Category: Sailing ships

A remarkable history of the slave trade

Slave canoe of the 1840s

Slave canoe drawing from The Illustrated London News, 1849; image reference EO22, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library. In West Africa, these canoes were the main vehicles for transporting slaves from the coast to transatlantic vessels. According to The Illustrated London News, the canoes could carry 200 slaves, and were said to be 40ft long, 12ft 7-8ft deep

 

Intheboatshed.net regular Ed Bachmann has drawn my attention to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database website, and the recently published prize-winning book Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The database provided the basis for the atlas in which historians David Eltis and David Richardson have created a comprehensive, 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion featuring nearly 200 maps.

Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. The extraordinary online Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes records of nearly 35,000 slaving voyages, or about 80 per cent of all such voyages ever made. The maps show which nations participated in the trade, where the ships involved were outfitted, where the captives boarded ship, and where they were landed in the Americas, details the experiences of the transatlantic voyages and the eventual abolition of the traffic.

There are also illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries that reveal the human story underlying the trade.

If you don’t buy the book, you can read Professor Eltis’s long essay on the website: A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on the website.

Thanks for the tipoff Ed!

 

Classic Sailing announces a special Tall Ships Race offer for 16-25-year olds

Tall Ships racing with Classic Sailing

Phwoarrr! If you’re 16-25 and can find the reduced price of €1495 from somewhere, this might just be an irresistable opportunity: http://www.classic-sailing.co.uk/log/youth-15-25-bark-europa

Participants will sail in two legs of the Tall Ships Race on the Europa, starting from Lerwick in the Shetlands on the 22nd July, then across the North Sea to Stavanger in Norway, and then to Halmstadt in Sweden.

My thanks to Mike Goodwin for pointing this out!

Can anyone help Keith Johnston find out about his ancestor’s guano trade ships?

Chincha Guano Islands, Peru, engraving published by The Illustrated London News February, 21st, 1863, photographed by Manuel González Olaechea y Franco

This London Illustrated News illustration of 1863 shows ships in the guano trade anchored among the Chinca guano islands off Peru. Image from the Wikipedia and photographed by Manuel González Olaechea y Franco

Regular reader and contributor Keith Johnston has written in to ask whether anyone can help him learn more about one of his forebears, Liverpool shipping agent and ship owner William Cliffe, who specialised in guano.

It seems Cliffe had four sailing barques ranging from 200 to 600 tons gross, all of which are mentioned in the 1883 Lloyds Register of Shipping.

Their trade was mainly in the valuable commodity of guano, ancient nitrate and phosphate-laden deposits of the faeces and urine of bats, seabirds, and seals used as a fertiliser and as an ingredient in gunpowder. It was found on remote islands in low rainfall areas, where there is little rainwater to wash away the nitrate fraction.

In what seems to be a textbook example of how foreign policy is often decided by commercial interests rather than by any sense of right or wrong, during guano’s heyday in the mid-19th century, the United States of America passed a law permitting US citizens to claim any guano island they found for themselves, so long as the guano recovered was to be used by US citizens.

Keith says the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool has been very helpful in tracking down this information, but wonders whether any intheboatshed.net readers have come across the ships listed as belonging to Cliffe, as he would like to try and find more detail about the actual ships, crews, cargos, ports of call and definitely pictures or drawings of them so that he can make models, if at all possible.

The vessels are:

  • Boldon – sailing barque, 656 tons net, 689 tons gross, 628 tons under deck; 168.1ft LOA 32.2ft beam 19ft depth, built at Sunderland by Crown in January, 1873
  • Guatemala Packet – sailing barque, 201 tons net, 326 tons gross, 110ft LOA 25ft beam 16.5ft depth, built by Harrington in 1852
  • Nimroud – sailing barque, 670 tons net, 693 tons gross, 135ft LOA, 30ft beam, 20ft depth, built at Scarborough by Tindalls in 1853
  • Quito, sailing ship, 503 tons net, 503 tons gross, 117.5ft LOA, 28ft beam, 18.7ft depth, built at Sunderland in 1850

If you have any information, please pass it on to me at gmatkin@gmail.com, and I’ll forward it to Keith.

PS – Hugh Jenkins has written in with some snippets of information about the guano trade that might be of interest. They turned up during his research into a sailing ancestor who worked for a Liverpool guano shipper. Hugh comments that the company mentioned, WJ Myers, was quite a substantial business, and yet today finding any reference to it is now very difficult.

Thanks Hugh!