Transatlantic Slave Trade Research Paper

Transatlantic Slave Trade Research Paper Assignment Help 1
HIST 308 Spring 2020 Dr. Matthew S. Hopper Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

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Transatlantic Slave Trade Research Paper
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Slave Ship Research Paper Guidelines This quarter, every student in HIST 308 will complete a research paper on the history of a slave ship from the nineteenth century. Essays are required to cite both primary and secondary sources. They must be a minimum of 10 double-spaced pages (excluding bibliography) in 12-pt. font with one-inch margins and may not exceed 20 pages. The following guidelines will help you research and write your essay. Background The British Royal Navy captured more than 1,500 slave ships in the course of its anti-slave-trade patrols in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean between 1808 and 1896 and released nearly 250,000 enslaved Africans from captivity aboard these vessels. The voluminous records of these captures preserve a massive amount of information about the slave trade and the struggle to end it, but very few of these captured slave ships have ever been explored in detail by historians. This quarter, you will have the opportunity to select one captured slave ship and thoroughly research it and tell its story, including the ultimate outcome for the enslaved Africans held captive on board. Your research paper has the potential to fill an important gap in the scholarship on slavery and abolition, and it may even become a publishable article, particularly because many of the primary sources you will use for this paper have been underutilized by historians, and many details of these stories remain to be uncovered. If done well, a microhistory of a single slave ship can effectively illustrate the horrors of the slave trade while demonstrating the complexity and nuances of slavery and abolition by using the various stages and locations of a particular journey to illustrate patterns of the slave trade in general. Some experienced scholars have even turned the story of a single slave ship or a single journey into an entire book. Excellent examples include: Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds Of The Slave Trade (2002); Sylviane Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2009); James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the and the End of Slavery (2011); Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion (2013); Bruce Mouser, A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794 (2002), and Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon (2018). Robert Harms, for example, famously used a single journal from one journey of one specific French slave ship, the Diligent, as the launching point to illustrate the complexities of the entire transatlantic slave trade.
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Selecting a Ship The ship you choose to research may be any one of the hundreds of ships captured by the British Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. A list containing the majority of the ships captured between 1808 and 1840 can be found in Appendix A List of Captures, in Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (2016), which is available as an eBook through the library under HIST 308 course reserves. To select your ship, you may begin by exploring secondary sources. You might start with the three classic accounts of the Royal Navy and the slave trade: Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (1968), W.E.F. Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers (1969), and Raymond C. Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (1987), which are on reserve in the library. In addition to these classic accounts, there are three newer books on this subject: Sian Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter (2011), Peter Grindal, Opposing the Slavers (2016), John Brioch, Squadron (2017). Grindals book is particularly detailed at a whopping 863 pages. Each of these books contains an index listing the ships covered in the text, but you may have the most success by reading selected chapters that relate to periods and regions that most interest you and selecting your ship from among those discussed in those chapters. Ships may be of particular interest to you based on your knowledge or experience with particular regions in Africa or the Americas or your interest in particular areas of history. Ships may interest you because of their country of origin (i.e., flag), the places they embarked enslaved Africans, the number of captives they had aboard, the destinations they were sailing to, the British ship that captured them, the circumstances of the capture, the outcome of the trial of the slave ship, etc. Select a ship that sounds interesting to you based on your own particular interests. The only requirement is that the slave ship is one of the majority of ships that contained a number of enslaved Africans at the time of capture (rather than one of the ships condemned for being fitted out for the slave trade but were otherwise empty of captives). Since our class is primarily interested in the fates of the Africans caught up in the transatlantic slave trade, your focus should not be on the ship itself or the enslavers but rather on the enslaved Africans themselves. Another good option for selecting a ship is to explore the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database at www.slavevoyages.org. After reading the introductory materials, click on Transatlantic and select Database from the dropdown menu. You can limit your search under the field Outcome to Outcome of voyage if ship captured and select British. This will give you a list of more than 1,800 captured slave ships, although it is important to note that many of these are before the nineteenth century; we are interested in the period between 1808 and 1897, for which we have the most primary sources. Keep in mind that documentation tends to be most extensive after about 1820.
