When I told my wife that I was reading a book called The Queen's Slave Trader, her immediate reaction was to ask why I was reading one of those "trashy romance novels." But Nick Hazlewood's new book is no bodice-ripper. It is instead a carefully researched, immaculately documented, intriguing portrait of John Hawkyns (or "Hawkins," as his name is often transcribed), the first master of the English slave trade. On occasion, Hazlewood lets his passion for detail interfere with the clarity of his narrative, but in general he brings a novelist's flare to the text of 16th century history.

During the 17th century, England established itself as the greatest slave-trading nation in the world even as its navy fortified trade routes from pirates and, in the words of one recent writer, "shaped the modern world." But in the preceding century, England was frequently an afterthought on the world stage, an island kingdom tinkering on the brink of inconsequence. Spain and Portugal had taken the lead in exploration of the seas, and for their efforts the "world" had been divided between them by the Pope. England and France were each racing to gain footholds in the New World, and Hawkyns was one of the men in the forefront of the action for England.

What is intriguing to me is that Hazlewood manages to painstakingly recreate the circumstances surrounding events that also played into the development of the British Royal Navy (as recounted by Arthur Herman in his book To Rule the Waves). In that narrative Hawkyns was but one player on a grand stage; here, Hazlewood focuses on Hawkyns alone, not in order to chart the development of English economic might but rather to isolate the factors which influenced both the man and his time.

Hawkyns may have been among the most notorious figures of his day (the Spanish certainly both despised and feared him), but he was also a product of a universal culture that considered slaughter and slavery just a sidenote to progress and civilization. When Hazlewood writes of the Spanish colonization of the Carribean, one must flinch at the visuals he offers; firsthand accounts of indiscriminate savagery as soldiers killed "small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth." According to one report, "they even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes," even as they took infants and "dashed them headlong against the rocks." It is against this backdrop, perhaps, that one begins to see the glimmer of such men as Hawkyns, who regarded the buying and selling of other human beings as nothing more than a route to riches.