The Slave Trading Lobby and Piracy in West Africa

At Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), the Royal African Company's headquarters in West Africa, the captured crew of Bartholomew Roberts’ were tried for piracy in nineteen separate trials occurring between 29 March and 19 April 1722. Of the 243 men captured, 168 faced trial. Seventy-seven were acquitted by evidence that suggested they had been forced on board while fifty-two were hanged. A further twenty were condemned to seven years’ servitude in the Royal African Company's African mines, seventeen were transferred to Marshalsea prison in London and two were respited for additional consideration. The remaining seventy-five captured men – described only as “black men” – were sold into slavery without trial. Roberts and his crew had committed numerous depredations in the Caribbean, Newfoundland, Brazil and Africa, before being defeated near Cape Lopez – in modern-day Gabon – by Captain Chaloner Ogle and the crew of the Royal Navy warship Swallow . This proved to be the most substantial naval victory over pirates between 1716 and 1726, which was emphasised by the knighthood granted to Ogle who became the first naval captain to receive a title for triumph over pirates. While the defeat of Roberts, who died during the engagement, and the capture of his crew is often related as one of the most significant events in the suppression of piracy in the early eighteenth century, the role of the British slave trading lobby in facilitating this victory is less understood. Although historians have acknowledged that pirates’ impact on slave trading capital prompted their “extermination” in the early eighteenth century, these assertions make it appear that influential merchants lobbied and the government responded with naval support. As has been discussed in the preceding chapters, government responses to mercantile petitions were much more complex than this. With multiple groups vying for the same finite naval resources, the government had to make decisions about where and when the Royal Navy was present in extra-European waters. Before 1719, naval vessels were not assigned to protect British trade in West Africa during peacetime and this only changed as pirates attacked British slaving vessels along the coast. The subsequent lobbying by competing groups of London-based slavers offers a revealing perspective into the mechanisms surrounding mercantile petitioning and its influence on the nature of British naval power in extra-European waters.

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