[gentle music]
- Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
Every ship that carried Africans to the New World
for a life of involuntary servitude had a story.
And if we look at the story of one of those ships,
we'll quickly find ourselves tangled in a web
of merchants and slave traders and seafarers.
Where was the power in that situation?
Not necessarily with the monarchy,
as we'll find out.
With me is James Sweet,
Professor of History at the UW-Madison
and the author of Mutiny on the Black Prince,
published by Oxford University Press in 2025.
And welcome back to University Place Presents.
- James Sweet: Thanks for having me, Norman.
It's great to be here.
- You start out by giving us a lot of background
as to the world as it was in 1768,
when the story of the Black Prince unfolds,
and you start in Bristol,
the English port where there was a burgeoning slave trade,
merchants involved in this trade.
Not a very happy place for anybody
by the way you describe it.
- Well, I mean, for the merchants,
it's a pretty happy place.
These guys are doing a booming business, actually,
with the Americas,
but certainly for working people,
it is a miserable place.
And so, I do, I start the story in 1767, 1768,
on the eve of the launch of the Black Prince.
And what I try to do is juxtapose the lives of people
who would find themselves working on board the ship
with those who actually owned the ships.
What's a little confounding about this is that,
at least in the case of the Black Prince,
one of the owners had himself begun his career
actually working on slave ships
as a worker and had worked his way up.
So it's an interesting sort of bootstrap story.
The other owner happened to have been a man of great privilege,
a man named James La Roche,
who actually became a member of Parliament.
So these two guys co-own,
and they become sort of a perfect metaphor,
if you will, for the way that the slave trade worked
in the 18th century.
But Bristol, for sailors, was a truly miserable place,
especially in the year 1768.
It was a year that had a very difficult winter.
Crops failed, people were hungry.
You saw in the newspapers of the city,
rich, wealthy people extending, you know,
sort of these acts of noblesse oblige, giving,
you know, coals and giving small amounts of food.
But people who were paupers had to wear signs
of their indigency.
And in the, on Marsh Street,
which was the street that had most of the pubs
and public houses and places
where sailors and working people stayed,
it was not unusual for the proprietors
of these institutions to,
you know, get sailors into debt, to feed them lots of alcohol,
get them to stay in their quarters
without pay, and then get them deep into debt,
and then basically sell them off to slave traders
and put them into the trade.
In the summer of 1768,
because of the misery that had been suffered,
you know, across the city and elsewhere across England,
you do see sailors start to take, or revenge themselves,
and they do this in a number of ways.
In some cases, they attack each other
on places like Marsh Street in these bars and pubs.
They attack houses of ill repute.
They end up themselves eventually, actually,
though, joining together with other sailors
across Great Britain, and they strike
for the first time, which is--
- Interesting you say too that the word, very word strike
comes from those labor actions of the sailors.
- This is what historians have found.
I mean, the word strike itself
comes from the act of striking the sails.
So the idea of drawing the sails down
so that the ships can't move.
And the first sign we see of this
in 1768 is in the northern part of England
in Sunderland, and it quickly spreads
to London, to places like Bristol.
It's interesting though, Bristol had been a sort of hub,
if you will, of the slave trade for many, many years,
and it continued to be in the 1760s.
But by this time, it had been supplanted by Liverpool.
But Bristol still provided large numbers of lead works,
and copper and pewter and glass and other trade goods
that they traded with Africa.
And then those trade goods went to the Caribbean
and to North America.
There was a very vibrant trade actually, in pottery and things
like that to North America as well.
So this, you know,
Bristol was still an important trade hub
for England during this time.
And so, when the strike of 1768 spread to Bristol,
the merchants very quickly tried to negotiate
with their sailing men and put an end to it fairly quickly.
Interestingly, in Bristol.
In other places like London,
the strike actually became quite violent
and lasted deep into the summer of 1768.
So this was a period of upheaval, if you will,
across England and also in Bristol itself.
- What kind of men were the captains,
if you can characterize them?
And what kind of men were the sailors?
- Great question.
So the captains tended to be men
who had worked their way up.
Many of them had, in terms of their backgrounds,
had pretty humble backgrounds.
They came oftentimes from either,
they'd either grown up in the sailing trades.
Their parents might.
Their fathers, for example,
might have been men who worked on board ships,
or they were in the ropeways, or they did a variety.
They could have been coopers.
They could have done just about anything,
actually, that was involved in the trade.
Others came from rural areas, though,
and, you know, joined the crews of ships
and then worked their ways up from the times
that they were young boys.
And it's important to note
that, like, there are not a small number of young boys
who are involved in shipping during this time,
and they work their ways up, from the bottom up.
In terms of the sailors themselves, the sailors,
generally speaking, were working people.
These were, you know,
these were not jobs that people sought.
In fact, there's, I use an analogy in the book
that was repeated time and again that,
you know, it was probably better to be in jail
than to be on board a ship because at least in jail,
you couldn't drown, so... [Norman chuckles]
- Maybe a little bit less likely to experience some
of the abuse that you could
if you had the wrong kind of captain.
And what about some of these captains?
- Well, the sort of personalities
of the captains ran the gamut.
I think the stereotype is of brutality.
And I think that that stereotype, you know,
as a rule holds.
There were ship captains who understood,
you know, vis-a-vis their merchant bosses oftentimes,
that this was a business, and that the best way
to run the business was to balance
the sort of chaos and madness of the slave trade
with sort of a firmness that allowed
for the business to unfold.
But then there were captains who themselves were,
they were just, they were psychopaths.
They were brutal, they were drunk,
they were high.
They saw their underlings as essentially extensions
of the enslaved Africans on the coast of Africa,
and they abused them as such.
Sometimes, I mean, you know,
in reading between the lines of some of these things,
I sometimes think
that the slave ship captains actually abused
the weakest members of their crews
almost as examples to the slaves to show
how brutal they could be.
