1
During the years 1788 and 1789, slave ships began 197 voyages from British ports, 19 voyages from American ports. Data drawn from
TSTD.
2
Clarkson,
History,
vol. II, 111.
3
Thomas Cooper, Esq.,
Letters on the Slave Trade: First Published in Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle and since re-printed with Additions and Alterations
(Manchester, 1787), 3-5. For a powerful new account of the origins and early history of the movement, see Christopher Brown,
Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
4
Excellent recent work on the image of the slave ship includes J. R. Oldfield,
Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787
-
1807
(London: Frank Cass & Co., 1998), 99-100, 163-66; Philip Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Images,” in Jean Yellin Fagan and John C. Van Horne, eds.,
The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 201-30; Cheryl Finley, “Committed to Memory: The Slave-Ship Icon and the Black-Atlantic Imagination,”
Chicago Art Journal
(1999), 2-21; Marcus Wood, “Imagining the Unspeakable and Speaking the Unimaginable: The ‘Description’ of the Slave Ship
Brooks
and the Visual Interpretation of the Middle Passage,” in Katherine Quinsey, Nicole E. Didicher, and Walter S. Skakoon, eds.,
Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
(Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing), 211-45; and Marcus Wood,
Blind Memory: Visual Representation of Slavery in England and
America, 1780
-
1865
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 14-77.
5
“Admeasurement of the Ships at Liverpool from Captain Parrey’s Account,” no date (1788), Liverpool Papers, Add. Ms. 38416, f. 209, BL; “Dimensions of the following Ships in the Port of Liverpool, employed in the African Slave Trade,” in
HCSP,
67.
6
Plan of an AFRICAN SHIP’S Lower Deck with NEGROES in the proportion of only One to a Ton
(Plymouth, 1788). It appears that the reproduction by T. Deeble of Bristol (17562/1, BRO) is identical to the Plymouth broadside. See also
Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship
(London: James Phillips, 1789); Clarkson,
History,
111. It should be noted that there was an abolitionist agenda behind sending Parrey to Liverpool in the first place. Pitt opposed the trade, and his own purpose in gathering the measurements of the slave ships was to allow abolitionists and their allies in the House of Commons “to detect any misrepresentations” the Liverpool representatives might make during the hearings on the slave trade that had been ordered by King George III in early 1788. See Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 535-36; Meeting of April 22, 1788, Minutes of the Abolition Committee, Add. Ms. 21255, BL.
7
“Dimensions of the following Ships in the Port of Liverpool,”
HCSP,
67. Information on the voyages of the
Brooks
appears in
TSTD,
#80663-80673.
8
Plan of an AFRICAN SHIP’S Lower Deck
.
9
Oldfield notes that Elford was a friend of Pitt’s. See
Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery,
99.
10
Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck, with Negroes in the proportion of not quite one to a Ton
(Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1789);
Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck, with Negroes in the proportion of not quite one to a Ton
(New York: Samuel Wood, n.d.).
11
Philip Lapsansky writes: “The famous 1789 representation of the cross section of a slave ship packed with chained black bodies lying in every available inch of the vessel was reprinted countless times throughout the age of American slavery.” Versions appeared, for example, in Charles Crawford’s expanded edition of his pamphlet
Observations on Negro Slavery
(Philadelphia, 1790); Thomas Branagan,
The Penitential Tyrant
(New York, 1807); the various editions of Clarkson’s
History;
and three editions of Samuel Wood’s pamphlet
Mirror of Misery
(1807, 1811, 1814). See Lapsansky’s “Graphic Discord,” 204.
12
Clarkson,
History,
111;
Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship
.
13
Captain Parrey’s note of 609 was the number of captives carried before the passage of the Dolben Act.
14
See Wood,
Blind Memory,
29-32. For publications of the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, see chapter 2, note 32, on page 372. For changes in the ship- building industry, see Peter Linebaugh,
The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
(London: Allen Lane, 1991), ch. 11.
15
The former slave-ship captain and now merchant James Penny testified in June 1788 that there existed “an Average of Breadth of Fourteen Inches” for the adults, twelve inches for boys and girls. Testimony of James Penny, June 13 and 16, 1788, in
HCSP,
68:39.
