by Mildred Europa Taylor, Face2FaceAfrica.com
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 banned the buying, selling, and transporting of enslaved people within the British Empire, but it did not abolish the practice of slavery itself until 1833, when the Slavery Abolition Act officially banned slavery across most of the British Empire.
After the inhumane practice was abolished, the British Government paid £20 million ($27m) to compensate plantation and slave owners for the “loss of human property.”
It has now emerged that British corporation Sandbach, Tinne and Company, which had connections with the merchants who received the biggest compensation payouts, still trafficked enslaved Africans illegally to Guyana, in South America, decades after abolition.
The findings were disclosed in a book, Searching for My Slave Roots, written by Malik Al Nasir, who has been researching his family history, as reported by the Guardian.
According to him, 40 years after the abolition of slavery in most of the British empire, Peter Miller Watson, who supervised Sandbach Tinne’s operations in Demerara, Guyana, wrote a letter to the company’s Liverpool office in 1847, in which he described the arrival of a ship from the company’s own fleet carrying a “cargo of negroes,” which comprised dozens of young children.
The letter referred to the ship as “the Parker” and said it was carrying “115 adult males, 86 adult females, 82 under 14 years, and 41 under 4 years.”
“There have been only three casualties during the passage – 1 man and 2 children – which Captain R. says may be attributed to the wretched state in which they had lived ashore,” the letter added, according to the Guardian.
Author Al Nasir said, “Slavery had been abolished, so how do we know the people on the Parker weren’t indentured, or Africans liberated by the Royal Navy? Firstly, Watson specifically refers to them as cargo, and not passengers, when liberated Africans were not regarded as cargo, enslaved people were called cargo.
“In referring to the ‘wretched state’ in which they had lived ashore, he’s saying they were shipped from land and are the architects of their own condition – if they had been previously enslaved blame would have been on their former masters, and they would not have been bought if they were sick. When [Watson] talks about casualties, he’s attributing the deaths as a loss of property. By process of deduction, we can see these are people illegally trafficked from Africa.”
Sandbach Tinne, which dissolved in 1975, was the family business of the Sandbach and Tinne families. They dominated the Demerara sugar trade alongside their partners and relatives in the Gladstone family.
Watson, who wrote the 1847 letter, was a distant cousin of British prime minister William Gladstone and the father of Andrew Watson, who became the first Black international footballer when he captained Scotland in the 1880s, as the Guardian reported.
Around the period of the 1847 letter, Sandbach Tinne and its affiliate companies had already collected compensation worth millions in modern value for the “loss” of the people they enslaved before abolition. Although patriarch Samuel Sandbach stepped down from the firm in 1833, his son William Robertson Sandbach and son-in-law Charles Stuart Parker Jr. remained key shareholders by 1847.
Meanwhile, the British public debt incurred to finance these compensation payments to enslavers was not fully settled until 2015.
“John Gladstone, the father of William Gladstone who owned plantations in Guyana and Jamaica, got the biggest single individual payout, while Sandbach Tinne got the second largest on aggregate – both were among architects of the compensation scheme,” Al Nasir stated.
The Demerara slave rebellion of 1823 helped in the fight to end slavery. The protagonists of this rebellion were a cooper on Plantation Success, Jack Gladstone, and his father, Quamina, who was a senior deacon at a church led by English protestant missionary John Smith.
It was a rebellion to press for good working conditions for the enslaved on the Demerara-Essequibo plantation in present-day Guyana. The protesters locked up plantation owners and slave owners during the night and compelled them to commit to improving their conditions on the plantations. Essentially, the revolt was staged to demand better conditions of service and not necessarily freedom.
Al Nasir even said that an 1847 missionary account documented ongoing, unregulated human trafficking “south of the line.” This showed that human traffickers bypassed the Royal Navy’s blockade to continue illegally trading enslaved individuals from regions south of the equator, including Angola.
After the slave trade was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, the British Royal Navy had to patrol the Atlantic to enforce the ban on slave ships, as not all territories complied immediately. Royal Navy personnel intercepted around 1,600 vessels full of captured Africans, helping free some 150,000 people.
The British sent about 450 of the ships captured to the island of St. Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, where the Navy had established a Vice-Admiralty court. Some 27,000 liberated Africans ended up being housed there in a settlement called Rupert’s Valley.
While some of these newly freed Africans stayed on the island and raised families, others journeyed back to Africa.
An estimated 8,000 of these individuals, however, died on the island soon after they arrived, largely due to what Smithsonian magazine described as “common slave-ship maladies like scurvy, dysentery and dehydration.”
Others also endured harsh conditions under apprenticeship and indentured labor systems, which subjected them to arduous, unpaid work.
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