This impressively researched and disturbing biography tells the story of John Hawkyns, an Elizabethan privateer who conducted profitable slave trading expeditions, capturing his victims on the west coast of Africa and selling them illegally in Spanish ports in the Americas. British journalist Hazlewood (Savage: The Life and Times of Jenny Button
) traces Hawkyns's move from "roughneck" Plymouth to London, his formation of a trading syndicate and his successful and brutal slave trading voyages of 1562–1563, from which he returned to England with a show of riches. Having won the patronage of Elizabeth I, Hawkyns departed on an another eventful voyage. Here Hazlewood is able to draw on a wide array of archival resources, both Spanish and English, as he recounts Hawkyns's exploits in Sierra Leone and South America. Hazlewood furnishes yet more scintillating detail in his account of Hawkyns's next, fateful 1567 voyage, focusing on various members of the crew, many pressed into service as young boys. After savagely capturing yet more African slaves, Hawkyns suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a Spanish squadron in Veracruz. Lacking drinking water and supplies for the journey home, he abandoned a number of his men in Mexico; their pathetic fates at the hands of the Spanish enemy are painstakingly traced. Brilliantly evocative of 16th-century Anglo-Spanish rivalry and the brutality of Elizabethan maritime life, Hazlewood's book is a tour de force that condemns rather than romanticizes its thuggish adventurer. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Luigi Bonomi at Sheil Lands Assoc. (On sale Nov. 23)
