Elizabethan Ventures into the ‘New World’: The Starting Point

The pro-maritime war argument that this book examines can be placed in the wider context of the history of English expansion into the Americas, especially Spanish America, which is one of the most important aspects of English expansion into the world outside Europe. From the early sixteenth century, several European powers, such as the French, English and Dutch, intruded into South America to obtain a slice of the wealth produced in the ‘New World’, first by depredation and illicit trade, and later by also establishing new colonies in the Caribbean and North America. In the case of England, this undertaking began in the early sixteenth century. The English had established a commercial link with Spanish America by the 1520s, and were engaged in trans-Atlantic trade with Spanish American colonies through Seville. In the 1530s, some of those with Iberian interests, such as William Hawkins of Plymouth, also initiated direct trade with Guinea and Brazil, though this often caused tension with the Portuguese. This direct trade was undertaken again in the 1550s and 1560s, when English traders, such as John Hawkins of Plymouth – a son of William – and the Fenners of Sussex, conducted slaving voyages to West Africa and Spanish America.