‘Florence Nightingale’ afloat: Jane Fennell Swinton and the worst ‘coolie’ voyage to ‘El Dorado’, the Salsette 1858

 A full version of this item will appear here shortly. Here is the prelude.

The long-overlooked backstory of Jane Fennell Swinton (1821-72) is an odd and highly original finale to my contributions to Black History Month 2023. 

Cotton merchant's daughter Jane Fennell married Captain Edulph (sometime written Edulfus or Edolphus) Swinton and sailed with him on the most infamous ‘coolie ship’. On the Salsette 120 of the 324 Indian indentured labourers and their children died between Calcutta and Trinidad in 1858. Almost one a day died from starvation, dysentery, typhid, and pining.

Jane wrote up his account, added her comments, and had the story published, as part of what we might now call the black rights movement. Journal of a voyage with coolie emigrants, from Calcutta to Trinidad . By Captain and Mrs. Swinton, late of the ship Salsette (1859) can be read online, free, in an hour. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=mSJcAAAAQAAJ&pg=GBS.PA16.  

There is also a hard-to-get facsimile edition edited by Ron Ramdin (1994).

She critiqued the damage caused by profiteers who sent unfit and distressed people far away on ill-provisioned ships. There were too few interpreters and no medical and nursing staff able to act as helpful intermediaries for people who were alarmed at Western medicine and uneasy about reporting to a western doctor.

Jane was not black. And she used racist language. But this brief book is important. No other captain, or captain’s wife, has written such a useful first-person account of life on what were, in effect, successors to slaveships, 1834-1917.

Who knows how much Jane contributed to the lessening of shipboard abuses? Her personal story  has never been told before, and it is only fragmentary.

Please keep your eyes open for my forthcoming blog item about this member of an Irish Quaker dynasty. Genealogical research reveals bankruptcy. It shows that she herself was of a family of migrants. Feminist abolitionism may have been her London context. And she had informed opinions about human cargo, including Chinese ‘coolies.’

 No other woman was in such a position of expertise about race on ships. Briefly, she was as effective a campaigner as Elizabeth Fry and Caroline Chisholm.  

Women of colour, naval men and naval wives: exploring stories of slavery and abolition

 
Guest blog by Mary Wills.  

Honorary Fellow, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull

After the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, Britain turned to the Royal Navy to carry out the unenviable task of enforcing an end to the still prolific trade in enslaved people from Africa to the Americas.

My book, Envoys of Abolition, explores the personal and cultural experiences of the naval officers serving on the West African coast in the nineteenth century.   https://tinyurl.com/Envoys-LUP

This story of pursuing slavers is most often told through the lens of a male, military operation. 

However, this blog item examines some of the different ways I found that gender impacted on the lives of women and men in the course of Britain’s abolitionist campaign.

(Pictured: Mary Wills).

Women and abolitionism

Many people were involved the pressure for an end to the transatlantic slave trade (1807) and to slavery in British colonies (1833). 

Women of all classes played a significant role. 

They joined anti-slavery societies and organised campaigns, such as boycotts of slave-grown sugar produced on plantations in the Caribbean.  (The Gillray cartoon (left) shows the significance of sugar politics in women's lives). 

Writers such as Hannah More and Elizabeth Heyrick (pictured)  published works against slavery. 

Campaigners of African descent campaigned with effect. Enslaved four times, Mary Prince wrote the only known autobiographical account of enslavement in the Caribbean from a female perspective. 

Her influential account, published in London in 1831, testified to the horrors of slavery. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, also revealed enslaved Caribbean people’s various resistance efforts against slavery.

By the very nature of their task - intercepting slave ships and releasing enslaved people - naval officers engaged with abolitionist convictions. 

The image below shows an artist's version of the capture of a large US slave barque, the Orion, by the Royal Navy's small HMS Pluto. (Illustrated London News, 1860). There were 847 slaves aboard, and this was the Navy's biggest capture ever. 