- What kind of ships are we talking about?
Were they specialized for carrying slaves?
- In some cases, yes.
In other cases, no.
In the case of no,
ships would sometimes be refit for the slave trade.
The image that we're looking at here
is an image of a ship like the Black Prince.
It's not the Black Prince, but it's a,
it's a three-masted frigate much like the Black Prince.
And what's important to notice here is that,
and it's very hard to see probably,
but just under the middle, middle mast,
you can see in that first row that is actually
where the enslaved Africans were kept
in very small quarters.
I mean, the one on the left is probably the size
of a large bedroom.
The one on the right is the size
of a very large living room or den.
So if you're thinking, you know, like maybe 800 square feet.
And that compart-- those two compartments together
were meant to hold 800 enslaved people.
Whereas you see the rest of the ship is burdened with cannons
because the ships were oftentimes
ships of war as well.
I mean, as many folks know, the 18th century
Atlantic world was rife with conflict.
And so it was not unusual,
particularly during the Seven Years' War, for example,
for English and French ships to be battling one another
and to be taking them as booty, if you will,
and taking the goods that were on board
and selling them off and making a profit.
So these were warships as well as they were slave ships.
- The slaves obviously were very valuable.
- Mm-hmm.
- How well cared for were they
on these slave ships of 400 of them
were packed into such a small space?
- I mean, I think the question kind of speaks for itself.
Not necessarily, not well, not well kept at all.
In fact, I think if you look on the
left-hand side of this image,
you can see that the overhead carriage, there was none.
And basically, you had three feet of space.
The analogy that people talk about is that the enslaved,
each individual was sort of like a spoon, right?
Spooning to the next person.
And, you know, these are, these compartments
where the enslaved were kept were putrid places.
Many people had diseases or contracted diseases,
oftentimes ones that were waterborne diseases.
So things like cholera,
and when people would get those diseases,
they're diarrheic diseases.
And so, people's filth and their waste
were all in these compartments.
And so, disease spread very quickly.
These were incredibly hot spaces because,
as you can imagine,
crossing the Atlantic during the summertime
on a wooden deck just below.
It's basically like being in an oven, you know?
- Constantly rolling. - Yes, exactly, the seasickness.
That's another aspect of this, right?
So, you know, unbeknownst for most of these folks,
they wouldn't know whether they were seasick
'cause they'd never been on ships like these.
But, you know, if you're seasick
and you vomit, you throw up, then where does it go?
You're sitting right next to the person, so you get--
I mean, I don't want to present
too stark an image here,
but stark, I think, is the right word.
And so, yeah, the hold
where the enslaved were kept was a very sort of--
And it was a very separate place.
The enslaved would come out usually once a day
to have the hold cleaned by the crew.
It was also an opportunity for them to get out and stretch,
to eat and so on.
But this was the rhythm of the slave ship
was to keep them below decks,
to try to protect the integrity of the individuals
as best as possible.
But the death toll was quite high.
And, you know, in some of these ships,
they arrived in the Americas
with only a handful of the enslaved Africans
that they left the coast with.
As a general rule in the 18th century,
we're talking about 15% to 20% mortality during that.
- That sounds, to put it in crass terms, very inefficient.
- It is on some level,
except that the profit margins were quite high.
So as a lot of merchants in England
liked to think about it, the slave trade was a lottery.
And so, there was a lot of risk involved.
Yes, you could incur great losses,
but there were, the successful voyages were also subject
to incredible returns, so...
- And as we look at the routes from Africa
to the New World, what were the perils?
What were the snares along that route?
- James: In the case of the Black Prince,
the voyage of the Black Prince begins in December 1768,
and the normal journey for this particular ship
would have taken it from the port in Bristol,
and it was on its way to a port called Old Calabar,
which you can see on the map
is what today is Biafra region of Nigeria in West Africa.
What made Old Calabar in particular
a dangerous port was, there are a couple of things.
One was it was about 40 miles into the interior,
which when one thinks of a port,
one doesn't necessarily think of going upriver
for long periods of time.
But in this case,
one had to pass through a series of sandbars.
So you needed to have some expertise in navigation.
But then, once you got into the interior,
you're kind of trapped.
So the ship itself was 40 miles inland on a river
and sort of subject
to the vagaries of trade in the interior.
And if trade was slow,
they would sit on the river for many, many months at a time.
People would die of disease and so on.
So it was difficult.
But then, once you gathered enough slaves
and were able to get into the middle passage,
things were usually, I mean, this was a,
this sort of triangular trade was, you know,
hundreds of ships did this.
Thousands of ships did this over the course
of the 400-year history of the slave trade.
So from there, the ship was on its way to Antigua
in the Caribbean.
And then eventually, it would have gone back to England.
In the case of the Black Prince,
the ship actually never made its way to Calabar, though.
It actually, the mutiny took place on board the ship
on the eve of its arrival into Nigeria.
And what happened was it was, basically, one evening
on board the ship, the first lieutenant was simply walking
across the deck, and one of the sailors wheeled past him,
turned on him, pulled a wooden club
out of his breast pocket,
and just hammered the first officer in the back of the head,
unbeknownst, and he just collapsed to the deck.
As soon as he did this, other crew members joined in
and subdued all of the officers on board.
There were roughly a dozen officers, and tied them up.
And then they made a decision to,
all the rest of the sailors,
they voted and decided that the best thing to do
was to throw the crew,
the captain and his officers overboard.
They decided not to do that.
Instead, they put them in a longboat
and just set them out to sea, where presumably they died.
- Was done occasionally.
I mean, although, you know, for Captain Bligh on the Bounty,
he went, what, 3,000 miles in that longboat
and came back to wreak vengeance.