Select Outcome
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Alternatively, you may browse the 95 volumes of the Parliamentary Papers related to the slave trade in the library (HT 1161.I73) or browse the FO 84 files from the National Archives (UK) online (we will look at these sources together as a class) and find individual ships described in the correspondence in these files. Further information about these two sources is found below in the section on Primary Sources. We also have another source unique to our class here at Cal Poly. Further information on it is below under Primary Sources. On the course website, I have posted a spreadsheet listing the complete contents of several volumes of the HCA 35 series that I have photographed over the past few years. You are welcome to browse the multiple sheets in the Excel workbook to view the ships contained in these volumes. The spreadsheet will give you an idea of how many pages of documentation are contained for each ship in these volumes (note that some ships appear in multiple volumes), where the ships were captured, their nationality, now many enslaved Africans were aboard, where the ship was condemned, and other details. Once you have identified the appropriate volume(s) and pages, you can view the specific pages in the sub-folders of the HCA 35 folder in the shared OneDrive. This collection is explained in the Primary Sources section below. Secondary Sources Once you have selected your ship, you will need to first identify secondary sources you can use to contextualize the history of your ship and its voyage. There are several good reasons for historians to begin with secondary sources. First, it is helpful to have some historical background before you begin looking at archival sources. You will be better equipped to encounter vocabulary, events, and concepts in the primary sources if you first explore what historians have already written about your topic. Second, a solid background in the secondary sources can save you from the embarrassment of belatedly learning that something you believed to be a new discovery is actually already well established in the historical literature. Additionally, having a strong knowledge of the secondary sources can help you be more efficient in your work with primary sources as you will be more likely to recognize the important aspects of your primary sources if you already understand the important themes explored by other historians. Some History majors have already mastered the art of finding secondary sources in their Research & Writing Seminar (HIST 303) and Historiography Seminar (HIST 304), but most majors in this class have not yet taken these courses. The following description may be a refresher of those research methods for more experienced students but a helpful introduction for many others. If you have taken other research courses in other majors, you are welcome to return to your notes from those classes for additional support as many of the research methods may be similar. To find secondary sources, login to the Cal Poly portal and click on the Library tab, then click on Research Guides and select the general History research guide to access the main databases. (You can also find them from the librarys homepage under Databases A-Z.) Using Boolean searches in the keywords and subject fields of the advanced search pages of JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Premier, identify articles; and using OneSearch, Ebook Central, Wiley Online Library, SpringerLink, and WorldCat, identify books related to your research project in the following six categories:
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1) The slave trade in general (i.e., either the Transatlantic slave trade or Indian Ocean slave
trade depending on your ship) 2) The slave trade in the specific area of Africa in which your ship embarked enslaved African
captives (e.g., Bight of Benin, Senegambia, Angola). 3) Slavery in the region to which your ship was heading (e.g., Cuba, Bahia, Pernambuco). 4) British antislavery policy toward the country your ship was from (e.g., Portugal, Spain, USA) 5) The history of the Royal Navys anti-slave-trade campaign in the particular region in which
your ship was captured (e.g., West Africa, Indian Ocean, Caribbean). 6) The history of liberated Africans in the particular area in which the captives from your ship
were released (e.g., Sierra Leone, Cape of Good Hope, Saint Helena, Caribbean). For each of these six categories identify a minimum of two secondary sources (books and articles). List them under each category using the proper Turabian/Chicago citation style (for either footnotes or bibliography). Essays should ideally include at least one book and one article in each category, although there may be a different number of books and articles in each category provided the total number of sources for each category is at least two (i.e., a minimum of 12 secondary sources in total for the essay). Here is an example of a potential entry under category 6: Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedoms Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Here is another example of a potential entry under category 4: Maeve Ryan, The price of legitimacy in humanitarian intervention: Britain, the right of search, and the abolition of the West African slave trade, in Brendan Simms