Broadly speaking, naval officers of the West Africa squadron worked in two distinct but interrelated fields: at sea, detaining slave ships or preventing their embarkation, and on shore, as part of Britain's wider abolitionist mission. This chapter examines the former, through the perspectives of naval officers. As such, it will provide the necessary background for other stories to follow: officers’ day-to-day challenges and experiences at sea were hugely influential in how they perceived the wider contexts of their anti-slavery duty.

Background

For six decades, the ships of the West Africa squadron patrolled 2,000 miles of West African coastline lying roughly between the island of Cape Verde in the north and Luanda (or St Paul de Loanda, as it was sometimes known) in the south, in present-day Angola. The British colony of Sierra Leone (and its capital, Freetown) served as headquarters for anti-slave-trade operations, and the squadron was divided geographically into five divisions along the coast (for a period between 1832 and 1840, it was integrated with the Cape of Good Hope station). The number of British ships that patrolled these waters varied. In 1818 Commodore Sir George Ralph Collier had six vessels under his command; the number remained below ten throughout the 1820s before increasing steadily in the 1830s to 27 by 1848. It was invariably the smallest warships that were sent to the West African coast, with crews varying between 60 and 135 men. Steam vessels (in contrast to sail) appeared on the squadron in greater numbers from the 1830s and 1840s. Warrants to search ships suspected of illegal slaving activities were issued to British warships on all foreign stations, and there was also suppression activity in the Americas. The second half of the nineteenth century also witnessed an intensification of naval suppression of trading in enslaved peoples taking place around the Cape of Good Hope and the East African coast.

Britain's use of naval power against the transatlantic slave trade was, in Richard Huzzey's words, ‘shaped or constrained by political calculation’, in the context of both national and international politics. As David Eltis and David Richardson have argued, ‘the campaign against the slave trade always had a strong international dimension’, and the Royal Navy's role in suppression was no different.