One of the paradoxes of slave-trade history is that while we now know a lot about the gut-wrenching process of turning Africans into slaves and the hazards of trafficking on tropical coasts, we know relatively little about the sailors who manned the ships. To be sure, historians have dredged the smattering of life writings that refer to slave ships, many of which reveal graphic accounts of the brutality of captains and mates and a seaman's induction into the trade. Yet precisely who the sailors were, from what ports they hailed, how they were recruited, remains elusive if not opaque. This has not stopped historians generalizing about slave-ship sailors: they are said to be ‘multiracial’, a ‘motley crew’ from different quarters of the globe.

One exception to this trend is Mike Breward who has made use of the detailed muster rolls of Bristol at the end of the eighteenth century to offer a portrait of slave-ship crews. The muster rolls earlier in the century did not have a lot to offer the historian, which typically record the pay due to sailors for months at sea and the last ships the seamen entered. These rolls were designed to assess the contribution seamen made to the hospital fund, legislated in 1747. In Bristol, the task of tracking the levy and its administration was put under the jurisdiction of the Merchant Venturers, which is why the muster rolls are in its archives. The early rolls tell us little about the social provenance of the seamen beyond noting the port from which they typically sailed, and because captains were sometimes lax about their entries, this information is not always reliable. The differential payments allotted seamen do reveal the number who died or ran during the voyage, those discharged at the port of delivery and the sailors who were impressed or even elected to enter men-of-war during wartime. This information is vital to assessing the volatility of crews. The one other advantage of the mid-century muster rolls is that the more regular ones list the last ship on which the seaman sailed, giving historians a chance to measure persistence, an issue that maritime historians have seldom addressed.

Mutiny was an ever-present threat on Bristol's slave ships. It was even written into the articles of agreement between owners and seamen. On the Sally, drawn up in July 1785, the crew promised to ‘faithfully and truly perform and do their several Stations and Services … without any Manner of Denial, Mutiny, or Resistance whatever.’ A template contract of 1787 said the same thing. What mutiny meant in this context was not entirely clear. It was a slippery term, applied most obviously to seamen who collectively took possession of a ship, merging in this context with piracy. We are all familiar with the mutiny on the Bounty. Yet mutiny could also apply to cuffing an officer, grabbing him by the lapels, maliciously complaining about poor provisions, and calling the officers ‘rogues’, as Justice Willes instructed the jury in a case involving a recalcitrant gunner in 1749; if, of course, such actions could be construed as inciting a general disaffection against the captain and ship's hierarchy. Simply refusing to obey orders and threatening to go on strike fell within its ambit, for these could be seen as ‘mutinous expressions’. The great mutiny at Spithead in 1797 was essentially a strike, although unlike a land-based one, the seamen commandeered the fleet, electing delegates to co-ordinate their resistance.

We will never know how many acts of mutiny took place on the high seas. Minor incidents were unlikely to be reported, especially if a captain handled the situation with any tact. On the Wasp, which sailed for Bonny and New Calabar, the captain charged the London bosun John Person of ‘mutiny’ in July 1794 and delivered him to the governor of Cape Coast Castle a month later. A chance entry in the muster rolls of the Mary, which set sail for Africa in the summer of 1789, reveals that the captain put John Walters, an able seaman from Cardiff, on board the Panama for ‘mutiny’ six months into the voyage. Later, when the ship reached Jamaica, Captain Edward Mentor put two Dubliners on board the HMS Centurion for the same reason. As John Newton remarked, removing truculent seamen to men-of-war was a well-worn tactic of slave-ship captains.

As you leave the archives and walk to the river's edge, you can sometimes see the tide turning. The tidal range of Bristol's River Avon is immense; at its highest point on the highest spring tide, nearly 50 feet. In 1830 it was reckoned to be 40, and in the late eighteenth century, before the construction of the floating dock, around 36. Pilots were needed to ferry ships up the river at full tide; indeed, pilots were needed to guide vessels from the stormy Bristol Channel towards Kingroad, the estuary of the Avon, where the ships would drop anchor and await a favourable wind and tide to take them seven miles to the city's centre.

This set of essays begins with the pilots, a body of men who lived at Crockerne Pill, close to the first natural harbour on the river at Hungroad. This closely-knit community created a dense cousinage to confront the dangers of piloting in the Bristol Channel. Aware of their importance to Bristol's commercial prosperity, the pilots were quite willing to carve some independence from the merchant oligarchy that officially regulated them and the Admiralty who sought to curb their willingness to help sailors escape the press. Pill became a haven for runaway seamen and illicit commerce, a thorn in the side of the city, the merchants, and the national government, who, for sound commercial and environmental reasons, had to tolerate its rambunctious disrespect for constituted authority.

