THE CAPTAINS IN THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE FROM 1785 to 1807 1 Stephen D. Behrendt In 1972 Frank Sanderson commented that 'no full-scale study of Liverpool and the slave trade has yet been published'. 2 This statement is still true because we know little about the people in the slave trade, whether from a statistical or a biographical viewpoint. For example, we do not know how many different captains were in the slave trade for any period from the late seventeenth century up to 1807, the year parliament abolished the trade. Nor do we know how many firms captains worked for, how many different vessels they sailed, or how many captains later owned slave ships. We also do not have enough biographical information on slave traders to draw any firm conclusions about their geographical and occupational backgrounds. Did Liverpool-based captains come from the Lancashire area? Did they come from commercial backgrounds? Did sons follow their fathers as captains in the slave trade? How many captains died on the African coast or at sea? These questions have been difficult to answer because of the logistical task of compiling accurate lists of captains in the slave trade, the limited number of accounts written by or about slave traders, and, most importantly, the problem of using parish church records as a source of biographical information for a large group of individuals. However, the availability of computer databases is removing these diffi­ culties. I have compiled a database of 2,876 slave voyages from 1785 to 1807 using information from Liverpool and Bristol muster rolls, parliamentary slave-trade lists, Lloyd's 80 .S'. D. Belmndt Registers of Shipping, and the Naval Office Shipping Lists. In addition, the Mormon International Genealogical Index (I.G.I.) of eighty-eight million British names derived from parish records is now available on CD-ROM disks at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. This new I.G.I, format enables researchers to access British church records simultaneously, rather than county by county as with the former fiche format, and has opened up an import­ ant new line of source material for historians. In this article I will present statistical and biographical information on the captains in the British slave trade from 1785 to 1807, the last two decades of the legal trade. I will devote sections to captains' family backgrounds and maritime experience, their years in the slave trade, and their careers after they left the slave trade. First, though, I will explain how I created lists of captains and how I used the new computerized I.G.I. to help find biographical details about these men. SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY For any study of a large group of individuals one must begin with an accurate list of names. Fortunately, the late eighteenth-century British slave trade was confined to three ports only Liverpool, Bristol, and London and more documents survive than for any other field of maritime history. 3 During the period of government regulation of the slave trade from 1788 to 1806, parliament ordered Customs House lists of slave trade clearances to be printed. Of these, the most important document is the list of 1,433 Bristol, Liverpool, and London slave clearances from 1 January 1795 to 30 April 1806 that gives the dates the vessels cleared customs, the vessels' names, the names of the captains, and the number of slaves each vessel could legally carry.4 A second printed list of captains' names appears in Gore's Liverpool Directory for 1807. This is a list of 185 Liverpool slave voyages from 1806 to the last legal Liverpool voyage on 16 August 1807. 5 Shipowners' names are also included in the Gore's list, and these names help determine how many captains owned partnership shares and how many captains became permanent owners. Four other slave trade lists also Slare Trade Captains 81 give shipowners' names. Two parliamentary slave trade lists give shipowners' names for voyages from 1789 to 1796,6 and two private Liverpool slave trade lists for 1798 and 1799 give captains' and shipowners' names for 278 Liverpool voyages. 