3. Britain’s slave ports

A profitable business

A bill of sale of slaves, formerly on display in a Bristol pub for tourists to goggle at, turned out to have come from Jamaica. And ‘enthusiasts’ persist in showing unwary visitors some caves near the city which, they say, were used for the reception of slaves – though there is no evidence that slaves were ever kept there. Such regrettable imperfections of the folk memory permit the comforting thought that Bristol never witnessed the sale of slaves ‘on a large scale’.1

Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade cannot usefully be discussed at this level. Bristol was built on the trade in slaves and the trade in slave-produced sugar. Its rival Liverpool was built on the trade in slaves and the trade in slave-produced cotton. With belated rhetoric, it was said of each in the nineteenth century that every brick in the city had been cemented with a slave’s blood.² Slavery, in one way or another, put both Bristol and Liverpool on the map. It gave them a transfusion of wealth that, in a few decades, turned them into boom towns and great world ports. In 1833 a prominent Bristol merchant admitted that without the West Indian trade in slaves and sugar his city would have been a mere fishing port.³ Thanks to slaves and sugar, the eighteenth century was Bristol’s golden age; for three-quarters of the century it ranked as Britain’s second city.⁴ Without the slave trade, Liverpool would have remained much as it had been towards the end of the seventeenth century: ‘an insignificant seaport’, ‘a small port of little consequence . . . a few streets some little distance from the creek – or pool – which served as a harbour’.⁵ The slave trade was ‘the pride of Liverpool’, for it flooded the town with wealth

which invigorated every industry, provided the capital for docks, enriched and employed the mills of Lancashire, and afforded the means for opening out new and ever new lines of trade. Beyond a doubt it was the slave trade which raised Liverpool from a struggling port to be one of the richest and most prosperous trading centres in the world.6

Liverpool’s population grew five times as fast as Bristol’s. The population of Bristol rose from about 20,000 at the start of the eighteenth century to 64,000 at its close, that of Liverpool from 5,000 to 78,000.⁷ Yet Bristol’s merchants had been quicker off the mark than those of Liverpool. They had entered the slave trade illegally and energetically well before the end of the seventeenth century, in flagrant breach of the Royal African Company’s monopoly.⁸ There is little doubt that they bribed Customs officials to accept false declarations about where their ships were bound; their Liverpool rivals certainly did so later, and it explains some of the gaps in the records.⁹ In 1688 the Society of Bristol, ‘laden with negroes and elephants’ teeth from the Guinea Coast’, was seized and condemned in Virginia as an interloper, and the merchandise, human and otherwise, was ‘sold on the King’s behalf’. In the same year the Betty of Bristol also violated the Royal African Company’s monopoly by landing black slaves on Montserrat, and ‘the King’s share of the condemned negroes’ was put up for sale.¹⁰ But the company did sometimes license non-members to trade. In 1690 it sanctioned the fitting out of a slaver in Bristol and five years later it voluntarily threw open the region east of the river Volta (the ‘Slave Coast’) to any Englishman on payment of 20s. for every African transported.¹¹ Then in 1698 the African trade was finally opened up to all who paid 10 per cent on goods imported into and exported from Africa – except for redwood, which carried only 5 per cent, and three commodities free of all duty: gold, silver, and slaves.¹² The ending of the monopoly was welcomed by the Bristol merchants, one of whom, John Cary, had recently been eulogizing

a trade of the most Advantage to this Kingdom of any we drive, and as it were all Profit, the first Cost being little more than small Matters of our own Manufactures, for which we have in Return, Gold, [elephants’] Teeth, Wax, and Negroes, the last whereof is much better than the first, being indeed the best Traffick the Kingdom hath, as it doth occasionally [i.e. incidentally] give so vast an Imployment to our People both by Sea and Land.¹³

For all the energy and enterprise displayed by the Bristol merchants, Britain’s leadership in the Atlantic slave trade ‘was not gained quickly or without effort or design’.14 The turning-point came in 1713, when the treaty of Utrecht gave Britain the coveted assiento, the right to supply slaves to Spain’s American colonies – not for the first time, though it was the first time the government had been concerned in the formal contract to do so. The privilege of supplying 4,800 African slaves a year to south and central America, the Spanish West Indies, Mexico, and Florida was conferred on the newly created South Sea Company – ‘those voracious robbers’, as they were called in Bristol.¹⁵ The British now emerged as the world’s foremost slave-traders, responsible for about a quarter of the Atlantic slave trade up to 1791 and for more than half the trade between 1791 and 1806.¹⁶ In the words of James Ramsay, the abolitionist, they were ‘honourable slave carriers’ for their European rivals.¹⁷

When did Liverpool enter the slave trade? Almost always the first voyage is dated 1709, when a tiny slaver of 30 tons sailed to West Africa; after which there is supposed to have been a gap until 1730.¹⁸ But the first recorded voyage in fact took place in September 1700, when the Liverpool Merchant sailed under Captain William Webster. This vessel delivered 220 slaves to Barbados, where they were sold for £4,239. The next month the Blessing sailed from Liverpool under Captain Thomas Brownhill, whose instructions suggest that this was a new kind of trade for the two merchants concerned. One of these, Richard Norris, was mayor of Liverpool and younger brother of one of its Members of Parliament; the other, Thomas Johnson, was a former mayor and future MP. Their Blessing was fitted out for the Gold Coast, Ouidah, and Angola, the slaves to be sold in the West Indies or at Cartagena in Colombia. In the following year this ship made another such voyage and in 1703 sailed again, only to be captured by a privateer after a fight two leagues off Angola. Another Liverpool ship, the Rebecca, also made a slaving voyage in 1703.¹⁹ It is by no means certain that even these were Liverpool’s first slaving ventures. As we have seen, the records were falsified. The merchants ‘were very largely evading the ten per cent. export duty by concealing their destination, probably with the connivance of the Customs officers’.²⁰

As for the supposed gap, in 1718 the seven owners of the Liverpool brigantine Imploy sued the ship’s doctor because of his neglect of the slaves in his care; out of 123 who had left the African coast healthy, 64 died before the ship reached Virginia, as did a baby born on board, and the owners lost £1,900.²¹ There were sailings from Liverpool in 1720 (the Farlton and the Filsby), 1724 (the Elizabeth, slaving in Madagascar under Captain John Webster), and 1726. In this latter year there were perhaps 15 voyages; Liverpool’s slaving fleet was by now 21 strong.22

Bristol peaked in 1738-9 with 52 sailings to Africa. In 1748-9 Bristol sent 47 ships that transported 16,640 slaves. But by mid-century Liverpool had decisively overtaken Bristol.²³ The ships varied considerably in size, and Liverpool’s tended to be smaller than Bristol’s. The 88 slavers trading from Liverpool in 1752 ranged from the Ferret (owned by John Welch & Co. and commanded by Joseph Welch), which carried only 50 slaves, to the exceptionally large Sarah (owned by Thomas Crowder & Co. and commanded by Alexander Lawson) and Eaton (owned by John Okill & Co. and commanded by John Hughes), each of which held eleven times as many. Altogether the Liverpool fleet in that year could carry 25,820 slaves, packed in the holds ‘like books upon a shelf’, each person allowed less than half the space granted, in the same period, to a transported convict.²⁴ In 1771 Liverpool sent 106 ships, carrying 28,200 slaves; Bristol sent 23, carrying 8,810; and London sent 58, carrying 8,136. In 1787 the score, in sailings, stood at: Liverpool, 73; London, 26; Bristol, 22.²⁵ By the 1780s Liverpool accounted for three out of four of the slaves transported to Jamaica; of the 19 British firms that transported the most slaves to Jamaica after 1781 – the top 10 per cent of the trade – all but three were located in Liverpool.²⁶ By the 1790s a quarter of Liverpool’s total shipping was employed in the slave trade and Liverpool, according to a contemporary estimate, accounted for 60 per cent of the British trade and 40 per cent of that of Europe as a whole.²⁷

According to the most recent estimate, Britain’s slave-merchants netted a profit of about £12,000,000 on the 2,500,000 Africans they bought and sold between c. 1630 and 1807, and perhaps half of this profit accrued between 1750 and 1790.²⁸ The profit from an averagely successful Bristol voyage in the 1730s, with an average cargo of about 170 slaves, came to between £7,000 and £8,000, not counting the proceeds from ivory. One ‘indifferent cargo’, in the same period, brought in a mere £5,746; but the disappointed merchants were lucky, as it turned out, for when more than one in three of the merchandise died a few weeks after being sold, this loss fell on the buyers.²⁹ (It was taken for granted that one transported African in three, at least, would either die of dysentery or commit suicide during the three-year ‘seasoning’ or acclimatization period.)³⁰

The Liverpool merchants soon found ways to undersell their London and Bristol rivals. The latter paid their captains monthly, granted them daily port charges and primage (an allowance for loading and care of the cargo), engaged full crews of adults, paid them monthly, and gave their agents 5 per cent on all transactions. Liverpool merchants cut such expenses to the bone. They paid officers and crews once a year, granted few allowances, hired as many boys as was practicable in preference to adult seamen, and paid their agents salaries instead of commissions. So they were able to undercut their rivals by about 12 per cent, or £4 to £5 per slave.31 Whereas London and Bristol captains in port between voyages could eat on shore occasionally and even enjoy a bottle of Madeira with their meals, their unfortunate Liverpool colleagues had to make do with a shipboard meal of salt-beef and hard biscuit washed down with rum punch.³² A contemporary estimate put Liverpool’s net proceeds from the entire African trade in 1783-93 at £12,294,116 or £1,117,647 per year; in those 11 years the net profit from the 303,737 slaves bought and sold by the Liverpool merchants was estimated at £214,677 15s. Id. per year, or about £7 10s. per slave.³³ Profits per voyage were very variable. There were occasional ruinous losses, balanced by occasional bonanzas of as much as 300 or 400 per cent; 100 per cent was ‘not uncommon’.³⁴ Recent estimates of the annual rate of return on investment, between 1761 and 1808, put it at about 10 per cent,³⁵ which was ‘distinctly good by the standards of the time’³⁶ and better than anything that Britain’s competitors managed to secure.

