Free to view

The Review

Volume 111, Number 2, Spring 2023

The Man in the Margins – The Black Sailor’s Voyage to Nelson’s Column (I)

By CDRE David Burns RN (rtd)

Message from the Editor

The first of a two-part series, and as a diversity and inclusion resource for Black History Month, the author examines the role of black labour in the Atlantic maritime system, from which the Royal Navy’s black sailors were drawn during the 18th century. This instalment focuses on the tragedy of black slavery as a component of the Atlantic slave trade, and the remarkable achievements of those slaves who nevertheless became Royal Navy sailors. A 30 minute read.

History Overlooked

At the base of Nelson’s column, on the left-hand side of the bronze bas-relief which faces Whitehall and depicts the Battle of Trafalgar, there is depicted a black sailor armed with a musket. Along with a neighbouring Royal Marine who is taking aim, and another sharp-eyed sailor pointing aloft, he appears focussed on returning fire at the unseen sniper who has just felled Nelson (Fig. 1). Naval Review readers may be familiar with this figure, but the general public is probably not. He was highlighted as part of our nation’s ‘forgotten history’ by historian David Olusoga in his book ‘Black and British’¹ and in his associated BBC TV series of 2016. The figure was also mentioned by journalist Afua Hirsch in a 2017 Guardian article in which she advocated removal of the monument for Nelson’s alleged sin of ‘white supremacy’.² In her article, Hirsch railed against the absence of context for the depiction:

“The statues that remain are not being ‘put in their historical context’, as is often claimed. Take Nelson’s column. Yes, it does include the figure of a black sailor, cast in bronze in the bas- relief. He was probably one of the thousands of slaves promised freedom if they fought for the British military, only to be later left destitute, begging and homeless, on London’s streets when the war was over. But nothing about this ‘context’ is accessible to the people who crane their necks in awe of Nelson. The black slaves whose brutalisation made Britain the global power it then was remain invisible, erased and unseen.”

Olusoga, for his part, points out the not insignificant number of sailors from Africa, America and the Caribbean listed on the ships’ musters at Trafalgar and suggests that their presence was so well understood as to make the depiction of a black sailor on the relief by its sculptor, the Irishman John Edward Carew, unremarkable when it was installed in 1849.³ Ships’ musters usually made no record whatsoever of race, only geographical origin (Fig. 2), so it is impossible to know with precision how many black sailors were actually present at Trafalgar or served aboard HMS Victory.⁴ Although not impossible, it is unlikely that any of the nearly 700 sailors listed on ships’ muster books, and originating from North America, Africa or the Caribbean, was a slave who had achieved liberty as a result of proclamations made during the American Revolutionary War, as Hirsch implies.⁵

Hirsch’s iconoclasm is deliberately provocative, but how many in today’s Service understand black history of the period well enough to be able to engage with her arguments?⁶ In contemplating black history and the Royal Navy, members of the modern Service might perhaps take some vicarious pride in the Royal Navy’s role in the suppression of the slave trade during the 19th century.⁷ It is doubtful many will have examined the Navy’s attitude towards slavery in the 18th century in any detail, or know anything at all about its black sailors and the conditions in which they served. This two-part article is intended to contribute towards correcting this deficit, as well as identifying some themes and lessons from this history which might inform diversity and inclusion in today’s Service.

The first thing to observe about the history of black sailors in the Royal Navy is that it hasn’t been erased, but it has largely been overlooked until relatively recently. When it comes to the standard literature on the Royal Navy of the 18th century, the contribution of black sailors to manning was rarely discussed at all, a laudable exception being N. A. M. Rodger’s The Wooden World.⁸ Only in the last 25 years have academics begun to shine light directly on black seafaring, and even more recently on the history of black sailors in the Royal Navy.⁹ This recent work has moved understanding beyond Rodger’s perhaps overly benign characterisation of the Royal Navy as “a refreshing world of relative equality” for the plantation slave. For those lucky enough to be able to gain a foothold in the maritime system, the Royal Navy provided the prospect of shelter from the worst excesses of slavery, but black sailors continued to live with racism and inequality, as well in perpetual fear that they might be returned to chattel slavery.

