The merchants of Bristol were unofficially involved in the transatlantic slave trade at least 35 years earlier than previously thought, according to new research revealed by a University of Bristol historian.
And among those wealthy merchants sending ships from Bristol to West Africa, then onto the Caribbean and North America with enslaved people, then back with goods like sugar, was a Thomas Colston - a principle investor in one of the first ships.
According to Dr Richard Stone, from the University’s Department of History and Centre for Black Humanities, the new evidence is proof of something that was long suspected - that Bristol’s merchants were involved in the ‘triangular trade’ long before they were supposed to be.
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Bristol only officially entered the trade in enslaved Africans in the 1690s when the Royal Africa Company’s London-based monopoly was broken, and with that official sanction, the city quickly became the leading slave trade port in England in the first half of the 1700s.
But the new research from Dr Stone reveals that Bristol was involved in the capture, enslavement and transportation of African people right from the early days in the mid 1600s.
Merchants from Bristol starting plantations in the Caribbean at first used a range of people from the British Isles as their forced labour - everyone from prisoners of war from the conflicts in Ireland and Scotland, orphans and men, women and children from Bristol who couldn’t pay their debts, people convicted of petty theft or poaching or people forced out of their homes in the countryside by enclosure of farmland.
The rich merchants of Bristol and the rich plantation owners in the Caribbean quickly found there wasn’t enough of a supply of forced, or bonded, labour from Britain - because the survival rate was so low. So they gradually switched to buying enslaved people in west Africa instead.
Dr Stone’s evidence came from a Bristol customs account in 1662, where he noticed two ships, called the Endeavour and the Mary Fortune, that left Bristol carrying an unusual cargo to an unusual destination - the island of Sao Tome, off the west African coast - and a Thomas Colston was the principle investor in the Endeavour
“This immediately caught my attention, as I don’t normally see ships heading for a destination like that off the coast of Africa, and they also had some odd commodities on board like glass beads,” said Dr Stone. “So, I added a note saying, ‘slave trader?’, and went on with the transcription.
“Later that year, I was due to teach a class on Bristol’s slave trade, and I remembered about these two ships. I thought it would be interesting to show my students ‘a still in progress’ research finding, so I did a little bit more investigation of the voyages.”
Dr Stone tracked the ships’ return - they both arrived safely the following year, laden with cargoes of sugar and other goods that could only have come from the Caribbean.
“The presence of glass beads and Indian cloth amongst their cargoes, which are only ever seen on slave trafficking voyages, combined with the involvement of Thomas Colston left me convinced that I had found Bristol’s first recorded entry into the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans,” he said.
“The significance of this could easily be lost among the numbers. After all, we’re talking about a couple of voyages amongst hundreds which left Bristol every year at that point. But history is about human experience, not statistics and economic significance, and this is a window onto the story of thousands of lives lost,” he added.
Dr Stone, who specialises in Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, investigated further and found dozens more voyages like those two - where Bristol ships set off for West Africa laden with goods with which to trade, then returned with goods from the Caribbean. At the time, there was a monopoly with only royal permission for ships from London to trade in enslaved people in West Africa, so the middle part of these voyages would have been kept quiet.
“My best estimate is that Bristol sent out an average of two slave trafficking voyages a year over the 35 years between 1662 and 1698. Taking a conservative estimate of the number of enslaved people carried on each voyage, this would equate to more than 10,000 people taken from their lives in Africa to ones of enslavement in the Caribbean. That’s the equivalent of half of the population of Bristol at that time,” he said.
“So, without doubt, we have to push the story of Bristol’s involvement in this horrific business right back to the earliest days of English involvement and name the Colstons as amongst its pioneers,” he added.
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