16
The quotation is drawn from Alexander Falconbridge,
An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
(London, 1788), a pamphlet that had been recently published by the London committee.
17
There is evidence of a dispute between the Plymouth and London committees over the image of the ship, but its nature is unclear. William Elford noted the London committee’s “strictures on the plan of the slave’s deck published by us,” to which he responded with “strong” expressions for which he later apologized. See William Elford to James Phillips, March 18, 1789, Thompson-Clarkson MSS, vol. II, 93, Friends House Library, London.
18
Meeting of June 12, 1787, Minutes of the Abolition Committee, Add. Ms. 21254.
19
Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 293-94, 367. Most of the quotes in the remainder of this section come from this two-volume history.
20
Ibid., vol. I, 322, 344, 364.
21
Clarkson’s Journal of his Trip to the West Country, June 25-July 25, 1787, in Correspondence and Papers of Thomas Clarkson, St. John’s College Library, Cambridge University. See
TSTD,
#17982 (
Africa
), #17985 (
Brothers
).
22
Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 316, 323, 330, 359, 361, 365. Many sailors were afraid of the slave-trade merchants and did not want to testify before Parliament.
23
Clarkson’s Journal of his Trip to the West Country; Thomas Clarkson,
The Impolicy of the Slave Trade
(London, 1788), 44-45; Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 301, 310-18.
24
Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 385-88, 409. Clarkson did later rent a second room away from the King’s Arms, where he could interview sailors and write.
25
Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 407, 410; Ellen Gibson Wilson,
Thomas Clarkson: A Biography
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 35.
26
Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 392, 395, 300, 408, 438.
27
Clarkson,
An Essay on the Impolicy of the Slave Trade,
iii.
28
It is important to note that Clarkson undertook a second tour to gather evidence from sailors beginning in August 1788, and that the interviews found in
Substance
reflect this knowledge, which was drawn from visits to ports other than Bristol and Liverpool.
29
Clarkson,
History,
vol. I, 329;
Sherborne Mercury,
December 8, 1788, and February 1, 1790, as quoted in Oldfield,
Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery,
100. Oldfield notes that “it is not at all clear who was responsible for the original design” of the image of the slave ship (182). Yet Clarkson certainly played a leading role. He had visited Plymouth in November 1788 and later wrote, “I laid the foundation of another committee,” a part of which would have been his research on the slave ship and his interviews among the sailors, which were cited in the text of the Plymouth broadside featuring the
Brooks
. He also tracked down and interviewed William Dove, a seaman who had sailed out of Liverpool, but now lived in Plymouth and worked as a cooper. Clarkson encouraged the Plymouth committee to conduct similar research on their own, which they did. When the enemies of abolition later claimed that Clarkson had exaggerated the abuses and cruelties practiced in the slave trade, William Elford drew upon local research to rebut the charges: “the whole tenor of the extensive evidence which their situation had enabled them to collect on the subject, corroborates and supports Mr. Clarkson’s accounts in the most positive and ample manner.” Two of their informants, mentioned in the local newspaper, the
Sherborne Mercury,
were James Brown and Thomas Bell, both masters in the Royal Navy and both thanked for the “very important intelligence they have already communicated, and for the offers of future intelligence.” Clarkson interviewed Bell, a sailor “bred to the sea,” and looked at some of his personal papers in preparing
The Substance of the Evidence
for publication in 1789. Bell had told him about the cruelties perpetrated against both sailors and slaves aboard the slave ship
Nelly,
including a gruesome account of how the hogs on board the ship tore at the flesh of slaves both dead and alive.
30
“Extract of a letter received from England,”
Pennsylvania Gazette,
April 13, 1791; Testimony of Isaac Parker, 1791,
HCSP,
73:123-39.
31
Thomas Clarkson,
An Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as applied to the Slave Trade
(London: James Phillips, 1789), 32.
