Writing to inform and explain

Preparation and Planning

There is little preparation required for this lesson. You will need to make enough copies of the Student Worksheets for each student as the exercises are predominantly focused on independent study.

In activity 3, the students are required to assess each others' work against an examination marking criteria so you will need to prepare this in advance. There is a large range of potential materials and debate incorporated within this lesson. You may wish to deliver this topic across two lessons.

Sensitivities
This subject should be handled with care and sensitivity. The historical sources feature language that might be interpreted as racist and offensive when used in a modern context. Care should be taken to ensure that students understand this language is not acceptable in today's society. You should refer to the racism policy in place at your own school to ensure that students fully understand that these references should only occur in the context of this lesson and to seek guidance on ways to tackle racism or prejudice during lessons.

About the MOD Topic

In 1807, the UK became one of the first nations to end its own participation in the Slave Trade, and went on to lead an international campaign to put a final end to the transatlantic trade, and ultimately slavery itself. Following the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, it was the only nation in the World with the political will, the economic strength, and a strong enough Navy to attempt it.

The Royal Navy has a proud history associated with the abolition of the Slave Trade and the pursuance of humanitarian rights, playing a significant role in the years following the 1807 Act to abolish the Slave Trade, through active policing and enforcement. This campaign which began in West Africa, lasted well into the 20th century and, by then was worldwide. Between 1807 and 1866, the Royal Navy captured well over 500 slave ships and prevented many more from loading their slave cargo.

The abolition was also very demanding for the sailors enforcing the Act; the Royal Navy committed up to 13% of its total manpower to its West Africa squadron, which in one year lost 25% of those sailors serving on the station, mainly to disease. Overall, the nineteenth-century costs to Britain of suppression were bigger than the eighteenth-century profits.
Although the transatlantic Slave Trade was over, slavery and the Royal Navy's efforts to suppress it continued in East Africa and the Indian Ocean into the 20th century. In the 21st Century this trade in humans is commonly known as people trafficking. Further details of this can be found on the 'Continuing Operations Today' page of the Royal Navy website at http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/server/show/nav.5999

Around 11 million people were transported from Africa to the New World as slaves between 1400 and 1866, not counting those who died in Africa or at sea. Britain, although a relative latecomer to the Slave Trade, is estimated to have transported over two and a half million Africans before 1807, at the rate of some 40,000 a year (around half the annual total) at the height of the trade. Portugal would go on to transport over four and a half million by the end of the 1860s. Most went to plantations and mines in Brazil, Cuba, the West Indies and the southern states of North America. After 1807 the United States banned the Slave Trade. Some smuggling went on, but the enslaved children born on the American plantations, (sometimes as a policy of deliberate breeding) were sufficient to maintain the labour force until the American Civil War and the final abolition of slavery in the United States. There was also some smuggling to the British West Indies until slavery there was abolished in 1833.The harsh conditions of the sugar plantations in Cuba and Brazil continued to demand constant imports of new African workers to replace the dead, and ever-rising prices ensured huge profits for successful slave-traders.

On the west coast of Africa there were markets with a plentiful supply of Africans - the captives of internecine wars, prisoners made in raids and a few condemned criminals - readily obtainable in exchange for European goods. The journey to the coast was often long, and the enslaved Africans were often half-starved and sick before they began the hellish journey across the Atlantic.

British warships around the world were engaged in the suppression of the Slave Trade but the campaign was focused on the west coast of Africa.

In 1819 a separate West Coast of Africa Station was created, its ships becoming commonly known as the 'Preventive Squadron', because the Station had been brought into being with the primary aim of stopping the illegal embarkation of enslaved Africans. It was generally subordinate to the strategically important Cape of Good Hope Station (previously responsible for the entire coastline), but remained as a separate entity until 1869 when its task was completed and the two stations were recombined. Although, like any other squadron, it engaged in surveying, and the protection of lawful commerce, it was devoted above all else to the anti-slavery campaign.

The Royal Navy ships were never sufficient in number for a full blockade. In 1825, there were seven ships on Station, manned by about 663 men. By 1845, the Station was averaging 25 to 30 vessels (about one third of which were steamers), and had upwards of 2,000 men, supplemented by around 1,000 native Africans. The Admiralty was never able to give undivided attention to the Slave Trade with its focus always on the possibility of another European or American war, with the largest concentration of its forces based in the Mediterranean. The Admiralty might also draw on the Station to deal with a sudden emergency elsewhere, as it did for a few months when war broke out with China in 1856; but over the years the Station developed detailed local knowledge and effective tactics, and was provided with ships which were increasingly swift and well equipped, the introduction of steamers proving to be a major advantage.