- And survived, exactly.
So, I mean, there are these stories of remarkable survival
when-- and the crew members would not have been
unaware of those things.
In some ways, the crew members
were quite savvy because the crew was trying,
or the captain was trying to negotiate with them.
In fact, he asked to be put on land somewhere,
wherever they wanted.
He didn't care, he's like, "Just give us some mercy."
So they sort of negotiated.
Instead of just throwing them overboard,
he said, "Okay, we'll put you in the longboat."
- Well, you can say, "We're leaving it up to God
to judge you." - Precisely.
And that's kind of the way they looked at it.
That's exactly right.
So once they're rid of the officers,
they're in charge of the ship,
and they're still on the African side of the Atlantic.
So they elect, they vote amongst themselves
to change the name of the ship from Black Prince to Liberty.
This is, as I mentioned earlier,
sort of in a revolutionary moment, and--
- Right before the American Revolution.
Also, you know, happening in the wake of this series of strikes
by sailors in England.
So there are free speech cases that are going on in England
that are really agitating people.
There's a lot going on.
So the sailors moved to name the ship Liberty.
As you know, I think we could see it as part
of a political ideology, right?
But then they go into the captain's quarters,
they take all of his clothes.
They actually, they literally wear his clothes
as an expression of sort of their new--
- Symbolism. - Symbolism, exactly.
And then they voted to sail for Brazil.
Now, you may ask, "Why Brazil?"
- I want to back up first-- - Sure, please, yeah.
- And ask a question.
Well, two questions.
One is, before we get to Old Calabar,
was this a place of some particular dread
then for sailors?
Is that what precipitated the mutiny on the eve
of their arrival there? - Great question.
There are a series of factors.
This is a question that I was asking myself
as I'm writing the book is,
you know, what's the motivation behind this mutiny?
There were very few, interestingly,
there were very few crew mutinies
during the era of the slave trade,
particularly in the Anglophone world, very few.
And as a juxtaposition,
there were quite a few mutinies of sailors
on board British naval vessels, for example.
So it's an interesting sort of, you would think--
- It would be the other way.
- Yeah, it would be the other way.
But that was not the case.
And so, you know,
one does have to dig deep into what the motivations are
of these sailors, beyond the sort of
revolutionary consciousness
that might be growing and their poor treatment generally.
Another big factor, and it follows on your question,
is that just less than a year prior, in 1767
in Calabar, a British merchant, a man named Ambrose Lace,
who was a slave trader from Liverpool,
arrived into Old Calabar with several other ships,
most of them from Bristol.
And they, what they found there were two rival factions
that were vying for control of the slave trade.
This was, these were, like, economically powerful groups.
The sort of analogy I like to use is like they were
sort of like mafia, you know, groups.
And basically, the English sided with one
of these rival factions against the other.
And they performed, they sort of,
they brought them together
to have what supposedly was a meeting
to sort out their differences.
And rather than see that meeting to its end,
the British joined with one faction
in attacking the other group.
And eventually, in the warfare that followed,
they killed, in that first 24 hours,
they killed 300 of this group's traders
and basically hijacked the trade.
And what followed over the course
of the next year and a half
to two years was a very virulent form of warfare
that really spread to the entire Atlantic world.
Any British, something on the course of like six
or seven ships that came in the aftermath
in the first few months were attacked either onshore
or offshore by some of these rival factions.
In other words, British ships were not able
to trade in the immediate aftermath
in the untrammeled ways that they had before.
So, Calabar was a dangerous place for all sorts of reasons.
And from the sailors' perspective,
they didn't wanna go there at this juncture.
- They could also, I gather,
be stuck there for a long period of time
for either business reasons
or having to do with the ship or the wind
or whatever it might be. - James: Right.
- Which would be even more dangerous.
- Of course, yeah.
I mean, so the longer you're sitting there,
I mean, during this time of warfare,
the trade itself was interrupted.
So there were a number of ships that stayed in, 40 miles inland,
sitting on the river for months at a time.
And as I say in the book, you know, this isn't--
I mean, this is dying time for not just the enslaved
that are brought on board the ship
who have to wait before the departure,
but also for the crew.
So the crew is dying of a number of diseases,
and it's not at all unusual
for these British slave ships to lose the majority
even of their crews while they're sitting in the river.
So yes, there were lots of good reasons why
the sailors had for performing this mutiny.
They sort of stacked up over the course of 1767 and '68.
- Before we pull out of Africa, though.
- Yeah, sure.
- I'm intrigued by the relationship between the British
and those slave-trading families or entities.
They actually knew each other well.
They corresponded and had, I suppose,
some members in common, even. - Yes.
So there had been a very long-standing, since,
going as far back as the late 17th century
of building of relationships
between these merchant factions, and interestingly,
the Bristol and Liverpool factions.
So in a way, the factions in Africa
reflected the factions in...
So the Bristol traders were more aligned with the traders
at so-called Old Town.
And then the Liverpool traders were aligned
with sort of the upstarts.
And the Liverpool, Liverpudlians themselves
were upstarts in the slave trade.
So it made sense that they would ally themselves
with these so-called New Town traders, right?
So, what ends up happening is that the,
you know, the forging of these different alliances
ultimately mean that there's lots of shared understanding.
And the trade itself passes generation to generation.
So, for example, the slave ship captains
of the earlier generation
in the 18th century passed their knowledge on
to men like John Fowler, for example,
who was one of the owners of the Black Prince,
or to James La Roche.
In fact, James La Roche's uncle
had been a trader in a previous,
in the previous generation of enslaved people in Calabar
and knew those traders.
So he passed the knowledge on to his nephew,
and they wrote letters back and forth,
as you mentioned.
They asked after one another's relations.
They knew, and some of the traders themselves
went to England for education.
Yes, they did have children.
