Liverpool Slave Trade
Liverpool Slave Trade
CONTEMPORARY ATTITUDES AND ASSUMPTIONS
In 1740 Thomas Augustine Arne set the words of James Thompson’s poem “Rule Britannia” to music. This poem emphasized how Britain was a “Blest Isle” of liberty and that “Britons never will be slaves.” Yet at the same time Britain was one of the major suppliers of Africans to the Americas as a slave labor force. In the course of the eighteenth century British ships forcibly transported an estimated 2.5 million individuals from Africa. This accounted for 40 percent of an estimated six million Africans carried by ships of all nations.
LIVERPOOL’S ROLE IN THE TRADE
By the 1740s Liverpool had emerged as Britain’s leading slave port, eclipsing London and Bristol, its nearest rivals. Rawley and Behrendt point out in The Transatlantic Slave Trade (2005) that the “adroitness of the Liverpool merchant community” was one of a number of factors accounting for Liverpool’s rise to prominence (p. 167). The sailing of the Blessing and the Liverpool Merchant in 1700 marked Liverpool’s entry into the trade. Over the next century approximately 5,300 slave ships sailed from Liverpool, accounting for almost one-half of 11,000 British slave ship clearances. By the end of the century Liverpool’s dominance was still more pronounced, as three-quarters of all British slaving ventures cleared from Liverpool. Behrendt (1991) points out that approximately 779 slave ship captains were active in Liverpool between 1785 and the abolition of the trade in 1807. Many were migrants from Scotland and the Isle of Man, attracted by career opportunities in the trade.
Liverpool vessels traded for slaves at a wide variety of locations on the West African coast, although the Bight of Biafra developed as a particularly important source of supply from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. John Dawson and William Boats, two of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants, controlled a significant share of the market at Bonny in the Bight of Biafra in the late eighteenth century. Captains trading at Bonny had to be skilled in negotiating with African merchants for the supply of slaves. They were often assisted in this trade by surgeons who carefully inspected the men, women, and children brought from the interior by African merchants.
CONTEMPORARY ATTITUDES AND ASSUMPTIONS
Copious business records were generated by British merchants who regarded the shipping of enslaved Africans as “morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar” (Eltis et al. 1999, p. 1). In contrast, few detailed personal accounts of captains engaged in the British slave trade have survived. Three examples are available for eighteenth-century Liverpool: Hugh Crow, James Irving, and John Newton. The best known is undoubtedly Newton, an evangelical clergyman who composed the hymn “Amazing Grace” in 1772. In his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, published in 1788, Newton bitterly regretted his former career as a slave captain. He explained that when he commanded the Duke of Argyle and the African between 1750 and 1752 he had no idea that the trade was wrong. He stated that “I never had a scruple upon this head at the time. … What I did I did ignorantly; considering it as the line of life which Divine Providence had allotted me” (Martin and Spurrell 1962, pp. 98–99).
His profound guilt and contrition are unlikely to be typical of other men engaged in the trade. Crow probably provides a more typical example of how slave traders reacted to abolitionist debate. Reflecting on his slave trading career in Liverpool between 1790 and 1807, Crow asserted that “it has always been my decided opinion that the traffic in negroes is permitted by that Providence that rules over all, as a necessary evil” (Crow 1830, pp. 132–133).
As the letters and journals of James Irving, a Scottish surgeon and captain, were not intended for publication, they provide a more accurate insight into the cultural assumptions and mind-set of a practitioner in the trade. On his third slaving venture, Irving wrote to his wife from New Calabar (Bight of Biafra) in August 1786 and informed her that trade was slow. He estimated that the process of bartering for slaves would take nine or ten weeks. After completing the Middle Passage from Africa to the West Indies, Irving wrote to his wife in December 1786 and informed her that they were awaiting the sale of their “very disagreeable cargo.” He ended this long conversational letter abruptly, and pointed out that “I think I’ll desist [writing] as our black cattle are intolerably noisy and I’m almost melted in the midst of five or six hundred of them” (Schwarz 1995, pp. 112–113). Irving’s description of the 526 Africans confined in the stifling heat of the ship’s hold as “black cattle” sheds light on the brutal inhumanity of the slave trade. Irving failed to recognize the humanity of the Africans and viewed them as inferior and eligible for enslavement.
After five voyages as a surgeon, Irving was promoted to his first command. Three weeks after sailing from Liverpool on May 3, 1789, the Anna was shipwrecked on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Irving and his crew were captured and enslaved and spent fourteen months in captivity. Redeemed through the efforts of British consular officials, Irving remained completely blind to the irony of his situation and within a month of returning to Liverpool had agreed to command another slave ship. Irving had no compunction about returning to his former occupation of enslaving Africans, and his captivity prompted no reflection on the morality of the trade. Despite his personal experience as a chattel slave, he recognized no similarities with the transatlantic slave trade principally because he did not accept that Africans were fellow humans. Irving died during this second captaincy of the Ellen on December 24, 1791. His correspondence indicates how older attitudes sustaining the trade were deeply entrenched, and that a slave trader who valued his own freedom had no qualms about depriving Africans of their liberty.
Historical controversy continues to center on the extent to which Liverpool’s rapid growth in the eighteenth century was linked primarily to the wealth generated by the slave trade. The complex and enduring legacies of the transatlantic slave trade were explored in an exhibition opened at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool in 1994. This gallery, entitled “Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity,” was groundbreaking as it was the first permanent exhibition of its kind in the world. The new International Slavery Museum opening in Liverpool in August 2007 will considerably extend the scope of the original exhibition.
SEE ALSO Freedom; Insurance Industry; Liberty; Shipping Industry; Slave Trade; Slave-Gun Cycle; Slavery; Slavery Industry
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Behrendt, Stephen D. 1991. The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 140: 79–140.
Crow, Hugh, 1830. Memoirs of the Late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool. London: Frank Cass, 1970.
Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, 1999. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Bernard, and Mark Spurrell, eds. 1962. The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton) 1750–1754. London: The Epworth Press.
Rawley, James A., with Stephen D. Behrendt, 2005. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. Rev. ed. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Schwarz, Suzanne, ed. 1995. Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade. Wrexham, U.K.: Bridge Books.
Tibbles, Anthony J., ed. 2005. Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press.
Suzanne Schwarz