An Artistic Record

The bronze figure on Nelson’s column is clear evidence that black sailors haven’t been ‘erased’ from the artistic record. Black lives in British society were first depicted in the 17th century when black slaves began to be included in portraits commissioned by their wealthy owners, long before most people in Britain would have seen a black person in the flesh.¹⁰ Wealthy naval officers followed this artistic fashion, and in doing so recorded some of the first black faces at sea in the Royal Navy. Captain Lord George Graham (Fig. 3) and Lieutenant Paul Henry Ourry (Fig. 4) were both painted with their black slaves in the mid-18th century.¹¹ Black figures like these were initially anonymous status symbols, but by the end of the century they had migrated from the margins of art to be depicted as central figures, just as slavery had become a central feature of political and religious debate in Britain.

Carew’s bronze on Nelson’s column was undoubtedly influenced by another famous depiction of a black military servant: John Singleton Copley’s 1783 painting ‘The Death of Major Peirson’ (Fig. 5) daringly placed at its heart an armed black servant exacting revenge for the death of the eponymous hero.¹²The painting was a huge commercial success and became exceptionally well known. There is no evidence that Copley himself was an abolitionist, but the picture was clearly intended to resonate with Revolutionary War proclamations on slave emancipation, in addition to the growing Enlightenment anti-slavery discourse is Britain itself. Copley’s central vignette of an armed black man avenging a stricken hero is very clearly echoed in Carew’s depiction of the death of Nelson. In both paintings the dying man is cradled by a group of figures immediately to the right of a group of avenging figures which includes a black man. Carew wasn’t alone in drawing on this inspiration. A similar group including a black man was also employed in an 1806 depiction of Nelson’s death by Samuel Drummond and ultimately in Daniel Maclise’s massive 1865 fresco ‘The Death of Nelson’ in the Houses of Parliament.¹³ While slavery and its abolition remained a subject of major political concern, and while black veterans were a visible presence in many of Britain’s ports, artists keen to ensure relevance and popular appeal depicted black sailors in their art. mfn]Black soldiers similarly made appearances. Sir David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1822, Wellington Museum, Apsley House), for example, includes a black bandsman of the 1st Foot Guards, recorded by the artist as once bring a servant of General Moreau, and who had witnessed the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. Like Copley’s “The Death of Major Peirson” it was a huge popular success when exhibited.[/mfn] But the artistic record poses some immediate questions: In an age of slavery, how did black labour come to be present in the maritime world? How many black sailors were there at the time of Trafalgar? And, most importantly, to what extent did those sailors truly enjoy freedom in the Royal Navy?

The Maritime System and Slave Labour

The acquisition and expansion of Britain’s colonial possessions and trade around the Atlantic in the 18th century was accomplished on the twin pillars of the Navigation Acts and the increasing strength of the Royal Navy. The interdependence of the system was summarised succinctly by Lord Haversham in an address to the Lords in 1707 when he stated, “Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; and your fleet is the security and protection of your trade: and both together are the wealth, strength and glory of Britain.”¹⁴

The colonial enterprise would become increasingly reliant on slavery to sustain much of its economic activity, eventually resulting in more than three million Africans being transported to British colonies by British slavers. In the 18th century, slaves brought to plantations would usually be dead within eight to ten years of arrival.

Taking Jamaica as an example: Between 1761 and 1768, 42,000 Africans were imported as slaves while 21,000 were concurrently born into slavery, yet the enslaved population actually declined by 21,000, mostly due to fatalities among the newly arrived Africans.¹⁵ In addition to the slaves sold to Caribbean and North American plantations, slaves were also moved to North American cities in smaller numbers to service domestic and artisanal requirements.

