While the chase and capture of ships at sea represented a natural fit for men of the Royal Navy, officers’ concurrent roles on shore in West African territories were more nuanced. Naval officers played a part in a reconfiguration of relations between Britain and West Africa in the early nineteenth century, as British abolitionist ideals and policies were introduced in the colony of Sierra Leone and increasingly rolled out along the coast. These included the pursuit of anti-slavery treaties with African rulers, the encouragement of ‘legitimate’ trade, a wave of exploration and increased missionary efforts. All were tied to the desire to end the slave trade at source in West African societies via the spread of European ideas of ‘civilization’. Officers’ narratives are revealing of increasing British intervention in West Africa, and how economic and strategic advantages for Britain became inextricable from humanitarian incentives.

Commerce, civilization and Christianity

As part of Britain's newly assumed humanitarian identity in abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, efforts towards the perceived betterment of West Africa, in a desire to raise the continent from its slave-trading traditions, were based on three guiding principles: commerce, civilization and Christianity. These ideals gathered force as a new phase of the anti-slavery movement gained momentum in the 1820s and 1830s, but they had evolved from ideas put forward in the late eighteenth century. In the 1780s Sierra Leone was first envisaged by British abolitionists as a settlement in which to relocate Britain's trade but slaveholding would be forbidden. The Clapham Sect, or Saints (the influential group of British philanthropists and social reformers who gathered in south-west London), incorporated the Sierra Leone Company in 1791, attracted to the idea of a free colony as an aid to their cause to advance abolition in West Africa and atone for wrongs committed by Britain in the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson optimistically wrote about the economic potential of the settlement, reflecting his belief that the encouragement of the ‘spirited cultivation’ of agriculture by Africans on their own land would be the means by which ‘the Civilization of this noble continent would be effected in time’. Free labour and competitive trade, it was believed, would generate more profit than slave labour, and hence undermine the institution of slavery.