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The Original Manuscript Version of William Snelgrave's New Account of Some Parts of Guinea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Robin Law
Robin Law*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Extract

Captain William Snelgrave's A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade, first published in 1734, is a work well known to historians of West Africa. The largest and most valuable section of it comprises a detailed account of voyages by the author in 1727 and 1730 to the ports of Whydah and Jakin on the Slave Coast, then recently conquered by Dahomey, and offers the earliest extended account of the latter kingdom to be published. The information in Snelgrave's book can also be supplemented by records of testimony which he provided on two occasions, in 1726 and 1731, before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London.

Snelgrave was a slave-trading captain with, at the time of his book's publication, some thirty years' experience of the West African trade. The details of his career are documented principally from his book, which in addition to the voyages of 1727 and 1730 (which form its principal subject), also alludes to several earlier slave-trading voyages undertaken by him. Snelgrave's first voyage to Africa, in which he served as purser on a ship commanded by his father, was to Old Calabar in 1704; a second voyage to Old Calabar was undertaken in 1713, a voyage to Sierra Leone (on which Snelgrave was captured by pirates) in 1719, and a voyage to the Gold Coast in 1721-22. This is not, however, a comprehensive catalog of Snelgrave's voyages, since he also alludes to having visited Whydah on “several voyages” before 1727. Other evidence documents two such earlier voyages by Snelgrave to Whydah, in 1717 and 1725. He was apparently still alive in 1735, the year after the publication of his book, when he is mentioned among a group of people involved in legal proceedings to press claims on the estate of Patrick West, a recently deceased merchant of Antigua.

Type
Notes
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 367 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Snelgrave, William, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, & the Slave Trade (London, 1734).Google Scholar Much of Snelgrave's material was also incorporated into Dalzel, Archibald, The History of Dahomy (London, 1793).Google Scholar

2. Not quite the earliest published account, however, since there is some material on Dahomey and its recent conquest of Allada and Whydah in the preface (but not the main text) of Labat, Jean-Baptiste, Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais en Guinée, Isles Voisines et à Cayenne (Paris, 1730).Google Scholar

3. Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 1723-8 (London: Public Record Office, 1928), 261–63 (11 May 1726)Google Scholar; Journal…1729-34 (PRO, 1928), 201 (27 May 1731).Google Scholar

4. For the voyage of 1704 see Snelgrave, New Account, Introduction and pp. 164-65; for that of 1713 see ibid., Introduction; for that of 1719, ibid., 193-96; and for that of 1721-22, ibid., 168, 185.

5. Ibid., 19; cf. 6, 61, 64.

6. PRO: C. 113/276, letter of William Baillie, Whydah, 8 April 1717; Journal of the Commissioners for Trade & Plantations 1723-8, 261-62 (referring to a voyage in which Snelgrave was at Cape Coast in October 1724 and at Whydah in January 1725). It was evidently the latter voyage on which Snelgrave heard of a recent diplomatic exchange between Dahomey and Whydah, mentioned in New Account, 6.

7. Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial Series, Vol. III: 1720-1745 (London, HMSO, 1910), 482–83 (13 Oct. 1735).Google Scholar The opposing party in this case included West's widow and her new husband “William Smith of Antigua;” possibly this was the William Smith whose own book A New Voyage to Guinea was posthumously published in 1744.

8. My thanks to David Henige, who drew my attention to this manuscript, and to Michael Webb of the Manuscripts Section of the National Maritime Museum for his assistance.

9. Matthews, Noel and Wainwright, M. Doreen, A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Relating to Africa (London, 1971), 86Google Scholar; Matthews, Noel, Materials for West African History in the Archives of the United Kingdom (London, 1973), 66.Google Scholar

10. The Katherine Galley was Snelgrave's ship on both the 1727 and 1730 voyages.

11. The manuscript is clearly a copy, as is shown by the omission of a line through haplography and its insertion as an interlinear addition on p. 91; but this copying error might, of course, have arisen in the course of Snelgrave's own copying out of a fair version from a rough draft.

12. Until 1751 the civil year officially began in Britain on 25 March rather than 1 January, so that 16 January 1726 corresponds by modern reckoning to 16 January 1727.

13. Cf. Manning, Patrick, “The Slave Trade in the Bight of Benin, 1640-1890” in Gemery, Henry A. and Hogendorn, Jan S., eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), 120Google Scholar, which cites Snelgrave's published figure as “more dependable” than other contemporary estimates. (Manning actually cites this figure as from Atkins, John, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil & the West Indies [London, 1735]Google Scholar, but Atkins seems to have taken it from Snelgrave.)

14. For the text of this letter, with some discussion of the question of its authenticity, see Law, Robin, “Further Light on Bulfinch Lambe and the Emperor of Pawpaw: King Agaja of Dahomey's Letter to King George I of England, 1726,” HA, 17 (1990), 211–26.Google Scholar

15. For a full account see Johnson, Marion, “Bulfinch Lambe and the Emperor of Pawpaw: A Footnote to Agaja and the Slave Trade,” HA, 5 (1978), 345–50.Google Scholar

16. For the date of Lambe's departure from Dahomey, cf. the report in PRO: T70/7, letter of Jeremiah Tinker, Thomas Humfrey, and Richard Green, Whydah, 28 May 1726.

17. Lambe in 1731 acknowledged the gift of eighty slaves from the king of Dahomey, but denied receiving any gold: Johnson, “Bulfinch Lambe,” 347.

18. The references to Lambe's mission in Smith, , New Voyage to Guinea, 189–90Google Scholar, and Atkins, , Voyage to Guinea, 121–22Google Scholar, seem both to derive from Lambe himself.

19. Henige, David, “The Race is Not Always to the Swift: Thoughts on the Use of Written Sources for the Study of Early African History,” Paideuma, 33 (1987), 55.Google Scholar