The traders, when they were in Calabar,
would have children with the women there.
So there were actual family relationships
that tied these networks together.
- Why Brazil? - Why Brazil?
That's a fascinating question that I wrestled with.
There was this old pirate tradition,
and there were the writings
about the sort of exploits of Black Bart.
In the earlier part of the 18th century,
Black Bart had actually attacked
a Portuguese convoy,
a royal convoy that was taking large amounts of treasure
and goods back to Portugal from Brazil.
And, you know, the idea was
that the British could become fabulously wealthy
and that the Portuguese in Brazil were kind of lazy
and feckless, and they were an easy target.
- So they're becoming pirates? - That's what the...
That's what the British would call them.
They would say that they pirated the ship,
that they, you know, that the mutiny itself
was an act of piracy.
And it is true that once they turned pirate,
as it were, that as they made their way across the Atlantic,
the new captain of the ship--
And by the way, these guys elected a new set of officers,
which is really interesting on this, basically.
- Very democratic.
- Very democratic of them, but also not very creative
because they just basically replicated
the same sort of hierarchy that they just toppled, right?
So, but this is the source of what becomes
some dispute among them.
But before we get to that, the idea was to try
to take over other ships as they crossed the Atlantic
and to pirate and to build wealth.
They were not very successful at it.
- In the meantime, they don't have these
400 slaves on board anyway? - James: No, no.
So they have no source of wealth.
They have to create their own if that's what they're going to do.
And the idea is to go to Brazil and to try to,
you know, see if they can make a go of it there.
And they arrive on the coast of Brazil
in a place called Ceará in the northern part of Brazil,
just sort of in the equatorial regions.
And there, they find--
they posture as the old captain and officers,
and they need a translator.
So in negotiations with the Portuguese,
they find that, you know,
because the vast majority of them are Brits.
They're English, Scots, Irish.
There are a few other Europeans.
There are Danes, there's one mixed race "mulatto" man.
And then there's this individual,
a man named Phillip Thompson,
who is described as a Black man, a man from Africa.
And it turns out that Phillip Thompson is actually a man
from a little island called Annobón
in the equatorial regions of Africa.
And Thompson is the key to the crew's survival
while they're in the northern part of Brazil, in Ceará.
So Thompson understands Portuguese marginally.
In Annobón, they speak a language
that's called Fá d'Ambô,
which is basically, that's a sort of
shortened creolized version of Fala de Ano-Bom.
It's basically the language of Annobón,
is basically what it's sort of a shortened version of that.
So he understands fragmentary Portuguese,
and he negotiates with the Portuguese--
the Brazilians, the Portuguese Brazilians to fit the ship.
He tells them that the ship has been caught in a storm,
that they need provisions, they need water, they need wood.
And so, the Brazilians bring those things for them.
And he's the key to their survival there.
While he's there, he actually gives his testimony,
along with eight or nine others of the sailors on board
who had committed the mutiny, just to remind you.
They performed this mutiny.
And he signs his name beautifully here,
as you can see, Phillip Thompson,
once he's actually given his deposition.
So this was a man who was born and raised in this tiny island
off the west coast of Africa.
He was probably involved in the slave trade himself
and jumped on board a British vessel
probably in the slave trade.
Eventually goes back to England, learns English,
learns how to read and write,
and then succeeds in becoming a crew member
on one of these British ships.
It's a remarkable sort of microstory
inside the larger story of this mutiny.
- Well, they're over here in Brazil.
Who's deposing them?
- So it's the Portuguese governor and his officials.
So they're soldiers, and there are
colonial government officials of the Portuguese.
- So you can't just, like, beach a ship on the coast of Brazil
and then, no questions asked. - Run roughshod, no, not at all.
In fact, there were protocols
that the Portuguese crown required
of any ship that arrived.
And in fact, this was not uncommon.
There ships that came
from the Spanish, from the Dutch,
from the French that would wash up
on northeastern Brazilian shores fairly commonly, actually,
because storms threw them there or because they get caught in,
you know, what sailors call the doldrums
in the equatorial regions.
And they just sort of labor
until they land in northeast Brazil.
So there were a set of protocols to make sure, A,
that these foreign ships would not,
that they weren't hostile, and B,
that they wouldn't engage in illegal trade
while they were there.
So that was...
- What, however, did the English think about all this then?
Here you have this mutiny on an English ship.
It's hijacked all the way to Brazil.
They find out about it.
They've been known to have a very long arm of the law.
- Right.
So one little wrinkle before we leave Brazil.
When they're in Brazil, the crew itself disintegrates
into this kind of violent mob.
And when that happens, there is a group
that's on board the ship at anchor in the bay
at Fortaleza, and they cut the line to the anchor,
they fire cannon shot into Brazil,
and they leave behind 11 men.
So by this time, the Black Prince is a depleted,
very depleted crew of sailors
who are not very adept at sailing.
And they find their way into the Caribbean.
And so, they've left behind 11 guys in Brazil now,
and they go into the Caribbean.
They lose other crew members there.
They land at a place called Crab Island,
which today is Vieques, which is part of Puerto Rico.
They left, like, 10 men there.
And eventually, the ship wrecks,
actually, on the coast of Hispaniola,
the southern coast of Hispaniola,
basically at the border of what today is
the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
As soon as that happens, the members,
the remaining members on board the ship,
they scatter all across the Atlantic world.
And it's only some months later--
Well, before that, there's a Jamaican ship
that actually finds the remains
of the Black Prince on the shoals.
In other words, the ship, by this time,
it had fallen apart on the rocks
of southern Hispaniola.
And these Jamaicans, British Jamaicans land
and try to sift through the wreckage.
And they find, all they find is a diary from a man
who claimed he was a doctor on board the ship,
but he names the ship the Black Prince.
And so, that news is then spread back to England.