The maritime lines of communication stitching this Atlantic system together were dominated by British merchants and the power of the Royal Navy. Around 50% of the total slave trade from east to west during the 18th century was transported by British ships operating under the protection of the Navy. But throughout the late 18th century the majority of the Royal Navy’s power remained focussed on protection of the home isles while projecting influence in European waters. In fact, only the demands of the American Revolutionary War ever saw more than half the fleet drawn away from European waters. ¹⁶ Always stretched for resources, especially in the Caribbean and Americas, the Royal Navy would of necessity develop a degree of reliance on black maritime labour both ashore and at sea, labour which was inevitably derived from slavery.

Black Labour Ashore

From the outset, dockyards in the West Indies were as reliant on black labour as the plantations. Slave labour was required to work on the coastal defences and deepen the harbours, in addition to unloading cargoes, providing boats crews and repairing port infrastructure. The Caribbean colonies struck down white colonists through illness at a significant rate, aggravating the shortage of skilled labour.¹⁷ Slaves might never see a plantation but instead could be brought directly into such maritime employment. By 1780 70% of the dockyard workforce at English Harbour, Antigua, consisted of black labour, the vast majority slaves.

The Naval Officers stationed in Antigua themselves became involved in the purchase and exploitation of black labour, evidently corruptly so. Officers were investigated and removed for having employed their own slaves on non-existent dockyard work at inflated prices. The extent and durability of RN participation in slavery can be judged by the fact that Naval Officers in Antigua received the sum of £23,000 for nearly 2,200 freed slaves when compensation was paid in 1833 under the Emancipation Act. Chronic labour shortages inevitably resulted in an overspill of black slave labour from shore employment into the crews of the ships and boats which serviced the coastal trade between the ports and plantations of the Caribbean.

Disease was a particular hazard on the west coast of Africa at Senegambia, captured from France in 1758 during the Seven Years War. Even before that war, the Royal Navy had required work ashore to be done by locals to protect sailors from disease. The sickly nature of the place discouraged European colonists, and the facilities in the region quickly became dependent on black labour both ashore and at sea. Senegambian men were expert in negotiating the region’s notorious surf in their local canoes in order get to and from ships, their linguistic skills as interpreters were highly valuable, and they were not affected to the same degree by disease. They soon became essential to the manning of Royal Navy ships on station, and from Senegambia black sailors diffused elsewhere into the Atlantic maritime system.

Heightened demand for labour did not admit black labour to the work force in all cases. In New York, where before the Revolutionary War blacks never comprised less than 14% of the population of New York and between 10% to 20% of the civil maritime workforce, from 1777 to 1783 only ten black men, all of them free, worked in the naval dockyard. The influx to New York of fugitive slaves from maritime related trades during the war saw no increase at all in their employment in the naval dockyard, where white artisans and labourers actively maintained a colour bar.¹⁸

Black Labour Afloat

Chronic labour shortages inevitably resulted in an overspill of black slave labour from shore employment into the crews of the ships and boats which serviced the coastal trade between ports and plantations. As early as 1722, a third of Antigua’s mariners were black slaves. As well as migrating to sea, having acquired nautical skills in dockyard employment, slaves were often purchased directly by seagoing masters. Slaves could also be hired out to captains by shoreside masters, and they could find employment at sea as fugitives, particularly during times of war. A historical survey of the newspapers and records of the ports of Philadelphia, New York and Newport from 1713 to 1783 found references to over 7,000 slaves working at sea or seeking to do so. Those who were fortunate enough to be nominally free could seek employment at sea of their own volition, although free black sailors and fugitives did so at the peril of finding themselves returned to their original master or sold into slavery once more through either the actions of an employer or as a result of capture at sea.¹⁹

One significant entry point to maritime employment for those with no experience of seafaring was privateering. During the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War, privateering played a major role in maritime operations, setting previously lightly armed merchant vessels to work in the business of intercepting enemy trade and commerce under the authority of a letter of marque from a belligerent government. Privateering was lucrative enough to be very enticing. In the 1740s, when a New York sailor might usually make around £15 for a voyage, a voyage on a privateer might deliver nearly ten times that amount in prize money.

