Primary Encounters with Subjects and Slaves: Comparing the Descriptions of North Americans and Africans in the Narratives of John Hawkins and William Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru

Early Modern travel journals have experienced a resurgence of scholarly interest in recent years. The earliest encounters between the geographically secluded and rhetorically xenophobic English and people other than continental Europeans, specically black Africans and Native Americans, have once again become an important area of academic exploration. In the rst part of the twenty-rst century, numerous anthologies on the topic have been produced. The Andrew Hadeld edited anthology Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630 (2001), is a collection of primary documents concerning English colonial encounters around the globe.1 Five years later, Peter C. Marshall edited a similar collection, Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery. Aside from primary document collections, scholars have also theorized and historicized the moment of encounter in works such as New World Encounters2 and Michael Householder’s Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter.3