The Royal Navy and the Battle to End Slavery

A new challenge

Prior to the 1807 act that abolished the British slave trade, the Royal Navy was inevitably involved in the trade itself, as a function of protecting the national interest at sea.

The Royal Navy was little different to any large organisation today, with individual officers and men holding differing opinions about slavery. One or two of the more successful naval officers owned plantations in the Americas, and it was also not unknown for officers to have personal slaves on board their ships, although the practice was officially forbidden by the Admiralty.

Contradictorily, the Royal Navy had its own enslaved Africans in its dockyards in Jamaica and Antigua and as part of its job it escorted slave ships down the African coast and fought major battles for control of the valuable 'sugar islands' of the West Indies.

Up to three million Africans had been transported in British ships since 1650, and at the end of the 18th century Britain was dominating the trade, with an average of more than 150 slave ships leaving Liverpool, Bristol, and London each year.

The slave-based economy of the British West Indies was flourishing, and its share of the world coffee and sugar production was sustaining Britain as she turned her face toward war.

While the 1807 act made trading in slaves illegal, there had been little consideration about how best to enforce the legislation. A quarter of all Africans who were enslaved in the period 1500-1870 were transported across the Atlantic after 1807. The Atlantic slave trade was not extinguished in a few years, as many had hoped.

The Foreign Office had to persuade other nations to enter into treaties prohibiting the slave trade and empower British naval officers to arrest the slavers. As defects in the treaties became plain, yet more diplomatic manoeuvring was needed.

Ultimately, it took nearly 60 years of untiring diplomacy and naval patrolling to finally abolish the Atlantic slave trade.

West Africa Squadron

Capture of a slaver in the Rio Ponga, 1853  © By 1807, the nation had been continuously at war for 14 long years, and only a token unit was sent to carry out the initial anti-slavery patrols. The ageing frigate 'Solebay' and the sloop 'Derwent' were dispatched to West Africa, but the two ships could do little more than cruise up and down the coast.

The number of vessels was increased to five in 1811 before the demands of war with the United States (1812-1814) curtailed progress.

With peace in Europe from 1815, and British supremacy at sea secured, the Navy turned its attention back to the challenge and established the West Coast of Africa Station, known as the 'preventative squadron', which for the next 50 years operated against the slavers.

But it was not a story of continual success. Patrolling the coast was arduous, unpleasant and frustrating, and the vessels employed on the station were often too old, too slow, and too few in number to catch the slave ships.

The task of enforcing the act was huge, quite beyond any one nation without the co-operation of all governments concerned. Unsurprisingly, this proved difficult to obtain. The French paid eloquent lip service to the idea, but, sensitive to any appearance of servility to the British, would not allow boarding parties to search their ships.

Nor would the Americans, who were in any case too dependent on slave labour to join the campaign in these early years with any real enthusiasm. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilians continued their human trafficking openly, and their colonial economies were so bound with slave labour that they had neither the will nor the power to act effectively.

The inclusion of an 'equipment clause' in new treaties - which made the presence of manacles and chains, extra planking or water storage enough to prove that a ship was engaging in illegal trading - improved success rates greatly, and in time these nations conceded Britain the right to search their vessels.

Reporting victories

By the 1850s, around 25 vessels and 2,000 officers and men were on the station, supported by nearly 1,000 'Kroomen', experienced fishermen recruited as sailors from what is now the coast of modern Liberia.

Service on the West Africa Squadron was a thankless and overwhelming task, full of risk and posing a constant threat to the health of the crews involved. Contending with pestilential swamps and violent encounters, the mortality rate was 55 per 1,000 men, compared with 10 for fleets in the Mediterranean or in home waters.

The prospect of prize money paid to naval officers and men for captured ships, and 'head money' for released slaves may have made the duty more bearable, but it is likely that only a few senior officers saw any profit in the campaign.

Rewards may well have cemented the humanitarian impulse, though one cannot doubt the evangelical zeal with which many officers and men alike took up the task of anti-slavery patrolling.

The pursuit and capture of slave ships became celebrated naval engagements, widely reported back in peace-time Britain with its expanding print culture, and was often memorialised in souvenir engravings.

The night-time fire-fight of 6 June 1829 between the schooner 'Pickle' and the slaver 'Voladora' was well-known, as were the exploits of the schooner 'Monkey' against Spanish slave brigs off the Bahamas later that month.

HMS 'Buzzard' successfully chased and engaged the slaver 'Formidable' in 1834, the 'Electra' brought down a Carolina slaver with its human cargo in 1838, and 'Acorn' captured the rogue 'Gabriel' in the summer of 1841, to name just a few of the many sensationalised actions.

An expectant public could follow vivid accounts in the newspapers, while many of these 'battles' were also reported at home in watercolours and oil paintings, which helped sustain the positive reputation of the Navy, while also maintaining public interest in Britain's suppression activities.

Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against 'the usurping King of Lagos', deposed in 1851.

Lines between the politics of slavery suppression and British expansionist ambitions become blurred. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers, but British motives were not entirely altruistic.

The Indian Ocean

Large numbers of people from the interior of Africa had been sold as slaves in Arabia, Persia, and even India for centuries.

