...attributes of normal and proper men: as one of the earliest English travelers described Africans, they were “a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth—which was to say that Negroes were not Englishmen. Far from isolating African heathenism as...

...and Nubia, with divers other great & large regions about the same, were in old time called AEthiopes and Nigritae, which we now call Moores, Moorens, or...that in many places they curse it when it riseth.” 9 Leo Africanus, the single most authoritative source on Africa until the age of modern exploration,...

...clucked like turkeys (anonymous) paganism with savagery and blackness. They were, wrote one observer, "A people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth" (Hakluyt 1903-05,6:167). The Africans were set apart not only by their color, but by their entire way...

...who brought five black men from Barbary to England in i¿ calls people of Ethiopia ‘Moores, Morens, or Negroes, a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth. . .‘ (emphasis added).¿ Here Moors are not Muslims who obey an alien God, but people outside of...

...focus on climate, not divine retribution. Richard Eden: They are "so scorched and vexed with the heate of the sunne, that in many places they curse it when it riseth." No doubt the biblical explanation gained increased currency after it became widely known that Africans...

...“a people of beastly living, without a God, law; religion, or common wealth, and so scortched by the heat of the sunne, that in many places they curse it when it riseth.” In 1568, Capt. John Hawkins helped three negro kings take a town of negroes, and the narrator, John...

...are illiterate. This description from the second voyage to Guinea is typical of negative accounts: "a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth" (Hakluyt 1903-05, v. 6:167). So too is the scornful account of the "people of Libya called Garamantes,...

...divers other great & large regions about the same, were in old time called A^thiopes and Nigritie. which we now call Moores, Moorens, or Negroes, a people of beastly living.. ." J4 The implication is that the "old lime" Ethiopians have degenerated into beastly "Negroes." Indeed,...

...colour so in condition are little other than Devils incarnate." An early impression of blacks was of "a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth." With such factors at work, until the opening of the nineteenth century the Great Migration westward...

...scale in the 15605. Opinions of the coastal people of West Africa were never high. ‘The Negroes [are] a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth: wrote an early English visitor. But as the trade gathered pace, it fed yet darker perceptions of Africans....