‘To Pot Straight Way we Goe'

This essay is concerned with two early English voyages to West Africa in the 1560s, recorded by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, and with a rarely studied, imaginative – or more precisely poetic – purchase on these voyages: a travel poem in two parts by Robert Baker, who served as a factor or commercial agent on both expeditions. English mariners were still infrequent visitors to the West African shoreline before the middle of the sixteenth century. Some extant sources confirm that English interest in the region existed as early as the 1480s and the reign of Henry VII, ¹ but no records of any actual travel to sub-Saharan West Africa survive from before the 1530s, the decade in which William Hawkins the Elder ‘touched at the River of Sestos, upon the Coast of Guinea’ ² three times on his way to Brazil. Hakluyt, to whom we owe knowledge of these early visits, reports that Hawkins ‘trafiqued with the Negroes’ while in Guinea, buying some ivory ‘and other commodities which that place yeeldeth’, ³ but he prints no independent account of Hawkins’s African stopovers. ⁴ The first full report of a Guinea voyage, which opens the West African sequence in both editions of The Principal Navigations, dealt instead with Thomas Wyndham’s ill-fated 1553 expedition to Guinea and Benin. Wyndham died in Benin, but remnants of his fleet arrived back in England in 1554, and in its wake English voyages to West Africa finally became a more regular occurrence, a good century after the Portuguese had started exploring this coastline in considerable detail. ⁵