The principal port of embarkation was the prosperous entrepôt Zanzibar, and by 1850 the traffic involved an estimated 20,000 enslaved people per year, while many more may have perished on forced caravans to the coast.

In the 1860s, David Livingstone's reports of Arab atrocities against enslaved Africans stirred up the interest of the British public, reviving the flagging abolitionist movement. Throughout the 1870s, the Navy attempted to suppress 'this abominable Eastern trade' at Zanzibar, in particular.

Soon realising that this policy served to alert the slavers to the Navy's presence, a succession of commanders adopted the scheme of spreading their cruisers as a 'waiting net' along the northern coast of the Arabian Sea.

The new policy produced results in capturing slavers and liberating enslaved people, but it also caused friction between the British Foreign Office and the Admiralty, and it was fraught with diplomatic challenges.

Sir Bartle Frere's mission in 1873 produced treaties with the sultans of Muscat and Zanzibar that strengthened Britain's hand in suppressing the trade and produced a recommendation that a guardship be permanently stationed off the Zanzibar coast.

Zanzibar dhow-chasing

The guardship at Zanzibar was HMS 'London', veteran of the siege of Sebastopol, since converted to steam and re-equipped to serve as a floating command centre, depot, hospital and prison.

Zanzibar was a new theatre of naval engagement that sustained a cast of peace-time heroes. There was Philip Colomb - the daring officer of the wooden steam sloop 'Dryad' that had captured seven slavers during its tour of the Indian Ocean - who returned to Britain a lionised figure, courted by the press, and soon published a best-selling account of his adventures.

In command of the London was the experienced Captain George Sulivan, as adept at capturing slavers as he was in dealing with consuls and belligerent local leaders. For four years he asserted the presence of the 'London' with marked success.

A rare watercolour survives in the collections of the National Maritime Museum - by the Reverend Robert O'Donelan Ross-Lewin, chaplain of the 'London' in 1875 - which features a typical small-boat operation in the many bays and inlets of the eastern coast.

On a larger scale of operation, at Mombasa where the military commandant challenged the sultan's authority, Sulivan reduced the fort to rubble. He thereby sustained the sultan and other British allies, demonstrated their dependence on Britain and articulated, with brisk firepower, the continued ability of the Royal Navy.

It becomes clear that humanitarianism and imperial muscling were able bedfellows. Over three decades of 'gunboat diplomacy' - sustained as it was by moral, commercial and, most important, strategic motives - naval cruisers captured some 1,000 dhows and saved about 12,000 Africans from the horrors of enslavement.

An inglorious crusade

The Royal Navy's role in the suppression of the transoceanic slave trades represents a remarkable episode of sustained humanitarian activity, involving patient diplomacy and problematic wrangling over treaty arrangements, dangerous and exacting naval operations, and intense political debate at home questioning the cost and purpose of the patrols.

The promise of employment and prize money, the pull of patriotism, prestige, even philanthropy were all motives that inspired servicemen to commit to the cause.

Yet any retrospective, historical self-congratulation may be tempered with an awareness of the facts. Britain was the pre-eminent slave trading nation during the 18th century and illegal British slave trading continued for many years after the passing of the 1807 act.

One can be certain that the high ideals of abolition and the promotion of legitimate trade were equally matched by economic and territorial ambitions, impulses which brought forward partition and colonial rule in Africa in the late 19th century.

'This spirit of chivalry...we see it in acts of heroism by land and sea, in fights against the slave trade.' Alfred Tennyson.

'The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.' William Lecky.

Find out more

This article draws substantially on Dr Robert Blyth’s essay, 'Britain, the Royal Navy and the suppression of slave trades in the nineteenth century', in Representing Slavery, eds. Douglas Hamilton and Robert Blyth (Lund Humphries and NMM, 2007, forthcoming)

Books

African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone (Oxford, 2007)

The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century by Christopher Lloyd (Longmans, 1949)

The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade by William Ward (Allen and Unwin, 1969)

The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade by Raymond Howell (Croom Helm, 1987)

The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century edited by William Clarence-Smith (Frank Cass, 1989)

The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics by Paul Michael Kielstra (Palgrave, 2000)

Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 by Emma Christopher (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807 by Marika Sherwood (IB Tauris, 2007)

Representing Slavery: Images, Documents and Artefacts in the Collections of the NMM edited by Robert Blyth and Douglas Hamilton (Lund Humphries and the National Maritime Museum, to be published in September 2007).

Places to visit

The National Maritime Museum [http://www.nmm.ac.uk/] is opening a new permanent gallery in November 2007 which will cover over three hundred years of war and conflict, trade and commerce, exploration and encounter, enslavement and resistance in the Atlantic. A number of items relating to abolition, and to the difficulties in enforcing it, will be displayed.

From February to December 2007 at the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth [http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/] there will be an exhibition entitled Chasing Freedom, which will look at the role of the Navy in battling against the trade in the late-19th century, as well as its continuing work in defending human rights and policing illegal trade operations.

About the author

Huw Lewis-Jones is Curator of Nineteenth-Century Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, and Editor of The Trafalgar Chronicle. He was educated at Cambridge University and recently held a Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University. His continuing research interests include the history of exploration, naval hagiography, and nineteenth-century fine art, literature, theatre, and popular material culture.