However, privateering was clearly a hazardous activity requiring a vessel to detain and perhaps fight an opponent. Combat required manpower over and above the normal complement of relatively small ships. Placing experienced sailors in harm’s way against the backdrop of a labour shortage was thus clearly undesirable for private-enterprise captains. As a consequence, masters were much more ready to accept inexperienced slave labour or fugitives to provide the added muscle they required to seize and operate prizes.

These inexperienced hands would generally receive between a third and three quarters of the prize money of an experienced able- bodied seaman. Even slaves require some incentive to fight and they too received a cut of the bounty. In 1758 the appropriately named slave ‘Fortune’ received £100 from a single voyage while still in bondage.²⁰ This relatively equitable treatment came at considerable hazard: Roughly half of New York’s privateer seamen either became casualties or were captured. For free black sailors, capture by the enemy entailed the high likelihood of being sold into slavery. Conversely, a number of slaves serving aboard Continental privateers captured during the Revolutionary War were emancipated by British officers implementing the Dunmore or Philipsburg proclamations.

The special case of Bermudan slaves in the maritime system is notable. Bermuda had converted its economy from agriculture to shipping based around fast Bermuda sloops which played a crucial role in the Atlantic trade.²¹ By the mid-18th century nearly half the crews of Bermuda sloops were black slaves, and in wartime these fast sloops made excellent privateers. In one remarkable incident in 1782 the Bermuda privateer Regulator surrendered to the Continental warship Deane, which discovered 70 of the Bermudan ship’s 75 man crew to be slaves. Unusually, rather than condemning the slaves to be sold on as prize goods, the Massachusetts Vice Admiralty Court offered the slaves their freedom. They all declined and asked to be sent home. Sixty were placed in the American ship Duxbury bound for British-held New York. Once underway, with a shout of “Huzzah for Bermuda” they rose up and employed their privateering skills to seize the ship and return to Bermuda, where the Duxbury was sold as a prize.

Bermuda’s slave mariners were tied to the island by their families and by the degree of economic return they were granted by their owners. They enjoyed levels of life expectancy, literacy, and community which were much in advance of the conditions enjoyed by the majority of slaves in the Atlantic basin, and their desertion rate was a tiny fraction of other sailors of the period. For the men of the Regulator, the freedom offered them in Massachusetts looked far less appealing than the conditions they enjoyed as slave mariners in Bermuda. ²²

Highly Skilled Black Mariners

Occupying the pinnacle of the black maritime world were the numerous pilots and masters, both slaves and free men, who guided ships through treacherous inshore waters into ports, harbours and rivers throughout the West Indies and the eastern seaboard of North America. Ships’ masters were utterly reliant on pilots’ intimate knowledge of tides, currents, wind and geography, and they were consequently paid handsomely for their services. Nothing illustrates better that slavery afloat was not a mirror of slavery ashore than the case of slave pilots who exercised a remarkable degree of control over their white masters in the execution of their trade. These black mariners had often first been employed in hazardous roles, wherein they acquired knowledge which was unavailable to whites less willing to hazard themselves in treacherous waters and trades.

When HMS Experiment found herself bottled up in Long Island Sound by three French frigates in August 1778, her black pilot facilitated a daring escape via the hazardous Hell Gate channel, a feat which had never been accomplished with such a large ship. This accomplishment earned the pilot a pension of £50 a year for life.²³ The success and notoriety of another black pilot, Thomas Jeremiah of Charles Town, South Carolina, would ultimately cost him his life. By 1775 Jeremiah had bought his own freedom, property worth nearly £1,000, and several slaves himself, with Governor Sir William Campbell declaring him “one of the best pilots in the harbour.” War loomed, and Charles Town’s increasingly rebellious colonists became fearful that Britain was fomenting a slave revolt. The colonists, suspicious of Jeremiah’s loyalties and prejudiced against his race (and aware that he might continue to pilot British warships into Charles Town in the event of war), accused Jeremiah of plotting a slave revolt. Despite his significant wealth and freedom, he was tried without a jury on slender evidence and hanged in August 1775.²⁴Pilots like Jeremiah and the many other slave pilots like him who fled to British ships following Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 proved crucial in the campaign in the southern colonies, facilitating access for British landings and eventually enabling the evacuation of thousands of loyalists, slaves and black loyalists.

