Britain’s war on the slave ships: how the Royal Navy policed the Atlantic in the 19th century

In the early 19th century, a Royal Navy squadron was sent to west Africa to hunt down ships carrying enslaved people to the Americas. The operation was hailed as an act of “pure unselfish philanthropy”. Yet, writes Mary Wills, the reality was far more tangled

Published: August 22, 2024 at 4:26 PM

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In March 1821, the Royal Navy vessel Tartar exchanged fire with a Spanish ship, Anna Maria. Such a tussle was not unusual in this period of British naval supremacy, fewer than 20 years after victory at the battle of Trafalgar. Yet this was an intervention in a very different kind of war, unlike anything British naval personnel had previously encountered. For Anna Maria was a slave vessel, with more than 400 enslaved African men, women and children crowded on board.

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The Anna Maria had just embarked from the river Bonny in what is now Nigeria; its human cargo intended for forcible transportation to the Americas’ plantations. In a report to the Admiralty, the Tartar’s captain, Commodore Sir George Ralph Collier, a veteran of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, struggled to put into words the human suffering he had witnessed on boarding such slave vessels. “No description I could give would convey a true picture of its baseness and atrocity,” he reported.

This was neither the first nor the last time that Collier would witness such horrors, for he belonged to the West Africa Squadron, a detachment of Royal Navy vessels formed to enforce the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, passed by Britain’s parliament in 1807. From its formal establishment in 1818 to its disbandment in the 1860s, the squadron pursued and captured around 1,500 slaving ships along 2,000 miles of west African coastline – all with the aim of suppressing the prolific trade in human lives prosecuted by other nations.

It was an endeavour that set London at loggerheads with a number of rival powers and saw its sailors engaged in a series of cat-and-mouse battles with the slavers. What’s more, it’s an episode that shines a light on Britain’s view of its place in the world in the first half of the 19th century.

The dominant force

That British sailors were hunting slaving ships at all in the 1820s is remarkable, given their nation’s deep and enduring links with transatlantic slavery. Just a few decades earlier, at the end of the 18th century, Britain was arguably the dominant force in a trade that, over four centuries, had led to an estimated 12–15 million African people being forcibly shipped across the Atlantic by European nations.

All that changed in 1807 when – in the face of a rising tide of campaigning, petitioning and boycotts that saw the abolitionist cause build an unstoppable momentum – it became illegal for any British ship or subject to trade in enslaved people. A nation that had for so long condemned vast numbers of people to unimaginable horrors now set about signalling its commitment to the principles of abolitionism, humanity and philanthropy. And one of the ways in which it sought to do so was by intercepting and detaining slave vessels.

The passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was a landmark moment in British history, but it hardly brought enslaved people’s suffering to an end. For a start, until 1834 (when Britain outlawed the owning, buying and selling of humans as property throughout its colonies around the world) nearly three-quarters of a million people remained enslaved across the Caribbean.

Britain now set about signalling its commitment to the principles of abolitionism and philanthropy

And then, of course, there were the other slaving nations. Denmark (1792) and the United States (1808) moved early, abolishing the trade before or just after Britain. But it would be 1836 before the Dutch, French, Spanish, Brazilian and Portuguese governments had all followed suit. Even beyond this date, illegal trading flourished, largely driven by the booming demand for enslaved labourers from the sugar and coffee plantations of Cuba and Brazil.

This was the environment in which the West Africa Squadron embarked upon its first mission in the early 19th century. Its crew may have represented the world’s most powerful maritime nation – one fired up by a newfound humanitarian zeal – yet, in reality, these sailors were severely under-resourced. Their numbers were bolstered by Kru sailors, West African seamen from present-day Liberia. Dozens served on every British vessel, assisting with navigation, interpreting, or transporting men between ship and shore.

At its height, in the 1840s, the squadron had a fleet of just 27 vessels to call upon. These were, for the most part, slower and less agile than the ships they were tasked with seizing. In fact, so rapid were the slavers’ vessels that the Royal Navy deployed former slave ships to counter them. The Black Joke (formerly the slave ship Henriqueta, detained in 1827) was renowned for its success in tracking and capturing its quarry.