and D.J.B. Trim, Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 231-255. It is not necessary to find books or articles that mention your specific ship by name (such specific mentions are rare), but if you do find your ship mentioned somewhere, be sure to make a note of where you found that reference as it is likely to be very helpful to you as you write your essay. Primary Sources Now that you have identified your secondary sources and have begun to read them, you are prepared to conduct your primary source research. This step is the longest and most rewarding part of the research process, so be sure to leave yourself a substantial amount of time to delve into these sources. Although we will not have time to travel directly to archives during this term, we have the next best thing in the form of extensive photographs of documents from archives and other sources. Your final essay must contain at least five different primary sources. The ideal research paper will use printed and handwritten manuscripts from various archival record groups. This quarter, we will have access to the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers volumes relating to the slave trade reprinted in 95-volume set by Irish University Press, in addition to digital copies of the original records of the
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High Court of Admiralty (HCA 35) photographed from the National Archives (UK) in Kew. We also have full digital access to the entire, massive 2,000+-volume Foreign Office records group relating to the slave trade (FO 84) via the National Archives (UK) website. Through the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database website (www.slavevoyages.org) we can also access the African Names Database and the full Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. In class, we will conduct training exercises in how to make use of historical newspapers (NEH), Parliamentary debates (Hansard), the U.S. Serial Set (LOC), the English Admiralty Reports (Hathi Trust), and the Registers of Liberated Africans from the Sierra Leone Archives (via www.liberatedafricans.org). (For select cases, I have also photographed additional records from the office of the Admiralty (ADM) and High Court of Admiralty (HCA) including appeals case records and prize papers. If you are interested in going above and beyond with your essay this term by using these additional sources, please see me about this possibility.) And new this quarter we now have access to the most exciting resource of all, ProQuests UK Parliamentary Papers database. We will spend time in class going over how to access each of these sources. The following is a supplemental guide to accessing them. HCA 35 The main primary sources for this research paper will come from the HCA 35 series in the National Archives (UK). This record group includes 89 handwritten volumes which reproduce the correspondence between Admiralty and Treasury regarding all slave ships seized by the Royal Navy between 1821 and 1891 and several additional cases beyond this date range. In part because these volumes have never been indexed or digitized and because they reproduce correspondence archived elsewhere, these records have received little attention from historians. Lloyd and Ward do not cite HCA 35 and Howell cites only the later volumes (76-89). The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database does not cite HCA 35, although it does cite the subsidiary record group HCA 37 in the cases of about 22 ships. This quarter we have the opportunity to work with these volumes without traveling all the way to the National Archives. Over the past three years on multiple research trips to Kew, I have photographed these 89 volumes, and a team of graduate students has been working with me to index them. So far, about 24 of the 89 volumes have been indexed, and our team is continuing our work this quarter to fully index the remaining volumes. About HCA 35 The following is the description of HCA 35 from the National Archives (UK) Discovery Catalog: In 1807 the slave trade was abolished in all British possessions and after that date many examples of the navys enforcement of this are to be found, especially in HCA 49/97, cases adjudicated in the court of vice-admiralty for Sierra Leone. In 1821 William Rothery was appointed by the treasury to report on all cases involving slavery in admiralty, vice-admiralty and mixed commission (held jointly with representatives of the other country involved) courts. In 1860 he was succeeded by his son Henry, who remained in the post until 1888, by which time the work was greatly diminished. Their reports are to be found in HCA 35, 1821-1891.
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Reference: HCA 35 Title: Slave Trade Adviser to the Treasury: Report Books
Description:
This series consists of entry books, known as ‘Government Reports’, which contain reports of the slave trade adviser on questions referred to him by the Treasury for report. They concern matters arising out of cases in the Admiralty, Vice-Admiralty, and Mixed Commission courts under the Proceeds of Captured Slavers Act 1821 and other measures relating to the suppression of slavery. Down to 1848 they also contain entries of associated papers. There is also a volume containing Treasury minutes referred to in the reports, 1860 to 1869.