But the Liverpool merchants still weren’t satisfied. So they devised an ingenious twist to the triangular system. They took to bringing back from the West Indies either ballast or small freight for other merchants, the proceeds from the sale of slaves being remitted in the form of post-dated bills of exchange. These bills were discounted in Liverpool and elsewhere. Such a system enabled merchants who owned ships better equipped for carrying inanimate cargoes to engage directly in the West Indies trade. This in turn stimulated both the creation, as we shall see, of banking facilities in Liverpool and the rise of the Merseyside shipbuilding industry.³⁷ In any case, by the 1780s Liverpool was ‘the single largest English construction site for slave ships’; of every five British-made slavers, two were built in Liverpool dockyards.³⁸

Some of Liverpool’s loot was siphoned off for the needs of Manchester’s burgeoning cotton industry, and Manchester textile manufacturers in turn helped the Liverpool slave-merchants by granting them up to 18 months’ credit.³⁹ Samuel Touchet and his brothers, who owned one of the leading check-making firms in Manchester, were engaged in both the Liverpool slave trade and the London sugar trade and also owned plantations in the Caribbean. In 1751 the brothers had an interest in about 20 West India ships. Samuel helped equip the expedition that captured Senegal in 1758, was MP for Shaftesbury (1761-8), and left a large fortune when he died in 1773.40 Another Manchester family, the Hibberts, started out by supplying the Royal African Company with checks and imitation Indian cottons, came to own Jamaica’s biggest slave factorage business (which sold 16,254 slaves to the island’s planters between 1764 and 1774), acquired Jamaican sugar estates, and set up a leading West India commission house in London.⁴¹

The slave-merchants of Bristol and Liverpool

In both Bristol and Liverpool, very small speculators had their snouts in the trough alongside the big merchants. It was a Bristol tradition for small shopkeepers to go in for bold trading ventures. Roger North, attorney-general in the reign of James II, found it ‘remarkable’ that in Bristol

all Men, that are Dealers, even in Shop Trades, launch into Adventures by Sea, chiefly to the West India Plantations and Spain. A poor Shopkeeper, that sells Candles, will have a Bale of Stockings, or a Piece of Stuff for Nevis, or Virginia, &c. and, rather than fail, they Trade in Men.1

There was in fact, until 1685, a local traffic in white slaves. That too was traditional: Bristol had been notorious as a slave market in the eleventh century.² In the seventeenth century, reprieved local felons were transported to the West Indies and sold into slavery, and successive mayors and magistrates either took a huge rake-off or simply connived. The magistrates also arranged for ‘small Rogues, and Pilferers’ to be advised privately by court officials that their only chance of escaping the gallows was to beg for transportation. This racket went on for years, until Judge Jeffreys publicly scolded the mayor, Sir William Hayman, as a kidnapping knave and fined him £1,000.³ With black slaves, both small and municipal enterprise continued. According to a satirist of the 1740s, Bristol boasted

swarming Vessels, whose Plebeian State

Owes not to Merchants, but Mechanicks Freight.⁴

In Liverpool likewise, ‘many of the poorer townsfolk had a share, however slight, in the smaller slavers’.5 A local historian wrote in 1795:

Almost every man in Liverpool is a merchant, and he who cannot send a bale, will send a bandbox . . . The attractive African meteor has . . . so dazzled their ideas, that almost every order of people is interested in a Guinea cargo . . . It is well known that many of the small vessels that import about an hundred slaves, are fitted out by attornies, drapers, ropers, grocers, tallow-chandlers, barbers, taylors, &c. some have one-eighth, some a fifteenth [sic], and some a thirty-second.⁶

The clergy were scarcely less eager than the grocers, barbers, and tailors. ‘The very Parsons at Bristol talk of nothing but Trade, and how to turn the Penny’, observed the government spy and travel-writer John Macky in 1732.⁷ But in this respect, as in so many others, Liverpool left Bristol standing. In the 1750s one of Liverpool’s younger slave-ship captains was studying for the ministry. His name was John Newton, he had experienced a sudden religious conversion in 1748, and he commanded, first the Duke of Argyle, then the African, which was owned by Joseph Manesty & Co. and carried 250 slaves.⁸ He put a stop to swearing by his crews (in front of him, at any rate), read them the liturgy twice on Sundays,⁹ and on one occasion tortured four recalcitrant black youths with thumb-screws, though only ‘slightly’, to be sure, and only to force them to confess to planning a mutiny.¹⁰ Newton became rector of St Mary Woolnoth, wrote the hymn ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’,¹¹ and was a friend of the poet William Cowper, author of the lines:

    I OWN I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,

    And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;

    What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,

    Is almost enough to drive pity from stones.

    I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

    For how could we do without sugar and rum?¹²

When Cowper included in another poem a line about ‘merchants rich in cargoes of despair’¹³ he may well have had in mind Newton’s first-hand account of the middle passage.¹⁴

Besides the small investors with their 3 per cent shares in 50- and 100-slave vessels – some of these sloops were later converted into pleasure-boats¹⁵ – there were of course the big battalions of the rich and powerful. The slave trade was always very closely connected with local government and it was tolerably well represented in Parliament, too. In the early part of the eighteenth century it was the practice for merchants to gain first-hand experience in the plantations before setting up in business in Bristol, and several who did so became aldermen and one, William Jefferis, became mayor.16 (By mid-century the leading Bristol houses had permanent representatives stationed in the chief colonial slave ports; these were often junior members sent out to learn the ropes.)¹⁷ Jefferis and Robert Armitage, mayor of Liverpool, were among the ‘Traders . . . to the Coast of Africa’ who signed a petition to the king in 1739 asking for naval protection against the Spaniards.¹⁸ Fifty years later a committee set up in Bristol to oppose abolition of the slave trade included nine former mayors, five former sheriffs, and many other worthies. Leading light on this committee was Alderman John Anderson, who had been captain of a slaver for 12 years, sheriff of Bristol in 1772, and mayor in 1783.¹⁹ A prominent local slave-merchant, Onesiphorus Tyndall, was senior partner in Bristol’s first bank, established in 1750; when he died seven years later he left at least £16,000 and some land in Gloucestershire.²⁰ Another Bristol success story was that of the Miles family. William Miles arrived in the port around 1760 with three-halfpence in his pocket, sailed to Jamaica as ship’s carpenter, bought a couple of casks of sugar, sold them in Bristol at a large profit, repeated his investment, and became Bristol’s leading sugar refiner, an alderman, and one of the leading local bankers. His son Philip John Miles dealt chiefly in sugar and slaves, received £5,481 2s. compensation for his 293 slaves in Jamaica plus a share of £8,782 for others emancipated in Trinidad, and died in 1848 leaving property worth more than £1,000,000.²¹

We met Thomas Johnson of Liverpool as part-owner of the Blessing. Despite the ship’s mishap in 1703, it was, for Johnson, aptly named. Described as ‘founder of the modern town of Liverpool’,²² he had been mayor in 1695 and sat as MP from 1701 to 1723; in 1708 he was knighted. In the House of Commons this pioneer of the Liverpool slave trade proved himself ‘a zealous servant of the trading interests’.²³ His son-in-law Richard Gildart (mayor, 1714, 1731, and 1736; MP for Liverpool, 1734-54) and another relative, James Gildart (mayor, 1750), were among the big names in the Liverpool slave trade in the 1750s,²⁴ along with John Welch, John Knight, George Campbell, Edward Forbes, and Foster Cunliffe and Sons.²⁵ Originally destined for the church, Foster Cunliffe became Liverpool’s leading merchant – some said the biggest businessman in the whole country – and was three times mayor (1716, 1729, and 1735). In mid-century he and his sons Ellis and Robert owned or part-owned at least 26 ships, at least four of them slavers: the Bulkeley, Bridget, Foster, and Ellis and Robert. Altogether these four ships held 1,120 slaves, and they brought the Cunliffe family enough profit to load a dozen ships a year with sugar and rum for sale in England. When Foster Cunliffe was invited to stand for Parliament he put his son Ellis up instead. Ellis Cunliffe was returned unopposed, held one of the Liverpool seats in the Commons for 12 years (1755-67), and was made a baronet. Foster Cunliffe’s elder sister married Charles Pole, who traded with Africa and the West Indies, was director and chairman of Sun Fire Insurance, and held the other Liverpool seat for five years (1756-61).26 Foster Cunliffe’s younger sister married Bryan Blundell (mayor, 1721 and 1728), who was treasurer and trustee of the Blue Coat hospital and ‘found in his philanthropy no argument against joining in the slave-trade’.²⁷ Ralph and Thomas Earle, mayors of Liverpool in 1769 and 1787 respectively, were sons of the local slave-trader John Earle, who started out as an ironmonger. Arthur and Benjamin Heywood, two brothers who made their fortunes in the slave trade, built with some of the proceeds two adjoining houses that served as both residences and business premises; behind the houses was a tennis court where they would relax after their labours. Each of the brothers married a rich heiress and each became a banker. When Benjamin Heywood died in 1796 he left legacies of several thousand pounds, apart from real estate; and his son Nathaniel left about £50,000 in legacies when he died in 1815. Arthur Heywood Sons & Co. was in 1883 absorbed by the Bank of Liverpool, afterwards Martin’s Bank and then, in its turn, absorbed by Barclay’s Bank.²⁸