In the wake of the Revolutionary War Britain required a new base on the eastern seaboard of North American. Between 1789 and 1795, James Darrell, a black slave and knowledgeable local mariner, assisted Lieutenant Thomas Hurd at surveying Bermuda in preparation for the building of a dockyard, in the process establishing himself as the island’s foremost pilot. Darrell would go on to pilot HMS Resolution, and a flotilla of five ships, into Bermuda in May 1795 for the first time. It was an accomplishment which would earn him his freedom, bought at the cost of £150 by the Governor of Bermuda, and the official position of Bermuda’s first King’s Pilot. ²⁵

Black pilots and merchant masters were fundamental to the functioning of the maritime system. Their value and consequent status can be gauged from the fact that one of the last men Nelson shook hands with on Southsea beach before he sailed for Trafalgar was a black pilot, Mr. Martin, who Nelson specifically called forward from the crowds to greet and who had been his pilot in the West Indies during the pursuit of the French fleet under Villeneuve that summer.²⁶

Black Mariners in the Royal Navy

It was from this pool of black maritime labour that black sailors were drawn to the Royal Navy. In times of war the Navy’s requirement for trained maritime labour expanded vastly as ships in reserve were activated. At the beginning of the American Revolutionary War there were around 20,000 sailors in the Royal Navy, in 1782 there were 105,000, but by 1786 the number had shrunk back to less than 20,000.²⁷ The availability of experienced sailors was therefore a vital strategic consideration for Britain. Repeated surges in demand for manpower increased the willingness of the Royal Navy to accommodate black labour, while legal decisions on the status of slaves, as well as increasing slave unrest and conflict in Britain’s and other nations’ colonies, acted to encourage black labour to seek greater security through maritime employment.

The question of precisely how many black sailors migrated to the Royal Navy as a result of these factors is the subject of academic debate. If the geographical origin of sailors on the Trafalgar rolls were simply correlated directly to race – a false assumption especially given the number of white North Americans on the rolls – then around 4% of seamen present would have been of black or other non-white races. This was clearly not the case and a figure of around 2% is a much more realistic estimate. Given that the strength of the Royal Navy at the time of Trafalgar was around 110,000, there might have been on the order of 2,000 black sailors serving in the Navy as a whole. The number of black sailors in any ship would have varied significantly depending on its station, whether it had recently arrived on station or was departing, the occurrence of outbreaks of illness among the ship’s company, and a host of other factors. During the Revolutionary War, for example, it has been estimated that somewhere between 5% to 10% of the manpower in ships on the North American station might have been black, although it has only been possible to identify a peak of around 4% with any degree of certainty.²⁸ Conversely, there would have been many ships in the Royal Navy at the time with no black sailors whatsoever.

It may be impossible to know with precision how many black sailors there were in the Royal Navy, but it is possible to examine the historical record to understand the backgrounds of some of these black sailors, their motivation for serving, and how they were treated.

