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TWO CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader by Harry Kelsey (Yale University Press, 2003. 402 pages. Illustrated. $35)
Fitzroy: The Remarkable Story of Darwin's Captain and the Invention of the Weather Forecast by John and Mary Gribbin (Yale University Press, 2003. 352 pages. Illustrated. $35)
Each volume under review demonstrates meticulous scholarship, evolves with stylistic grace, and constitutes a significant contribution to naval and maritime history. In a recent London Review of Books article (3 February 2005), the historian Linda Colley seems to call for precisely such an amalgamation of naval and maritime interests, and in my view both authors and Yale University Press are to be congratulated for having anticipated with each of these books Colley's much justified suggestion.
By modern standards Sir John Hawkins was a consummate pirate; by Elizabethan standards Hawkins was a highly successful merchant, one of the truly great seafarers of his time, a brilliant naval administrator, one of four commanders who led the English fleet to victory against the Spanish Armada, and the man who, with the queen's tacit approval and financial backing, pioneered the English slave trade. Although the case remains vague, he may also have been briefly a traitor, offering service to Philip n of Spain in exchange for the release of a large number of his sailors who were captured at San Juan de UMa in 1568. At the same time, considering how well he kept Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham informed about his "negotiations," a modern reader would be inclined to see him as a double agent whose true loyalties remained firm but whose contemporary reputation suffered owing to the treacherous shoals of Elizabethan politics. Whatever the case, Hawkins's service against the Armada and his long years as treasurer of the navy redeemed him in the eyes of his peers and helped to set England on a course toward future greatness.
Hawkins's role in establishing England in the slave trade remains reprehensible. The best that can be said for it is that Hawkins could not think his way beyond the limits of his time, and when one considers that even the queen and members of the court profited from this act of what passed for commerce, one sees how far civilization...