A list, compiled in 1752, of 101 Liverpool merchants trading to Africa included 12 who had been, or were to become, mayor of the town,²⁹ and 15 who were pewholders in the fashionable Benn’s Garden Presbyterian chapel.³⁰ At least 26 of Liverpool’s mayors, holding office for 35 of the years from 1700 to 1820, were or had been slave-merchants or close relatives.³¹

By 1795, though there was still ample scope for the small investor, ten firms had secured control of more than half the port’s slaving fleet and accounted for almost two-thirds of the cargoes; in the years 1789-91 over half the total number of slaving ventures were accounted for by the seven largest firms.³² The leading names were now William Neilson, John Shaw, William Forbes, Edward Philip Grayson, Francis Ingram, Thomas Rodie and, above all, Thomas Leyland.33 A self-made and very stingy man – his dearest love was money – Thomas Leyland started out as a dealer in wheat, oats, peas, and bacon, won some government stock in a lottery, married his former employer’s daughter, and found that dealing in Africans brought him more of what he loved best than did any other branch of commerce. It made him, in fact, one of Liverpool’s three richest men, with an income estimated locally at tens of thousands of pounds a year. In the years 1782-1807 he transported 3,489 slaves to Jamaica alone.³⁴ The surviving records of his 11 ships’ slaving voyages are ‘beautifully written books’.³⁵ Co-opted to the Liverpool town council, he served as bailiff in 1796 and mayor in 1798, 1814, and 1820. In 1798 he ‘contributed a handsome £300 to the Tory fund in support of the Government’s vigorous prosecution of war with France’; after all, ‘Liverpool, probably including its mayor, derived considerable profit from privateering activities’.³⁶ No doubt judging that abolition of the slave trade was inevitable and that diversification of his money-making activities would be a prudent step, Leyland joined Liverpool’s oldest bank in 1802 as a senior partner. (Curiously, one of his new associates, William Roscoe, was an abolitionist.) Leyland presumably learned all he could about banking before withdrawing in 1806 and launching his own bank, Leyland and Bullin, in 1807. His nephew and partner Richard Bullin was also a merchant and shipowner in the slave trade, both before and after his formal entry into banking. Within eight years the new bank had assets of over £1,000,000 sterling and rivalled the larger London banks in importance.³⁷ By 1826 Leyland’s private fortune totalled £736,531 9s. 8d., including £384,374 11s. 7d. in government stock. He died in the following year. Leyland and Bullin was absorbed by the North and South Wales Bank in 1901, and that in turn by the Midland in 1908.³⁸

The Heywoods, Thomas Leyland, and Richard Bullin were not the only Liverpool slave-merchants who gravitated towards banking. The Bolds, the Gregsons, and the Staniforths did the same.³⁹ It was a natural progression. The growth of banking and insurance in the port coincided with the involvement of merchants in the slave trade:

Merchants and shipowners very largely insured their own ventures themselves, but the need for discounting facilities arose after 1750 with the growing volume of bills drawn against West Indian merchants. Thus some of the more important Liverpool merchants began to exercise the functions of banking.40

Ten prominent local slave-merchants helped to found ten of the fourteen important Liverpool banks listed after 1750.⁴¹ Many other local bankers were West India merchants or, like John Moss of Moss, Dale, and Rogers, owned immense sugar plantations in Demerara (afterwards part of British Guiana).⁴² Each of the Liverpool banking houses associated with the slave trade could command assets of between £200,000 and £300,000.⁴³

In a trade studded with self-made men, the name of Peter Baker, of Baker & Dawson, stands out. Originally a joiner’s apprentice, he became a shipbuilder and died in 1795 during his year of office as Liverpool’s mayor. He and his son-in-law John Dawson were credited with shipping more than 20,000 Africans to the West Indies in the years 1783-9.⁴⁴ Dawson was ‘perhaps the biggest operator’ in the port, ‘but in a highly specialised way’. From 1783 he was under contract with Spain to supply its colonies with slaves, providing a minimum of 3,000 per year, and as many more as possible, to Cuba, Santo Domingo, Carácas, and Savannah. His ships were the largest and most specialized in the trade. And when, in 1787, a new contract was negotiated, Messrs Baker & Dawson laid out nearly £2,000 in Spain in bribes.⁴⁵

Not only the self-made men, but all the ‘grand old Liverpool families’ too were ‘more or less steeped’⁴⁶ in slavery, either trading or owning or both. One celebrated Liverpool slave-owning family bore the name Gladstones, from which the final s was dropped by royal letters patent in 1835. John Gladstone’s slaves in British Guiana and Jamaica made his sugar, his rum, and his fortune, which he invested in land and houses in Liverpool and in profitable trade links with Russia, India, and China. He was chairman of the West India Association and, under the pen-name Mercator, carried on a long controversy with a local abolitionist in the Liverpool Mercury.⁴⁷ An MP from 1818 to 1827, he was created a baronet in 1846. He proved himself ‘especially influential in adjusting with Lord Stanley, then Secretary for the Colonies, the terms of negro emancipation’ in 1833 – and in procuring for the West Indies planters a grant of £20,000,000 by way of compensation.⁴⁸ His own share was ‘adjusted’ to £93,526, awarded for the loss of 2,039 slaves.⁴⁹ At his death in 1851 his estate was valued at about £600,000.⁵⁰ When his son William Ewart Gladstone first stood for Parliament in 1832, at Newark, opponents mocked the 23-year-old candidate as a schoolboy and, more unkindly, reminded him that a large part of his father’s gold had sprung ‘from the blood of black slaves’.51 That did not prevent the future Liberal prime minister from devoting his first substantial speech in the Commons to a defence of slavery on the family estates in British Guiana.⁵² The younger Gladstone was to make several other speeches in defence of the slave-owners. He and his father took the view that immediate emancipation would not be in the slaves’ best interests; if the ground were not first well prepared, emancipation would prove ‘more fleeting than a shadow and more empty than a name’.⁵³

London as a slave port: the West India lobby

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Royal African Company had sent to Africa 500 ships carrying goods worth £500,000, transported 100,000 black slaves to the plantations, imported 30,000 tons of sugar, coined 500,000 guineas, and built eight forts on the African coast.1 Fifteen of London’s lord mayors and 25 of its sheriffs between 1660 and 1689 were shareholders in the company, as were 38 of the City’s aldermen between 1672 and 1690.² In fact London was ‘as deeply involved in the slave trade as . . . Liverpool’³ – but not merely through sending out ships. It was the London commission agents that greased the wheels by financing the entire system. By 1750 London merchants were handling almost three-quarters of the sugar imported into England, and their profits played a crucial sweetening role.⁴ They had become moneylenders of a highly specialized kind. ‘Acting in the dual capacity of broker and banker’, they ‘reaped lucrative commissions and interest for accommodating the peculiar needs of planters and slave merchants’.⁵

The foundations of this commission or ‘factorage’ system were laid in the last 40 years of the seventeenth century. It was the means whereby credit, ‘the very life-blood of the West Indies in the eighteenth century’, was transmitted from Britain.⁶ Because of the long seasonal delays, and the time needed to convert newly acquired slave labour into produce, a complex system of long-term credits was evolved. The agents in the West Indies paid for slaves and supplies with bills drawn on their London connections, payable after 18 months or even two or three years. The slave-ship captains conveyed these bills to their employers. The commission agents took 5 per cent commission on gross sales and a further 5 per cent on the sums remitted to Britain: 10 per cent on gross turnover, in other words. They also raked in large sums as interest from the planters. In their role as acceptance houses or quasi-bankers, these London West India houses ‘stood at the centre of this web of trade’. They were ‘the focus of the system’.7

One of the first commission agents was John Bawden, absentee planter and part-owner of ships plying for hire. From time to time he dabbled directly in the slave trade. In 1687 he was knighted and became an alderman of the City of London. By then he and John Gardiner, his partner from 1682, had ‘the largest Commissions from Barbadoes of any Merchants in England, and perhaps the largest that ever were lodg’d in one House in the West-India Trade’: so wrote Bawden’s brother-in-law, John Oldmixon.⁸ Bawden’s chief competitors in this lush field were John and Francis Eyles, sons of a Wiltshire mercer and wool stapler, who made their fortunes as London merchants and founded ‘one of the great mercantile dynasties of eighteenth-century London’. Active in the West Indies commission business at least as early as 1674, John Eyles sat as MP for Devizes (1679-81), became an alderman and lord mayor of London (1688), and ended with a knighthood. He lent £29,000 to the government in 1689 and ‘died a wealthy man’. His brother Francis became an alderman and a baronet.⁹

