Incidentally, if we were to investigate real involvement in slavery and human rights abuses we would have to rename all the King’s and Queen’s Heads in Devon, and most of the Wetherspoons. Also, it’s not only an issue based on white people exploiting black people, as it’s estimated that over a million people from the coastal communities of Devon, Cornwall and Southern Ireland were taken by North African slavers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

I think that it’s also about a conscious knowledge that we are doing something wrong. Hawkins, and the many millions of people from all ethnic groups who benefited from slavery, did not think at the time that they were acting immorally or illegally.

It may be offensive to make this parallel, though in four hundred years time, perhaps someone will be asking:”They kept on taking those cheap flights to Spain from Exeter Airport and they knew they were going to destroy the climate and kill hundreds of species and millions of people”… “Every day in Devon they drove past factory farms and slaughterhouses, they knew about the cruelty but did nothing”.