A recurrent theme of this book is how slavery and the slave trade dominated the observations of naval officers. This is clearly the case in their attitudes towards recaptives, but also applies to their relationships with other African people met on shore. What follows is an examination of cultural encounters between British naval officers and West African peoples, and the role of racial attitudes and identity therein. As Philip Curtin and others have argued, supposed knowledge and prejudices about Africans and the nature of the British relationship with them served as filters through which the observations of those working or travelling in West Africa were recorded. Officers offered commentary on the different manners, customs and religious beliefs they encountered, but also their ideas for African ‘improvement’. To an extent, naval officers perceived West Africans through the lens of metropolitan attitudes; many observations subscribed to common racial prejudices. Others, however, were more considered, born of experience, interaction and affiliation.

Naval officers and racial stereotypes

A set of racial assumptions existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, fed by travel literature and historical theories on racial identity, which affirmed non-European societies as inferior to those of Europe. The expanding slave trade in the eighteenth century reinforced assumptions of racial superiority as West Africa was viewed through its dependency status as supplying slave labour. Enslavement was justified with references to the older Judaic and medieval Christian association between the origins of the black man and the curse of Ham (in which Noah's grandson from Ham, Canaan, was cursed to a life of servitude). Naval surgeon Robert Flockhart repeated this association in a letter from Sierra Leone in 1838. ‘There is nothing of romance out here’, he wrote, ‘nor anything to make one poetical, although you see the descendants of Ham coming along side in canoes in their native purity.’ Expressions of an ethnocentrically based dislike of the African’s physical appearance were fed by moral judgement, as blackness was often associated with heathenism and bestiality. West Africans were portrayed as brutish and deviant; black skin was taken as a natural sign of inferiority, alongside other physical features such as thick lips or a protruding jaw.