Abstract
Pax brought the gift of peace in places that were accustomed to war but it itself called for the use of force. Africa, a continent of many societies and peoples, posed special problems in certain locales, for it was a place of warlords, and slaves were property captured in war. Whole kingdoms arose from the human pillage. Traffic in slaves by slave-hunters “fermented tribal warfare, destroyed native African culture and agriculture, dispersed peaceful communities, caused unimaginable suffering, destroyed natural immunity to disease and rendered refugees vulnerable to infections they had not previously encountered”.1 It fell to the Navy, as servant of the state, to quell the traffic at sea and on the coasts. This was a central feature of Pax. Pax was a latter-day consideration in the long history of the African continent, and it had a short life, for once the policing duties of the Navy and the diplomatic pressures brought by the Foreign Office, and even colonial governors ashore, came to an end, control of African societies and principalities passed to other hands. While it lasted, it was a gallant and altruistic attempt to establish freedoms, promote human liberty, and release thousands from bondage ashore and afloat.
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Notes
James Watt, “Sea Surgeons and Slave Ships: A Nineteenth Century Exercise in Life-Saving”, Transactions of the Medical Society of London, 104 (1987–1988), 130.
Quoted, E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London: Longmans, 1966), 28.
Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 98.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery on the Eve of Abolition (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1977).
A review of the literature is in Selwyn Carrington, “The State of the Debate on the Role of Capitalism in the Ending of the Slave System”, Journal of Caribbean History, 22, 1–2 (1988), 20–41;
reprinted in Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Oxford: James Currie, 2000), 1031–1041.
Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, a Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 265.
Arnold W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964).
John Keegan, “The Ashanti Campaign 1873–1874”, in Brian Bond, ed., Victorian Military Campaigns (London: Hutchinson, 1967).
Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierre Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Georg Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (2 vols in one: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874), 1: 74, where Stephen is quoted at length.
George Francis Dow, Slave Ships & Slaving (reprint, Toronto: Coles, 1980), 181. Additional details from Merseyside Museum, Liverpool.
Paul Mbaeyi, British Military and Naval Forces in West African History, 1907–1874 (New York: NOK Publishers, 1978), 16.
Alfred Burdon Ellis, History of the First West India Regiment (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885).
John Winton, An Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (London: Salamander, 2000), 106.
Reginald Coupland, in J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton and E. A. Benians, eds, Cambridge History of the British Empire (8 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929–1959), 2: 216.
John Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cardinal, 1974), 431.
Howard I. Chapelle, The Search for Speed Under Sail (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968), 299.
Among other sources, George M. Brooke, Jr., “The Role of the United States Navy in the Suppression of the African Slave Trade”, American Neptune, 21 (1961): 28–41; Alan R. Booth, “The United States African Squadron, 1843–1851”, Boston University Papers in African History (Boston, 1964);
Judd S. Harman, “Marriage of Convenience: the United States Navy in Africa, 1820–1847”, American Neptune, 32 (1972), 264–274;
and A. H. Foote, The African Squadron (1855).
Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans Green, 1949), 57.
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: the Climax of Imperialism (New York: Anchor, 1968), 34.
Conference on board Her Majesty’s ship Bonnetta, 11 March 1839, Parliamentary Papers, LXIV, “Papers Relating to Engagements Entered into by King Pepple and the Chiefs of the Bonny” [970], 2–3. Also, Jane Samson, ed., The British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 129–130.
Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: the Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans Green, 1949).
Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy ([1839] London: Dawsons, 1968), 512–513.
Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the Niger, 1841–1842 (London: Yale University Press, 1991).
Palmerston’s instructions to Beecroft, 21 February 1851, F.O. 84/858. Also, Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), 23.
Grey to N.M. Macdonald, 7 November 1848, C.O. 268/4. See also Colin Newbury, ed., British Policy towards West Africa: Select Documents, 1786–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).
K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford, 1956), 175; see also Newbury, British Policy towards West Africa, 120.
Quoted in John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2013), 61.
Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975).
Chapelle, Search for Speed Under Sail, 319. This lists four vessels. There were many such, with the ex-slaver Bella Josephina, renamed Adelaide; Henriquetta, renamed Black Joke; Dos Amigos, renamed Fair Rosamond; and Caroline, renamed Fawn among the principal ones. Black Joke and Fair Rosamond were built at Baltimore and had long naval service as slave-catchers. See further particulars in Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: Bonanza Books, 1985), 156–164;
see David Lyon and Rif Winfield, The Sail & Steam Naval List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy 1815–1889 (London: Chatham, 2004), 134–135, notes at least eight schooners that were wrecked on reefs, keys, coasts of the West Indies and Caribbean, 1826–1835, and most of these were ex-pirate or ex-slave vessels taken into imperial service. More complete surveys were needed, sailing directions, buoys and lighthouses too; but these were stormy waters, subject to heavy weather (notably gales and hurricanes).
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1997), 749–785;
David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980) recounts the difficult diplomatic issues.
Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
For an epitome, see the same author’s account in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume III: From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 728–737.
See also, George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Salem, MA:: Marine Research Society, 1927), 250.
Bethell, Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, 327–363; also, Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slave Trade, 1850–1888 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 23.
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 82, 92–94, 101.
Bernard Semmel, Jamaican Blood and Victorian Conscience: The Governor Eyre Controversy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).
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© 2014 Barry Gough
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Gough, B. (2014). Anti-Slavery: West Africa and the Americas. In: Pax Britannica. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313157_10
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