Chapter one presents an indispensable link from the quay to the Atlantic. The other chapters zone in on different aspects of Bristol's broader maritime history. Although Bristol was always something of a metropolis of the west, an important market and distributing centre for goods made or grown in the West Country and Wales, overseas commerce was the lifeblood of the city. That commerce was diverse. Bristol had strong links with Ireland, trading with Dublin and the ports to the south such as Cork, Limerick, Kinsale, and Waterford. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, seventy vessels carried dairy produce, salted beef and pork, linen, leather, and timber to Bristol in return for manufactured goods and colonial products.

‘Everyone that enters upon it’ wrote Henry Laurens of the slave trade, ‘should fortify themselves against misfortune.’ There were many who would concur. William Snelgrave, a London-based slaver of the 1720s, alert to the dangers, zoned in on African mutinies aboard slave ships, which he designated the ‘chief subject’ of his Account. Seventy years later, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson addressed the same issue in a letter to one of the early leaders of the French Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau. There was an ever-present threat of rebellion aboard ship, he told this progressive aristocrat, and all too frequently the insurgencies of slaves were ‘industriously consigned to oblivion, that not a Trace, if possible, may be found’. Clarkson cited the case of the Britannia, a Bristol ship skippered by James Bruce, where shackled slaves besieged the ships’ barricade and overran the quarterdeck only to be suppressed by superior firepower. Confronted by defeat, some of the militants ‘cast themselves into the Sea, with masks of Joy in their Countenance, and of the most perfect Contempt for their oppressors.’ Or, so it was reported. Of the 190 slaves who boarded the vessel on the Windward coast, only ninety reached Barbados.

The revolt on board the Britannia was far from exceptional. A seaman who had sailed on three Bristol slave voyages during the 1760s told Thomas Clarkson that the predicament of capture was ‘so very intolerable and grievous’ that Africans ‘will do anything to extricate themselves from it’. Historians who have trawled through the relevant sources for the long eighteenth century have discovered roughly 500 acts of collective violence by Africans caught up in the British, Dutch, and French slave trades: nearly 100 by free Africans who attacked boats and vessels from the shore, often as reprisals against malicious trading; and about 400 shipboard mutinies. These are conservative estimates, for Clarkson was right to note that slaveship captains were reluctant to chronicle many intended revolts because they would reflect badly on their reputations.

In 1777, the regulating officer for Bristol, Captain William Hamilton, the man responsible for recruiting seafaring men into the navy, ran into a spot of trouble. His lieutenant had impressed a couple of pilots for assisting men to escape the clutches of the press gangs, and the whole river came to a standstill. As Hamilton explained to their lordships at the Admiralty, the pilots and their assistants were responsible for the navigation of all inward and outward boats to Bristol, and he had no choice but to release the men his lieutenant had detained. The pilots, who all lived at Crockerne Pill, a village some five miles from Bristol and two miles from the mouth of the river on the Somersetshire side of the Avon, were ‘absolutely necessary to the trade of this City & have always been considered as such’, he remarked.1 The master of the Society of Merchant Venturers had applied for their discharge and Hamilton had conceded. What else could he do but continue to garner good relations with the merchant elite whose co-operation was always important to the manning of the British navy.

Hamilton was not the only regulating officer to be confronted with this dilemma. In March 1742, the lieutenant of a naval tender impressed another pilot, one James Rumney. He lived in Pill with his wife and four children, and predictably his fellow pilots swung into action, threatening to close the port in protest to his detention. As the town clerk reminded the Admiralty, it was quite irregular to impress pilots on duty. ‘If such Grievances are overlookt, or winkt at’, he continued, the merchants’ ‘Shipps must be kept riding at their anchors, which they shall rather choose than to hazard them loaden down our Channel without the assistance of these so usefull and necessary Conductors.’

Huge tides, blustery winds, treacherous rocks, and shifting quicksand meant that pilots were essential to the commerce of Bristol. John Stuckey remarked that the tides to Bristol ran ‘at a prodigious rate’ with a range of nearly 6 fathoms or 36 feet. Without an experienced pilot and his hobblers, ships could easily be beached on the serpentine Avon, bringing traffic to a standstill. The approach to the Avon estuary was equally treacherous.

