The Forgotten Trade

The chance discovery of the log of a slave ship - the "Daniel and Henry" which set sail from Dartmouth in 1700, bound for the Guinea Coast - prompted Nigel Tattersfield to make this investigation into an episode in England's provincial maritime history. After an Act of Parliament in 1698 released monopoly on trading in West Africa, respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized their chance of quick rewards from human souls. This book provides an insight into the world of these merchants who knew nothing of trading in Africa, nor of the unscrupulous tribal chiefs who readily offered men, women and children in hard bargaining for beads, alcohol, weapons and gunpowder. After months at sea, what remained alive of the human cargo, stacked in chains on platforms in sweltering heat below deck, was delivered into the hands of rich plantation owners in the West Indies and North America in exchange for sugar, cotton, rice or tobacco. The author draws on long-forgotten documents to chart how the ports of Deal, Lyme Regis, Exeter, Falmouth, Whitehaven, among others, fared both economically and morally in the frantic early years of slaving when so much was won and lost.