Essential Information

Type Talks and tours
Location
Online
Date and Times Tuesday 9 December 2025 | 5.15-6.30pm
Prices Free

Between 1808 and 1864, the Royal Navy intercepted more than 900 vessels and brought them to Freetown, Sierra Leone as part of Britain’s post-1807 suppression of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. The vessels were tried before Freetown’s Vice-Admiralty and Mixed Commission Courts, and the enslaved people on board legally emancipated. Under various bi-lateral treaties, the vessels themselves were sold at public auction. The vessels’ stores – consisting of cloth, guns, alcohol, and tobacco – were similarly auctioned to a public that included European colonial officials and merchants, African colonists and traders, and slave traffickers themselves.

Who bought these vessels, their cargos, and what became of them?

 

A watercolour painting of the Carolina slaving ship
Prize Bay, Sierra Leone, June 24th 1849 (PAF8604) © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

 

While some vessels quickly-re-entered the hands of traffickers in enslaved Africans others were purchased by Liberated Africans who used them to reverse the Middle Passage and sail back to their West African homelands. This talk considers the auction of slaving vessels and their cargos as a microcosm of the legal limitations of British abolitionism in West Africa, as well as the financial possibilities auctions afforded formerly enslaved peoples.

About the speaker: Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson is Lecturer in the History of Race, Ethnicity and Migration at the University of Strathclyde. He previously taught at the universities of Aberdeen and Exeter. Richard is a historian of Africa and the African Diaspora, with particular emphasis on British abolitionism and colonialism in West Africa and the Atlantic world. He is the author of African Narratives of Slavery and Abolition: testimonies from the nineteenth century (Bloomsbury, 2024), Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Rochester University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in the English Historical Review, Slavery & Abolition, History in Africa, and African Economic History.

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Header image: Prize Bay, Sierra Leone, June 24th 1849 (PAF8604) © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London