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Further Light on Bulfinch Lambe and the “Emperor of Pawpaw:” King Agaja of Dahomey's Letter to King George I of England, 1726

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Robin Law
Robin Law*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Extract

The story of Bulfinch Lambe (or Lamb) and his mission to London on behalf of the king of Dahomey (or “Emperor of Pawpaw”) has been told by Marion Johnson in an earlier article in this journal. Lambe was an employee of the Royal African Company in its factory at Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada, who was seized and detained by the king of Allada, as security for an unpaid debt, in 1722. He was still held prisoner in Allada when it was conquered by Agaja of Dahomey in 1724, and thus became a prisoner of the latter, who carried him off to his own capital at Abomey, further inland. Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's suggestion, the idea of negotiating some sort of commercial agreement with the Royal African Company. A letter which Lambe wrote from Abomey to Jeremiah Tinker, Governor of the Company's factory in the neighboring kingdom of Whydah, in November 1724 reported that Agaja “talks much of settling a Correspondence with the Company, and of having White Men come here.” Lambe evidently offered himself as an intermediary, as a means of securing his release from captivity, and expressed the hope that he might persuade Agaja to acquiesce in his proposals “about my going and returning again with more White Men from the Company.” When Lambe was eventually released in 1726, this was on the understanding that he would return: Agaja himself told the English trader William Snelgrave in the following year that Lambe “had taken an Oath, and promised on his Faith, to return again in a reasonable Time with a Ship.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 211 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes to Introduction

1. Johnson, Marion, “Bulfinch Lambe and the Emperor of Pawpaw: a Footnote to Agaja and the Slave Trade,” HA, 5 (1978), 345–50.Google Scholar

2. Letter of Bulfinch Lambe to Jeremiah Tinker, 27 Nov. 1724, in Smith, William, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 174, 183.Google Scholar

3. William Snelgrave, manuscript (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, WEL/29), 73. The published version of Snelgrave's work has a slightly different wording: A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea (London, 1735), 67.Google Scholar

4. Johnson, , “Bulfinch Lambe,” 349.Google Scholar

5. Atkins, John, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies (London, 1735), 122.Google Scholar

6. Atkins evidently met Lambe, since he elsewhere cites him as an informant (on albinos in Africa): ibid., 67.

7. Akinjogbin, I.A., Dahomey and its Neighbours 1708-1818 (Cambridge, 1967), 74.Google Scholar

8. Henige, David and Johnson, Marion, “Agaja and the Slave Trade: Another Look at the Evidence,” HA, 3 (1976), 57–67Google Scholar; Ross, David, “The Anti-Slave Trade Theme in Dahoman History: An Examination of the Evidence,” HA, 9 (1982), 263–71.Google Scholar

9. Johnson, , “Bulfinch Lambe,” 350.Google Scholar

10. Law, Robin, “Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey,” JAH, 27 (1986), 244–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. also Reid, John, “Warrior Aristocrats in Crisis: The Political Effects of the Transition from the Slave Trade to Palm Oil Commerce in the Nineteenth Century Kingdom of Dahomey” (Ph.D., University of Stirling, 1986), 86.Google Scholar

11. The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. XXVIII [1789–1791] (London, 1816), 82–91.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., 91; cf. Snelgrave, , New Account, 158Google Scholar; and see further Law, , “Dahomey and the Slave Trade,” 250.Google Scholar

13. My thanks to Mary L. Robertson, Curator of Manuscripts at the Huntington Library, San Marino, and Miss R. Watson, County Archivist, Northamptonshire Record Office, for their assistance.

14. The only reference to this letter of which I am aware (which in fact directed my own attention to it) is a vague and not wholly accurate allusion in Mannix, Daniel P., Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London, 1962), 184.Google Scholar

15. Johnson, , “Bulfinch Lambe,” 347.Google Scholar