The progress of abolition in Bristol presents us with an interesting paradox. Why did the emergence of a movement to abolish the slave trade falter after a promising start in the 1780s? The obvious answer is that Bristol was a slave port and successfully muffled and contained demands for the termination of the trade. While this is undoubtedly true, it is not an entirely sufficient answer. Bristol had many of the qualities that made it a vibrant scene of public debate: a rich assortment of clubs and associations; a newspaper press with at least three weeklies vying for public attention; and a library society and circulating libraries that meant the city had antislavery literature at its fingertips. Following up on James Bradley's research into the dissenting vote and British radicalism, David Richardson, the foremost authority on Bristol's slave trade, has surmised that Bristol had all the conditions that made Manchester and Sheffield important centres of abolition sentiment. And yet Bristol did not emulate the mass petitioning of those towns in the big push for abolition in 1791–2. Along with Liverpool it was mute; encircled by a host of West Country towns that did join in the mass condemnation of the slave trade, including Bath, Trowbridge, Taunton, Gloucester, and Exeter.

In the first seven decades of the eighteenth century, abolition was a non-starter in Bristol. Until 1745, Bristol was the pre-eminent British slave port, profiting from the termination of the Royal Africa Company's monopoly in 1698. Clearing only five ships per annum in the late 1690s, Bristol was sending out over forty a year by 1720 and over forty-five in 1730–2 and 1737–8. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, 1698–1807, Bristol carried 587,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, of which 486,000, or 82.8 per cent, survived. In its heyday, Bristol merchants were responsible for 40 per cent of all British slaving, and the knock-on effect of this activity was immense, in terms of shipbuilding, manufacture for African markets, marine insurance, and the importation, refining, and selling of tropical products. David Richardson has calculated that in 1790 perhaps 40 per cent of all economic activity in the port was involved one way or another with the slave trade, and at its prime one can reasonably assume it was higher.

Henry Cruger is usually remembered as Edmund Burke's radical sidekick, his colleague as MP for Bristol from 1774 to 1780, a tumultuous half-decade when Britain went to war with its American colonies. Although he had stronger links with Bristol than Burke – he had been a common councilman since 1766 and became an alderman in 17821 – it has always been Burke who has stolen the limelight. This has been snobbery on Bristol's part; the pleasure of being represented by a well-known national politician and writer. In the centre of Bristol to this day stands a statue of Burke. Cruger's memory is tucked away on a small plaque off Park Street where the merchant-politician once lived.

The plaque reveals several things. Cruger had a long life, dying at the age of 87 in 1827. He was an American, but lived for thirty-three years in Bristol, becoming mayor of Bristol in 1781 and joining the elite Society of Merchant Venturers that dominated the commercial and political life of the city. Henry Cruger was also a transatlantic figure. He was one of three American-born members to sit in eighteenth-century British parliaments; he actually contested four elections and sat twice for Bristol, in 1774 and again in 1784. But in April 1790, two months before the next general election, when parliament was still in session, he left for New York and two years later became a state senator there. That made him rather unique, especially as objections were raised to his American heritage when he ran in Bristol in 1784, and to his British links when he ran in New York.

Cruger's decision to return to New York was related to the impact of the American war on his economic circumstances, but there is no doubting the strength of his roots there. He hailed from a merchant dynasty that had prospered in New York and was active in its politics. His grandfather Jan Cruger, very likely of Dutch descent, arrived in New York in 1696 and established a shipping business in association with Onzeel Van Swieton. The partnership survived some early legal challenges including one from Abraham De Peyster, a leading figure in New York.

On the 12 July 1779, the merchant James Caton was arrested at the Bristol Exchange by Lieutenant Richard Lane of the press gang. Merchants protested at his abrupt detention, especially his friend, Paul Farr, who was told to back off, otherwise Lane ‘would shoot him with his pistol’. Caton was whisked away to a lock-up in Prince Street, a ‘nasty stinking room’ in which the chimney place was used as a common latrine. Lane derisively offered Caton a shilling for victuals, ordered the sentry to bolt the door, and refused to allow any of his friends to consult with him. When the regulating officer, Captain William Hamilton arrived, Caton demanded to know the reason for his arrest and again insisted he meet with his friends to settle his affairs. Hamilton retorted that he was ‘fit to serve the king’ and would not see any of his friends or associates until he was aboard the tender at Kingroad. He also refused Caton's request to see the mayor of the city, Sir John Durbin, remarking that ‘he has no business with it’. The two lieutenants of the rendezvous, Richard Lane and William Springhorpe, were equally uncooperative, and at 6p.m. Caton was hustled onto an open boat at the Gibb and taken seven miles down the river Avon to Kingroad. There Paul Farr was denied access to his friend, but he tried again the following morning along with Thomas Mullett and a man called Davis. Despite promises that they might finally talk with Caton, they were ‘peremptorily refused admittance’. The words suggest they were never allowed on board the tender.