The slavers were occasionally heavily-armed, and it was not unusual for Spanish slavers in particular to carry more guns than their British opponents. The Royal Navy, however, had a clear advantage in the quality of its gunnery, and in case after case demonstrated the worth of its speed and accuracy of fire and the practised fighting ability and determination of its crews. For the slavers, there was little incentive to risk death in battle - the Royal Navy's crewmen faced much greater danger from malaria and yellow fever.

Life in the West Coast of Africa Squadron was monotonous, unpleasant and dangerous; and unlikely to offer much chance of glory or promotion. The chief compensation for the officers and crews was prize money provided by the British Government, which took the form of 'head money' for liberated slaves and a tonnage bounty for captured slave ships (increased for empty ships in order to offset the lack of head money). The relative values of the two types of payment meant that crews stood to profit more by capturing loaded slavers than empty ones, leading to accusations that the system encouraged the squadron to allow the embarkation of enslaved Africans. This is not supported from statistics on captures - between 1835 and 1840, 85 Spanish ships were captured empty, and only 18 loaded. Bounty might be withheld if the Admiralty judged a commander had exceeded his powers; whilst if a vessel was not condemned by the courts, he ran a grave risk of being personally sued for compensation by the owners.

Naval surgeon Alexander Bryson described the suppression of the Slave Trade as 'perhaps the most disagreeable, arduous, and unhealthy service that falls to the lot of British officers and seamen'. The west coast of Africa was notoriously a graveyard for Europeans; its swamps and stagnant lagoons were breeding grounds for mosquitoes, with malaria and yellow fever an ever-present risk. The causes of these diseases had not been identified, and mortality sometimes ran high. In 1829, the worst year for the squadron, 204 men died out of the total strength of 792, the majority in an outbreak of yellow fever on board HMS Eden. Two died from drowning, all the rest from disease.

Ships on the West African station stayed healthiest when their crews were kept on board and at sea. But blockades are always dull; and the monotony of long months cruising off shore was identified by Bryson as the worst aspect of life in the squadron. It made the seamen anxious for any opportunity for action, and there were always plenty of volunteers for boat service in the rivers, in pursuit of the slavers, despite the fact that it placed crew members in danger of contracting a much feared fever. After terrible mortality on board the Eden, the surgeon on HMS Sybille, Robert McKinnal, took an unprecedented step in order to convince his fellows that yellow fever could not be contracted person-by-person. One of the symptoms of yellow fever is black vomit, and once one of the crew members had contracted the disease Mckinnal ordered for a glassful of the vomit to be collected before drinking it in full view of the ship's crew.

By the 1850s naval surgeons had established how best to keep the crews of the warships healthy; but the enslaved Africans liberated from captured slave-ships were often in desperate need of medical help. Often already exhausted and half-starved before being taken on board, the cramped and filthy conditions rapidly spread diseases such as dysentery, smallpox, ophthalmia and diarrhoea, in addition to the prevalent malaria and yellow fever. Bryson wrote:

'There is perhaps not any condition in which human nature may be viewed in a more revolting aspect than in that of a crowded slave-vessel, with dysentery on board. Of all the horrors attending the middle passage, with the exception perhaps of small-pox, it is the worst. The effluvium which issues from her decks, or rather prisons, is peculiar and sickening beyond conception, and is generally perceptible at a great distance to leeward.'

With the Africans in such a state, even the process of unshackling them was fraught with danger and might have to be undertaken in stages until the enslaved Africans, who seldom had any language in common with their liberators, could be brought to understand that the newcomers were seeking to help them. Cleansing the slave decks cannot have been a pleasant task; and, until the slave ship had been condemned by the courts, there was no guarantee that the capture of the ship and the struggle to aid her human cargo might be in vain with the enslaved Africans being given up to the traders once more.

