The Slave Trade and Plantation Wealth
Sir John Hawkins (1532- 1595) from Plymouth, was the first Englishman to trade in Africans, making three voyages to Sierra Leone and taking 1200 inhabitants to Hispaniola and St Domingue (present day Dominica and Haiti) from 1562.
The British slave trade started to become a major enterprise in the 17th century, when King James Ist set up the first monopoly company to trade with Africa in 1618. Britain acquired colonies in America and the Caribbean and demand for slaves to work the tobacco, rice, sugar and other crops on plantations grew. London was the centre of this early trade.
In 1698 the monopoly on trade with Africa was abolished, opening up the valuable opportunity to merchants from other ports such as Bristol and Liverpool. Wealth from the direct trade in slaves and from the plantations came back to Britain and was invested in buildings which stand today.
London
London held a central position in the development and continuation of transatlantic slavery from John Hawkins’ first voyage to Sierra Leone in 1562 to the opening of the West India Docks in 1802. Until 1698 London enjoyed a monopoly over the trade by royal charter.
Between 1660 and 1690 15 Lord Mayors of London, 25 sheriffs and 38 aldermen of the City of London, who met at the Guildhall, Gresham Street, London EC2 (020 7606 3030 ext. 1463), were shareholders in the Royal Africa Company which ran the transatlantic slave trade. These connections to the slave trade increased during the 18th century.
The Zong Case (1783) was tried here. This incident, in which 133 slaves on a ship to Jamaica were thrown overboard alive in order that the owners could claim the insurance on them under British law, shocked the public and was seen as a turning-point in the abolitionist campaign. A statue to William Beckford Sr (1709-1770) stands at the east end of the south wall in Guildhall – the only Lord Mayor to receive this honour. Beckford was known as the "uncrowned king of Jamaica". His fortune came from 20,022 acres of plantations on the island. He was twice Lord Mayor of London and was also MP for the City of London.
Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield heard many cases in Westminster Hall, Palace of Westminster, London W1, 020 7219 3000, Parliament and the British Slave Trade 1600-1807, when it was a Court of Law. He presided over the case of James Somerset, in 1772. Somerset was a slave from America who escaped while his owner was visiting London, was re-captured and put aboard a ship to Jamaica. Mansfield ruled that 'no master ever was allowed to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he deserted from his service'. Mansfield's home was Kenwood House, Hampstead Lane, London NW3.
A commemorative statue to Robert Milligan, chairman of the West India Dock Company stands on the West India Quay, Canary Wharf, London E14. Milligan, together with other West India planters and merchants, built the docks for the safe importation of sugar, rum and coffee from the Caribbean plantations. It was described on its opening in 1802 as “the largest feat of civil engineering since the building of the pyramids”. Behind the statue, The Museum in Docklands, 0870 444 3851, occupies one of the two surviving warehouses built at this time.
Bristol area
The Georgian House Museum, 7 Great George Street, Bristol BS1 5RR 0117 921 1362, Bristol City Council, was built by John Pinney (1740-1818), who earned his fortune from his sugar plantations in Nevis. He became even richer through the company he set up with his friend, the anti-abolitionist pamphleteer James Tobin.
They owned ships, loaned money to plantation owners and took over both the plantations and slaves of those who could not pay their debts. Pero (1753-1798) was Pinney’s personal servant, sold to Pinney when he was 12 along with his two sisters, possibly in Nevis. Pero was living here by 1791 and would have seen the kitchens very much as they are shown here.
Edward Colston (1636-1721) made his fortune as a sugar merchant and member of the Royal African Company with interests in St Kitts but was also famous for his charity and philanthropy in Bristol, where he was born.
He founded almshouses at St Michael’s Hill and supported local schools. A statue of him was erected in Colston Avenue, Bristol in the 19th century.
Queen Square, Bristol (built 1699-1727) was home to wealthy merchants with interests in the West Indies.
Henry Bright (1715-1777), Mayor of Bristol and a prominent Bristol merchant and slave trader, lived with his black servant called Bristol at number 29, currently leased to the South West regional office of English Heritage.