The system pioneered by men like Bawden and the Eyles brothers was developed more profitably still by the Lascelles family, connected with Barbados from the end of the seventeenth century. ‘Big business was slave business, especially in Barbados . . . an island of great slave merchants’,¹⁰ and Lascelles and Maxwell, sugar factors, stood security on behalf of these great slave-merchants, receiving the customary 5 per cent on the money advanced. They also lent large sums to the slave-merchants of other islands and received interest on those loans, too. The loans were used partly to buy slaves and partly to buy plantations.¹¹ As Customs collectors for Barbados, Henry Lascelles and his brother Edward had earlier found another way of enriching themselves. Henry had pocketed about a third, Edward over half, of the sugar duty they collected on the government’s behalf. Systematic fraud and money-lending to slave-merchants eventually made Henry rich enough to buy himself a seat in the Commons for somewhat under £13,000 (about three or four times the going rate, apparently). He got rid of the sitting member, William Smelt, by procuring a Customs post for him in Barbados.¹² He sat for his native town of Northallerton from 1745 to 1752, when he resigned in favour of his younger son Daniel, who held the seat until 1780 and then retired to let in the elder son, Edwin. Chief fixer for the house of Lascelles was the powerful John Sharpe, MP, solicitor to the Treasury and agent for Barbados and other islands.13 When Henry Lascelles died in 1753 he left £284,000 besides annuities; £166,666 went to Edwin, whose share was ‘enough by itself to found one of the noble families of England’.¹⁴ And that was what happened. Edwin was created Baron Harewood in 1780. Some 40 years later, on the eve of emancipation, his cousin’s son the Earl of Harewood owned two plantations and 344 slaves in Jamaica, three plantations and 745 slaves in Barbados.¹⁵ When these slaves were emancipated, the earl received compensation totalling £22,473 17s. 11d.¹⁶

Slave-merchants’ and sugar planters’ special financial needs led, in London as in Bristol and Liverpool, to close connections between these trades and the banks. Alexander and David Barclay – theirs was not yet a household name – were among the 84 Quaker slave-traders in 1756.¹⁷ Another prominent London banker, Sir Francis Baring, seems to have made his first money out of dealing in slaves when he was only 16. It evidently gave him an excellent start in life, for this ‘prince of merchants’ earned nearly £7,000,000 over 70 years, sat as MP for 18 of them, was made a baronet in 1793, and left property worth £1,000,000.¹⁸ City of London financiers with interests in the West Indies included the Lloyds underwriter John Julius Angerstein, whose choice collection of pictures formed the nucleus of the National Gallery.¹⁹

The bank that might justly have been called the ‘Bank of the West Indies’ in the eighteenth century was the Bank of England. Black slavery augmented, in one way or another, the family fortunes of many of its directors and governors. Humphry Morice, MP, director of the bank from 1716, deputy governor in 1725-6, and governor in 1727-9, personally owned six slave-ships, four of them named after members of his family: Anne, Katherine, Sarah, and Judith. After Morice’s sudden death in 1731 he was found to have had his hand in the Bank of England’s till: he had discounted fictitious bills to the tune of over £29,000, had embezzled trust funds left to his daughters by an uncle, and was said to have taken poison to forestall discovery.²⁰ Sir Richard Neave, Bt, director of the Bank of England for 48 years, deputy governor in 1781-3, and governor in 1783-5, was chairman of the Society of West India Merchants and of the London Dock Company (which built the London Docks in Wapping, opened in 1803). Neave’s daughter married Beeston Long junior, son of Neave’s predecessor as chairman of the West India Merchants; Beeston Long junior in his turn became chairman of the West India Merchants and the London Dock Company – and director (1784–1820) and governor (1804–6) of the Bank of England.21 Thomas Boddington, director of the Bank of England (1782–1809) and of the London Dock Company, financed the purchase of estates for the Pinneys in the late 1780s.²² Thomas Raikes, director (1776-1810), deputy governor (1795–7), and governor (1797–9) of the Bank of England, dandy, and friend of Beau Brummell, had a nephew, Job Mathew Raikes, who was partner in a prosperous family firm of West India merchants. This nephew married the eldest daughter of Nathaniel Bayly, ex-MP and rich Jamaican plantation-owner, who died in 1798 leaving well over £100,000; the two families linked by this marriage later acquired a connection with the banking firm of Glyn, Mills & Co.²³ William Manning – whose father had acquired by marriage two estates on St Kitts – was agent for St Vincent and Grenada, ‘eclipsed the older families to become the most eminent of West India merchants’, amassed a ‘handsome fortune’, and served as director (1790-1831) and governor (1812-14) of the Bank of England. His brother-in-law Abel Smith was a partner in the banking house of Smith, Payne and Smiths; his youngest son was to add a different kind of lustre to the family name by becoming a cardinal and archbishop of Westminster.²⁴

No wonder that the ‘sugar and slave men’, as one historian of the Bank of England calls them, were favoured customers:

Including the discounting done for bankers, the aggregate for persons ‘in Discount with the Bank’, as reported on 1 January 1800, was £6,603,000 . . .

    At the head of the merchants, with £581,000 of bills under discount on that day, came the great West India Interest – the sugar and slave men. Because of the ‘extraordinary situation of their trade’ in war time, they had recently been given specially favourable terms.²⁵

London’s immensely rich and powerful West India lobby was made up of three closely associated and often overlapping elements. First, there were the commission agents, already referred to. Second, there were the absentee proprietors, many of whom played an active part in local and national politics. ‘I need not, I suppose, observe to you’, wrote a pamphleteer in 1760, ‘how many Gentlemen of the West Indies have seats in the British House of Commons.’²⁶ Jasper Mauduit, agent for Massachusetts (then a British colony) wrote in 1764 that the West Indians had a ‘very formidable number of votes’ in the Commons,27 and his brother Israel declared in the same year that ‘50 or 60 West India voters’ in the Commons ‘can turn the balance on which side they please’.²⁸ Two years later a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine reckoned that ‘there are now in parliament upwards of 40 members who are either West-India planters themselves, descended from such, or have concerns there that entitle them to this pre eminence’.²⁹ Two prominent slave-traders who sat in the Commons in the early part of the eighteenth century were the Barbados merchants Robert and William Heysham. The former was an alderman of the City of London (1720) and master of the Drapers’ Company (1720–1).³⁰ Other early West Indian MPs were Sir William Stapleton and Sir William Codrington, both baronets. One of Stapleton’s grandfathers had been captain-general of the Leeward Islands, the other, governor of Nevis. Codrington’s grandfather had migrated to Barbados in 1628 and he and his two sons made great fortunes there, which the grandson inherited.³¹ Sir William Pulteney, MP, who served as secretary at war (1714-17), and was afterwards created Earl of Bath, owned large estates in the West Indies and Scotland that brought him in about £10,000 a year.³² Richard Pennant, MP, first Baron Penrhyn, who inherited the largest estate in Jamaica, summed up the slave-owners’ views when he wrote to his agent there in 1783: ‘I am glad to hear the Negroes are well. The Hearing a good account of them, and of the Cattle, always gives pleasure.’³³

Perhaps the most famous, and probably the richest, of this group of MPs was William Beckford, uncrowned king of Jamaica, where he held 22,022 acres in 1750. Born on the island, he became a successful London merchant and a City alderman. He served as sheriff (1755-6), as lord mayor twice (1762-3 and 1769-70), and as MP for Shaftesbury (1747-54) and London (1754-70). One of his brothers, Richard, who owned 9,242 acres in Jamaica, sat for Bristol (1754-6); another brother, Julines, who owned 8,198 acres in Jamaica, sat for Salisbury (1754-64). William Beckford’s illegitimate son Richard was also a West Indian planter-MP (Bridport, 1780-4; Arundel, 1784-90; Leominster, 1791-8), and his legitimate son William, author of Vathek (1786) and, in Byron’s phrase, ‘England’s wealthiest son’, sat for Wells (1784-90) and Hindon (1790-4 and 1806-20) and squandered a huge fortune.³⁴

The West Indians could well afford to buy their seats in the Commons. In 1767 a borough-jobber – a dealer in rotten and pocket boroughs – laughed at Lord Chesterfield’s offer of £2,500 for a seat in Northampton, explaining that

there was no such thing as a borough to be had now; for that the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of three thousand pounds at least; but many at four thousand; and two or three, that he knew, at five thousand.35

The West Indian colonies’ political agents resident in London made up the third element in the West India lobby. These representatives of the island planters and merchants were paid by the various colonial legislatures. Barbados appointed an agent as early as 1671; he seems to have been the first. Jamaica and the Leeward Islands followed suit in 1677.³⁶ Like John Sharpe, one of the most successful, many of these agents were also British government employees; others had formerly been in government service or would later enter it. So this was politically the most powerful element in the lobby – more so than even the planter- and merchant-MPs. Charles Delafoye, agent for Jamaica, was a government clerk and became an under-secretary of state. John Pownall, agent for the Virgin Islands, had been secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations. George Chalmers, agent for the Bahamas, had the main responsibility for administrative work at the Board of Trade for many years. Sir John Stanley, agent for Barbados, was commissioner of the Custom House. Thomas Beake, agent for St Kitts, was a clerk in the Council Office. Lovel Stanhope, agent for Jamaica, was law clerk to the secretaries of state.³⁷

