Sir John Hawkins - Erased by the Mob

It's late, but I'll post tonight. It'll save me posting tomorrow morning I guess. I'm actually a little bit sad. Obviously today we've had yet more protests over statues. The main focus being aimed towards the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. He's survived so far, but still, it's pretty depressing stuff. The main thing that has gotten to me though is that I've just found out that they're renaming Sir John Hawkins Square in Plymouth because of all this.

(Portrait of Sir John Hawkins,

National Maritime Museum, London)

Now, yes, John Hawkins did trade slaves, but he lived over 400 years ago! We're talking Elizabethan history here. On top of this it's so far back in history that we can't even be entirely sure what that history was. I actually finished reading Hakluyt's Voyages not too long ago, which is a compendium of sailing accounts from this era. It was all a bit sketchy and everything was written in ye olde Englishe. So we're talking very old stuff here. Hawkins, being something of hero, featured fairly heavily. If I recall correctly his main focus was competing with the Spanish.

Occasionally when reading I'd come across accounts of him and others catching a slave or setting fire to a Spanish settlement, and I'd think, "Oh, that's a bit brutal." However, shocking though it was, I understood that I was reading something from a far distant era, when life was very different. In fact, it wasn't at all uncommon for Christians to be captured and sold into slavery back then too. So it was a very different world. Of course, that doesn't excuse horrendous acts, but nevertheless it does require that a bit of context be applied. I'm a vegetarian, so I deem eating meat pretty savage, but I don't go around viewing all meat-eaters as evil people. I understand the context.

Perhaps one day society as a whole will move away from eating meat full stop. Will we pull down statues of anyone who ever ate meat at that point?

I find it quite concerning seeing Elizabethan history being stripped away like this. Again, as with Hakluyt's Voyages above, there's not a great deal of it. In fact, much of the information you'll find on Hawkins' Wikipedia page, which Marxist revisionists are now gleefully waving as evidence, come largely from these few written accounts. So the local ties and folklore attached to places like Plymouth really are important links to this history. It's not just simply a question of changing a street name.

Also, much of this history carries with it an aesthetic quality. So far no one has really mentioned how beautiful some of the statues are for instance. Why would we want to make our country more ugly? Surely people can appreciate the beauty of something even if the subject is flawed in other ways. Or are these people simply incapable of dealing with ambivalence?

(My battered copy of

Hakluyt's Voyages)