British Archaeology 94, May/June 2007

Buy sell, trade, drown. Jane Webster asks what archaeology can bring to the story.

For centuries (c1500–1860) European merchant ships transported captive Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. These people were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, a global phenomenon binding together three continents and bringing about the African diaspora: the largest forced migration in human history. An estimated 11 million Africans endured the infamous "middle passage" to the Americas, where they and their descendents played a formative role in shaping the modern Atlantic world.

Britain played a major part in this slave trade. As the recently compiled transatlantic slave trade database reveals (TSTD: see box page 15) every second slave entering the Americas between 1660 and 1807 arrived on a British vessel. Altogether, more than three million people were transported on British ships, with the great majority disembarking in the Caribbean. Jamaica and Barbados were the main points of entry, and a staggering 980,000 Africans are estimated to have arrived in Jamaica alone between 1700 and 1800. Most of these people were put to work on plantations growing cane sugar, the primary export crop of the British Caribbean.

Many readers will be aware that on March 25 1807, parliament voted to end Britain's involvement in the slave trade. From May of that year, British vessels were no longer permitted to carry slaves (but slavery itself was not abolished: slave ownership remained lawful in the British colonies until 1838). The bicentenary of the passage of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is being marked around the country by exhibitions, conferences, walks, talks and church services. Parliament dedicated March 25 to the bicentenary, and commemorative stamps and a £2 coin have been issued. At least 20 major exhibitions are being hosted by museums and heritage centres, and there is even a film to mark the moment: Amazing Grace, the life of leading abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Clearly, the bicentenary has touched a national chord, allowing the country as a whole to reflect not just on Britain's part in an iniquitous trade, but also on one of the historical forces that shaped today's multicultural Britain. This is a good moment, then, to look at the ways in which archaeologists are contributing to the study of that most iniquitous of businesses: slave shipping.

So many slaving voyages took place that wrecks might well be assumed to be the first port of call for archaeological work on slave shipping. Not so: despite the fact that the TSTD documents some 800 vessels lost at sea, only a handful of wrecks have been studied by archaeologists. One of these is the London-based slaver Henrietta Marie, lost off the coast of Florida in 1700, shortly after selling a slave cargo in Jamaica. The discovery of the wreck was accidental, made in 1972 by the commercial salvage company Treasure Salvors Inc, whilst hunting for the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Since that time, archaeologists working for the not-for-profit Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society have carried out sporadic but fruitful work on the wreck.

Artefacts recovered from the Henrietta Marie have proved particularly helpful in creating a picture of shipboard life and the practices of the slave trade. They include over 80 sets of shackles, two enormous copper cooking stoves, two cast-iron cannon, huge numbers of glass trade beads, iron trade bars, elephant ivory, and a large collection of English pewter tankards, basins, spoons and bottles (the latter used by the ship's crew). The partial remains of the ship's hull have also made it possible to attempt a reconstruction of the vessel (see www.melfisher.org/henriettamarie.htm).

The trade beads carried by the Henrietta Marie appear to have been manufactured in Venice, but the recent discovery of Sir Nicholas Crisp's glass bead manufacturing site at Hammersmith Embankment, London reminds us that trade goods for the slave trade were very often produced in the uk.Crisp fronted a syndicate of entrepreneurs granted a monopoly on the "Guinea" (African) trade by Charles I, and the beads were made on the site of his London mansion. Crisp's glassmakers created beads in at least eight colours and 15 styles, some of which were almost certainly destined for the slave trade.

Other goods manufactured in the uk for the slave trade include textiles, "battery wares" (beaten brass bowls and cooking kettles) and manillas, brass and iron bracelet-shaped ingots made to standard weights. The latter became an important currency of the slave trade.

The Henrietta Marie is one of only two active slave ships to have been extensively studied by maritime archaeologists (the other is the wreck of the Danish slaver Fredensborg: see end note). Fortunately, maritime archaeologists have also explored the remains of several other vessels with a slave-trading past. One of these is the Whydah, a London-built slave ship captured in the Bahamas by the pirate Samuel Bellamy in February 1717, shortly after selling a slave cargo in Jamaica. The Whydah sank just two months later, and amongst the finds from the wreck site are 79 fragmentary gold ornaments originating from the Gold Coast (Ghana). They comprise the oldest known group of reliably dated Akan gold artefacts in the world, and may well be a relic of the vessel's slave-trading past.

The "triangular trade".
Ships travelled from Europe to Africa
with goods to exchange for captives.
In the second leg (the
"middle passage", c.two months)
they crossed the Atlantic.
"Human cargo" was sold,
and the vessel returned home
with sugar, rum and tobacco.
The journey lasted a year.

The role of the Royal Navy in suppressing the slave trade after 1807 has long been justly celebrated (although its protection of British slave shipping before 1807 is all too often forgotten). Between the establishment of the Navy's West African squadron in 1807 and the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade in 1888 (a period known, from the British perspective, as the "illegal era"), the navy was actively engaged in the suppression of slave shipping in both the Caribbean and west Africa, pursuing and capturing large numbers of Spanish and Portuguese vessels. One of these was the Portuguese-owned slaver Don Francisco, captured off Dominica in 1837. This ship has an extraordinary history. Following its capture, it was condemned by the Court of Mixed Commission at Sierra Leone, and should have been broken up. Somehow the vessel avoided this fate, and was later reregistered in London for general trading purposes, under the name James Matthews. In 1841, having carried a cargo of roofing slates to Fremantle, Western Australia, the James Matthews foundered after grounding in a storm.