7 A final unpublished list of seventy-two Liverpool slave-ship captains' and owners' names for 1787 is found in the Liverpool Papers held at the British Library Manuscripts Room. 8 Eighteenth-century Bristol and Liverpool 'ship's agreement and crew lists', or muster rolls, survive as well. Captains' names appear on the heading of each muster. Their names are listed first, followed, in order of rank, by those of the crew. Musters were completed and signed after the voyage ended, and deaths and discharges were always noted. Thus, we can determine how many captains died in the slave trade. If the captain survived the voyage and returned to England, he usually signed the muster. From these musters I verified the parliamentary and contem­ porary lists of slave clearances and filled in the gaps in the historical record from 1785 to 1807. The Society of Mer­ chant Venturers of Bristol owns the Bristol muster rolls from 1748 to 1795. For this study, I examined the 137 Bristol slave voyages from 1785 to the last surviving Bristol slave-ship muster of 1795 (a 1794 voyage). Liverpool mus­ ters survive from 1775 and are held at the Public Record Office, Kew. In this group of Liverpool musters, voyage and crew details are given for 1,925 slave voyages that cleared Liverpool between 1785 and 16 August 1807. I calculate that there were 2,227 Liverpool slave clearances during these years. Thus, musters exist for about 86 per cent of all Liverpool slave voyages. The London slave trade is more difficult to piece together, as captains' information is only listed in the series of clearances from 1795 to 30 April 1806. For the years from 1785 to 1794 and May 1806 to 1807, I relied on Lloyd's Registers oj Shipping to find the names of London slave-ship captains. In a few cases, I was able to verify the captains' names by examining the Naval OfBce Shipping Lists for the British West Indies as well as the London ship registers from 1786.'' However, since Bristol and Liverpool musters survive, this article focuses primarily on slave-ship captains based in these two ports. 82 S. D. Behrendt I then created a database on the British slave trade from 1785 to 1807 to allow analysis of different aspects of the trade. By sorting the slave voyages by captains' names, I found that 946 different captains made 2,876 slave voyages during these years aboard 1,080 different vessels. Almost 80 per cent of these voyages cleared from Liverpool, and 779 captains traded at one time out of Liverpool. 10 Next, I began a search for biographical information about these men. Bristol musters allowed me to do this for captains in the trade from 1789 to 1794, as musters from these dates were printed on a specific slave trade form. Of the seventeen columns, three give specific biographical information: 'where born', 'age', and 'years at sea'. The other columns list voyage details and wage and duty information. The eighth column, 'cause of discharge, death or drowned', is valuable because specific diseases are men­ tioned." By comparison, Liverpool musters are not printed this way, and no biographical information is given on slave-ship captains from the largest slaving port. In general, contemporary and secondary sources do not give biogra­ phical details on captains in the slave trade from 1785 to 1807 either. Two exceptions are the Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow (1830) and Gomer Williams' History of the Liverpool Privateers (1897).' 2 Sometimes this information is of little value, as when Crow mentions that 'Captain Tool' [Francis Toole] 'was a catholic' (and thus perhaps Irish). Other times it is of greater value, as when Williams states that 'Captain William Lace was the son of Mr. Ambrose Lace, merchant and shipowner, of St Paul's Square, and brother of Mr. Joshua Lace, the founder and first president of the Liverpool Law Society'. Williams also shows that Ambrose Lace was a slave-ship captain in 1762 and then a merchant in 1770. u A better way to approach eighteenth-century British genealogy is to study the Inland Revenue (IR) documents held at the Public Record Office at Kew and Chancery Lane. These apprenticeship records exist from 1710 to 1810, and they are indexed from 1710 to 1774. 14 Unfor­ tunately, however, they give little information on boys apprenticed to ship captains, as this was usually an informal procedure. For example, when I compared my list of Slare Trade Captains 83 captains in Appendixes A and B with the IR indexes, I found only one possible apprenticeship of a future slave- ship captain: in 1756, James Bachope was apprenticed to a Glasgow cordwainer. 1 ' This could be the same man, as Bachope was born in Scotland and would have been about fifteen years old at the time (see Appendix B). Information from British parish records compiled in the computerized Mormon International Genealogical Index (I.G.I.) proved the best source of biographical information about mariners. As this is the first study to use the new I.G.I, format, I will give some description of it. The Family History Library I.G.I, computer programs include parish christening and marriage records from Canada, Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. The database for the British Isles includes predominantly An­ glican records, and it consists of eighty-eight million names. The data is stored on fourteen CD-ROM disks that are arranged alphabetically."' This is an index to locate names, so information such as age, occupation, or residence which might appear in the original church record is not included, though the source information and citation are given.