"On seeing the naval officers look down the main hatch, the liberated slaves sent up a most hearty cheer, which can never be forgotten by those who heard it." 

Many testimonies by naval officers aboard ships like the Pluto reveal how they were driven by non-conformist religious belief, and particularly by the rise of evangelicalism. 

Some naval wives were involved with their husbands in networks of interest between anti-slavery and religious societies on one hand, and the very masculinist Royal Navy on the other.

Mary Grey (pictured) and George Grey are a good example. Sir George had been immersed in Navy life since he was 14 and served in the West Indies in the 1780s and 1790s. He was younger brother of MP Sir Charles Grey. As Prime Minister Charles oversaw the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean in 1833.

Captain George Grey was married to Mary Whitbread, whose father was the brewer and anti-slavery supporter Samuel Whitbread. George and Mary were committed evangelical Christians. They counted the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce among their friends. 

However, British women were also among the large number of owners of Caribbean slave-worked plantations identified in Britain in the 1830s. This is revealed by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Britons were absentee slave owners at the very same time as the Royal Navy was attempting to suppress the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. This contradiction demonstrates the tensions and complexities regarding anti-slavery within British society at this time.

White wives in West Africa

The majority of naval officers on the West African coast were absent from home for up to three years while serving there. But others travelled to the coast with their families, particularly to the British colony of Sierra Leone. 

After 1807 Sierra Leone became the centre of British anti-slave trade operations, with a community of European officials, military representatives, missionaries, and their families. 

Waterloo Market, Sierra Leone. Illustrated London News, 1856.

Anne and Charlotte Columbine, the wife and daughter of Captain Edward Columbine, are examples of this. They died from yellow fever after going out to join him when he was governor of the colony in 1809-11. He resigned from his post
after they were struck down. 

Columbine later died on the voyage home. He wrote in his journal that he had ‘a heart broke down with grief’.

Mrs Henry Grant Foote published her recollections of life in West Africa in 1869 (see picture of title page). She was the wife of Captain Foote, who served on the anti-slave trade squadron.

Black women connecting with naval men in West Africa

Naval officers’ letters and journals from the West African coast reveal encounters and relationships with West African peoples. Naval officers met West African women in a variety of circumstances, employing washerwomen, for example. 

The sketch of ‘Officers of HM Brig Bonetta on board a Hulk, Sierra Leone, Africa in ‘37’ (see https://tinyurl.com/Bonetta-RMG) was likely drawn by a crew member of the Bonetta, which was used to police the slave trade. 

An African woman depicted there seems, from her stance, to be a slave kept for the sexual satisfaction of British sailors or someone who sold sexual services. The hulk was probably the Conflict, which was allegedly used as a floating brothel for crews of British naval vessels visiting Sierra Leone during this period. 

Sailors’ letters rarely discuss specific interactions with enslaved women encountered on captured slave ships. The interception of slave vessels was their official duty, and the emotions expressed are typically pity and compassion. 

By contrast, the African women met on shore were often written about in romanticized or sexualized contexts. 

This was reflective of travel or exploration writing of the time. British middle-class women were characterized by virtuousness and submissiveness while Asian and African women were often admired for their perceived exoticism.

Lieutenant Francis Meynell touched on this allure in a letter, writing to his father from the Atlantic island of St Helena in 1846, that ‘[m]any of our officers loose [sic] their hearts here’ (letter held by the National Maritime Museum).

Pictured: Lt Francis Meynell’s sketch of Africans released from the slave ship Albanez, aboard the British naval ship Albatross, 1845

Women as gifts

A girl was dubiously presented ‘as a wife to comfort him, & to wash his clothes & cook his meals’ Captain Luce said of his Commodore, Arthur Eardley-Wilmot.

This human gift was proffered on their mission to negotiate an end to the slave trade from the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Nigeria) in 1863. They’d stayed in the capital, Abomey, for many weeks. 