Several important measures were adopted under the determined pressure of the West India lobby. One was the Molasses Act of 1733, hitting at the north American colonies’ trade with the French islands; in 1764 this was reinforced by the Sugar Act. It was on the lobby’s demand that Canada was annexed to the British Empire in 1763 instead of Guadeloupe or Martinique, whose huge crops would have brought sugar prices crashing down.³⁸ The lobby also succeeded, against much opposition, in having the West India Docks, in the Isle of Dogs, constructed and opened in 1802. Prime movers in the scheme were George Hibbert, son of a West India merchant, agent for Jamaica, alderman of the City of London, and later an MP and author of a pamphlet opposing abolition of the slave trade; and Robert Milligan, a West India merchant.³⁹

Nobody sat down and planned the West India lobby. It took shape piecemeal. Informal gatherings in coffee-houses achieved more than formal meetings. A Committee for the Concern of Barbados was set up in London in 1671. The Planters’ Club of London was formed before 1740, but its membership was confined to proprietors and, in any case, it seems to have been more social than political in character.40 A co-ordinated Society of West India Merchants did not come into existence until the 1760s.⁴¹

From 1788 the entire strength of the West India interest in London would be mobilized to defend the slave trade against the mounting campaign for abolition. By then London’s pro-slavery network had behind it more than 100 years’ experience in running pressure groups, presenting and managing petitions, transmitting information, getting letters into the newspapers, organizing lobbying of every kind – including, as we shall see in a later chapter, having a quiet word with the attorney-general and solicitor-general after dinner to persuade them to give an official ruling that a slave who was brought to this country remained a slave and could lawfully be shipped back to the plantations. Here is a remarkably modern-sounding example of the lobby’s cosmetic operations. ‘The vulgar are influenced by names and titles’, said a letter published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789. ‘Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave trade by pious divines, tenderhearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians.’⁴²

Those who wanted the slave trade abolished had formidable enemies. Agents, planters, and merchants had built up a powerful system. And so ‘the history of the abolition movement . . . was one of continuous fighting against the almost overwhelming power of interest.’⁴³

Competition

Britain’s three main slave ports had to face competition, chiefly in the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s, from ten other ports. But only three of these – Lancaster, Whitehaven, and Portsmouth – ever made a significant contribution to the trade, and even then their role was minor compared with that of Liverpool, Bristol, and London. Slave-trading ventures from the remaining seven – Chester, Preston, and Poulton-le-Fylde (near Blackpool) in the north-west; Plymouth, Exeter, and Dartmouth in the south-west; and Glasgow – seem to have been quite rare. In 1750, in fact, Lancaster, Chester, Plymouth, and Glasgow were reported to have only six slave-ships between them.1

In a certain sense, though, Lancaster had entered the trade 30 years earlier. The slaver Penellopy was built there in 1720 but was registered at Liverpool, in 1724, with four north Lancashire owners.2 There was an intricate connection between Lancaster and Liverpool, especially in the years 1759-76, with some Lancaster slavers clearing from the larger port and some Lancaster merchants holding shares in Liverpool slavers in the 1760s.³ Occasional slaving voyages are recorded from Lancaster itself from 1736 onwards, but regular trade did not begin until 1748.⁴ By 1754 Lancaster could boast nine slave-ships of its own, and in the years 1757-76 an average of four ships a year were cleared from the port for slaving voyages. Lancaster’s slave-ships were extremely small: 40 to 80 tons, with some even smaller that were probably used as tenders. Favourite destinations were Sierra Leone and the Gambia, where in 1761 the slaves on board the Lancaster ship Mary, commanded by Captain Sandys, rose and killed most of the crew.⁵ Two years later the Lancaster merchants were petitioning the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, ‘setting forth the prejudice arising to their Interests . . . from some of His Majesty’s Subjects having entered into Contracts for supplying the French with Negroes’.⁶ Lancaster’s slave trade dwindled to a trickle after 1781 and ended altogether, formally speaking, with two voyages in 1792 – though three later examples are known of Lancaster-owned vessels clearing from Liverpool.⁷

The other small north-western ports seem to have entered the slave trade in the 1750s because they thought they could undercut their bigger rivals; but it does not seem to have done them much good. Chester tried twice, in 1750-7 and 1773-5, registering a total of only nine voyages altogether.⁸ Two of Chester’s ships were lost and not replaced – one of these, the Black Prince, was destroyed by French men-of-war⁹ – and two were advertised for sale in Liverpool newspapers. Chester was probably too close to Liverpool to compete successfully.¹⁰ Preston and Poulton started regular trade in 1753, but between them managed only five slaving voyages by three ships before dropping out four years later. At least one of these ships was owned by a Kirkham firm of linen manufacturers that also had shares in five Liverpool slavers between 1767 and 1771.¹¹

Whitehaven was more successful. It entered the trade in 1750 and sent out an average of four slave-ships a year between 1758 and 1769. Portsmouth managed two such voyages a year between 1758 and 1774.¹² Glasgow took part very occasionally, though ‘many of its merchants waxed fat on the direct trades in sugar and tobacco’ and ‘some made fortunes directly by becoming planters in the West Indies’.¹³ The Glasgow slave-trading firm of Alexander Grant Junior & Co. went bankrupt in 1807 after the passing of the Abolition Act.14

There was also occasional competition from the Royal Navy. In 1703 Vice-Admiral John Graydon, described as a ‘brutal’ man, was accused by the Jamaica merchants and planters of stealing their slaves and cattle to sell on the Spanish American coast. He was dismissed the service, for another offence, by resolution of the House of Lords.¹⁵ In 1711 a complaint was made to the Admiralty that Captain Matthew Elford had been taking black slaves to Antigua to sell and provisioning them at Queen Anne’s expense.¹⁶ Two years later, 42 Jamaica merchants petitioned the Council of Trade and Plantations about the conduct of Rear-Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker, who was letting his captains carry black slaves and other merchandise to sell duty-free on the Spanish American coast, thus stealing ‘the most considerable and advantageous branch’ of their trade. Indeed, in order to render this ‘private trade’ more convenient, the admiral had considerately shifted his base from Port Royal to Bluefields, about 200 miles to the west. The merchants asked that the captains be restricted to guarding the coast and protecting trade instead of appropriating it.¹⁷ There were similar complaints in 1718.¹⁸ The Admiralty often sent out warships to the West Indies by way of the west coast of Africa, and this gave naval officers a chance to supplement their pay by dealing in slaves. King George II promised in 1732 that he would put a stop to this improper behaviour but, in spite of complaints by the French, ‘it does not seem to have stopped’.¹⁹

Naval officers sent to the West African coast to guard British slavers from foreign privateers were also sometimes tempted to do a little trading themselves, and they could not always resist temptation. In 1737 the officers and crews of the warships Diamond, Greenwich, and Spence, lying off the African coast for the protection of British merchant vessels, were actively engaged in buying gold dust, ivory, and slaves. Each of his Majesty’s three ships had on board large stores of cotton goods, liquor, gunpowder, and other merchandise, which they were offering at prices far below normal. At the same time they were paying £4 per head above the usual rate for slaves. The slaver captains found themselves unable to procure cargoes except at an outlay involving ruinous losses for their employers. A Bristol affidavit complained that HMS Greenwich had sailed for Barbados with 200 slaves, while HMS Spence, a mere sloop-of-war, had taken between 50 and 60 more.²⁰

Quality control

The reputation of those who traded in black slaves depended on their ability to supply customers with first-class goods. Here was the one area where they could not afford to cut costs. The Liverpool brand, DD, burnt with red-hot irons into the living flesh of African men, women, and children, was famous among West Indian planters as a guarantee of prime quality.1 Merchants and planters alike exercised strict quality control by careful examination at the point of purchase on both sides of the Atlantic. A naval surgeon who watched slavers at work in West Africa in the 1720s compared the scene to a cattle market. The people offered for sale were ‘examined by us in like manner, as our Brother Trade do Beasts in Smithfield; the Countenance, and Stature, a good Set of Teeth, Pliancy in their Limbs, and Joints, and being free of Venereal Taint, are the things inspected, and governs our choice in buying’.² It was the same at the other end of the middle passage. Richard Ligon described the scene in Barbados: ‘The Planters . . . choose them as they do Horses in a Market; the strongest, youthfullest, and most beautiful, yield the greatest prices.’³ John Oldmixon’s account was similar: ‘The Slaves are purchased by Lots, out of the Guinea Ships. They are all view’d stark naked, and the strongest and handsomest bear the best Prizes.’⁴ ‘Selling these Slaves’, the author of a bookkeeping manual assured his readers in 1754, ‘differs in nothing from selling other Merchandize.’⁵

If merchants were to be sure of ‘Prime Healthy Negroes’⁶ they had to keep their employees up to the mark. So they sent detailed instructions to every captain, sometimes more than once during a single voyage. These were the instructions sent by the Bristol firm of Isaac Hobhouse & Co. to William Barry, commander of the Dispatch, in 1725:

Let your endeavours be to buy none but what’s healthy and strong and of a Convenient Age – none to exceed the years of 25 or under if posible, among which so many men, and stout men boys [i.e. strong male adolescents] as can be had seeing such are most Valuable at the Plantations . . . So soon as you begin to slave let your knetting be fix’d breast high fore and aft and so keep ’em shackled and hand Bolted fearing their rising or leaping Overboard.⁷

The same house wrote to one of its agents in 1733:

We hope this will find you safe arrived on the coast of Angola and with a fine Parcell of Negroes ready to putt on board our ship Union . . . You must in the best manner of which you are capable exert yourself in the purchase of a parcell of fine Men and Women, that you may not loose the good caracter you have already gott. And as you are obliged to take at times some boys and Girls, you must endeavour . . . to purchase about 100, aiming chiefly at the females from 10 to 14 years of age . . .

