Faith & Spirit Quote by John Hawkins

Gratitude can be a weapon, and Hawkins wields it like a ledger entry blessed by God. "Our ships, God be thanked, have received little hurt" lands with the cool restraint of a man whose real concern is not bloodshed but balance sheets. The piety is doing double duty: it frames survival as providence, which flatters the speaker and calms the audience, while quietly laundering the violence that made the voyage possible.

Hawkins is often remembered as an early architect of England's slave-trading economy and a hard-nosed operator in the Atlantic world. In that context, "our ships" is the tell. The sentence centers property, infrastructure, and continued capacity. "Little hurt" sounds modest, almost domestic, as if storms and cannon fire are merely wear-and-tear on a commercial asset. It's a line designed to minimize risk and maximize confidence, the kind of reassurance that keeps investors, patrons, and crown officials aligned: the venture remains viable; the machinery of trade still floats.

The religious tag, "God be thanked", is less a burst of feeling than a strategic moral varnish. It signals that whatever happened out there on the water sits within an accepted cosmic order. That matters in an era when English expansion had to be narrated as righteous endurance, not opportunistic predation. Hawkins doesn't celebrate victory or dwell on loss because his authority comes from composure. The subtext is blunt: we've taken hits, but not enough to stop the enterprise. And the enterprise will continue.