Pictured: King Gezo of Dahomey, illustration from the published journals of Lt Frederick Forbes, 1851.

The story of Omoba Aina, a young Egbado princess intended as a diplomatic ‘present’ for Queen Victoria from King Ghezo of Dahomey, offers evidence of a more long-lasting, familial relationship. 

In 1850, Lieutenant Frederick Forbes brought the seven-year-old back to Britain under instructions from the King (Forbes later published his journals from the anti-slavery mission). 

Sarah Forbes Bonetta (as she was later christened) lived with the Forbes family in Windsor. Queen Victoria paid for her education. 

And Sarah‘s daughter was named Victoria after her godmother, the Queen: See images at https://tinyurl.com/daughter-Victoria.

Pictured: Sarah Forbes Bonetta's gravestone, Madeira.

Summary

It is difficult to learn more about these encounters. Were they exploitative? Did meaningful relationships develop? 

Victorian notions of respectability prevented most officers from including detail. What we can ascertain is that many officers became immersed in their experiences of West African societies, even though they were briefly passing though.

Naval men away from home had a range of relationships with women of colour at a time when race was a complex issue. White women in Britain were vocal allies of the abolitionist movement but could also be slave-owners. 

These are just some of the countless and complex stories of the part played by gender in Britain’s history of slavery and abolition.

Learning more

• Mary Wills, Envoys of abolition: British Naval Officers and the Campaign Against the Slave Trade in West Africa, Liverpool University Press, 2019:https://tinyurl.com/Envoys-LUP 
• Pictures at http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/

Jamaican woman behind the Navy List

A barely-known Jamaican-British woman, Penelope Steel (and her 'freed Negro' mother) are behind the early survival of the Navy List, the Royal Navy's 'bible' or directory.

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/steels-navy-list

Today if you want to know about the navy you google or go online to "The Navy Directory",  

https://tinyurl.com/navy-list-2018  

The directory tells you the names of ships, offices, and officers. It's a sort of who's doing what, and where, and with what history.

When the navy was the biggest employer in Britain this list (then an almanac and trade directory too) was particularly invaluable.

From 1782 you would have 'surfed' by using that thick tome, Steel's Navy List, which came out every quarter.  (The 'Steel' was dropped in 1814.)

The Navy List's longevity is such that in the National Maritime Museum's Caird Library the back copies occupy over six bookcases.

Britain's other arms of the state had something similar: Crockford's Clerical Directory (from 1858) and Hart's Quarterly Army List (from 1839).

But what has slavery got to do with the publication of the Senior Service's directory, decades before that?

Jamaican roots

The answer is that a slave-owner's mixed-race daughter helped fund the publication - while also drawing maps and being a mother, not far from London's Tower Hill.

Penelope Winde was born in St Catherine's, Jamaica, in 1768. 

She was one of several recognised 'natural' children of Kingston merchant Scudamore Winde, who 'owned' 70 enslaved people. Penelope's mother was Sarah Cox, who is listed as a 'freed negro or mulatto' (as historian Trevor Burnard has found.)

Her father died in 1775, leaving the equivalent of £7 million in today's money.  Penelope, aged nine, came to Britain with her brother. (She may have initially gone to her father's ancestral home in Kentchurch Court, Docklow, Herefordshire, pictured below today, http://www.kentchurchcourt.co.uk. Or to his business contacts in London.) 

Somehow Penelope met barrister David Steel, the son of David Steel. David junior's family's business publishing charts was based at Navigation Warehouse, No 1 Union-Row, Little Tower-Hill, London.

They were married on May Day 1786 at St Botolph's, Aldgate (pictured), when she was about eighteen. 

Their home and the family business were on the same premises. Her unmarried sister-in-law Elizabeth may have continued to run the home too. 

That way Penelope may have managed to combine being the mother of five children with drawing maps and charts too. 

Her maps included those of her home island, in a period of great naval activity in the West Indies against Frances, Spain and America. 