Soon slave-ship captains were developing ever more canny tactics to escape detection – and in response, the Admiralty started pursuing increasingly coercive strategies. This included blockades of established slave trading ports and rivers, and the bombardment of coastal settlements where merchants prepared enslaved Africans for embarkation in buildings called ‘barracoons’. One attack along the river Gallinas in Sierra Leone in 1845 destroyed a number of villages, enraging the locals and calling the squadron’s ‘humanitarian’ motives into question.

Prize voyage

The squadron patrolled the seas under nascent international treaties which enabled the Royal Navy to intercept slaving vessels of other nations. Once they had captured a slave ship, British sailors would undertake the ‘prize voyage’. This would see the intercepted vessel being transported to Sierra Leone on the west African coast, a journey that could take weeks. If the capture was declared legal, a financial reward, ‘prize money’, was distributed among the crew for the condemned vessel and its property (which in this context included the captive Africans).

Some ships were empty when captured, but many were horrendously overcrowded, with 300 or 400 enslaved people crammed onto one vessel. First-hand testimonies of these harrowing voyages are rare. “My wretchedness I cannot describe,” reported the formerly enslaved Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua of his experiences. “Nothing can exceed the horrors of those slave vessels,” confessed Admiral Robert Wauchope in his memoirs. These are mere snapshots but they shine a light on the misery that enslaved people endured on the ‘Middle Passage’ across the Atlantic.

Such conditions were not easily alleviated on prize voyages. Although no longer under the authority of a slave-ship crew, African captives still suffered from overcrowding, dehydration, poor ventilation and disease. Dysentery, smallpox and eye diseases were rife. “I certainly never beheld such a scene of complicated misery as our prize presents this morning,” wrote one officer in 1841 about a Portuguese prize brig that had 392 enslaved people on board. “I dread sending away an officer and men in such a floating pest house!”

Such appalling conditions contributed to tensions between sailors and captive Africans. The account of Samuel Ajayi Crowther – released from a Portuguese slave vessel before going on to become a missionary, and the first Anglican African bishop – reveals the distrust inherent in encounters with European sailors. “We found ourselves in the hands of new conquerors”, he wrote, “whom we at first very much dreaded, they being armed with long swords.”

While there are many accounts of compassion in sailors’ narratives, there is also evidence of naval men asserting control in ways reminiscent of the trade they were trying to suppress. Lieutenant James Stoddart wrote that while he was in charge of the prize vessels Josephine and Veloz in 1836, “cats [cat o’nine tails whips] had to be used freely”.

Virulent diseases

Given the miseries they witnessed, the alien environment in which they plied their trade, and the fact that they often felt they were operating with one hand tied behind their backs, it’s hardly surprising that the West Africa Squadron had an infamous reputation and morale was poor. Climatic extremes on the west African coast included searing heat and violent tropical storms. Virulent diseases such as yellow fever and malaria were a constant concern.

The climate, poor sanitation and lack of immunity to disease contributed to a significantly higher mortality rate than on other naval stations in this period. In September 1845, the Éclair arrived back in Britain with around two-thirds of the original crew (more than 70 officers and men) dead or dying. As for Sierra Leone, it was considered so unhealthy it was nicknamed ‘the white man’s grave’. After serving there for two years or more, many became, in the words of one naval officer, “heartily disgusted” with the service.

Sailors weren’t alone in harbouring doubts about the West Africa Squadron. Britain claimed to be a champion of international justice, yet the squadron’s activities proved highly controversial on the global stage, raising issues of the rights of one nation to intervene in the activities of another.

The squadron also enjoyed a mixed reception in Britain. While the Black Joke’s feats were celebrated in paintings and reproduced in newspapers, MPs used parliamentary debates to lambast the squadron’s spiralling cost and perceived lack of results.

Was the criticism justified? This was an unquestionably ambitious and valiant operation. The 1,500 vessels that it captured represented an estimated 6–10 per cent of slaving vessels, and around 200,000 African people released. That’s a significant number, but a relatively small share of the estimated 3.2 million men, women and children who embarked as slaves between 1808 and 1863.
Critics of the squadron could also point out that 5,000 British sailors lost their lives during the campaign off west Africa, along with a significant number of recaptives, mostly through disease. And though the transatlantic slave trade was largely extinguished by the late 1860s, this was arguably more the result of internal political changes within slave-trading nations than acts of suppression on the high seas.

