Our latest “Document of the Week” was chosen by our Senior Curator, Dr Mary Wills. It is a list of enslaved Africans released from a slave ship by the Royal Navy. It offers insights into Britain’s relationship with transatlantic slavery after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British involvement in the trade.
Subsequently, the Royal Navy was tasked with detaining slave ships embarking from the West Coast of Africa. HM Sloop Derwent seized two American slave vessels, Eliza and Baltimore, in 1808. This document is a list of some of the 167 Africans released and taken to Freetown, the capital of the British colony of Sierra Leone.
Their names are given, along with whether they were considered adults or children. The list also shows under whose “service” they were placed. This reflects the beginning of the “apprenticeship” scheme, whereby formerly enslaved people were employed in the colony. This could mean as domestic workers, as labourers on public works, or as part of a military corps.
Sierra Leone was originally founded by British abolitionists in the 1780s as a “Province of Freedom”. But the “apprenticeship” scheme had its critics, not least the colony’s Governor, Thomas Perronet Thompson, whose papers also feature in the primary source collection from which the list is drawn. He believed that such transactional arrangements concerning control of people and their labour had too many similarities to slavery.
Between 1808 and the 1860s, many thousands were released from slave vessels by the Royal Navy and re-settled in Sierra Leone, where they were expected to rebuild new lives and communities. They became collectively known as “Liberated Africans”, although historians now question this ambiguous idea of freedom.
Where to find this document
This document is from our collection Indigenous Cultures and Christian Conversion in Ghana and Sierra Leone, 1700–1850. This features images from the Bodleian Library and Hull History Centre, which provide insight into the West African branches of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. It is a key resource for students and researchers of the British empire. Visit the collection page to learn more.
You can also find Mary’s article about researching the lives of enslaved people on our website. The article is part of an ongoing project to amplify other voices present in British Online Archives’ collections, particularly in archives relating to British colonial rule.