    Observe that the Boys and Girls you buy be very black and handsome.8

Cargoes often included a high proportion of children. When Sir William Young, afterwards governor of Tobago, visited the Windward Islands in 1791 he went on board the Pilgrim of Bristol and the Aeolus of Liverpool and found that ‘a full half of either cargo consisted of children (and generally as fine children as I ever saw) from six to fourteen years of age’.⁹ Thomas Leyland’s firm instructed the master of the Earl of Liverpool when it sailed in 1797: ‘In your selection of the slaves, we desire you will not purchase any exceeding eighteen to twenty years of age, well formed, and free from any disorder.’¹⁰ John Pinney was one of the many planters who preferred to buy ‘men–boys’ and ‘women–girls’ rather than adults.¹¹ In the 1720s, one in six of the slaves the Royal African Company landed in Barbados, one in three of those it landed in Jamaica, was a child. Seventy years later, about 13 per cent of the slaves taken on board British slavers were children, officially defined as those under 4ft 4in. tall. Of the slaves landed in Jamaica in the same period, 7 per cent were children. The difference is to be accounted for partly by the uniformly high mortality rate among the children, for three boys in twenty and one girl in five did not survive the middle passage.¹²

The overall death rate of slaves in transit gradually dropped from one in four in the 1680s to one in twelve 100 years later.¹³ During the ships’ long absences some of the merchants were inclined to fret about the possibility that captains were risking a higher than average death rate by buying Africans who were diseased or infirm or past their first youth. This fear obsessed the Liverpool merchant Robert Bostock. During a single voyage one of his captains received ten separate sets of instructions from him. Bostock wrote in 1789 to Edward Williams, commander of the Jemmy: ‘I hope you will be very careful about your Slaves and take none on Board but what is Healthy & Young.’ In the following year he warned another of his captains, named Flint, not to buy slaves of ‘Old Spider Leged Quality’.14 In 1803 Captain Cæsar Lawson, master of the Liverpool slaver Enterprize, was instructed to obtain ‘prime Negroes, Ivory and Palm Oil’, and the owners added: ‘In the choice of the Negroes be very particular, select those that are well formed and strong; and do not buy any above 24 years of Age.’¹⁵

These slave-ship captains were the elite of their calling, identifiable not only by their ‘privilege Negroes’ but also by their gaudy laced coats with big silver or gold buttons, their cocked hats, the silver or gold buckles on their shoes.¹⁶ Most of them, whatever they had been like when they entered the trade, turned into brutal tyrants. But it was a trade that tended to attract sadists. Slaves were flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails on the slightest pretext, and it was often the captain himself who did the flogging and took a visible delight in it. In 1764 the newly promoted captain of the Liverpool slaver Black Joke, whose name was Marshall, flogged to death a baby less than a year old for refusing food, then forced the mother to throw the corpse overboard.¹⁷ Uprisings were put down with horrible reprisals, partly because they sent officers and crews into paroxysms of terror. But the need to satisfy their employers’ lust for profit did tend to put a check on the captains’ lust for inflicting pain. Unable to torture the slaves freely, sadistic captains had to make do with their own seamen. To these they were so cruel that by the 1780s it was growing hard to recruit men for slaving voyages. Such voyages were unpopular for two other reasons: they could last a year or more; and the death rate among crews as well as cargoes was notoriously high. The seamen used to sing:

    Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin

    There’s one comes out for forty go in.¹⁸

That was an exaggeration – but from 1784 to 1790 the death rate among seamen on slaving voyages was one in five, more than twice as high as the death rate among slaves in transit in that period. One authority writes, with agreeable irony: ‘If the Africans suffered hardships and the mortality rate among them was high, it must be acknowledged that the same was true with respect to the white seamen removing them to their new homes.’¹⁹ According to Hugh Crow, master of the last slaver to sail from an English port, many of these seamen were ‘the very dregs of the community’:

Some of them had escaped from jails; others were undiscovered offenders, who sought to withdraw themselves from their country lest they should fall into the hands of the officers of justice. These wretched beings used to flock to Liverpool when the ships were fitting out, and after acquiring a few sea phrases from some crimp [i.e. agent who recruited seamen] or other, they were shipped as ordinary seamen, though they had never been at sea in their lives. If, when at sea, they became saucy and insubordinate, which was generally the case, the officers were compelled to treat them with severity: and, never having been in a warm climate before, if they took ill, they seldom recovered . . . Amongst these wretched beings I have known many gentlemen’s sons of desperate character and abandoned habits, who had either fled for some offence, or had involved themselves in pecuniary embarrassments.20

But not all the seamen employed on board the slavers were white. And the free black seamen, who often signed on as cooks, bore their full share of the captains’ frustration. In 1786 Joseph Williams, commander of the Bristol slaver Little Pearl (later renamed the Ruby), ‘appeared to enjoy a particular Pleasure in flogging and tormenting’ his cook, a free black seaman who spoke Portuguese: ‘He often amused himself with making the Man swallow Cockroaches alive, on pain of being most severely flogged, and having Beef Brine rubbed into his Wounds.’ The black cook, who sometimes opted for a flogging rather than swallow ‘the nauseous Vermin’, was chained by the neck night and day to the copper in which he prepared food for the slaves and crew; and ‘the Body of this poor Wretch, from the Crown of his Head to the Soles of his Feet, was covered with Scars and Lacerations, intersecting each other in all Directions, so that he was a most miserable Object to behold’. The ship’s surgeon said afterwards that not a man on board had escaped the captain’s fury.²¹

In the previous year the Brothers had limped home to Bristol with 32 of the crew dead through their captain’s ill-treatment and another crew member, a free black seaman called John Dean, sickeningly mutilated. The captain had tied him face down on the deck, poured hot pitch over him, and cut his back open with hot tongs – all for ‘a trifling circumstance, for which he was in no-wise to blame’. When the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Bristol to gather ammunition for the campaign against the slave trade, he investigated this case and had the details confirmed by a ‘respectable ship-builder’ called Sydenham Teast.²² He also investigated the case of the slaver Alfred, which had just docked, and whose captain had chained the surgeon’s mate to the deck for days and nights on end. Yet another free black seaman, a cook on board the Juno, was beaten with handspikes and other implements by the captain and surgeon and forced to work in chains.23

Such atrocities were the talk of Bristol. The deputy town clerk, Daniel Burges, confided to Clarkson ‘that he only knew of one captain from the port in the Slave-trade, who did not deserve long ago to be hanged’.²⁴ Public opinion was turning against the trade. Bristol seamen had to be dead drunk before they would sign on – or, for a consideration, obliging publicans would falsely accuse them of debt, offering them the choice of ‘a slave-vessel, or a gaol’.²⁵

In Liverpool, too, Clarkson found that ‘horrible facts’ about the trade were ‘in every body’s mouth’, though Liverpool people seemed ‘more hardened’ than Bristol people. While he was investigating the case of a Liverpool captain who had flogged a seaman to death, some of the owner’s bully-boys tried to throw him off the end of the pier.²⁶ The campaign against the trade had the merchants badly rattled. Soon after Clarkson’s visit the Liverpool council conferred the freedom of the borough on Charles Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury, ‘in gratitude for the essential services rendered to the town of Liverpool by his Lordship’s late exertion in Parliament in support of the African Slave Trade’; he was later created Earl of Liverpool.²⁷ And the council commissioned a Spanish-born Jesuit, the Reverend Raymund Harris (his real name was Hormasa), to write a 77-page pamphlet, Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave-trade, shewing its conformity with the principles of natural and revealed religion, delineated in the sacred writings of the word of God. As their ‘most obedient And most humble Servant’, Harris ‘most respectfully inscribed’ this work to the mayor, recorder, aldermen, and bailiffs of the town.²⁸ According to Harris, the trade was ‘in perfect harmony with . . . the principles and decisions of the Word of God respecting Right and Justice’.²⁹ Even in Liverpool it was just as well to know that God was on your side, and the council awarded the author £100 out of the public purse ‘for his late excellent publication on the subject of the Slave Trade’, in recognition of ‘the advantages resulting to the town and trade of Liverpool from the said publication’.³⁰ Liverpool sentiment was summed up in a 1790 election squib:

    If our slave trade had gone, there’s an end to our lives,

    Beggars all we must be, our children and wives;

    No ships from our ports their proud sails e’er would spread,

    And our streets grown with grass, where the cows might be fed.31

While in Liverpool Clarkson saw, on public display in a shop window, the devices used by the slavers’ crews to manacle, punish, and forcibly feed their cargoes. He bought specimens of them: iron handcuffs; leg-shackles; thumb-screws; and a speculum oris, a surgical instrument for wrenching open a locked jaw, used on the slave-ships to force open the mouths of slaves who refused to eat.³² (Other expedients were to shove hot coals against the lips of those refusing food or pour molten lead on them³³ or flog them unmercifully.)³⁴ Branding-irons, too, were openly exhibited for sale in eighteenth-century Liverpool.³⁵ In 1756, at an auction in the Merchants’ Coffee-house there, 83 pairs of shackles, 11 slave-collars, 22 pairs of handcuffs, 4 long chains, 34 rings, and 2 travelling chains were among the apparatus offered for sale, and shackles, chains, slave-collars, and handcuffs were advertised for sale in 1757.³⁶ An ‘Iron Gag Muzzle’ specially designed for use on Africans was offered for sale by London ironmongers in the 1760s.³⁷

Black people in the slave ports

There is no positive evidence that such instruments were exposed for sale in Bristol, where Clarkson says he ‘entirely overlooked’ them, the implication being that he would probably have found them had he known about such things at that stage of his inquiries.1 But there is plenty of evidence that slaves themselves were bought and sold in Bristol. Many a captain, mate, or ship’s surgeon, short of funds, decided to convert his ‘privilege Negro’ into a spot of ready cash before the next voyage. ‘To be sold, a black boy’ is a cry that punctuates the pages of Bristol’s eighteenth-century newspapers.