At about the same time, the men who had been
left behind in Brazil arrive in Portugal,
and one of them goes to the British consul
and explains what happened on board the ship with the mutiny.
- Was this a kind of proactive way of avoiding prosecution?
- That was the idea, that he was seeking,
he was seeking a royal pardon in order to sort of spill his guts
and tell the story of his comrades,
some of whom were even with him still.
So there were five men who went to Portugal,
into Lisbon, and one of them was a guy
who sort of sold out his comrades.
So by this time, the owners back in Bristol
come to the news of what happened with their ship,
and they spare no expense in trying to find the mutineers.
When this public warrant that you see up here
is one example of one of the ways in which they did this.
They sent this exact same warrant out
across the English-speaking world.
So this same notice that explains or describes the mutiny
and then names each of the figures who was involved in it
and where they were last seen.
It has their names, a physical description of them,
their rough ages, and where they were last seen.
And these appear all across North America
in cities like Boston and New York and Charleston
and Savannah, also in places like Jamaica,
and across the British Caribbean,
and as well as in England.
So these things, the news of this circulates very quickly.
- But some time has passed since the ship foundered.
These men, as you say, scattered.
Week follows week, month follows month.
Is there any retribution
from English law? - Absolutely.
So a couple--
So just to sort of fill in the gaps of the timing here.
So the ship leaves Bristol in 1768.
The wreck is found in Hispaniola by the Jamaicans
in April of 1769.
But it's really not until the summer of 1769
that the-- And this is an illustration
of news moves very slowly.
It's not like our day
where everything moves instantaneously.
So it's like-- - Like an, "Oh by the way."
- Yeah, yeah, exactly, it moves very slowly.
It's just grinding, right?
So, but that being said,
the owners still were able to, through the newspapers
and, you know, because they were able to get
the surveillance powers of the Crown
as well as just everyday people,
they were able to round up these individuals
from the different parts of,
that they had run to in places like Boston, in places
like New York, in places like Hispaniola,
and even as far as South America.
And even one other one was in Africa.
- So they're bringing them all back to England?
- They're bringing them back.
And this is a moment, Norman,
that a lot of people don't understand.
I mean, they think of this period in this, you know,
in the late 18th century
as a period of revolutionary change.
And while that's absolutely true politically
and ideologically,
there is this, what I call sort of a shadow revolution
that accompanies this.
England executed more people between the American Revolution
and the French Revolution
than at any other time in its history.
- Just in the course of 20 years?
- Exactly, and the reason for this is
because they put new laws on the books
that made crimes against property punishable by death.
So there were hundreds and hundreds of men
who were hung because of, you know,
simple, what I would call simple crimes,
like, you know, larceny.
You know, crimes even against property,
like blowing up bridges, for example,
or ruining a road or...
And ships obviously factored into this.
So stealing a ship was considered,
it was a capital crime.
It wasn't, and interestingly,
the men who were eventually prosecuted,
there were two who were hung as a result
of what happened on the Black Prince.
And they were hung not because of the murders
that occurred on board the ship,
but rather because they stole John Fowler's ship.
- Property was more important than the human lives.
- Property was more important than human lives.
- Was there a lobby of some kind in England
that put the pressure on the Parliament
to change these laws
so that property crimes were capital crimes?
- Yeah.
So this is merchant pressure coming to bear
in this revolutionary period.
And it manifested itself in a variety of ways.
I look particularly through the prism
of the owners of the Black Prince
and particularly through John Fowler,
who, as I mentioned earlier, himself had been,
had worked his way up on a slave ship.
So he knew intimately how these things worked.
But once he became a wealthy merchant,
even at the local level,
he lobbies his city council
to put up street lamps to protect his interests
because people are robbing his stores
along the port in Bristol.
He leans on the Crown in order
to put forth these warrants for the arrests.
There are communications
between the secretary of state and governors
all up and down the North American coast
and in the Caribbean about the sightings
of particular individuals.
So there's a surveillance aspect to this.
There is the emergence in London,
for example, of the Bow Street Runners,
which is sort of the precursor to investigative policing.
And John Fowler takes advantage of this.
He goes to London, he swears out a warrant
against all these mutineers,
and some of them have been sighted in London.
So he goes to Fielder,
who is the founder of the Bow Street Runners, offers a reward.
And there's another warrant that's put out
that actually tries to find one of the mutineers
and lists his mother's address in the newspaper
to try to find him. - His mom?
- Yes, exactly.
So there were all sorts of ways.
And then, with the men who were left over in Portugal,
this eventually evolved into a diplomatic dispute
that ran on for eight years
after the Black Prince wrecked, all the way until 1776.
So through the American Revolution.
- As a matter of extradition or what?
- As a matter of extradition, exactly.
So the Portuguese initially wanted to--
Once they learned that these were pirates,
they wanted to prosecute them for what they perceived
to be crimes against Portugal.
In other words, the men who fired cannon shot into Brazil.
They were conflating these things,
not realizing that they were different people, right?
But once they came to the realization
of what had happened, they withdrew
their attempts to prosecute.
But they would not extradite.
Rather, they insisted that these British subjects
be tried before what was called...
There was basically a British arm
of the Portuguese judicial system that operated there.
This was called a British judge conservator.
It turned out that the judge conservator
was a Portuguese jurist who was paid by British merchants
to preside over courts in Lisbon
and in other Portuguese cities.
- Interesting legal situation.
- Well, it was a symptom
of British dominance over the Portuguese
economically and politically.
And the Portuguese bristled under this kind of arrangement.
And they insisted that they did not want
for this trial to take place
in Portugal under these conditions.
They wanted the mutineers to be sent back,
to be tried, and hung.
But what ended up happening
is that the Portuguese eventually won
the diplomatic argument.