At numbers 33 to 35 lived Captain Woodes Rogers (1679-1732), a famous privateer who made a voyage around the world in 1708 to 1711, trading in slaves on the way. He also invested in a ship carrying slaves from Africa to Jamaica
Blaise Castle, Henbury Road, Henbury, Bristol, 0117 353 2268, is a quirky gothic folly built on the top of Blaise Hill in 1766 by Thomas Farr.
Farr had large investments in the slave trade and it is said that he spent the equivalent of about £150,000 today building the folly, so that he could climb it to watch his ships sailing back up the River Avon to Bristol.
William Beckford's (1760-1844) huge inheritance allowed him to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle, be a writer, collector and patron of the arts, and to build the gothic Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and Beckfords Tower, 1 Royal Crescent, Bath 01225 460705, in 1827.
William was the son of William Beckford Snr, plantation owner and twice Lord Mayor of London. His grandfather Peter Beckford (1643-1710) founded the greatest sugar fortune in the West Indies.
Liverpool
Like London's Guildhall, Liverpool Town Hall, 0151 225 5530, was at the centre of the city's trading activity. All of the city's mayors between 1787 and 1807 were involved in the slave trade. Built in 1754, the building's frieze shows African faces, elephants, crocodiles and lions representing Liverpool's African trading links.
Though one of Britain's busiest trading ports, little remains of the Liverpool docks of this time, but the Canning Graving Docks, which remain, were used for fitting out and repairing slave ships in the late 18th century.
North West merchant houses
Grand properties were built by successful plantation owners far away from Liverpool where their fortunes were made.
Whernside Manor, Dent, Sedbergh, Cumbria 01539 625213, is currently a hotel but was the country home of the Sill family from Liverpool whose wealth came from Jamaican plantations. Speke Hall, The Walk, Liverpool (National Trust 0151 427 7231) was the home of Richard Watt, a Liverpool merchant who had made his fortune from sugar plantations in Jamaica. He bought the house and its 2400 acre estate for £73,500 in 1795. Storrs Hall, Windermere, Cumbria 015394 47111, now also a hotel, was acquired in 1806 by John Bolton, a Cumbrian who made his fortune as a Liverpool slave trader, with plantations in St Vincent and St Lucia.
A question mark hangs over the wreck of the "Douro", a Liverpool ship wrecked and sunk beneath the seas at Round Rock, Isles of Scilly in 1843, 36 years after British ships were banned from the slave trade. Said to be heading to Portugal when it went down with a cargo of textiles and munitions, divers have found large numbers of glass beads and manillas, bronze bracelet-shaped trading tokens, on the wreck. These had a long history as currency used to trade for slaves in West Africa.
Was the Douro involved in illegal slaving or carrying supplies for the banned trade? The market for slaves did not disappear with abolition in Britain, and so traders continued to meet demand in places like Brazil and Cuba. To combat illegal slave trading the British Navy organised anti-slavery patrols off the West African coast between 1815 and 1865 when they seized many vessels.
North West
In the course of the 18th century, Lancaster and Whitehaven slave ships carried in excess of 29,000 and 14,000 slaves, respectively, out of Africa. Though overshadowed by Liverpool, London and Bristol, these statistics put them at the forefront of smaller operators. Between 1750 and 1775 ships made 100 voyages to the African coast from St Georges Quay, Lancaster, where Kevin Dalton Johnson's Captured Africans Sculpture, unveiled in 2005, is now a memorial to this history. Whitehaven ships accounted for nearly 60 further slaving voyages.
Yorkshire
Henry Lascelles (1690-1753) was a banker and sugar importer who held shares in 21 ships involved in the slave trade between Barbados and Africa. He bought land in Yorkshire with the fortune he had amassed and in 1759 his son Edwin Lascelles, Baron Harewood (1712-95), laid the foundation stone of Harewood House, Harewood, Leeds LS17 0113 218 1010
West Midlands
The Fitzherbert family, owners of Tissington Hall, Tissington, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, 01335 352200, since the 17th century, married into the Perrin family, who owned four plantations in Jamaica, producing sugar and coffee from the second half of the 18th century. These came to be owned and managed from Tissington Hall. At the same time, reflecting the growing divisions on the slavery issue, John Alleyne, one of the barristers supporting the case of escaped slave James Somerset, was also related to the Fitzherberts by marriage. Alleyne had turned against his own family's business in Barbados and worked with Granville Sharpe in the abolition cause.
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