He was not, Jacques Francis insisted as prosecution witnesses tried repeatedly to have his testimony thrown out, a slave. They called him ‘blackamoor’ and ‘infidel-born’, but he called himself famulus rather than servus – a member of the household, a worker alongside free servants.
At this historical distance, it seems a slight distinction – Francis made no claim to being a free man – but what is remarkable is that his dignity, articulacy, and achievements won the argument. No villein’s testimony had been admissable in an English court since feudal times, but in February 1547 the High Court of Admiralty ruled Francis was no villein. His words not only stood but were transcribed – and thus we are able to read them five centuries later.
Francis was born on what is now Arguin Island in Mauritania around 1527. He was probably a teenager when he started work in the salvage crew of the Venetian Piero Paulo Corsi, who clearly valued the young man’s skill as a diver – perhaps acquired searching for pearls off the west African coast. How much help that early experience would have been for working 12m down in the cold waters of the Solent one can only wonder.
The Princess of Khok Phanom Di