Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
The county’s heroes and villains of the slave trade
Black Lives Matter protesters recently pulled down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and dumped it in Bristol Harbour - but Colston isn’t the first slaver to end up flying head first into the drink. Chris Hunter takes a look into Kent’s role in
One Mr Bowles from Deal beat Colston by some 368 years when he accidentally blew himself up near the coast of West Africa in 1652.
The details aren’t as clear as today’s reports of Colston’s fortunes, but records show the Bowles family of Deal, together with the Crispes of Thanet, were involved early on in the ignominious business of trading for human cargo in Africa. English involvement with the slave trade began through the Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa - known more famously as The Guinea Company.
It was the first company of its kind to trade in Africa and in 1628 the controlling stock holder was Nicholas Crispe.
By the 1650s the Bowles family were on board too - although not for long in the case of one of them.
In his book ‘The Forgotten Trade’, Nigel Tattersfield records how one of the family met a spectacular end on the Guinea Coast in 1652, quoting a contemporary account stating: “Mr Bowles, one of your factors (a trading agent) going up with a cargo to Baracunda (the English trade port on the Gambia River), was killed by an explosion of a powder chest on which he was sitting smoking a pipe of tobacco under the impression it was a gold chest.”
To conclude that Mr Bowles actually ended up in the sea like Colston’s statue is admittedly a bit of a leap, given the evidence, but we can be pretty certain bits of him did.
If that was a case of instant karma, sadly the same fate didn’t await all those who greased the wheels of the slave trade.
The ugly business soon became a cornerstone of the British economy and between 1640 and 1807 - when the slave trade was banned - it is estimated British ships transported 3.1 million Africans (of whom 2.7 million arrived) to the British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and elsewhere.
While the major ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol were the central hubs of the industry, Kent’s role was largely peripheral - but the county can hardly claim total innocence. Whether through benefitting indirectly or by actual involvement, Kentish companies, ships, sailors, and the population as a whole, had blood on their hands. As David Killingray notes in his essay Kent and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, ships like the
Peggy and Comet, built at Folkestone in 1783 and 1787, were both either engaged in transporting slaves or slave produced goods, while the Queen Esther, built in Gravesend in 1789 was also used for trade to the West Indies.
Because of its proximity to London, Gravesend was more involved than many towns. An account from as far back as 1677 records how the Royal Africa Company ship the Arthur set sail from Gravesend on December 5 that year and arrived on February 10 in New Calabar River in Nigeria to buy slaves to sell in Barbados. George Hingston, the company’s agent for the voyage, kept a journal which records how he traded with African kings to buy 348 slaves at a price of 36 copper bars for men and 30 copper bars for women. Before the ship had even set sail for Barbados on March 28, 19 of them had died, and by the end of the two-month voyage a total of 83 had perished. The same story would be repeated countless times over the following century. But even at the height of the slave trade, there were those fighting against it, and the people of Kent did their bit too.
In July 1770 the then mayor of Gravesend, William Harrison, played a role in the dramatic rescue of a former slave, Thomas Lewis - one of thousands of freed and escaped slaves living in London - who had been captured and chained to the mast of a ship bound for Jamaica.
“One dark night in 1770 this former slave was suddenly and brutally seized by his ex-master, Robert Stapylton, and two watermen hired for the job,” recounts Peter Fryer in his book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. “After a struggle they dragged him to a boat on the Thames, tied his legs with a cord, and tried to gag him with a stick. They rowed him to a ship bound for Jamaica and put him on board, to be sold a slave. Fortunately his cries were heard by some servants who knew him.” Thanks to those servants the news reached Granville Sharp, one of the first British campaigners for the abolition of the slave trade, and a writ of habeas corpus was obtained from the Mayor of Gravesend. Even so, with the ship already clear of Gravesend it was a race against time, and it was only thanks to an unfavourable wind that the kidnappers were caught off the Kent coast and Thomas was saved.
“The officer who served the writ on the captain saw Lewis in tears, chained to the mainmast,” adds Fryer, quoting Sharp’s own account. “The captain was furious, ‘but knowing the serious consequences of resisting the law of the land, he gave up his prisoner, whom the officer carried safe, but now crying for joy, to the shore.’” Ultimately, the mayor of Gravesend’s role in the emancipation of slaves from British ownership was a minor one, but the role of Kentish vicar - Rev James Ramsay of Teston - would be much more significant. A former surgeon with the Navy, in 1757 Ramsay’s ship the Arundel had intercepted a British slave ship, the Swift, on which the surgeon found over 100 slaves living in inhumane conditions, and the scenes of filth and degradation he encountered would have a lasting impact on him.
He went on to serve as a vicar and surgeon on the island of Saint Christopher, now Saint Kitts, and after seeing the conditions which slaves endured and the brutality of many planters, began to call for improved conditions.
But it would be to no avail. Exhausted from conflict with the slavers, Ramsay left St Kitts in 1777 and went on to become vicar of Teston and Nettlestead. And it was there that he became part of the group of influential opponents to slavery based at
Barham Court, where he was persuaded by them, in particular Lady Middleton, wife of Baron Charles Middleton, to publish his account of the horrors of slavery.
Barham Court became the centre for planning the abolition campaign, and despite coming under attack from pro slavery advocates, Ramsay stuck to his cause, meeting several times with William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, and on one occasion with William Wilberforce in 1783. Ramsay’s meeting with Thomas Clarkson in 1786 encouraged Clarkson’s efforts against slavery, which ultimately led to the formation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which helped push for the Slave Trade Act of 1807, ending the British trade in slaves. However, Kent’s campaign for abolition was poor in comparison to the north of England with just two boroughs, Maidstone and Folkestone, lobbying Parliament, according to Mr Killingray, who also notes Canterbury agreed to support the movement, but for some reason did not proceed with a petition. It would be another 26 years before the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished slavery in most British colonies, freeing more than 800,000 enslaved Africans.
But Ramsay had played his part in the struggle, helping to end the job a Kentish barrel of gunpowder had started nearly two centuries before.