And by the way, during all of this,
these, it's the merchants themselves.
John Fowler from Bristol, as the sort of merchant king.
I failed to mention earlier.
John Fowler eventually becomes
the second-largest slave trader in Bristol in the 18th century,
only behind the uncle of James La Roche,
who was his partner,
and James La Roche becomes a member of Parliament.
So together, they're able to lobby two different aspects
of sort of British society.
One is the political aspect.
So La Roche has the ear of the king
and the secretary of state and so on.
Meanwhile, Fowler has the ear of groups
like the Merchant Venturers, who are a Bristol...
The analogy I use in the book
is it's kind of like a chamber of commerce,
but with a lot more political power.
I mean, not nearly as salutary
as I think we normally associate with the chamber of commerce.
But they're a group of businessmen
organized around merchant trade.
And Fowler actually depends or leans on them for,
like, helping him collect reward money to try
to capture some of these guys.
- Powerful as these merchants are,
is there any kind of a push in British politics at this point,
1770 and so on, to outlaw slavery,
which ultimately happens?
- So there, you're starting to get
voices of opposition to the slave trade
in the second half of the 18th century.
But they're in the wilderness
at this point in the late 1760s and early 1770s.
By the time that John Fowler finally finishes his career
in the 1780s and 1790s,
you start to have that real abolitionist movement,
the one that people are more familiar with,
the Wilberforces and so on.
But that is slow in the making.
And at this juncture, it's, there isn't much of that
other than outside of a few sort of pockets
like the Quakers and people like that, right?
- I have to wonder if some of the stories seeping back
from these slave ships, though, didn't help
to precipitate some of that anti-slavery movement.
- Without a doubt.
The brutality of the ships themselves, the treatment.
I mean, one of the things we've left out of this conversation
so far, obviously, is the treatment of enslaved Africans.
You know, Fowler was responsible, by himself,
for tens of thousands of enslaved Africans
going to the Americas
during the 20-year period of his career as a merchant.
And, you know, each of those ends up in different parts
of the Caribbean, and some of them go to North America.
Their individual experiences are--
because the Black Prince never actually takes on the enslaved,
this is mostly the story of the sailors
and of the merchants.
But this was a system that was corrosive for everyone.
And I think that's the, that's one of the key transitions
I try to make after I discuss the mutiny
and sort of its immediate aftermath
and this sort of corporate conspiracy
that brings the traders together,
along with the Crown,
to try to control particularly the judiciary.
The other story here is that the way
in which the sort of sinews
of labor and capital and workers
and enslaved and merchants all come together.
And even for people who weren't directly involved in the trade,
a place like Bristol, it was very hard to avoid
some kind of connection to the trade.
People who were in the manufacturers,
they were manufacturing for the slave trade.
People who were in manual labor were doing manual labor.
If you were making ropes, you were making them for ships
that were gonna be involved in.
It's just, it goes on and on and compounds.
If you were a banker, you were providing loans.
If you were an insurer, so it goes...
- Everybody was complicit.
- Everybody was complicit on some level.
I mean, it's hard to avoid it.
- As long as we're back in Bristol.
The crew of the Black Prince, the mutineers then,
two of them were hanged.
Who were they?
And you mentioned their crimes. - Right.
So, and this is kind of complicated.
So one of them was a man named John Schulz.
John Schulz was a Dane.
His case is an interesting one,
because he survives a crazy gauntlet
in order to be able to arrive back into England.
He ends up in Newgate Prison in London,
and is eventually hanged in London.
But he is, after the mutiny,
he flees into the Atlantic.
He continues working on ships.
He's actually tracked down in Suriname, of all places.
There were people who saw him on a ship
that was going to Suriname.
This was confirmed.
The captain brought him back to New York.
He went from New York to--
I'm sorry, to Boston and from Boston to London.
There in London, he was put in jail.
He survived all of these travels,
which is remarkable 'cause once these guys were arrested,
they were basically treated themselves like lesser than--
I mean, they were treated like slaves, essentially.
They were put in chains and put below decks
and fed sparingly.
So the fact that he survived.
There were others that I talk about in the book
who were arrested but never made it actually to trial,
so they never actually were hung.
The other person who was hung was a man named George Geary.
And Geary is an interesting case, because he didn't--
he ultimately didn't hang for the crime
he committed on the Black Prince,
but rather on an act of piracy
that he committed earlier in England.
He was from Hastings, and he committed some--
He attacked ships with a group of men
in the English Channel prior to his--
In fact, he was a criminal.
He was on the run from--
He was a fugitive from justice when he joined
the Black Prince crew, which was not unusual.
In fact, there were nearly a half dozen crew members
who tried to get on the Black Prince
who had criminal records or were put in jail
before they actually made it on the Black Prince.
- Probably not unheard of today.
- Yeah, exactly. [both laugh]
- What about the rest of the crew, apprehended?
- So several of them die in custody,
as I mentioned,
but the vast majority of them actually get away.
The ones who are hung, there are interesting stories
about those who end up being hung.
There is a special sort of ritual
that was-- that's the best way
to call it, that was preserved or reserved for piracy.
And the sort of execution dock
which was actually on the River Thames.
And what would happen was at low tide,
they would perform the hanging.
And you see all of these people gathered around.
Thousands and thousands of people would come
for these public executions, and all the pirates
would be hung, and their bodies,
they would be put out at low tide
so that then three high tides,
the rope was a rope that allowed them
so that the tides would come in over their bodies
and wash over them three times
before then they were taken down.
And normally, their bodies were,
they were put into these sort of metal--
They were put in chains, like metal contraptions
and then hung by gibbets in various places,
either along the river or in the cities from whence they came.
And basically, their bodies were allowed to rot
as public examples to anyone
who might want to perform similar acts of piracy.
So this was public spectacle.