Intercepting slave ships in the trackless expanse of the Atlantic was almost impossible, but the Navy had learned through long years of war that the way to close down a trade was not to chase individual cargoes (satisfying though that might be), but to stop them at their source, by blockading ports and places of embarkation. Before 1807 a slave ship might be able to run down the coast of Africa, stopping to trade and buy a few enslaved Africans here and there until she had a full load; but with warships hunting them, the slavers needed depots where hundreds of enslaved Africans could be penned up in enclosures known as barracoons, ready to be loaded quickly when the coast was, literally, clear. It did not take long for the locations of such depots to become known, and one warship lying offshore could paralyse trading for weeks or months at a time.

Most slave ships were fairly small, with a shallow draught to enable them to get inshore and up river to load enslaved Africans, and they were built for speed. Their hunters also had to be stealthy, swift and manoeuvrable - this was no Station for lumbering line-of-battle titans, but for sloops, frigates, and ultimately steamers. Palmerstone as Foreign Secretary complained that if there was a 'particularly old slow-going tub in the Navy, she was sure to be sent to the coast of Africa', but over time the Admiralty sent out better and faster ships. Their commanders also made extensive use of the ships' boats. These could be swift and stealthy (the tall masts of a warship often betrayed her before she could get close enough to intercept the faster schooners), and could penetrate shallow waters beyond the reach of the parent vessel. In the early days, some enterprising officers bought in some of the faster captured slave ships to serve as auxiliaries. Two such converted prizes, the Black Joke and the Fair Rosamond, were outstandingly successful.

European diplomacy was the preserve of the Foreign Office, but naval officers on the coast had a great deal of latitude to negotiate local treaties with the African chiefs. They had little success with the inland kingdoms such as Dahomey, from which so many of the enslaved Africans came, but much more on the coast where the impressive sight of warships had due effect. One such treaty was obtained by Joseph Denman in 1840 at the Gallinas, a major slave depot, after the local chief's son made the critical error of imprisoning a washerwoman: poor she might be, but she was from Sierra Leone and a British citizen. Denman's blockade had made the Slave Trade unprofitable for many months, and the chief was disinclined to protect the slave dealers - the treaty allowed him to destroy the barracoons and liberate over 800 enslaved Africans. Some of the dealers, terrified of the liberated enslaved Africans, begged Denman for safe conduct to Sierra Leone.

The effect of this action was countered almost immediately when the Attorney General gave the Foreign Secretary advice suggesting that its legality was doubtful. One of the slave dealers from the Gallinas, a Spaniard named Buron, promptly sued Denman for trespass and unlawful seizure of property. The impression given in Africa was that Denman had been disowned by his government; and the Slave Trade at the Gallinas, which had been suspended, revived at once. Denman was suspended and put on half-pay in England to await the outcome of the court case. He put this time to good use by helping to draft Admiralty Instructions for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, giving general instructions, specimen treaty forms for use in negotiations with local chiefs, texts of all the relevant treaties, conventions, Acts of Parliament and other legal documents which affected what an officer might or might not do. It was kept up to date through a series of later editions (always substantial and sometimes multi-volume), and with useful additions such as a Swahili phrase book for use on the east coast. The final decision in Buron vs. Denman was reached in 1848, and was in Denman's favour.

Charles Hotham, the new commodore on the African station, immediately burnt down the Gallinas barracoons again. The Slave Trade was slowly strangled with the dealers driven further and further away from the stronghold of areas like Lomboko in Sierra Leone, southwards down the coast. But there were still far too many ships obviously engaged in the trade, but untouchable because they flew the flags of nations which had no anti-slavery treaty with Britain.

Lomboko apparently refers to a stockaded compound created by the infamous Spanish trader Pedro Blanco. It contained several large holding depots or barracoons for enslaved Africans brought from the interior. Lomboko stood on an island near Sulima on the Gallinas coast that was controlled by Spanish slave merchants. The location is now within the modern country of Sierra Leone. By 1839, about 2,000 enslaved Africans a year were coming out of the Gallinas River, despite the fact that the Slave Trade had been made illegal. In 1849 a British Royal Navy expedition destroyed the slave factories at Lomboko on the Gallinas River. All the enslaved Africans found in the fortress were freed by the Royal Marines. Lomboko was then completely destroyed. The fortress itself plays a prominent part in the Steven Spielberg film Amistad.

