The test of this was made by Sir John Hawkins who at the beginning of his career as a great English sea captain had informed himself in the Canary Islands of the Afro-American opportunity awaiting exploitation.  Backed by certain English financiers, he set forth in 1562 with a hundred men in three small ships, and after procuring in Sierra Leone, “partly by the sword and partly by other means,” above three hundred negroes he sailed to Hispaniola where without hindrance from the authorities he exchanged them for colonial produce.  “And so, with prosperous success, and much gain to himself and the aforesaid adventurers, he came home, and arrived in the month of September, 1563."[2] Next year with 170 men in four ships Hawkins again captured as many Sierra Leone natives as he could carry, and proceeded to peddle them in the Spanish islands.  When the authorities interfered he coerced them by show of arms and seizure of hostages, and when the planters demurred at his prices he brought them to terms through a mixture of diplomacy and intimidation.  After many adventures by the way he reached home, as the chronicler concludes, “God be thanked! in safety:  with the loss of twenty persons in all the voyage; as with great profit to the venturers in the said voyage, so also to the whole realm, in bringing home both gold, silver, pearls, and other jewels in great store.  His name therefore be praised for evermore!  Amen.”  Before two years more had passed Hawkins put forth for a third voyage, this time with six ships, two of them among the largest then afloat.  The cargo of slaves, procured by aiding a Guinea tribe in an attack upon its neighbor, had been duly sold in the Indies when dearth of supplies and stress of weather drove the fleet into the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulloa.  There a Spanish fleet of thirteen ships attacked the intruders, capturing their treasure ship and three of her consorts.  Only the Minion under Hawkins and the bark Judith under the young Francis Drake escaped to carry the harrowing tale to England.  One result of the episode was that it filled Hawkins and Drake with desire for revenge on Spain, which was wreaked in due time but in European waters.  Another consequence was a discouragement of English slave trading for nearly a century to follow.

[Footnote 2:  Hakluyt, Voyages, ed. 1589.  This and the accounts of Hawkins’ later exploits in the same line are reprinted with a valuable introduction in C.R.  Beazley, ed., Voyages and Travels (New York, 1903), I, 29-126.]

The defeat of the Armada in 1588 led the world to suspect the decline of Spain’s maritime power, but only in the lapse of decades did the suspicion of her helplessness become a certainty.  Meantime Portugal was for sixty years an appanage of the Spanish crown, while the Netherlands were at their heroic labor for independence.  Thus when the Dutch came to prevail at sea in the early seventeenth century the Portuguese posts in Guinea fell their prey, and