The career of James Irving, a surgeon and captain in the Liverpool slave trade in the late eighteenth century, was based on the forcible transportation of African men, women and children into a life of slavery in the Americas. This sophisticated trade in human cargo was ‘global and international, involving all the maritime powers in Europe, from Spain and Portugal to France, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and even Brandenburg’. Some 37,000 slaving voyages cleared from ports of the Atlantic littoral between the early sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth century and, collectively, they transported an estimated eleven million individuals from Africa.

The pervasive nature of the trade was such that employment on slaving vessels was a fairly common maritime occupation in eighteenth-century Britain, and the archival imprint left by this form of commerce is extensive. Contemporary concern with the profitability of these human cargoes meant that copious business records were generated at different stages of the transatlantic venture. Logbooks written by captains and surgeons are among ‘many hundreds of extant firsthand accounts of slaving voyages’. In view of Britain's dominance of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, it is not surprising to find that a significant number of accounts written by men who served on slaving voyages have survived. Perhaps the most well known accounts are those written by John Newton and Hugh Crow, former captains in the Liverpool slave trade. Hugh Crow's autobiography was first published in 1830 at a time when there was widespread public condemnation of the evils of the slave trade and slavery. John Newton's letters to his wife and a log of three slaving ventures on the Duke of Argyle and the African were not published until the twentieth century, but a pamphlet (published in 1788) containing his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade was used to support the abolitionist cause.6 The testimony of British captains in the trade also appears frequently in the records of parliamentary enquiries undertaken in response to growing abolitionist pressure in the late eighteenth century.

Despite this wealth of evidence, it is still comparatively rare to find extensive personal accounts of the captains engaged in the slave trade. Letters written and received by James Irving, together with a journal describing a period of enslavement on the Barbary Coast, were deposited anonymously in the Lancashire Record Office in 1977.