Godwyn was a member of a distinguished British ecclesiastical family. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1665, served briefly as a vicar in Wendover, Bucks, and then traveled to Virginia and subsequently Barbados. His work is particularly interesting in that it records the intellectual bases on which slave owners were attempting to deny human status to black Africans. Prominent among these beliefs is the use of the pre-Adamite heresy (the belief that there were men before Adam) to deny that Europeans and black Africans had a common ancestor in Adam. Godwyn insists that black Africans have the same bodily constitution and intellectual faculties as Europeans and that differences between them are not innate, but rather the products of culture and education. He is, however, promoting the conversion and humane treatment of slaves, not their liberation, and he argues that a Christian slave is more docile than a heathen one.

And the Spaniards question (which the same Taverneir also mentions) touching the Brutality of the Americans, (and, which I have heard was held in the Affirmative in one of the Universities of Spain) serving not a little to make my report more credible; and to acquit me of all fictitious Romancing herein. Wherefore it being granted for possible that such wild Opinions, by the inducement and instigation of our Planters chief Deity, Profit, may have lodged themselves in the Brains of some of us; I shall not fear to betake my self to the refuting of this one which I have spoken of.