32
Newport Mercury,
February 22, 1790,
Providence Gazette; and Country Journal,
March 6, 1790. For a South Carolina minister’s sympathetic response to the image of the
Brooks,
and a prescient remark that “this state will be the last to acquiesce in the annihilation of so inhuman a traffic,” see
Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser,
February 2, 1792. See also Seymour Drescher,
Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 24.
33
William Wilberforce’s speech to the House of Commons, “On the Horrors of the Slave Trade,” May 12, 1789, in William Cobbett, ed.
, The Parliamentary History of England, From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803
(London: T. Curson Hansard, 1806-20), 28 (1789-91). See also Seymour Drescher, “People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
20 (1990), 561-80.
34
Testimony of Robert Norris,
HCSP,
73:4-5, 8, 10; 69:203.
35
Roger Anstey,
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Abolition, 1760
-
1810
(London, 1975), 293; Drescher,
Capitalism and Anti-Slavery,
20; Hugh Thomas,
The Slave Trade: The Story of the African Slave Trade, 1440
-
1870
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 513-15; Adam Hochschild,
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 153-58.
36
Parliamentary Register
(London, 1788), vol. 23, 606-7; Fox and Windham quoted in Clarkson,
History,
1:111, 187; 2:326, 457. See also James W. LoGerfo, “Sir William Dolben and the ‘Cause of Humanity,’ ”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
6 (1973), 431-51. The Dolben Act was renewed in 1789, with new clauses to protect seamen, amended in 1794 and 1797, and made permanent in 1799 by 39 George III, c. 80.
37
Clarkson,
History,
151-55; Clarkson’s Journal of his Visit to France, 1789, Thomas Clarkson Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta. Some years later, in June 1814, Clarkson presented the emperor of Russia, Alexander I, a copy of the slave ship at a congress in Calais. The emperor explained that he had grown violently seasick in his passage to the gathering but that the image of the
Brooks
“made me more sick than the sea.” See Wilson,
Thomas Clarkson,
125.
38
Thomas Clarkson to Comte de Mirabeau, December 9, 1789, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. See also Thomas Clarkson,
The True State of the Case, respecting the Insurrection at St. Domingo
(Ipswich, 1792), 8.
39
Testimony of Thomas Trotter, 1790,
HCSP,
73:81-101. Trotter also produced other testimony about his experience on the ship: he had, in 1785, before the rise of the abolitionist movement, published a pamphlet in which he compared the shipboard experiences of naval sailors and enslaved Africans. See his
Observations on the Scurvy, with a Review of the Theories lately advanced on that Disease; and the Theories of Dr. Milman refuted from Practice
(London, 1785; Philadelphia, 1793).
40
Testimony of Clement Noble, 1790,
HCSP,
73:109-21. The Noble family was prominent in the trade. William Noble, likely Clement’s father or uncle, was captain of the
Corsican Hero
on a voyage of 1769-70; Clement himself was almost surely on board (as mate), because he would eventually gain command of the vessel. He would then do as his father or uncle had done, taking relatives, probably his own sons, aboard the
Brooks
a few years later. Muster rolls reveal that Joseph Noble sailed with him on the voyage of 1783-84 and that he and a William Noble sailed on the ship in 1784-85. Joseph apparently got his own ship a few years later, as he appears in 1790 as captain of the
Abigail
bound from Liverpool to the Gold Coast. A James Noble captained the slave ship
Tamazin
out of Liverpool in 1792. Some of the knowledge and lore of the slave trade was apparently passed on in a “trade book” kept by the elder Captain Noble. See “A Muster Roll for the Brooks, Clement Noble, from Africa and Jamaica,” Port of Liverpool, October 6, 1784, Board of Trade 98/44, NA; “A Muster Roll for the Brooks, Clement Noble, from Africa and Jamaica,” Port of Liverpool, April 29, 1786, BT 98/46; Letter of Instructions from Mathew Strong to Captain Richard Smyth of the ship
Corsican Hero,
January 19, 1771 380 TUO 4/4, David Tuohy papers, LRO (for the trade book). For the voyages of William, Joseph, and James, see
TSTD,
#90589, #90655, #80008, #83702.