Abstract
Until relatively recently, the Royal Navy’s nineteenth-century campaign to suppress the transatlantic slave trade was a neglected subject in the histories of both British abolitionism and the navy. The popular movement to abolish the slave trade, which achieved its aim in 1807 with the passing of the Abolition Act, has rightly received much scholarly attention, but the story of the West Africa squadron, tasked with enforcing the legislation, was formerly one of many blank spaces. Peter Grindal’s Opposing the Slavers comprehensively fills many of these gaps in our knowledge of the squadron’s operations against slave ships in the Atlantic.
After 1807, the British government dispatched Royal Navy vessels to the West African coast to capture and prosecute British ships which continued the barbaric trade in human lives. Subsequently, the attention of British campaigners increasingly turned to suppressing the slave trades of other nations. A permanent West Africa squadron was established in 1819 and operated until the mid-1860s, when, finally, the transatlantic slave trade was brought to an end. Throughout this sixty-year period, Britain made major diplomatic efforts to secure international agreements with other maritime nations to commit to abolition, although enforcement of these laws proved difficult. Fundamentally, traders of Brazil, Portugal, France and Spain were unwilling to give up their trade in African peoples when demand for enslaved labour was still high, especially from the sugar plantations of Cuba and Brazil.
Peter Grindal offers the first thorough examination of Britain’s naval campaign on the West African coast since Christopher Lloyd’s The Navy and the Slave Trade, first published in 1949, and William Ward’s The Royal Navy and the Slavers (1969). Drawing heavily from Admiralty records, Opposing the Slavers is a meticulously researched and admirably detailed account of the ‘mechanics of suppression’, to quote Professor Andrew Lambert in the foreword. A retired naval commander, Grindal has much to offer in respect of his knowledge of ships, seamanship, tactics, navigation, and logistics. However, those unfamiliar with naval terminology will also find this an accessible and well-written read.
There are excellent detailed chapters on the operations of the squadron, with particular focus on many difficulties faced by naval officers, attempting to suppress a system so entrenched in the colonial trade relations of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas. Grindal has mastered the ADM papers from this period, which provide insight into the strategies and tactics employed by naval officers, their actions against slave ships, and their various successes and setbacks. Grindal’s concurrent study of Foreign Office papers illuminates the diplomatic relations and negotiations upholding abolition and the difficulties transferred to naval operations by the complex web of bilateral treaties signed between maritime nations. The book looks at the role of the Vice-Admiralty and Mixed Commission Courts in West Africa where captured slave ships were tried and condemned, the frustrations of the adjudication process, and the ineffectiveness of treaties in the face of fraudulent practices of slave ship captains (sailing under the flags of other nations, for example).
Opposing the Slavers also offers fascinating detail on the day-to-day activities of ships at sea in this inhospitable climate, where fever was rife and took the lives of many sailors. Grindal has meticulously pieced together accounts of incidents and actions on the West African coast, many of which were formerly unknown. For example, he plots the courses of the Black Joke and Fair Rosamund, former slave ships repurposed by the squadron and famous for their speed and success in capturing slavers in the 1820s and 1830s. This detail is particularly useful in the early chapters addressing the period before the official establishment of the squadron in 1819, which is often ignored in other accounts of the squadron. The efforts of Captain Frederick Irby, Captain Edward Scobell, Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo and others in the period before 1819 are now given due recognition in the historical record. There are also very useful appendices; the list of suspected slave vessels detained between 1807 and 1839, for example, is invaluable to any researchers of this topic.
It is somewhat disappointing, then, that the book concludes rather abruptly in 1839. Grindal acknowledges his own frustrations about the absence of existing relevant Admiralty records for the thirty years or so after this date, but from a reader’s perspective the result is an imbalanced narrative of the squadron. So much of what happens in the following three decades is crucial not only to an understanding of the naval campaign against slave ships, but also of British imperial intentions in West Africa. The increased interventionism of the squadron (in the destruction of slave barracoons in the 1840s and 1850s, for example) and developing British interest in the African interior are covered briefly in the epilogue, but these themes deserve more attention, particularly considering there are other sources to work from for this later period, in the form of Parliamentary Papers, ships’ logs, personal papers etc. Conversely, the opening chapters on the histories of abolitionism and the slave trade before 1807, while welcome in their recognition of Britain’s major role in establishing the slave trade, are very lengthy considering that this is work that, by the author’s admission, can be found elsewhere.
This book is not about broader themes of British anti-slavery, identity or imperialism in West Africa, and nor does it claim to be. And yet, the West Africa squadron was at the centre of a complex and multi-dimensional web of relationships between abolitionists, colonial officials, explorers, slave traders, African rulers, and enslaved people. This was particularly the case in the Crown colony of Sierra Leone, but it was also true in regards to Britain’s nascent imperial interest in other West African territories. Clearly Royal Navy vessels at sea had a crucial role to play in the suppression of the slave trade, but so too did those naval officers tasked with negotiating on shore with African rulers to end their slave trading. Some further reflections on these relationships and their implications would have been welcome. However, as a naval history of this costly, challenging, and harrowing campaign, Opposing the Slavers is an essential and authoritative source for the West Africa squadron’s operations in its first three decades.