Hawkins made for Teneriffe in the Canaries, off the west of Africa.  There, to everybody’s great ‘amaze,’ the Spaniards ’appeared levelling of bases [small portable cannon] and arquebuses, with divers others, to the number of fourscore, with halberds, pikes, swords, and targets.’  But when it was found that Hawkins had been taken for a privateer, and when it is remembered that four hundred privateering vessels—­English and Huguenot—­had captured seven hundred Spanish prizes during the previous summer of 1563, there was and is less cause for ‘amaze.’  Once explanations had been made, ’Peter de Ponte gave Master Hawkins as gentle entertainment as if he had been his own brother.’  Peter was a trader with a great eye for the main chance.

Sparke was lost in wonder over the famous Arbol Santo tree of Ferro, ’by the dropping whereof the inhabitants and cattle are satisfied with water, for other water they have none on the island.’  This is not quite the traveller’s tale it appears to be.  There are three springs on the island of Teneriffe.  But water is scarce, and the Arbol Santo, a sort of gigantic laurel standing alone on a rocky ledge, did actually supply two cisterns, one for men and the other for cattle.  The morning mist condensing on the innumerable smooth leaves ran off and was caught in suitable conduits.

In Africa Hawkins took many ’Sapies which do inhabit about Rio Grande [now the Jeba River] which do jag their flesh, both legs, arms, and bodies as workmanlike as a jerkin-maker with us pinketh a jerkin.’  It is a nice question whether these Sapies gained or lost by becoming slaves to white men; for they were already slaves to black conquerors who used them as meat with the vegetables they forced them to raise.  The Sapies were sleek pacifists who found too late that the warlike Samboses, who inhabited the neighboring desert, were not to be denied.

’In the island of Sambula we found almadies or canoas, which are made of one piece of wood, digged out like a trough, but of a good proportion, being about eight yards long and one in breadth, having a beak-head and a stern very proportionably made, and on the outside artificially carved, and painted red and blue.’  Neither almadie nor canoa is, of course, an African word.  One is Arabic for a cradle (el-mahd); the other, from which we get canoe, is what the natives told Columbus they called their dugouts; and dugout canoes are very like primitive cradles.  Thus Sparke was the first man to record in English, from actual experience, the aboriginal craft whose name, both East and West, was suggested to primeval man by the idea of his being literally ’rocked in the cradle of the deep.’