People would come out and watch.
In the case of, I believe it was Geary,
when Geary was hung, if you can see here
along the right-hand side of this image,
there's a wall where people are sort of gathered.
The wall actually collapsed at the hanging of Geary,
and a number of people were injured.
I think maybe even one man died.
So it just gives you an idea of sort of the nature
of this public spectacle and the way that people
sort of just consumed it.
- To get a little further into it,
because there obviously was a strong...
We'll say, for better,
want of a better word at this point,
a religious component to this kind of death, too.
If you tried to commit suicide before you were hanged,
that was particularly frowned upon.
- Yes, so I talk about a case,
an earlier case of a sailor
on board a ship of John Fowler's, interestingly,
where there was...
Fowler was unusual because, as I mentioned earlier,
there were very few mutinies on board slave ships,
but he had at least two ships where this happened.
In the earlier one, the man who was directly,
like, the ringleader of this mutiny
ends up in New York.
And just on the eve of his scheduled hanging in New York,
he hangs himself by the very small rope
that was tied around his waist to keep his pants up.
Basically a belt, but it was basically a piece of cloth.
And he took it and he put it on the bars of the cell
and hung himself.
So the day before,
the evening before he was meant to be hung in the morning,
British soldiers arrive at the cell,
they find him, and there was a peculiar burial
that was preserved for people who committed suicide
who were felons.
And that was, they were buried in a pauper's grave somewhere,
and they had a stake put through their, basically--
Like, their body is put down
and a stake is put through their chest.
And in this case, in the case of this particular individual,
a sign was put on the stake that was driven through his chest,
and it was put along a roadway between New York and Boston
where everyone could see it.
And the sign basically read, you know,
beware of becoming a pirate or a highwayman.
You can't commit crimes against property,
or this is what will happen to you.
- I suppose minor in the scheme
of things of the slave trade.
But were there other commodities
that were also profitable in this route?
- Oh, yes, of course.
So, I mean, primarily, people forget.
I mean, we talk about the slave trade,
but slaves are being traded for goods, right,
once they arrive in the Americas.
So obviously tobacco and sugar.
I think people are familiar with those.
But even from Africa, there are important goods,
particularly ivory.
So tusks they were sometimes called.
So ivory is really important.
Some cloths, particular kinds of African cloths
became commodified and important
in the sort of larger Atlantic world.
So there were, you know, other--
Later on, palm oil, different kinds
of food goods, foodstuffs, things like that.
So yes, there were other goods
that were traded back and forth.
And the Africans themselves, African merchant traders,
you know, really sought out luxury goods
from their merchant partners in England.
Things like silk clothing, and particular kinds
of hats and umbrellas and things
that we think of as mundane, perhaps, clocks.
But also cannons and things, things that are more practical
for warfare, for example.
So, yeah, there were all sorts of goods
that flowed back and forth.
- What do you see as the legacy of the Black Prince,
the mutiny, the Liberty, and the aftermath?
- Yeah.
So as I mentioned earlier,
I think there are two big legacies.
One I've already mentioned,
and that is sort of this, this sort of
what I call this corporate state conspiracy
that emerges in what's supposedly,
or shadow revolution,
if you will, that happens during the revolutionary period.
I think that one legacy of that
is that the sort of manipulation of the state
by corporate interests is something
that continues in ways that are oftentimes hidden.
- We think of that as a very recent phenomenon, I suppose.
- We do, and we think of-- I mean, it's ironic, Norman.
When I was writing this book, you know,
all of, like, we had the emergence of these kinds
of questions about sort of corporate state capture,
both, you know, in our own country with first
a Supreme Court ruling that said that businesses are like people.
- Yeah, that's true. - And then later
with powerful people in political positions
who themselves are corporate entities, right?
So, but yes, this has been going on for many, many years.
And it traces, it has at least its origins going back
to the slave trade.
And slave traders were, you know, were eminent figures
in making these kinds of manipulations.
So, I try to trace those out.
The second, I think, big legacy is, you know,
Bristol was an interesting space,
because in the contemporary period
in the last 25 years,
a lot of attention has been placed on the British crown.
And you mentioned this in your introduction
that the monarchy oftentimes gets the blame
and figures who are attached to the monarchy.
One of them is a man named Edward Colston,
who we'll talk about in just a second.
But, you know, the sort of focus on the monarchy,
the focus on figures like Colston,
I think, has drawn attention away
from everyday figures like John Fowler
who nobody really knew much about until recently.
And so, what I try to do is I trace the money.
Fowler dies an extraordinarily wealthy man,
even though he was born into humble circumstances.
He dies the equivalent of a multimillionaire.
I suggest that he's worth about $18 or $19 million on his death
in contemporary money.
He has six children.
He leaves them all millionaires.
And then what I do is I trace generationally what happens
because this is an important question,
you know, this question about, like, what does wealth
that was drawn from slavery,
how does it manifest itself over generations?
Like, what are the legacies, like, the economic legacies?
And looking at a family like the Fowler family,
it becomes very apparent that that $18 million
that he distributed to his six children is compounded.
Like his oldest son, for example,
only got a fraction of--
So he got a fractional piece of that estate,
which is worth $18 million, and he increased it by 16%.
And that is including, accounting for inflation
by the time that he died.
So the individual of six people compounded that wealth, right?
The grandchildren of the-- I think there were five boys.
Three of them went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Two of them went into business.
One of them became a lawyer.
One of them became an international trader
in South America.
One of them became an Anglican priest.
[Norman laughs]
And so you can see how, you know,
slave trading snowballs into the sinews of British society,
particularly in the aftermath of the revolutionary period
and into the Industrial Revolution and beyond.
- They become, many of them, benefactors.
Any of these slave traders,
you know, men of high civic standing in Bristol?
- Oh, yes, nearly all of them.
