African experience on slaving vessels captured by the West Africa Squadron, 1808-1867

In 1807, the British Parliament passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the Royal Navy began to suppress illegal trading off the coasts of West and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil. An 'illegal' vessel was one operating in contravention of negotiated international treaties.

Over the course of some sixty years, the West Africa Squadron, based at Freetown (Sierra Leone), intercepted 1,600 mainly Iberian and Brazilian vessels, and 'liberated' an estimated 160,000 African people from slavery. 

Each captured ship became a naval 'prize'. Their now 'liberated' former captives endured a journey to shore known as a 'prize' voyage, undertaken in the care of a small naval crew aided by African mariners ('Krumen') in the Navy's employ. 

Despite its 'liberating' purpose, this journey bore notable similarities to the transatlantic Middle Passage and resulted in a qualified, displaced kind of freedom.

In this talk, Jane Webster will consider how the texts and images produced by naval personnel and held by Royal Museums Greenwich might be interrogated to reveal African experiences of the 'prize' voyage. 

About the speaker: Dr Jane Webster

Jane Webster is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Newcastle University, where she was Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology from 2004 to 2024. She is also undertaking her second Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum.

Jane has written extensively on slavery in ancient Rome and its provinces, and on the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. She is author of Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping 1680–1807 (2023) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Comparative Archaeology of Slavery (2026). Her current research focuses on curated artefacts of both Roman and transatlantic slavery in British museum collections, and involves collaborations with the British Museum, the Museum of London, the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory, Greenwich in London, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.