Hawkins, Sir John (1532-1595):; Sir John Hawkins was a slave trader, merchant, privateer, naval commander, and naval treasurer of Elizabethan England. Beginning in the 1550s Hawkins entered the family shipping business, sailing and working extensively around Spain and France. In the 1560s he made numerous voyages to Guinea, in Africa, and began to take a major hand in the triangular trade of slaves from Guinea and goods from Spanish holdings in the Americas, proving himself a shrewd and successful businessman. From the 1570s all the way through the 1590s Hawkins was involved in major privateering expeditions against Spanish shipping in the Americas, as well as counterespionage efforts and, of course, the engagements against the Spanish Armada in 1588 and against the Spanish Main in the following years. Hawkins also introduced the double-skin planking method of ship construction, was instrumental in Britain’s adoption of the galleon for their war efforts, and introduced numerous hygiene and health reforms on the ships he commanded. His final voyage came in 1595 when, during an expedition attempting to capture Panama, he died of an undisclosed illness, leaving a mixed in British history in which he is hailed as a swashbuckling and patriotic savior of British sovereignty and national defense and alternately condemned for the deplorable part he played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.;
Works Cited:; Basil Morgan, ‘Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12672, accessed13 Oct 2011];