Spanish Slave-Ships in the English West Indies, 1660-85

Abstract

FROM THE BEGINNING of the Restoration period, the English Crown was determined to maintain its control over foreign trade, as over all foreign affairs; and it did this by the grant or continuance of exclusive charters and monopolies, such as were issued to the Levant, East India, and Royal Fishery Companies in 1661, to the Royal Company of Adventurers trading into Africa in 1663, to the Canary Island Company in 1665, to the Hudson Bay Company and the Bahamas Company in 1670, and to the Royal African Company in 1672. It was a matter of direct concern to the Crown to protect the interests and rights of such companies, and to prevent outsiders, interlopers, whether foreign nationals or English private traders, from encroaching upon the sacrosanct areas of commercial operation. In the case of the African trade, the field of monopoly spanned from the Barbary Coast to the Cape of Good Hope-or so it said on paper. Stockholders in the Royal Company of Adventurers, and in the later Royal African Company, included the king, members of his family, court dignitaries, the chief politicians of the day, and the principal merchants and traders of London and Bristol. The king's brother, James, Duke of York, governed both.' Company policy was therefore Government policy: both had vital colonial interests, both sought quick colonial profit, both hated the name of a competitor. The government's chief bane was the Dutch, who had consolidated their 'factories, emporia for gold, ivory, slaves, on the Guinea coast of AVest Africa, and whose great slave-mart at Curaeao in the Caribbean was the envy of all nations and the goal of most planters hungry for slave-labor. The company, besides suffering from the * Dr. Thornton is lecturer in British Commonwealth history at the U7niversity of Aberdeen.-Ed. 1 The Royal ComIpany of Adventurers was chartered on 10 January 1663; the Royal African Company, on 27 September 1672. For these Charters, see Carr, Select Charters of Trading Conpanies (Selden Society, London, 1913), pp. 172-181, 186-192; and for lists of the stockholders, see C[alendar of] SLtate P[apers] C[olonial], 1661-8, 408, and CSPC, 1669-74, 934.