Royal Navy versus the Slave Traders: Enforcing abolition at Sea, 1808-1898 by Bernard Edwards, publ 2007
If you like books like Hornblower but with a bit more history put in then you’ll love this. Its full of detail about what sort of boat did what where and when and with who as their captain, crew, and the sort of guns that they had. I find this bit to be dull. But I kept at it because the writer is going to great detailed lengths to show how Great Britain when it had taken its parliamentary vote to cease trading in slaves took another move which was to stop others, to capture their boats and liberate their slaves. This story is not known. This is the Royal Navy’s African Squadron.
His starting point is, and he repeats this throughout the book, the idea that “slavery in Africa was not initiated by the white man but often the consequence of inter-tribal warfare. Long before the arrival of foreigners on their shores, it was the habit of local chieftains to make slaves of prisoners taken in battle” (p19). I didn’t know that. I suppose this makes some sense and differs little from the tribal warfare we know of in Europe through the early Middle Ages. He gives as an example King Tegbesu of Dahomey (an area inside modern Benin) who “towards the end of the 18th century was said to be selling more than 9000 slaves a year” (p40).
I know a little about the pernicious slave trade to the West, the Americas. But I did not know about the slave trade to the East, by the Arabs (he doesn’t quite define who this is meant to be).
I knew that the hymn Amazing Grace was written by an ex-slaver, John Newton. Though it would seem that even whilst he was still a slaver, he had strong religious convictions and yet still was known as a cruel captain. But then I’ve known very religious people who haven’t met with saving grace. It wasn’t until later, 1760, that he became a vicar and began vociferously preaching against the slave trade.
26th July 1833 was the date for the Slavery Abolition Act outlawing slavery in the British Empire. Wilberforce died three days later. I didn’t realise that Britain was ahead of the curve here. France, Spain, Portugal and others continued for a while longer.
Edwards admits that the Royal Navy African Squadron didn’t stop other nations slave trading but argues that these men deserve some recognition and remembrance for doing their bit to help try to stop it.
His book then makes an odd but important segue away from the North Atlantic and to the African slave trade that continued and went East via Zanzibar “which by the 1840s were handling up to 20,000 slaves annually” p171.
So, its quite an intense and important book. It’s a quick readable read. But the depth that Edwards goes to to explain how appalling this man-stealing was is good solid and makes for an uneasy sleep. Here is a good reminder that it wasn’t just Wilberforce and Equiano who endeavoured to fight this evil.
Alas that the slave trafficking continues. Perhaps the book should have closed with a reminder to us all to be vigilant to how we can continue the fight. So I’ll end with this link to the Clewer Initiative, there are lots of others, – https://www.churchofengland.org/news-and-media/news-and-statements/clewer-initiative-launches-app-designed-help-tackle-labour
(Photo is of inside the Church at Beit Sahur, the Shepherd Fields, near here is a cave or two, yes its very likely it was about here that the Angels sung to the shepherds)