Today, down river and on the other side of the Thames from Penelope's old home, visitors can see the National Maritime Museum's examples of the charts and books published by her. See https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/three-women-london-chart-trade-c1800-1860

Money helps

Did David marry Penelope for her money? Possibly. But barristers are not usually poor. And maybe the business only began struggling when he took over after his father's death, thirteen years into the marriage.

Initially she did not have all that much, just her father's annuity of £60 per annum (c £9,300 in today's money). And three years later, when she was 21, she inherited £2,000, plus another £3,500  to come. 

Anne M Powers has tracked Penelope down as far as she can. Anne comments that this inheritance 'is particularly interesting

'... under the 1761 Act of the Assembly illegitimate mixed-race Jamaicans were debarred from inheriting more than £2000.... I have not found any private Act permitting the Winde children to have more.'  

http://aparcelofribbons.co.uk/2012/01/mixed-race-jamaicans-in-england/

But somehow Penelope's inheritance helped fund the Steel family's struggling enterprise.

For a full range of the business's publications see A Bibliography of the Works Written and Published by David Steel by Mario Witt, Greenwich Maritime Monographs, 1991.

A widow in maritime business

When Penelope's husband died after seventeen years, in 1803, his Will left her 'the option of either selling the business or, if she preferred, continuing to run it in her own right', writes Anne Powers.

Penelope, like so many widowed mothers in maritime London in that period, chose to work in the business. She was also drawing maps, which must have added to the income. 

This is Penelope Winde Steel's timeline: 

1768? Born Jamaica.

1775. Came to England, just four years after Nelson sailed to the Caribbean.

1786. Married into Steel family.  They carried on with the Navy List 

1787. Son David Lee Steel was born

1789. Son Scudamore born

1791. Daughter Penelope Sarah born

1795. Daughter Mary born and dies two years later.

1797. Daughter Ann born

1799. Her father-in-law, David Steel, died.

1803. Her husband David Steel died. They carried on with the Navy List 

1806. Penelope remarried, William Mason

1807. She had one child with William. Their son died as an infant.

1810. David Lee, and Scudamore, were no longer living at home. Her daughters Penelope Sarah and Ann were, and may have helped with the business and cartography too.

JW Norie, https://americanhistory.
si.edu/norie-atlas/john-w-norie

1814. The Navy List was no longer called 'Steel's' 

1818. Penelope's son David Lee, died, seeming after a breakdown over his distress at losing out over his inheritance.  

1821? JW Norie & Co took over the printing business. John W Norie had worked for William Heather, a similar nautical publishing firm. 

1837 or 1840. Penelope died, quite well off, in Euston Place. The Navy List still continued. 

For more details of what happened to the descendants, mainly in the US. See Anne M Powers.'A Family Saga and A Theatrical Disaster', http://aparcelofribbons.co.uk/2014/10/family-saga-theatrical-disaster/ 

As for Penelope's mother, Sarah Cox, we don't know if she stayed in Jamaica. If so, did she handle imported copies of the Navy List and her daughter's maps out there, perhaps even selling them to the British fleet in the West Indies?

Conclusion

Without the input of a BAME person, and profits from slavery, would there have been an uninterrupted flow of Navy Lists? Indeed would the navy have been able to function so efficiently, including in the Caribbean?

We can only wonder if, Thameside, racism and sexism affected how much Penelope was able to gain respect as an effective business woman and cartographer. 

Certainly her son, Scudamore Winde Steel, (pictured right) rose high in the army and was knighted, despite being visibly mixed-race.

Enslaved women on ships

Adjua (June Carryl) and Dembi (Kimberly Scott) in 'The Liquid Plain'. Photo by Jenny Graham

Today in Britain there are estimated to be 10,000 to 13,000 slaves, mainly women (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30255084). We have a Modern Slavery Bill going through parliament and a Minister for Modern Slavery and Organised Crime, Karen Bradley (pictured)


In these days of increased trafficking (mainly by air) it's telling to look back and see the parallels with the 15-18C slave trade, in which 4-5 million women slaves were transported (about a third of the estimated 12-15 million.)
Not many experts have written about gender on slave ships, let alone written for popular audiences.