Here, for instance, in 1728, is Captain John Gwythen with ‘a Negro man about 20 years old’ to dispose of; so he inserts a genteel advertisement in Farley’s Bristol Newspaper, where it is sure to reach a good class of person. It describes the slave as ‘well limb’d’, which has an elegant ring; ‘fit to serve a gentleman’, which flatters any prospective buyer; and apt for instruction in any handicraft trade, which is a highly practical recommendation.² Here, in the Bristol Journal of 1750, a black boy ‘of about 12 years of age’ is advertised for sale.³ In 1754, ‘any gentleman or lady who wants a Negro Boy’ can buy a 14-year-old, recently landed – as most of those offered for sale in this way probably were.4 In 1760 Bristol citizens are invited to buy ‘A Negroe BOY, about ten Years old’, and the advertisement adds reassuringly: ‘He has had the SMALL-POX.’⁵ ‘To be sold, a Black Boy, about 15 years of age; capable of waiting at table’, announces an advertisement of 1767.⁶ And in 1768 there is offered ‘a healthy Negro Slave named Prince, 17 years of age; extremely well grown’.⁷

One Liverpool street – the sources do not identify it – witnessed so many sales of black children and youths that it was nicknamed ‘Negro Row’ or ‘Negro Street’. They were sold by auction in shops, warehouses, and coffee-houses, and on the front steps of the Custom House, on the east side of the Old Dock (afterwards Canning Place).⁸ An 8-year-old black girl was publicly auctioned in Liverpool in 1765, the auction being announced in a local newspaper in these terms:

To be sold by Auction at George’s Coffee-house, betwixt the hours of six and eight o’clock, a very fine negro girl about eight years of age, very healthy, and hath been some time from the coast. Any person willing to purchase the same may apply to Capt. Robert Syers, at Mr. Bartley Hodgett’s, Mercer and Draper near the Exchange, where she may be seen till the time of sale.⁹

A ‘fine negro boy’ offered for sale by auction at the Merchants’ Coffee-house, Old Church Yard, was 11 years old; the sale was ‘by order of Mr. Thomas Yates, who hath imported him from Bonny’.¹⁰ In 1757 a flour merchant called Joseph Daltera offered for sale ‘10 pipes of raisin wine, a parcel of bottled cyder, and a negro boy’.¹¹ In the same year two black youngsters were offered for sale in the same advertisement:

For Sale immediately, ONE stout [i.e. strong] NEGRO young fellow, about 20 years of age, that has been employed for 12 months on board a ship, and is a very serviceable hand. And a NEGRO BOY, about 12 years old, that has been used since Sept. last to wait at a table, and is of a very good disposition, both warranted sound. Apply to Robert Williamson, Broker.¹²

A Liverpool advertisement of 1766 offered the unusually high number of 11 black slaves for sale: ‘To be sold At the Exchange Coffee House in Water Street, this day the 12th inst. September, at one o’clock precisely, Eleven negroes Imported per the Angola.’¹³ Two years later, a ‘fine Negroe Boy’ offered for sale in Liverpool was said to be ‘about 4 Feet 5 Inches high, Of a sober, tractable, humane [i.e. willing] Disposition, Eleven or Twelve Years of Age, talks English very well, and can Dress Hair in a tolerable way’.14 Sometimes an advertisement was inserted by a prospective buyer. ‘Wanted immediately a negro boy’, said one such advertisement in a Liverpool newspaper in 1756, specifying that he must be ‘of a deep black complexion, and a lively, humane disposition, with good features, and not above 15, nor under 12 years of age’.¹⁵

Not all the young Africans to be seen about the streets of Liverpool in the last quarter of the eighteenth century were slaves. By the 1780s there were always at least 50 African schoolchildren, girls as well as boys, in Liverpool and the villages around. Most of them came from the Windward and Gold Coasts (i.e. present-day Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Ghana), and they were sent by their well-to-do parents to receive the advantage of a European elementary education. They were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. The girls, in addition, were instructed in ‘domestic Duties’ and needlework. African children were also educated in Bristol in the same period.¹⁶

What about London? Were black slaves bought and sold publicly in Britain’s capital? The Admiralty judge Lord Stowell answered this question in 1827:

The personal traffic in slaves resident in England had been as public and as authorised in London as in any of our West India islands. They were sold on the Exchange and other places of public resort by parties themselves resident in London, and with as little reserve as they would have been in any of our West India possessions. Such a state of things continued without impeachment from a very early period up to nearly the end of the last [i.e. eighteenth] century.¹⁷

Most of the slaves sold in London were children. An advertisement of Queen Anne’s reign offered the purchaser ‘a Negro boy about 12 years of age, that speaks English’.¹⁸ ‘To be Sold, A NEGRO BOY, aged about Eleven Years’, proclaimed a 1728 advertisement, adding: ‘Inquire at the Virginia Coffee-House in Threadneedle-street, behind the Royal-Exchange.’¹⁹ ‘A Pretty little Negro Boy, about nine Years old, and well limb’d’ was offered for sale in 1744. He could be inspected at the Dolphin tavern in Tower Street and, ‘if not dispos’d of’, was to be ‘sent to the West Indies in six Days Time’.²⁰ Two ‘fine Negro Boys’, offered for sale in 1756, were stated to be ‘on Board the Molly . . . from Africa, now lying at Horsleydown Lower Chain’.21 ‘To be disposed of’, said a 1762 advertisement, ‘A Negro Boy 12 Years old, extremely well made, good-natured, sensible, and handy, speaks English well, and has had the Small-Pox’.²² In the following year, a young black slave who had belonged to a forger – the forger was hanged at Tyburn and his property was therefore forfeit to the Crown – was put up for auction and sold for £32, and the Gentleman’s Magazine, rather behind the times, supposed it to be ‘perhaps the first instance of the kind in a free country’.²³ ‘To be disposed of, a fine healthy Negro-Boy, between ten and eleven Years of Age’, said a 1769 advertisement, adding: ‘He has been five Years in England, is very good-natured and tractable, and would be very useful in a Family, or a Lady’s Foot-boy . . . No Objections to lett the Boy be a Week on Trial.’ The price was 50 guineas, which may explain why the advertisement was reinserted seven weeks later, this time with no price stated: the child was now said to have been born in America.²⁴ In the same year there was offered for sale in London ‘a Black Girl, the Property of John Bull, Eleven Years of Age, who is extremely handy, works at her Needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well; is of an excellent Temper, and willing Disposition’.²⁵ Here is another 1769 advertisement (a timwhisky, usually so spelt, was a kind of carriage):

HORSES, TIM WISKY, and BLACK BOY.

To be SOLD, at the Bull and-Gate Inn, Holborn, A very good Tim Wisky, little the worse for wear, with good harness, and, if desired, a Horse also, that goes well in it.

    A Chestnut Gelding, 14 hands and a half high, is very sightly, and would suit a lady in every respect, extremely well, as he goes safe, pleasant, and steady.

    A very good Grey Mare, 15 hands high, mistress of 12 stone, and a very pleasant goer. The above are just come out of the country, are rising five years old, and will be warranted sound.

    A well made, good-tempered Black Boy,; he has lately had the small-pox, and will be sold to any gentleman. Enquire as above.²⁶

As in Liverpool, prospective buyers in London advertised their wants sometimes: ‘WANTED, A Blackamoor Boy of eight or nine Years of Age: Whoever has such a one to dispose of, may hear of a Purchaser at Mrs. Cranwell’s, over-against [i.e. opposite] the Chapel in Conduit-Street.’²⁷

Seventeenth-century hue-and-cry advertisements for runaway slaves were quoted in the previous chapter. Such advertisements were often inserted in Bristol’s local newspapers in the eighteenth century and, with odd scraps of evidence of other kinds, such as an epitaph, they throw light on the development of the black community in the port and its hinterland. In 1713 Captain Foye of Bristol offered £5 for the return of ‘a Negro called Scipio (his Negro Name Ossion), of middle Stature aged about 24 Years, speaks imperfect English, somewhat Splayfooted’.28 Two years later another Bristol ‘Scipio’ ran away, and the local postmaster undertook to pay two guineas and expenses for his recovery; he belonged to a privateer captain called Stephen Courtney and was described as ‘about 20 years of Age, well sett, having 3 or 4 marks on each Temple, and the same on each Cheek’.²⁹ Yet another local black youth of the same name – Scipio Africanus, in fact – served the Earl of Suffolk, died in 1720 at the age of 18, and is buried in Henbury churchyard, four miles from Bristol. The inscription on his tombstone reads:

