To witness the brutality and human trauma of the transatlantic slave trade on a detained slave vessel was extraordinary employment for British naval officers. This chapter uncovers their reactions to such service and explores the extent to which officers engaged with the individuals they were ‘liberating’ – on captured slavers, on Royal Navy ships, or while stationed at the British territories of Sierra Leone or St Helena. The Royal Navy has long associations with concepts of freedom: Britain's maritime supremacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was regarded as an upholder of Christian freedoms, crucial to national identity. As P. J. Marshall has argued, ‘Protestantism, commerce, maritime power and freedom were seen as inextricably linked.’ The Royal Navy was now responsible for granting liberty (or British perceptions of liberty) to captive Africans. As we shall see, officers’ ideas about freedom, its limits and its applicability to African people were concepts bound to racial attitudes and their understandings of different African societies.

Officers’ experiences of prize voyages

In his memoirs of service on the West Africa squadron, Admiral Robert Wauchope gave this distressing account of the capture in 1836 of the Spanish slave schooner Atylia, with 119 captives on board. It was the task of only a small number of nominated officers and men to form a prize crew, instructed to transport detained slave vessels to the nearest port at which an international Court of Mixed Commission (or from the 1840s, a Vice-Admiralty Court) would establish the legality of its capture. On the West African coast, this invariably meant Freetown.