By the mid-fifteenth century, Europeans had developed a lucrative trading relationship with Africa, which included gold, ivory, and slaves. African slaves were first seen as exotic oddities, but increasingly they were bought as laborers to work in shops or on agricultural estates. As the slave trade increased, Europeans developed a vision of Africans as heathen, savage, and vastly inferior to themselves. The following passage, taken from the descriptions of John Lok, the captain of an English expedition to Africa in 1554, represents common European depictions of Africans in the sixteenth century.
It is to be understood, that the people which now inhabite the regions of the coast of Guinea, and the midle parts of Africa, as Libya the inner, and Nubia, with divers other great and large regions about the same, were in old time called Æthiopes and Nigritæ, which we now call Moores, Moorens, or Negroes, a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth, and so scorched and vexed with the heat of the sunne, that in many places they curse it when it riseth. . . .
There are also other people of Libya called Garamantes, whose women are common: for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie.
Source: “The Second Voyage of M. John Lok to Guinea, Anno 1554,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), 6:167–68.
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