The Éclair arrived back in Britain with around two-thirds of the original crew dead or dying

Yet, for all that, the work of the West Africa Squadron was undeniably the first chapter in a long history of British naval campaigns directed against international slavery, including in the Indian Ocean from the 1860s, in the Red Sea from the 1880s, and the Persian Gulf from the 1920s. It encouraged other nations to adopt anti-slavery laws and prompted the navies of the United States and France to engage in their own suppression efforts.

The extensive military commitment made by the British to anti-slave-trade operations is, therefore, rightfully commended. But it certainly wasn’t the act of “pure unselfish philanthropy” acclaimed by the naval historian CD Yonge in 1863. The picture is inevitably far more nuanced.

Ultimately, the same is true of the wider picture of British abolitionism in its varied forms in the early to mid-19th century. While such abolitionism was the product of a genuine humanitarianism, it also shaded into cultural arrogance – one that would produce a ‘civilising’ effort to encourage the end of slave trading in African societies and the conversion of African people to European forms of religion and government. As Commander Arthur Parry Eardley-Wilmot wrote in a defence of the West Africa Squadron in 1853: “If Africa is ever to be free and happy, England must be the apostle of that freedom.” The British believed they alone could save non-Europeans from slavery, and that attitude would inform policies towards British colonial possessions into the second half of the 19th century and beyond.

One man who wouldn’t live to see these policies implemented was George Collier. The commodore’s understanding of his professional duty was imbued with a personal, moral responsibility to release the enslaved; his actions against slavers were performed with “no view to personal merit, for I did what humanity, and therefore my duty, only required”.

In 1824, three years after leaving the squadron, Collier took his own life. At the inquest into his death, he was described as a “zealous and gallant officer”. A naval officer quoted in the Royal Cornwall Gazette asserted that his “services on the coast of Guinea could not but prove injurious to a mind more than commonly sensitive”.

Collier’s fate is a sad footnote in a story of politics, principle, philanthropy and national identity – and of a flawed mission affecting human lives. The tale of the West Africa Squadron is one of servicemen often acting bravely with moral and religious imperative to end the transatlantic slave trade, but who endured hardship and disease in the name of abolition. And, of course, it’s also the story of formerly enslaved African people, who were seen to personify the victory of a humanitarian crusade, yet who still found themselves dominated by other forms of control.

FROM HELL TO FREEDOM?

The capture of a slave ship was the first step of a journey that rarely took enslaved people back to their homelands

The seizure of a slaving vessel was a cause for celebration for the West Africa Squadron. But what fate awaited the enslaved Africans crammed aboard these ships? The British crown colony of Sierra Leone was often the first destination for those released from the hellish grip of the slavers. British abolitionists had founded the colony in the 1780s as part of their ‘civilising’ mis- sion – and its capital, Freetown, was the administrative centre of anti-slave trade operations. It was here that captured vessels were often adjudicated by British maritime courts. Once in British hands, the enslaved people were condemned as part of the ship’s property, registered and declared legally ‘free’. They were now referred to as ‘liberated Africans’. However, this was a version of liberty that many people would struggle to recognise today. As they remained subject to another nation’s will, the terms ‘recaptives’ or ‘recaptured Africans’ are now understood to better describe their situation. Few of the enslaved people could expect to see their homelands again. Rather than being repatriated, many were expected to build new lives in villages in and around Freetown. Some, such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther, were educated by the Church Missionary Society. Crowther made an extraordinary success of his post-enslavement life, going on to become the first African Anglican bishop. Others were enlisted into the armed forces or employed on naval vessels. James ‘Kaweli’ Covey joined the crew of HMS Buzzard in 1838, and acted as interpreter during legal proceedings following a revolt aboard the slave ship La Amistad in 1839. Thousands more were subjected to years of indentureship working in private households, in a system known as ‘apprenticeship’. This practice was brought to an end in 1847 after facing fierce criticism back in Britain. The West Africa Squadron had sought to prevent Africans from being transported to the Americas. Yet, from the 1840s, the Caribbean was the destination for thousands of recaptives recruited to work in the sugar plantations of the British West Indies. This scheme was introduced in the wake of the Emancipation Act of 1834 in a bid to replace enslaved people with ‘free’ labour. Yet, as Captain Joseph Denman, a commander with the West Africa Squadron, observed, it was seen to “perpetuate their slavery”.

Mary Wills is a senior curator at British Online Archives. Her books include Envoys of Abolition: British Naval Officers and the Campaign Against the Slave Trade in West Africa (Liverpool University Press, 2019)

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This article is from the July 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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