John Hawkins Initiates English Slave Trade

English sea captain John Hawkins launched England's entry into the Atlantic slave trade in 1562, seizing approximately 300 Africans from Sierra Leone and selling them in Hispaniola. Queen Elizabeth I initially protested but later invested in and knighted Hawkins after his profitable second voyage in 1564. His voyages established the English pattern of violent seizure and commercial sale of enslaved Africans, laying groundwork for England's eventual dominance of the trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. England would transport more enslaved Africans than any other nation.