The Forgotten Trade
Comprising the Log of the Daniel and Henry of 1700 and Accounts of the Slave Trade From the Minor Ports of England 1698-1725
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
`I pray people will read this richly detailed and absorbing book, with its vivid renaissance of a matter most of us English seem to have wished into oblivion. ' John Fowles Meticulously kept by Walter Prideaux, the log of the Daniel and Henry provides an astonishing record of a trading venture in the year 1700. Two years earlier, the Guinea trade had been prised loose by an Act of Parliament from the monopoly of the Royal African Company, and respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized what they saw as an opportunity for quick rewards from the slave trade. Few of these merchants knew anything of trading in Africa, nor of the unscrupulous tribalchiefs who readily offered men, women and children in hard bargaining for beads, alcohol, weapons and gunpowder. In the second part of this book, Tattersfield went in search of long-forgotten documents to chart how small provincial ports fared both economically and morally in the early years of slave trading.
Customer Reviews
A beautifully written, well researched and important history.
This is a really well researched and interesting book. The first half chronicles the voyage of a slave ship to the West Coast of Africa with a cargo of cloth etc, then buying slaves from the local African chiefs who were the slave dealers and then sailing across the Atlantic to the West Indies to sell the slaves (only about 50% survived the voyage)and then buying sugar and rum etc to return to England. Of course the African chiefs enslaved many more of their fellows than they would have done, absent the demand from the Europeans. The second half describes the slaving activities of many of the little ports along the South coast of England (such as Lyme Regis)....it should be compulsory reading in schools as the whole trade was far more complex than is currently thought. For example, the moral question was not simply ignored but answered as follows...it was thought better to buy black people from the African slave dealers and then sell them to Christian white owners in the America's, than to leave them in Africa as pagans, because the slaves would then be converted to Christianity and baptised and thus they would (or at least had a chance of going) go to Heaven! So the trade was blessed by the Christian religion! It is a really good book and I thoroughly recommend it.