Part VII · Chapter 2

A Ship Called Pole

c. 1495-1589 · Plymouth, Guinea, Brazil

●Traditional

William Hawkins was a Plymouth merchant and seaman, born about 1495, [1] who may have been master of Henry VIII's ship the Great Galley in 1513. [2]

About 1530 he took his ship, the Pole, of 250 tons, down the coast of Africa to Guinea to trade for ivory, then across the Atlantic to Brazil, [2] among the first Englishmen to make that voyage. [3] [1] On a second voyage soon after, a Brazilian chief agreed to sail with him to England, and Hawkins left a Plymouth man, Martin Cockeram, behind as a pledge. The chief was presented to Henry VIII at Whitehall. He died on the voyage home. Hawkins's men feared for Cockeram, but the Brazilians accepted that the English had dealt honestly, and Cockeram came home. [2][3]

Hawkins was twice mayor of Plymouth, in 1532–33 and 1538–39, and sat for the town in Parliament in 1539, 1547 and 1553. [2][1] He married Joan Trelawny, and they had two sons. William, the elder, became a merchant and three times mayor of Plymouth in his turn, and died in 1589. [2][4] John became one of the leading English seamen of his generation, a commander against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the man who pioneered English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade with his voyages of the 1560s. [5] The family's story holds both.

William Hawkins the elder died about 1554. [2]

The connection: compiled family trees place the Hawkinses of Plymouth among the family's English ancestors. No record has yet proven that link.

Sources

  1. Roger Virgoe, “Hawkins, William (c.1495–1554/55), of Plymouth, Devon,” in S. T. Bindoff, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509–1558 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982); archived copy.
  2. John Knox Laughton, “Hawkins or Hawkyns, William (d. 1554?),” in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 25 (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), 227–28.
  3. Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589), 520–21. archive.org
  4. “Hawkins or Hawkyns, William (d. 1589),” in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 25 (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), 228.
  5. “John Hawkins (naval commander),” Wikipedia, accessed October 17, 2026; Basil Morgan, “Hawkins, Sir John (1532–1595),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12672.