    I who was Born a PAGAN and a SLAVE

    Now Sweetly Sleep a CHRISTIAN in my Grave

    What tho’ my hue was dark my SAVIOUR’S Sight

    Shall Change this darkness into radiant light

    Such grace to me my Lord on earth has given

    To recommend me to my Lord in heaven

    Whose glorious second coming here I wait

    With saints and Angels Him to celebrate³⁰

In 1746 Captain Eaton announced in Bristol that his slave Mingo had run away after eight years, offered a guinea reward for his recapture, and warned: ‘All persons are hereby forbid entertaining the said Black at their peril.’³¹ Such a warning, which was not unique, suggests that there were people in Bristol prepared to give shelter to runaway black slaves. Josiah Ross, a Redcliff Street soap-maker, advertised the escape of his ‘Black-Boy’ in 1748: ‘He is about 12 or 13 Years of Age, a stocky round favour’d well-set Boy, and goes by the Name of Somerset. Whoever shall help the said Mr. Ross to the Boy again, shall be rewarded and all Charges thankfully Repaid, by directing a Letter to him at Bristol.’³² In 1757 a young black slave called Starling, who ‘blows the French horn very well’, ran away from a publican in Prince’s Street, and a guinea reward was offered for his capture;³³ a week later a black slave owned by Captain Bouchier, of Keynsham, escaped;³⁴ and six months after that Captain Ezekiel Nash was advertising the escape of his black slave and threatening to prosecute anyone that sheltered him.35 A £5 reward was offered in 1758 for the recapture of a ‘Malotta Boy’ who had run away from his master in St Philip’s Plain.³⁶ And in 1759 Captain Holbrook advertised a ‘handsome reward’ for the recovery of his ‘Negro man named Thomas’.³⁷

Similar hue-and-cry advertisements were frequently to be found in London newspapers of the eighteenth century. In Queen Anne’s reign a guinea reward was offered for the return of ‘a Negro Maid, aged about 16 Years, much pitted with the Small Pox, speaks English well, having a piece of her left Ear bit off by a Dog; She hath on a strip’d Stuff waistcoat and Petticoat’.³⁸ Two similar advertisements from the same period: ‘A Tall Negro young fellow commonly known as Jack Chelsea, having a Collar about his Neck (unless it be lately filed off), with these Words; Mr. Moses Goodyeare of Chelsea his Negro, ran away from his Master last Tuesday evening’;³⁹ ‘Run away from his Master about a Fortnight since, a lusty Negroe Boy about 18 years of Age, full of pock holes, had a Silver Collar about his Neck engrav’d Capt. Tho. Mitchel’s Negroe, living in Griffith Street in Shadwel’.⁴⁰ On three consecutive days of 1756, the Public Advertiser carried a notice offering a guinea reward for ‘a Negro Boy, named Torrie, the Property of William Lessley, Commander of the Ship Johnson’. This ‘Property’ was ‘about fourteen Years of Age, not tall, but well-set, walks in-toed, is thick-lipp’d, and flat-nosed . . . He sometimes calls himself Liverpool, and has a Scar on the Top of the upper Joint of his Arm’.⁴¹ Two guineas was offered in the Public Ledger, in November 1761, for the return of‘a BLACK Fellow, about five Feet six Inches, aged 16 Years’, who had ‘RUN AWAY from Mr. STUBBS’; he had ‘a scar in his Face’.⁴² Almost two months later, this runaway not having been recaptured, his Ratcliff master inserted a longer and more detailed advertisement:

RUN AWAY.

From Captain STUBBS

A Yellowish Negro Man, about Five Feet Seven Inches, very flat Nose, and a Scar across his Forehead, he had when he run away, a white Pea-Jacket, a Pair of black Worsted Stockings, and a black Wig. Whoever will bring the said Negro Man to his abovementioned Master, Capt. STUBBS, in Prince’s Square, Ratcliff Highway, shall receive Two Guineas Reward.

    N.B. The abovementioned Master, Capt. STUBBS, desires that no Commander, Merchants, or any other Gentlemen will employ the abovementioned Negro; he goes by the Name of Stephen Brown, and if he will return to his Master, nothing will be [done to] him.43

In those last two months of 1761, the pages of the Public Ledger fairly bristled with hue-and-cry advertisements. Four guineas was offered for the capture of ‘a Negro Man, called YORK’, who had run away from the Lovely Betsy, commanded by Matthew Darke and lying in Church Hole. The absconder was ‘about five Feet six inches high, thick-set, and well-made, aged about 21 Years, and says he was born in New York or Bermudas, and speaks good English’.⁴⁴ Another runaway was described as ‘a Negro Man about 24 Years of Age, Five Feet eight Inches . . . remarkably bad legg’d and stoops much, and speaks tolerable good English’. The reward offered for his return was two guineas.⁴⁵ On Christmas Day of that year two black slaves ran away together from the Britannia, commanded by Captain Scott. One, named Lewis, was nearly six feet tall and had two holes in his ears; the other had ‘two or three Particular Scars between his Eyebrows, and his Teeth are filed down like a Saw between every Tooth’.⁴⁶ And soon after Christmas ‘a New Negro Fellow, about 20 Years of Age, five Feet eight or thereabouts’ ran away from the brig Madeira Merchant, commanded by Captain Goodhand, which had brought him from Guadeloupe. There was a guinea reward for this runaway, who could not speak English and was scarred on both sides of his face.⁴⁷ One final advertisement from the end of the same decade: a ‘pot-belly’d’ black boy, aged about 12 or 13, had bad scurvy and a shaven head, could talk some English, answered to the name of Mark, or Batchelor, ‘and whoever detains him, shall be prosecuted’⁴⁸

The slave ports’ self-image

When the Commons turned down Wilberforce’s first motion to bring in a Bill abolishing the slave trade, in 1791, Bristol’s church bells were rung, workmen and sailors were given a half-holiday, cannon were fired on Brandon Hill, a bonfire was lit, and there was a fireworks display.1 Sixteen years and many cargoes later the trade was at last abolished. Did abolition hit the slave ports hard, as had been forecast?

Bristol’s slave trade, in fact, was already in decay. Its merchants had been severely hit by the 1793 economic crisis and their ranks had been thinned by bankruptcies.2 Those left could see the writing on the wall and had largely transferred their capital to safer fields. The need to diversify had been clear for some time to Liverpool’s more far-sighted businessmen, too. Some, like Thomas Leyland, had chosen banking as the next best thing to slave trading. Most of them simply switched their attention to another profitable commodity – one that happened to be produced by slave labour. For the next quarter of a century cotton, slavery, and Liverpool made up a trinity no less rewarding, and no less important to British capitalism, than the triangular trade it replaced. Liverpool, says a recent writer,

gained greatly in importance even as the slave trade on which it was founded was officially abolished. The city’s slave-trading past . . . was smugly overlaid by a respectability based on cotton. Yet by a cruel irony, slavery remained one of the bases of the wealth of Lancashire, and of Liverpool’s prosperity, which together provided such a large component of Britain’s nineteenth-century supremacy. For a further 27 years . . ., as for the previous two centuries, the black slave remained the prop, and victim, of the British economy.³

Apart from folklore – which, as we have seen, is sometimes imprecise – London, Bristol, and Liverpool have almost entirely forgotten their past as slave ports. When it is remembered the tone is usually one of oily complacency. This chapter began with an example of such complacency from Bristol; it ends with three from Liverpool.

Ten years before the British slave trade was abolished, a Liverpool surgeon justified it in these words:

While the Africans continue in the same untutored, and consequently defenceless state, they must remain a prey to their more skilful neighbours – such is the character of man. Will the enlightened and refined European say, why his Creator doomed the mind of the African to remain as dark and naked as his body? . . . The ignorance of the African slave makes him unconscious of being so . . . The thousand wants and cares of the free and opulent European are unknown to him; the few he has, which his nature and education require, are gratified. Why then is his lot so very miserable? . . . Since slavery has existed in all ages, and this particular part of it for a long time and to its present extent, instead of aiming to subdue it by violence, let us rather endeavour, as human prudence will suggest, to meliorate it to the utmost in our ability; and thus endeavour to palliate what it is not in our power to remove.4

We go forward nearly 100 years. In 1893 a Liverpool writer declared that there was nothing derogatory in the fact that their ancestors had dealt in ‘niggers’; that the horrors of the slave trade were exceeded by the horrors of the Liverpool drink traffic; that, after all, ‘it was the capital made in the African slave trade that built some of our docks’ and ‘the price of human flesh and blood that gave us a start’; that some of those who made their fortunes out of the slave trade had soft hearts under their waistcoats for the poor of Liverpool; and that the profits from slave trading represented ‘an influx of wealth which, perhaps, no consideration would induce a commercial community to relinquish’.⁵

Sixty years later the same tune was being sung. A history of Liverpool, written in 1957 by the city’s then public librarian, and sponsored by the city council to celebrate the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Liverpool’s charter, dismissed the slave trade in just 28 lines (in a book of 515 pages) that ended with this remarkable sentence: ‘In the long run, the triangular operation based on Liverpool was to bring benefits to all, not least to the transplanted slaves, whose descendants have subsequently achieved in the New World standards of education and civilisation far ahead of their compatriots whom they left behind.’⁶

Well might a city governed and memorialized by Panglosses display on its town hall, built in 1749-54, the symbolic heads of African elephants and African slaves.⁷ For all its past and present wealth, Liverpool remains at its heart what a poet called it in 1909: a ‘City of festering streets by Misery trod’.⁸