Recovering a black African's voice in an English lawsuit: Jacques Francis and the salvage operations of the Mary Rose and the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus, 1545-ca 1550.(Articles)

THE encounters between the English and the black Africans or Moors in Tudor England have remained an ill-mined territory despite a rich crop of Africanist studies released in the last three decades. The prevailing view that the uneven encounters set in rather late, that blacks in Tudor England were rarities bereft of their personal voices, that the English had no experience as slave traders in the first half of the sixteenth century, that the English slave trade was pioneered by John Hawkins, that no blacks were bought or sold in England until the seventeenth century, does no longer stand the test of historical examination. (1) The prominent Africanist historian James Walvin noted that the history of British involvement with black Africans did not begin with the first effective importation of black slaves into England. Thus he argued that it would be worthwhile investigating the earlier and wider history of European explorations and discoveries. (2) Spanish historians have followed his recommendation, establishing the undeniable fact that the English merchants stationed in Andalucia at the close of the fifteenth century kept African slaves, Moors, mulattoes, and Negroes as domestic servants and as indentured workers in their soap factories. What is more, the English merchants, in the wake of their Genoese partners and in emulation of their Spanish colleagues, became heavily enmeshed in the African slave trade as early as the 1480s when the trade was still in its infancy. (3)

The present article is meant to be a contribution to the understudied subject of the black presence in early modern England. (4) It draws on a set of interrogatories conducted by the High Court of Admiralty in London. What emerges from these state records is the story of Jacques Francis (Jaques Frauncys), a Guinea diver kept as a slave by the Venetian Piero Paolo Corsi who was hired, in July 1547, by a partnership of Italian merchants to recover goods from the sunken trading vessel, the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus, owned by Francesco Bernardi of Venice, and who, in 1546, had been commissioned by the admiralty to participate in salvaging the wreck of the Mary Rose. Jacques Francis is likely to have gone down in the annals of an English court of law as the first black witness to give firsthand evidence in a hotly contested lawsuit. The court ignored the argument put forward by the Italian merchants, who had lost their goods in the wrecked vessel, that the African diver had no right to appear before a European court.

I will first dwell on the historical context, recording the salvage operations in Southampton waters, and then I intend to address the cultural and legal issues raised by the appearance of Jacques Francis as witness before the court of admiralty in February 1548. A dispute over the legal and cultural status of Jacques Francis arose in the courtroom. The admiralty judges were ready to acknowledge the humanity and selfhood of the Guinea diver who had obviously salvaged some nautical gear from the Mary Rose whereas the Italian witnesses denounced the black diver as an uncivilized man, a "slave," a "morisco," a "Blacke more," a "bondeman," and an "infidell borne." Therefore his testimony, they argued, was inadmissible.

The African witness summoned to be questioned by the court of admiralty in London did not turn out to be a cultureless and savage figure unable to respond in intelligible language. On the contrary, the civilized and highly articulate Jacques Francis, who in Guinea is likely to have been trained as a pearl diver and who in England had lived up to the potential of his qualities, was aware of his outstanding record of underwater exploits as a skilled diver and of the valuable service he had been performing the English state in recovering part of the expensive ordnance of the Mary Rose, the recovery of the ship and her ordnance being a matter touching the fibers of national pride. He stood his ground, seizing the opportunity offered him by an English law court of making the best of the dispute over his humanity, his black identity, and over the definition of his legal status and ethnic origin. The cultural objections raised against him by the Italian merchants and his master Piero Paolo Corsi were symptomatic of the difficulties in coming to terms with the racial ambiguities generated by the presence of black Africans and Moors in early modern Europe and, in particular, in England. These ambiguities were to be mirrored in Prospero's contradictory attitude toward indispensable Caliban, and European dependence on the specialist knowledge of Africans was to be probed in the record of Othello's military prowess and the service he has done to the Venetian state.

It was the dramatic loss of the Mary Rose on 19 July 1545 that launched the spectacular career of Jacques Francis as a wreck diver and salvage operator whose services to the English government were considered indispensable for recovering the wreck. The warship was ready to take action against the French invasion fleet commanded by admiral Claude d'Annebaut when she sank within a few minutes, engulfing about 400 seamen and soldiers before the very eyes of king Henry VIII. The disaster was definitely not caused by enemy gunfire; it was rather the result of the unfortunate conjunction of poor unprofessional crew discipline and incompetent seamanship. Overloading had obviously brought the lower gun deck too close to the waterline, and when the ship heeled over under the impact of a gust of wind, the water rushed in through the lower-deck gunports left open for action and the ship suddenly capsized. (5)

As the Mary Rose sank in six fathoms in low tide, the authorities expected that the ship and her ordnance would be salvaged by foreign specialists. Built in the first year of king Henry VIII's reign, she was one of the first English warships to mount heavy cannon, which was valued at over [pounds sterling]1700. She was carrying some ninety-six guns, among them thirty-three serpentines, twenty-six stone guns, ten murderers, five brass curtals, five brass falcons, besides six guns in her tops. (6)

For John Dudley, Lord Lisle, the admiral of England, the disaster of the Mary Rose threatened to upset the naval campaign he was conducting in order to ward off a French invasion of the Isle of Wight. The immediate measures he took and the fleet orders he issued in mid-August show that he was an innovative naval commander at home with the latest tactics in naval warfare. His determined efforts to salvage the Mary Rose delayed his immediate pursuit of the French fleet, but as soon as he realized that the salvage operations were bound to fail, he resumed his task to prevent the imminent French attack, making contact with the enemy on 15 August. (7)