The ship was excavated between 1973 and 1977 by Graeme Hendersen of the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australia Maritime Museum, when the wreck site was totally exposed. More publications have appeared on this wreck than for any other with a slave-trading past (most in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology), and excellent supporting online information is available at www.museum.wa.gov.au/collections/maritime/march/treasures/matthews.html.

The hull of the James Matthews is very well preserved, and the ship's final cargo of roofing slates and other constructional materials survived largely intact. More than 800 additional artefacts were recovered from the wreck, ranging from fittings and cordage to personal effects of the crew. As might be expected given the ship's complex history, none of the manufactured goods found on this vessel relates directly to the James Matthew's slave-trading past. The wreck nevertheless provides a wealth of information about the construction, rig and fittings of a shallow-draft slaver (a ship built for speed) from the "illegal" era.

Artefacts from surviving slave ships like the Henrietta Marie speak to us about the transatlantic trade with a powerful voice, and it is truly unfortunate that so few slave ships have been excavated. But there are other ways in which historical archaeologists can study the material culture of slave shipping. For example, contemporary paintings and documents can help us identify a range of material things – from trade goods to food supplies, from hold modifications to shackles and other restraints – specific to slaving voyages. Depictions, descriptions and sometimes even surviving examples of some of these artefacts can be found in British maritime museums. They are the subjects of my own research project, in which I am writing an historical archaeology of British slave shipping.

One facet of my research involves collating varied sources of information about the physical appearance of slave ships. My aim is to gain a better understanding of the daily experience of those on board slaving vessels – both captive Africans and British crews. Wreck sites are of very little help here, not simply because so few wrecks have been excavated, but because the most important timber fittings of slave ships would be unlikely to survive even in the best preserved of wrecks.

But there are other ways to explore the layout of slave ships. Between 1788 and 1792 parliament conducted lengthy inquiries into the slave trade, and many detailed accounts of slave ship design and fittings survive in parliamentary and abolitionist records. In addition, a small number of 18th century paintings depict slave ships at sea. Together, these sources provide some idea of the layout and daily routines of British slaving vessels.

To give just one example, one of the key features of a slave ship was the "barricado", a timber partition stretching across the quarterdeck, securing the area used by slaves when they were brought up from below for air, exercise and meals. The barricado was a temporary feature, constructed off the coast of Africa (using lumber carried from Britain expressly for the purpose) and dismantled upon arrival in the Americas. It is most unlikely that maritime archaeologists will ever find a slaver wreck with an intact barricado, but documentary sources and (more rarely) paintings, give us some idea of their appearance and use.

In exactly the same way, it is possible to build up a fairly detailed picture of other elements of slave shipping routines, from dietary regimes to surveillance, punishment, and day-today interaction between captives and crews. Thus while the lack of wreck sites undeniably limits the contribution maritime archaeologists can at present make to the study of the British slave trade, the subject is by no means closed to historical archaeologists.

It is worth noting, finally, that at least ten unexplored slaver wrecks lie off the British coast. The National Monument Record wreck database does not identify most of these as slave ships, but each of them is also recorded in the transatlantic slave trade database and their role as slavers cannot be in doubt. They include the inbound Joanna and Mary of Bristol (NMR 877411) wrecked of Bideford in 1735; the outbound Quester of Liverpool (NMR 1033598), lost off Liverpool in 1757 and the Elizabeth of London (NMR 75395) wrecked in the Thames Estuary in 1762. Diving on these in cold, cloudy British waters would be no picnic, yet the excavation of just one of these vessels would dramatically improve our understanding of the business of 18th century slave shipping. One day, perhaps, we will know more about at least one of these important relics of the British slave trade.

How are slaves counted?

A great deal of statistical information is available about the slave trade, on everything from shipboard mortality rates to vessel tonnages. Much of this is contained in European and colonial historical archives. British archives include shipping records maintained by the maritime insurers Lloyds of London, and customs and excise records held by the Treasury and the Colonial Office.

Scholars first began collating archive data in the 1960s, in an effort to build up a better picture of the overall volume of the transatlantic slave trade. Very big databases were created, containing information about hundreds or even thousands of voyages. In the early 1990s, leading statisticians of the slave trade proposed that a single, multi-source dataset should be formed, and made available to researchers in cd-rom format. This hugely ambitious project, hosted by the web Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research (recently renamed the web Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research) at Harvard University, came to fruition in 1999 with the publication of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on cd-rom (TSTD).

The TSTD dataset suggests that in total, 11,062,000 people were carried from Africa on slave ships of all nations, with 9.6 million of these individuals surviving the middle passage to the Americas. These figures are of course estimates, based on statistical inferences, but most scholars accept them as being the most accurate made so far. TSTD contains information on 9,945 British slaving voyages, probably around 90% of the total number undertaken. An imputed (inferred) 3,112,300 slaves were carried away from Africa on these British ships.

See D Eltis, SD Behrendt, D Richardson, & HS Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database on CD-Rom (Cambridge University Press 1999), and L Svalesen, The Slave Ship Fredensborg (Indiana University Press 2000). For resources for the 2007 anniversary visit www.direct.gov.uk/en/slavery/dg_065970.

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Issue 94

May/June 2007

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Ringed with the wrecks of slave ships: The Atlantic slave trade

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