The Caton affair engaged ‘the conversation of all ranks of people’ in Bristol and inevitably prompted some pressing questions. Why was a merchant like James Caton arrested at the Exchange? Why was he denied an audience with the mayor and his friends? The answer to the first question was that Hamilton believed there were plausible grounds for impressing Caton because he was someone who had been in the merchant marine. He was a former captain who had commanded Bristol ships for leading Bristol merchants, very possibly in the Mediterranean trade in the mid-1750s, but also in the American trades.

The Unfortunate Shipwright is an important primary source for the slave trade but one that is used sparingly. David Richardson did not use it in his research on the Bristol slave trade; Marcus Rediker cited it twice in The Slave Ship; and Emma Christopher deployed it selectively to detail the poverty of seamen and one fleeting episode of sailor-slave amity. The tract has surfaced in Bristol, where it is noted in the Port Cities website as one of three first-person accounts of the Bristol slave trade, and it is mentioned in a number of local histories. Even so, the larger story has not been told, despite the fact it is a valuable eye-witness account of a slave voyage by a literate artisan, and one that he subsequently fleshed out in a much larger version. Many of the life writings of seafarers in this period come from people of a somewhat higher station, déclassé mariners who went to sea for youthful adventure, men like Robert Stanfield or William Butterworth. It is unusual to find a perspective from a labouring man. There are very few of them for the eighteenth century. The Unfortunate Shipwright is important not simply because it throws insider light on shipboard tensions and chains of command, but because it reveals quite graphically the difficulties of seamen getting legal redress for wrongs committed on the voyage. It links the power dynamics of the ship to the power dynamics of the port and its courts of law. The Unfortunate Shipwright belongs to a strain of travel literature in which adventures overseas are discussed to edify the public about exotic lands and peoples. As a genre it could be traced back to the picaresque novel of Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, first published in 1593, although it is not as jocosely satirical as that account since it was designed as a prelude to a legal suit and fired by a strong sense of personal grievance. It was also a narrative of life on the high seas and, in the spirit of Defoe, of ‘extraordinary Events, unexpected Accidents and miraculous Deliverances’. There was a spate of these productions in the 1740s when Britain engaged first Spain and then France to protect colonial possessions and promote freer trade in Atlantic waters.

The mid-century decades were Bristol's golden age of privateering. In the years 1738 to 1783, over 580 vessels were launched to maraud enemy shipping, the high point being during the Seven Years’ War when Britain engaged the French in Atlantic waters and expanded its territory in North America and the Caribbean. The newspapers of the day are full of accounts of the ventures of the privateers, their battles, captures, and disasters, to a point that some historians have typified the era as the age of plunder.

Much of this activity was transcribed in the style of derring-do, a Chaucerian phrase meaning ‘daring to do’, which by the eighteenth century exemplified the courage and masculinity of the British sailor taking on its traditional foes. Although some historians continue to regard privateering as little more than legalized piracy, privateering was subject to quite specific rules of reprisal. Unlike piracy, it was not regarded as ‘an afront to all mankind’. The days when the boundaries between piracy and privateering were blurred by the willingness of the state to sanction the pillaging of the Spanish Main and open new avenues of commerce were over. Private men-of-war were commissioned by the state; their owners or captains had to apply for licences to attack enemy vessels, whether specially designated privateers or merchantmen; and the conquests had to be officially registered or ‘condemned’, to use contemporary legal parlance, in the Admiralty courts or adjunct jurisdictions.1 Royal proclamations and statutes laid out the division of spoils for officers and men in naval vessels, with the Admiralty taking a share of 10 per cent before 1708 but none thereafter. Private men-of-war were subject to more flexible arrangements, but they had to be set down in legal contracts, and the captains of these vessels had to register the names of crew members who were entitled to a share, just in case they felt shortchanged by the agents who managed the prizes.

Understandably and predictably, there were grey areas of privateering activity that were open to abuse. A Caroline statute allowed captains and seamen the right to pillage ‘all such Goods and Merchandizes’ as could be found ‘upon and above the gun deck’, a right that potentially cut into legitimate prizes and encouraged embezzling.