St Helena’s post-abolition story
This week, on Wednesday, it was the ‘International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition’. I’m actually quite a fan of these ‘days’, simply because, if you want to, they give you a chance to learn about one issue for a day. Yes, there are far too many of them. And I have my doubts about the need for ‘National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day’! But take, for example, International Women's Day (IWD). This started with just 15,000 women marching in New York over a century ago demanding shorter hours, and proposing an annual day for this kind of thing. IWD is now celebrated in hundreds of countries around the world and it’s officially a day off in 27 of them.
My insignificant contribution to this Day is to write about the significant role St Helena played in the Abolition of the Slave trade. First, though, a thank you to those of you who contacted me about the London film screening of ‘A Story of Bones’…….the ‘bones’ being the remains of ‘liberated Africans’ buried on St Helena. It’s that film that spurred me to write this.
Rupert's Valley where enslaved people were brought to the depot
The background is that between 1840 and 1867 about 27,000 enslaved people were rescued from slaving ships which were still crossing the South Atlantic after abolition. The rescuers were the British Navy’s West African Squadron and the people on board had to be brought to the nearest ‘colony’ - in this case St Helena. The Squadron was actually based on the island. About 9,000 of these people didn’t survive the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ between Africa and the Americas, or more specifically between West Africa and Brazil. Thousands did. Although to uncertain futures.
When I arrived on the island as Governor in 2016, I certainly didn’t know about St Helena’s role in rescuing slaves and suppressing the slave trade. It’s one I sometimes talk about in my tours about the East India Company or my tea tour.
It starts with the Slavery Abolition Act which Parliament passed in 1833. Not only did this outlaw slavery in the British colonies, but Britain also made agreements with other countries to enforce abolition on their behalf.. For countries like Brazil, these agreements seemed little more than a sleight of hand. Brazil didn’t want to risk losing their maritime commercial relations with the British. So they agreed to the enforcement while at the same time continuing to transport slaves from Africa, across the Atlantic, in order to work on sugar and coffee plantations. Records show that about 710,000 African slaves were brought to Brazil between 1840 and 1867 for plantation work. Remembering that the total estimate of people who were forcibly moved across the Atlantic is put at 12.5million Africans, Brazil alone received 4.9million of that total. Indeed, Brazil takes the inglorious title of being the largest single destination country for enslaved people during the slave trade.
But back to 1840. On the small island of St Helena, thousands of miles from anywhere, the task of the British Navy’s West African Squadron was to hunt down slaving ships and put an end to the slave trade south of the Equator. To be honest I have my doubts that this was entirely an altruistic motivation. The abolitionists certainly declared they had a ‘civilising mission’. But also perhaps there was a commercial driver. And a letter I discovered in the St Helena archives, dated March 1841, addressed to the Governor of Sierra Leone from the Secretary of State at No 10 Downing Street, also gives us a clue and rather chillingly says :
“I consider the establishment of a regular intercourse between Africa and the West Indies, will tend greatly not only to the prosperity of the British West Indian Possessions, but likewise to the civilisation of Africa. A new epoch has arrived for the African race. We have in the West Indies, 800,000 negroes of whom perhaps three fourths are Christians in the enjoyment of the practical freedom of education, and of physical comfort to a very high degree. We have made in the last ten years a wonderful and successful experiment. But the consequences are yet to be developed and may far exceed the present good which has been effected, great and surprising as that may be.”
The Waterwitch Monument in Castle Gardens, St Helena
The West African Platoon operated out of St Helena for 27 years. In total, it seized 425 ships and brought them, the enslaved people, and the crew, to St Helena. The most active ship was the Waterwitch and there is a memorial in Jamestown to the crew (including three African crew members) who lost their lives doing this work. Typically a third of the Waterwitch crew was black. Navy ships intercepted slaving ships and rescued thousands of people. Some slaving ships carried the Brazilian or Portuguese flags. But many, when they saw the Navy approaching, disguised their ships’ nationalities, and/or threw slaves overboard. Some also set fire to the ships in attempts to destroy the evidence..
This is because Queen Victoria decreed that captains and crew should be tried at the Vice-Admiralty Court on St Helena - there were similar courts in Sierra Leone, Barbados and the Cape. Regular trials took place in Jamestown. And clearly there was a steady flow of business for the Court. The St Helena Gazette for 24 January 1846, recorded “There are at present no fewer than fifteen condemned slavers in this port. Two out of the above were full of slaves…. The first arriving on 25 December was a Brazilian schooner captured off of Palmerinho, having on board 547 slaves. The other arriving on the 11th, a brig, name and nation unknown, had 542 slaves on board,”
There were financial rewards too for the Commanders and crews of the West African Platoon. For example, in November 1843, the Commander and crew of HMS Espoir was awarded bounty of £2,000 (about £210,000 today) for the capture of slaves on board a Brazilian ship. It was split according to class, with the Commander receiving the lions’ share.
When they came ashore, St Helenians were employed at the depot to care for the rescued people and nursed many back to health. One report said ‘many died as they were in the act of being passed over the side of the ship’. When they were well enough, they were given the choice of going on to the West Indies as indentured labour; or going to the Cape Colony. From DNA analysis commissioned during my time as Governor we know that the people in these ships in fact set sail from Northern Angola and Gabon. No-one asked them if they would like to go back. A table below shows their destinations and ‘the manner of their disposal’.
A table showing destinations between 1840 and 1847
We also have a photograph of five ‘Liberated Africans’ who stayed and who were employed on the island. The photo was taken by Governor Colonel Galway. In the book he wrote in 1903 he tells us the taller man is called ‘Duke Wellington’ and the other, ‘Blinker’.
What of the 9,000 who were rescued but didn’t live to start their new ‘free’ lives? They were buried in shallow, unmarked, graves in two burial sites in Rupert's Valley, a quiet, dry valley full of industrial plant. Of these, the partial skeletons of 325 people were found during the island’s airport construction in 2008. About two thirds of those found were young adults, mainly men and boys. And about a third were children. Prior to their discovery, these people had lain virtually forgotten by St Helenians. But since their discovery, and particularly in the past few years, more and more people want to know about Britain’s role in the slave trade, for good or for bad. Of course this isn’t about offsetting, weighing scales, or a balance sheet. That doesn’t make sense. But the story of St Helena and the role of the West African Platoon, the Vice-Admiralty Court, the buried ‘liberated Africans’, and the St Helenians who saved their lives, can certainly perhaps contribute to that knowledge and understanding.