ABSTRACT
English missionaries called Sierra Leone 'The White Man's Grave'. Probably about one fifth of the 400 men who had sailed from Plymouth in October 1567 were dead when the expedition left Guinea less than six months later. John Hawkins began large-scale English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade: Richard Madox foreshadowed both the English shaping of African linguistics, and the pioneering work in Guinea of nineteenth century Protestant missionary-linguists. From Sierra Leone, Hawkins's expedition had sailed to the Caribbean, and had there proceeded to trade with the Spanish settlements. In sum, Robert Barrett peacefully trading in the Sierra Leone estuary had reasonable grounds for supposing that he was no pirate. Thus, archives in Spain and Mexico record details about the activities of the English expedition as it sailed along the coast of western Africa, from its landfall near Cap Blanc in November 1567 to the stay at Sierra Leone between January and March 1568.