The Liquid Plain
But US playwright Naomi Wallace has, in The Liquid Plain, a play that won the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play. So far it has only been staged in the US, not here in the UK. (http://www.tcg.org/tools/newplays/details2012a.cfm?ShowID=213)
It's about two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, and the docklands community in late-18C Bristol, Rhode Island, which was a major slave marketplace. With sailors Adjua and Dembi make common cause and plan to return to Africa and 'freedom'.
The play's title comes from a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c1753-1784),who was herself transported from West Africa as a child but became the first African-American to have a book published, and at only twenty.
In her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral she writes:
While for Britannia's distant shore
We sweep the liquid plain,
And with astonished eyes explore
The wide-extended main



Naomi Wallace was inspired to write the play after reading Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship. She refers to the 1791 indictment for murder of slave ship captain James D'Wolf.
He'd wanted the crew of the Polly to heave the nameless woman overboard because he thought she had small pox and would infect the whole crew and thereby cause him to lose his profitable cargo. The sailors refused so,according to seaman John Cranston:
D'Wolf 'himself ran up the Shrowds [he'd had the woman put high up in the mainmast two days earlier] ..then he lash'd her in a Chair & ty'd a mask round her Eyes & Mouth & there was a tackle hooked upon the Slings round the chair when we lowered her down on the larboard side of the Vessel.

That chair, that mask
I know about the story because I've just finished reading Rediker's book. For me the most potent of all many potent images in this history is that chair, and the idea of a captain who was so afraid to touch her skin that he tied her to a chair (presumably she was too ill to move unaided.The sailors themselves were quite keen to get exposure to smallpox and thereby gain immunity).
And then there's the mask, which Cranston said was tied onto the woman so that she could not see what was happening to her so that she would not struggle.
'It was [also]done to prevent her making any Noise that the other Slaves might not hear, lest they should rise.'

Comprehending the full horror of appalling histories, such as slavery and the holocaust, can be hard to do. But the chair and mask somehow helped me take in the horror of a trade that treated human beings in this way. It is similar to the impact on me of seeing the mountains of human hair at Auschwitz: just a commodity.

James D'Wolf (pictured) got away with it, just as so many slave captains got away with their appalling 'business practices' over 244 years. On ship the millions of kidnapped African women were the sexual targets of officers and sometimes crew too. There was rape and there were relationships too.

Regulating women on ships
I started grasping slave women' stories when researching the chapter in my forthcoming book that discusses the regulation - and entertainment - of women passengers in transit. Over the centuries there were matrons, conductresses, escorts, social hostesses - and always natural leaders among the 'human cargo' too.

Rediker retells the stories of two such natural leaders on slave ships: both nicknamed ‘The Boatswain’ they were on the Nightingale in 1769 and the Hudibras in 1787.
On the Hudibras there was also a cultural leader and griot of enslaved women, a ‘songstress ‘ and ‘orator’ who would stand or kneel at the centre of concentric circles of women on the quarterdeck, elders in the outermost circle.
She sang ‘slow airs of a pathetic nature’, and gave orations. Watchers who didn’t speak their language thought these were epic poetry as the women all responded with a chorus at the end of significant sentences.
Seaman William Butterworth, watching, was so moved that he ‘shed tears of involuntary sympathy.’ Rediker reports that at least one captain found the songs of resistance ‘very disagreeable’ and had the singing women flogged so badly their wounds took two to three weeks to heal.

For the women it was, Rediker explains, ‘an effort to retain historical identity in a situation of utter social upheaval … a central element of an active and growing culture of opposition aboard ship.’
It was solidarity and comforting company - something the poor masked murdered woman in the chair so needed.