Footnotes

1
Olusoga, D. (2016) Black and British. A Forgotten History. London: Pan Macmillan.
2
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/topplingstatues-nelsons-column-should-be-nextslavery
3
TNA WORK 20/3/1 contains the public works files relating to the commissioning and installation of the bronze panels on Nelson’s Column. Artists were given complete artistic freedom in their depiction of the scenes with the exception that smoke was not to be depicted. There is no comment in the file on the depiction of the black sailor, and only one letter in official correspondence referring in any way to artistic aspects, criticising the composition and some proportions in Carew’s work.
4
Costello, R. (2012) Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp.52-64 cites HMS Bellerophon as explicitly recording ethnicity, allowing 10 black sailors to be identified with certainty. However, this ethnic recording was not done routinely in Bellerophon. The muster rolls for Sep-Oct 1805 do not indicate ethnicity (ADM 36/16498). There were
sufficient white colonial births in all classes to render geographical origin on its own a poor metric of race. For example, of the 35 sailors listed on the Ayshford Trafalgar Rolls as being from Jamaica, three were clearly white midshipmen. The ethnicity of sailors was usually only referred to in recording other administrative and disciplinary matters, often where ethnicity was itself an issue.
5
John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, royal governor of the British colony of Virginia, signed a proclamation on November 7,
1775 promising freedom for Virginia slaves who left rebel colonial owners and took up arms for the Crown as black Loyalists. The Philipsburg Proclamation issued by General Sir Henry Clinton on 30 June 1779, declared emancipation for all slaves of rebel colonial owners regardless of their willingness to fight for the Crown. A twelve year old in 1779 would have been 38 at Trafalgar, and the Trafalgar muster books have around 85 sailors from Africa, the Caribbean and North America over the age of 37. One candidate for “slaves promised freedom if they fought for the British” might be Cato Mumford of Rhode Island, who served in HMS Agamemnon before deserting at Gibraltar in November 1805. He would only have been 12 at the time of the Philipsburg Proclamation. This Cato Mumford found his way into the Navy from the Army, where he had been a drummer/fifer. A Cato Mumford of Rhode Island had been both a member of a privateer crew and a volunteer in the army during the Revolutionary War and was a free man by 1797. He fades from the records in Rhode Island by 1800 before reappearing in 1808. Even if the two men could be connected, the Revolutionary War Cato Mumford still The Man in the Margins – The Black Sailor’s Voyage to Nelson’s Column (I) 109 doesn’t fit Hirsch’s narrative; he fought for Continental forces.
6
See Nelson Hood, P. A. (2020) ‘In Defence of Nelson’. Naval Review, Volume CVIII, Issue 4, pp. 543-548 for a rebuttal of Hirsch on Nelson’s attitudes to race and slavery
7
See Wills, M. (2023) Envoys of Abolition: British Naval Officers and the Campaign Against the Slave Trade in West Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, for a detailed examination of those operations and contemporary naval attitudes towards slavery and anti-slavery operations.
8
Rodger, N. A. M. (1986) The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. London: Collins, pp. 159-161. A much earlier exception was Pares, R. (1937) The Manning of the Navy in the West Indies, 1702-63, transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 20, pp. 31–60, which discussed the use of both free and enslaved black seamen.
9
Bolster, J. W. (1997) Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, was the first major work to examine North American slavery through a purely maritime lens. Dr. Ray Costello’s, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (2012), is a study of 500 years of black British seafaring. Foy, Charles R. (2020) ‘Britain’s Black Tars’, in Gretchen H. Gerzina (ed.) Britain’s Black Past. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 63-80 provides an excellent overview of the experiences of black sailors in the Royal Navy in the 18th Century. Dr. Charles R Foy is Associate Professor Emeritus at the Eastern Illinois University, has published extensively on this subject, and has since 2014 been working on a Black Mariner Database which now contains details of over 33,000 black mariners in the Atlantic world. Another detailed examination of black labour in the maritime system is provided by Morgan P. D.
(2007) ‘Black Experiences in Britain’s Maritime World’ in Cannadine, D. (ed.) Empire, The Sea
and Global History. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 105-133.
10
‘Slave’ is used here instead of ‘servant’ given the nature of the relationship and the conditions under which such individuals usually served, although slavery was never codified in English law.
11
