||Hawkins, John, Sir, 1532-1595
||Third Troublesome Voyage Made with the Jesus of Lubec, 1567-1568
||Burrage, Henry S. (editor). Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906). Pages 135-148.
||16 / 0
Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595), a cousin of Sir Francis Drake, was
born in Plymouth, England. Hawkins inherited a small fleet of merchant
ships and was responsible for England’s entrance into the North
Atlantic slave trade when he broke the Spanish monopoly in the early
1560s. His successes as a merchant sea captain and slave trader
elevated him to positions of power as a politician and naval administrator,
where he served as one of the chief architects of the Elizabethan
Hawkins served as a member of Parliament for Plymouth from 1571-1583.
In 1571, he exacted a measure of revenge on the Spanish for the
ill treatment described in the text presented here. Pretending to
support the Spanish ambassador in a plot to place Mary, Queen of
Scots, on the English throne, Hawkins accepted a large bribe, revealed
the plot, and then used his profits to equip privateers to prey
on Spanish commerce. In 1577, he was appointed treasurer of the
English Royal Navy. He received a knighthood for preparing the fleet
to meet the Armada in 1588. In 1595, he once again set sail in the
company of Sir Francis Drake to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements
in the West Indies. He died at sea on November 12, 1595.
Hawkins’ Third Expedition, 1567-1568
This disastrous expedition by John Hawkins was his third voyage
seeking commercial gain by selling African slaves to the Spanish
settlements of the West Indies. He left Plymouth October 2, 1567,
for Africa, where the inhabitants violently resisted his efforts
to capture slaves. After succeeding in kidnapping Africans to be
sold as slaves in the West Indies, Hawkins sailed to the eastern
coast of Mexico. Here the Spanish fleet attacked him and Drake while
they were at the port of Veracruz. The Spanish at first feigned
assistance to help Hawkins rebuild his ships, which had been damaged
in a severe storm, but soon attacked the English vessels. Hawkins
and another ship escaped from the bay at Veracruz but the Spanish
killed the English sailors that were trapped on shore and attempted
to pursue Hawkins. Of the six ships in the English fleet only two,
those captained by Drake and Hawkins, made their way back to England,
which they reached on January 25, 1568.
This account is notable not only for its firsthand description
of slave stealing and selling, but also for the lack of any intimation
of disgrace attached to these activities. It also provides important
insight into the beginning of the long quarrel between England and
Spain that led to open war in 1585.
This edition comes from a reprint of Hawkins’ account
published by the Hakluyt Society in 1878.
Other Internet and Reference Sources
We have included here accounts of Hawkins’ second and third voyages.
For an excerpt from a report on Hawkins’ first voyage (from Donnan,
Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade,
vol. 1, pp. 44-47; originally published as The First Voyage of
John Hawkins, 1562-1563), see
For portraits of Hawkin, see the National Maritime Museum web site
Britain’s Channel 4 history web site on pirates contains a useful
biography of Hawkins at http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/pirates/
Harry Kelsey's Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) is the standard modern