So the Society for Merchant Venturers,
which, as I said earlier.
I mean, it does it does evolve into something
like the chamber of commerce.
So today, they want people to believe
that that is who they are.
And they do a lot of amazing charitable work.
They always have.
In fact, there were charitable networks
that were established in the honor of Edward Colston
in fact, after his passing,
you know, in the 17th and 18th or 18th century,
at the beginning of the 18th century.
So nearly all of the sort of major slave traders' children
become leaders of the Society of Merchant Venturers.
Many of them become mayors or sheriffs of Bristol.
They sit on the boards of the earliest railroads that connect,
for example, Bristol to London.
They sit on the boards of,
as did the slave traders themselves,
they sit on the boards of turnpikes.
And the turnpikes were essentially private ventures
that built roads.
The state was not in the business
of building long-distance roads.
So merchants did that for them, and it was mostly slave traders
because it was in their interest
to have sort of trunk lines that connected
to their ships, right?
And those continued.
So those slave traders' children were the ones
who sat on the boards of these turnpike trusts.
So it goes on and on and on.
And then there are more direct business connections, obviously.
They take over the businesses,
gunpowder works, ironworks and so on that also fed the trade.
- Where does all that money go
once the slave trade evaporates over the course of the decades?
- So this is the remarkable part of the story for me,
is that I guess going into this project,
I'd always assumed that, you know,
the slave trade wealth was the slave trade wealth.
I knew that these guys were diversified,
but I didn't realize how diversified someone
like John Fowler was.
John Fowler had businesses on his death
that were spread all over England.
He had invested in everything from distilleries
to ironworks, to docks, to rope ways, to banks.
He was the partner in a bank.
He-- I could go on.
But he also owned large numbers of properties,
including properties across England,
but also owned mortgages in Antigua and in Jamaica.
So indirectly, he actually owned slaves,
although he didn't--
He owned the properties or mortgages
on the properties that were sugar properties
and that owned slaves.
And so, but the majority of his wealth
by the end of his life was actually in investments in,
basically, the treasury, the British treasury.
By the time his oldest son William dies,
he has £150,000 in British consols,
which is an enormous-- I mean, that was enough money
to live on just the interest of those consols.
They paid like 3%, 3.5%.
But he could have lived a very wealthy man's life
just on the interest of those consols.
And this is important because this money, obviously,
is helping facilitate the growth of the British Empire, right?
So they're intertwined.
- In Bristol itself today,
is there some rethinking about the history of Bristol
and the prosperity that came to Bristol
because of the slave trade? - Absolutely.
And this is the, this is sort of the subject
of my sort of afterword or last chapter.
I call it "Reckoning."
And there has been a reckoning,
a very long-standing reckoning, I would say.
I mentioned earlier Edward Colston.
When I first went to Bristol,
I was going there to do research on this project,
and I love going to the places that I study.
You can't, I just don't feel like you can do
this kind of work without actually feeling
and getting a sense of the place.
And it was a very schizophrenic place.
On the one hand, I, as a like a history,
you know, sort of nut and somebody who is,
like, going there to do this particular kind of research
was always on the lookout for some sort of traces
of the sort of African past and African slaving in Bristol,
and it's really hard to find.
It's a beautiful city that's laid out on this,
you know, this river.
There are lots of nice restaurants,
museums, lots of kids.
It's just a beautiful place.
But it has this, you know, unseemly underbelly.
And the most prominent projection of that
was this very large statue in the center of the city
of Edward Colston.
Colston had very strong ties to the British monarchy.
He was an officer in the Royal Africa Company
in the 17th century,
and that statue was erected of him
in the early part of the 20th century by people
who saw him as a visionary and a good man and a charitable man.
On his death, he gave a lot of his wealth
to various charities in Bristol,
so his name is everywhere.
It's on schools, it's on buildings, it's on streets.
It was, like, on the performing arts center.
It was everywhere in Bristol.
So once people came to understand
that his involvement with the Royal Africa Company,
which was literally the Royal Africa Company,
was run by the monarchy, but he made wealth off of that,
he became a target.
And one of the things I try to sort of finesse in the book
is this emphasis on people like Colston.
And I think it's perfectly understandable
that Colston becomes a sort of stand-in or a target
for slave trading in England writ large.
- A symbol. - A symbol, yes.
But it does in some ways obscure,
sort of hide figures like John Fowler or James La Roche
who are the really, like, they were the ones
who got their, you know, their hands dirty in this.
Colston never saw the inside of a slave ship in terms--
I mean, unless he saw it just on the docks.
He was never, like, involved in those kinds of ways.
But in the aftermath of or in the wake
of the Black Lives Movement in Bristol,
after many years of sort of fitful changes,
there were some groups that started renaming,
like Colston schools, for example.
But in the wake of this,
and right after the Black Lives Movement really took off
in 2020, you saw a period
where Colston became more and more of a target.
People spray painted his face,
they put signs in front of it.
And then eventually, a very large crowd gathered
and they lassoed this ropes around his neck,
dragged him down from this pedestal.
I believe he was, what?
I don't remember how tall he was.
18 or 20-something feet?
Very large and on a large pedestal.
So they pull him off of the pedestal,
and then roll this very heavy statue down a public square
and into the harbor.
And this is the image that you see here of the activists
actually dumping his figure in the harbor.
And to answer your question about the legacy too,
they put this statue into a museum now.
They fished it out of the river,
and it now sits in a museum dedicated to questions
about Bristol's legacy, legacies with slavery.
- And with that symbol, we'll leave it there.
James Sweet, thanks for taking us aboard the Black Prince
and looking into the mutiny,
which touches on so many other things.
- My pleasure, thanks, Norman.
- I'm Norman Gilliland,
and I hope you'll join me next time around
for University Place Presents.
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