William Hogarth. Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin. Oil on canvas (1745). National Maritime Museum BHC2720, Lieutenant Paul Henry Ourry, MP (1719-1783) with ‘Jersey’. Joshua Reynolds. Oil on canvas (circa 1748). National Trust, Saltram, Devon. For excellent online resources on slavery and portraiture in 18th Century Britain see https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/figures-empire-slavery-and-portraitureeighteenth-century-atlantic-britain.
12
Tate Britain N00733. Copley altered actors and events to make his painting more popularly resonant and commercially attractive. Although the painting was promoted as showing Peirson’s free black servant avenging his master, Pierson himself didn’t actually have a black servant. There is anecdotal evidence that one of the free black servants of another officer did play a part in the engagement and may have avenged Peirson (either Abraham Allec or Isaac Burton, most likely the latter). See Kamensky, J. (2016) A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. New York and London: Norton, pp.316–27 and Saunders, G H. (1990), ‘Genius and Glory: John Singleton
Copley’s “The Death of Major Peirson”’. The American Art Journal, Autumn, 1990, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 4-39.
13
‘Study for “The Death of Nelson’” (1859-64), Daniel Maclise, Walker Art Gallery, WAG 2116 (and the final fresco in the Houses of Parliament). See also ‘The Death of Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805’ (1806), Samuel Drummond, NMM BHC0547. Drummond did not include a black sailor in his several variations of the same scene (e.g. NMM BHC0551). Unlike Major Peirson’s death, there is no account indicating a black sailor was actually involved in returning fire at Trafalgar.
14
Lord Haversham speech to the Committee of the House of Lords, 19 November 1707 (Accessed National Library of Scotland https://deriv.nls.uk/dcn23/1880/4223/188042235.23.pdf)
15
Fergus, C (2009) “Dread of Insurrection”:
Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain’s West Indian Colonies, 1760-1823. The William and Mary Quarterly , Oct., 2009, Third Series, Vol. 66, No. 4, pp. 757-780.
16
Conway, S. (2007) ‘Empire, Europe and British Naval Power’ in Cannadine, D. (ed.) Empire,
The Sea and Global History. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 22-40.
17
This problem afflicted military forces too. As white troops were so susceptible to disease, during the French Revolutionary wars thousands of slaves were purchased by the 110 Articles: Learning from the Past government for service in Britain’s colonial West India Regiments.
18
Foy, C. R. (2016) The Royal Navy’s employment of black mariners and maritime workers, 1754-1783. International Journal of Maritime History, 28(1), pp. 6-35.
19
Foy, C. R. (2006) Seeking Freedom in the
Atlantic World, 1713—1783. Early American Studies, 4(1), pp. 46–77.
20
Foy, C. R. (2008) Ports of Slavery, Ports of Freedom: How Slaves Used Northern Seaports Maritime Industry To Escape and Create Trans-Atlantic Identities, 1713-1783.
Faculty Research & Creative Activity. 7. http://thekeep.eiu.edu/history_fac/7.
21
Note that HMS Pickle, originally the Sting, wasa Bermuda sloop built in 1799.
22
Jarvis, M. J. (2002) Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783. The William and Mary Quarterly, 59(3). pp. 585–622.
23
Dawson, K. (2013) Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions: Challenging Notions of Race and Slavery between the Boundaries of Land and Sea. Journal of Social History, 47(1), p. 72.
24
Harris, J. W. (2009) The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty. New Haven: Yale University Press.
25
Dawson, K. (2013) Enslaved Ship Pilots in the Age of Revolutions: Challenging Notions of Race and Slavery between the Boundaries of
Land and Sea. Journal of Social History, 47(1), p. 83.
26
Carlisle Journal, 5th October 1805.
27
Rodger, N. A. M. (2004) The Command of the Ocean : A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815. London: Allen Lane. pp. 636-639.
28
Foy, C. R. (2016). The Royal Navy’s employment of black mariners and maritime workers, 1754-1783. International Journal of
Maritime History, 28(1), p. 12.

John Perkins: A Black Commander on the Jamaica Station

Sir Samuel Bentham 1757–1831: Civil Architect and the First Engineer of the Royal Navy

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement	1 year	Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category .
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
CookieLawInfoConsent	1 year	Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie.
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
_ga	2 years	The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors.
_ga_EF0SNC8FQN	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics.
_gat_gtag_UA_112095442_1	1 minute	Set by Google to distinguish users.
_gid	1 day	Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Cookie	Duration	Description
_chatwoot_session	session	No description available.
ampDeviceId	never	No description available.
cw_conversation	1 year	No description