Prize voyages and ideas of freedom

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
African People ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
St Helena ◽  
Naval Officers

To witness the human trauma of the transatlantic slave trade was extraordinary employment for British naval officers, and this chapter examines rare surviving accounts of life on prize voyages, whereby naval officers were tasked with transporting captured slave ships to Admiralty courts for adjudication. It explores the extent to which officers engaged with the individuals they were ‘liberating’ – on captured slavers, on HM ships, or while stationed at the British territories of Sierra Leone or St Helena. Officers’ ideas about freedom, its limits, and its applicability to African people were concepts bound to racial attitudes. A prize voyage could constitute an alternative ‘Middle Passage’ for captive Africans, a state of affairs naval officers could contribute to. This chapter looks at the experiences of captive Africans, and at cases where individual Africans were taken into British guardianship by naval officers.

British Antislavery and West Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The 19Th Century

Resistance to slavery within African societies was as complex and heterogeneous as slavery itself. For enslaved Africans and their descendants taken by force to Europe’s colonies in the Americas, antislavery was an existential struggle. Among European states, Britain was among the first imperial powers to pass laws abolishing its slave trade (in 1807) and slavery in its colonies (in 1833). Antislavery was a transnational phenomenon, but Britain made suppressing the Atlantic slave trade an element of its foreign policy, employing a Royal Navy squadron to search for slave ships, pressing African leaders to sign anti-slave-trade treaties as a condition of trade and coordinating an international network of anti-slave-trade courts. And yet, for many leading British abolitionists, “Africa” was an ideological sandbox—an imagined blank space for speculation and experiment on the development of human societies and the progress of “civilization.” In the 18th century, early British critics of the transatlantic slave trade argued that “Africa” presented an unparalleled commercial and imperial opportunity. Although the slave trade—and the plantations in the Americas that slave ships supplied with labor—were profitable, some argued that slave-trading regions could, with enough investment, produce goods and commodities that would be many times more lucrative. Moreover, if Britain were the first European power to abolish the slave trade, it might also be among the first to gain a territorial foothold on African soil. Over time, these arguments coalesced into the concept of “legitimate commerce.” A combination of Christian teaching, slave-trade suppression, and commercial incentives would persuade slave-trading polities to give up the practice and instead produce other goods. Legitimate commerce intertwined with a theory of civilization that held that any society that enslaved people was so degenerate in its social development that nearly any reform or intervention was justifiable. By the end of the 19th century, antislavery became a justification for European conquest. There were at least three broad reform projects launched by British officials and merchants in Africa in the name of antislavery. First, drawing on critiques of the slave trade from the 18th century that emphasized the commercial potential of legitimate commerce, antislavery activists and politicians argued for replacing the slave trade with new kinds of export-oriented commerce. Second, in two colonies, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Britain and the United States experimented with the possibility of using Black people from the African diaspora as settlers and missionaries. In Sierra Leone, more than seventy thousand people, usually known as “Liberated Africans,” were repatriated from slave ships into the small colony. Third, in the mid-19th century, as the transatlantic slave trade declined, Britain and other European powers invested heavily in African plantation agriculture, particularly in cotton and palm oil monocrops.

scholarly journals The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Coercive Intervention

AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

Liberated Africans

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
St Helena ◽  
The 19Th Century

“Liberated Africans” refers to a group of African-born men, women, and children intercepted by naval forces from slave ships and slave trading factories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans as part of the 19th-century campaign to abolish the transoceanic slave trade from Africa. Following the passage of Britain’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the British Royal Navy patrolled both the Atlantic and Indian oceans in order to suppress the external trade from Africa. Captured vessels were taken to a series of Vice-Admiralty courts, and later Mixed Commission courts, located in Freetown, Sierra Leone; Havana, Cuba; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tortola; Cape Town, South Africa; James Town, St. Helena; Luanda, Angola; and Port Luis, Mauritius. Naval interdiction by Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and other powers resulted in a smaller number of cases brought before unilateral anti-slave-trade tribunals. Between 1808 and 1896, this complex tribunal network “liberated” approximately 214,000 Africans who survived the Middle Passage. Perhaps 75,000 of these individuals were settled in Sierra Leone; the remainder were settled in the British Caribbean, Brazil, Cuba, Liberia, and British colonies and outposts from the Gambia, Cape Colony, and Mauritius, to Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Bombay. The arrival of an estimated 192,000 Liberated Africans into Atlantic ports continued through the demise of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1860s. In the Indian Ocean, approximately 22,000 Liberated Africans disembarked in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and India as a result of a highly uneven British naval campaign from 1808 into the 1890s. Many Liberated Africans experienced very liminal freedom. Adults and children were apprenticed to colonial inhabitants for periods of up to fourteen years. Men were conscripted into the British West India Regiments and Royal African Corps. Many women were forcibly married to strangers soon after arrival. Approximately one out of every four Liberated Africans underwent a second oceanic passage, most of them forcibly relocated to the British West Indies. The settlement of Liberated Africans—referred to by British officials as their “disposal”—represented a sizable involuntary African migration into and across the British Empire in the decades after the abolition of the British slave trade. Their arrival brought with it a lasting linguistic and cultural impact in many colonial societies. The descendants of Liberated Africans remain identifiable communities in many postcolonial societies from Africa to the Caribbean.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

scholarly journals Ship Crowding and Slave Mortality: Missing Observations or Incorrect Measurement?

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 1177-1202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Solar ◽  
Nicolas J. Duquette
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Missing Observations ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Incorrect Measurement ◽  
Over Time

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported inLloyd's Registersare shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

Four Sierra Leone Recaptives

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

Antislavery on a Slave Coast

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Early History ◽  
Joint Stock Company ◽  
Stock Company ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.

Abolitionism and the Back-to-Africa Movement in Britain: The Sierra Leone Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Black Poor

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.

Abolition at sea

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-40
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Tropical Diseases ◽  
The West ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Prize Money ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Naval Officers

This chapter introduces the work of the West Africa squadron in detaining slave ships at sea by examining the experiences of the naval officers involved in its operation. It explores the development of a British abolitionist presence in Sierra Leone and examines the evolving tactics of naval suppression, including increasing intervention (so-called ‘gunboat diplomacy’) leading to blockade of points of embarkation for slave ships and destruction of slave barracoons. Arguments over tactics contributed to feelings of futility and low morale over operational limitations and the perceived efficacy of naval abolitionist policy. Other daily struggles faced by naval personnel included ill-discipline, an inhospitable climate and the threat of contracting the deadly tropical diseases that led to unprecedented peace-time mortality rates. Officers often perceived financial incentives in the form of prize money and promotion as the only meaningful compensation for these hardships.

Revisiting Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Vincent Carretta
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Olaudah Equiano ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Canonical Status

The backlash against challenging the origin story of Olaudah Equiano, author of the influential autobiography The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, is the subject of this chapter by Vincent Carreta. Since first being published in 1789, the text has achieved canonical status as a rare first-hand account of an African-born person describing the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery. Interesting Narrative was successfully appropriated political propaganda by abolitionists to help end the transatlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. After revealing archival documents calling Equiano’s birth in Africa into question, Caretta describes the firestorm of criticism he faced, including threats of assault, from some scholars. He suggests that the unwillingness of some scholars to confront the possibility that Equiano may have lied about his birthplace is too high stakes as it opens the door to questioning how much of Interesting Narrative is fiction and how much work that relies on the text may require reexamination.

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