It is interesting to observe that in all these early narratives of the slave-trade there is no intimation that it involved cruelty or any form of wrong. Hawkins sailed in the ship “Jesus,” with faith as sincere as if he had sailed on a crusade. His sailing orders to his four ships close with words which remind one of Cromwell: “Serve God daily; love one another; preserve your victuals; beware of fire; and keep good company.” By “serve God,” it is meant that the ship’s company shall join in religious services morning and evening; and this these slave-traders regularly did. In one of their incursions on the Guinea coast they were almost destroyed by the native negroes, as they well deserved to be. Hawkins narrates the adventure with this comment: “God, who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by him we escaped without danger. His name be praised for it!” And again, when they were nearly starved, becalmed in mid-ocean: “Almighty God, who never suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the ordinary breeze.”[140] The success of the second voyage was such that a coat-of-arms was granted to Hawkins. Translated from the jargon of heraldry, the grant means that he might bear on his black shield a golden lion walking over the waves. Above the lion were three golden coins. For a crest he was to have a figure of half a Moor, “bound, and a captive,” with golden amulets on his arms and ears. No disgrace attached to the capturing of Africans and selling them for money. That the Heralds’ Office might give to the transaction the sanctions of Christianity, it directed Hawkins, five years after, to add in one corner of the shield the pilgrim’s scallop-shell in gold, between two palmer’s staves, as if to intimate that the African slave-trade was the true crusade of the reign of Elizabeth.