The barracoons themselves were flimsy constructions, easily rebuilt, and there was always a fresh supply of enslaved Africans from the interior, so it was sometimes thought that the destruction of the barracoons caused additional suffering for the enslaved Africans (left without shelter or food) without having a lasting effect. But the barracoons also housed the trade goods which paid for the enslaved Africans, and the records of past transactions and the loss of which caused substantial disruption. The task of rebuilding was also less easy if the slave dealers wanted new barracoons to be defensible.

By the end of the 1840s a turning point had been reached. The Parliamentary debate had ended by supporting the Preventive Squadron, it had been reformed and its effectiveness increased, its health improved, and the network of anti-slavery treaties extended. Britain had also obtained a great diplomatic triumph in helping to close the Brazilian slave markets. In 1845 Lord Aberdeen had introduced an Act to enforce the provisions of a much disregarded 1826 treaty with Brazil, and allow the Royal Navy to seize suspected Brazilian slave ships. The Act met with unexpected support from within Brazil itself where the Slave Trade was largely in the hands of a small number of wealthy and unpopular Portuguese. In 1850 the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies announced that the 1826 treaty would be enforced; and within a few months newly-landed enslaved Africans were being impounded by the authorities and those incoming slave ships which had evaded the Royal Navy were being seized on arrival. In these circumstances the trade could not be sustained, and collapsed with astonishing swiftness.

The Cuban trade was still flourishing, now almost entirely in American ships; but in autumn 1860 Abraham Lincoln was nominated President, and initiated action against slave ships being built or fitted out in the northern States, especially in the trade's principal haven, New York. Slave trading had been theoretically a capital offence in America since 1820 but no slaver had ever been condemned to death. On 7th February 1862, an American slave ship captain named Nathaniel Gordon, who had been tried and convicted, was executed. Two months later, there followed the Treaty of Washington between America and Britain (proposed by America on the standard British lines) with an equipment clause and mutual right of search. The American squadron on the coast of Africa was withdrawn almost immediately because of the Civil War, but the British squadron was free to act on behalf of both countries, using its tried and tested armoury of steam and auxiliary steam warships, concentrated forces, and close blockade of known slave depots. With no remaining safe haven and no protection to be had from the American or any other flag, the risks to the slave-traders were rising steeply. Slave-owners could also see the writing on the wall, and were becoming reluctant to invest in enslaved Africans so prices were falling. By 1866 the last of the transatlantic slave ships had been hunted from the sea. In 1869, the West Coast of Africa Squadron had achieved its goal and was no longer needed - its ships became once more part of the larger Cape of Good Hope Station; and in 1870 the courts of mixed commission, set up under Britain's antislavery treaties to deal with captured slave ships, were closed as they had nothing more to do.

However, if the transatlantic trade was over, once and for all, slavery was not. Africans would no longer be transported to the New World as slaves; but on the east coast of Africa another Slave Trade was flourishing. The Royal Navy would continue to fight the Slave Traders into the next century.

Although the transatlantic Slave Trade was over, slavery and the Royal Navy's efforts to suppress it continued in East Africa and the Indian Ocean into the 20th century. This trade in humans is now commonly known as people trafficking. The UK is a signatory to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which prohibits the transport of enslaved Africans by sea. Today, the Royal Navy supports the full compliance of the Convention's requirements. Working closely with other UK government agencies and international partners, it still operates worldwide to give humanitarian aid, deter piracy, intercept illegal narcotics and prevent people trafficking wherever it is encountered. For example, in the summer of 2006, HMS Illustrious tracked and ensured the safe passage of a dhow containing 758 people being sent back from Oman to Pakistan. More information about this can be found at the following web address:
http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/server/show/nav.5999

Further Opportunities for Learning

Students can produce a detailed outline of a proposed wall display which explains the reality of life from the point of view of a slave, a seaman or a Royal Navy ship's Captain in the West Africa Squadron.

The display can be arranged in three columns to reflect the three different viewpoints (all on the same wall) and students can be encouraged to answer a series of identical questions, allowing anyone viewing the display to compare and contrast easily. In order to make their characters believable as responses from characters of the period, students should conduct further research using the internet.

Students should consider the use of dialect and background in order to create believable dialogue.This task then lends itself well to the students practicing a speaking and listening piece which will help them in any subject which requires presentation delivery, especially English.

Student worksheet answers

Download the teachers notes PDF to access the answers for this lesson.