in the east. Other English voyages, notably the slaving expeditions of Sir John Hawkins (son of William), also stopped in Guinea on their way to the West Indies, but these are covered elsewhere in Hakluyt’s anthology.7 e ten voyages solely to Guinea were all principally trading ventures, and none was a slaving mission per se, even though Hakluyt notes (following Richard Eden)8 that John Lok, captain of the rst English voyage to Guinea aer Wyndham’s, brought ve ‘blacke slaves’ back to England as early as 1555.9 What attracted English merchants to Guinea in the sixteenth century (and especially to that part known as the Gold Coast) was, in the rst instance, not slavery but the trade in gold, pepper, and ivory. In return, traders from England successfully imported textiles from Europe and elsewhere, as well as all kinds of metal utensils and tools,10 which were in high demand, owing to the relative scarcity of iron in the coastal regions of Guinea.11