Date: 1821-1891 Held by: The National Archives, Kew Legal status:
Public Record(s)
Language: English Physical description:
89 volume(s)
How to cite HCA 35 The National Archives may be described or cited as:
The National Archives (TNA) The National Archives of the UK (TNA)
The National Archives website requests: We recommend using a capital T on The when writing our name, whether or not it comes at the beginning of a sentence. Cite the department code (HCA) then the series number (35) followed by the volume number. Example: The National Archives of the UK (TNA), HCA 35/1 The following abbreviations may be used, without punctuation and not italicised:
p or pp for page or pages f or ff for folio or folios
Example: TNA, HCA 35/1 pp 15-16 How to use HCA 35 First, access the online resources from the HCA 35 folder (available in your OneDrive under Shared Files) to identify your ship and find original 19th-century documentation for your particular case. You may search for your specific ship in the index in the HCA Index sub-folder and view
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the Excel spreadsheet titled HCA Volumes. If you are in the process of selecting a ship (see p. 2 above), you can browse the various subfolders for a case that interests you (each folder represents a different volume in the HCA 35 series and contains between 200 and 400 images representing 400 to 800 pages) or browse the HCA index.
The pages of the specific volume you are looking at will provide your first primary source. Note that records for some ships can be very lengthy and detailed containing correspondence about bounties paid to the Royal Navy, dramatic details about the pursuit and capture of the slave ship, and in certain rare cases, a full register of the liberated Africans removed from the ship. Other records may be short, in which case be sure to double check the entire workbook rather than one sheet for other references to your ship. You can use the Control+F feature in Microsoft Excel to search the document, but be sure to click on Options and select workbook because the search will otherwise default to sheet, which will only search a single volume. The most interesting research papers will use the most detailed records, so keep an open mind and be willing to change ships if you find more detailed records for a different ship that turns out to be more interesting during your research. Once you have found your ship look at the corresponding files in the HCA 35 file in the OneDrive. Each folder contains one volume. For periods with volumes that have been photographed but have not yet been indexed, it may be necessary to browse
Each tab or sheet is a new volume. Start and end pages for each case.
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multiple volumes. Below is a list of the approximate date ranges covered in each volume. Again, keep in mind that ships appear in multiple volumes and correspondence frequently spans multiple years, so you may need to do some old-fashioned detective work to find the full correspondence on your ship. Approximate Dates of HCA Volumes (from the National Archives Discovery Catalogue) HCA 35/1 1821-1822 HCA 35/2 1822-1823 HCA 35/3 1823-1839 HCA 35/4 1823-1824 HCA 35/5 1824 HCA 35/6 1823-1825 HCA 35/7 1825-1826 HCA 35/8 1825-1832 HCA 35/9 1825-1826 HCA 35/10 1826-1827 HCA 35/11 1826-1827 HCA 35/12 1827-1828 HCA 35/13 1828-1829 HCA 35/14 1827-1829 HCA 35/15 1829-1841 HCA 35/16 1829-1830 HCA 35/17 1829-1830 HCA 35/18 1830-1841 HCA 35/19 1830-1831 HCA 35/20 1831-1832 HCA 35/21 1831-1832 HCA 35/22 1831-1842 HCA 35/23 1832-1833 HCA 35/24 1832-1833 HCA 35/25 1832-1841 HCA 35/26 1832-1833 HCA 35/27 1833-1834 HCA 35/28 1833-1834 HCA 35/29 1833-1834 HCA 35/30 1834-1839
HCA 35/31 1834-1839 HCA 35/32 1834-1836 HCA 35/33 1835 HCA 35/34 1835-1836 HCA 35/35 1835-1837 HCA 35/36 1836-1837 HCA 35/37 1836-1838 HCA 35/38 1836-1837 HCA 35/39 1837-1839 HCA 35/40 1837-1838 HCA 35/41 1837-1838 HCA 35/42 1837 HCA 35/43 1836-1837 HCA 35/44 1838 HCA 35/45 1838-1840 HCA 35/46 1839-1842 HCA 35/47 1839 HCA 35/48 1838-1840 HCA 35/49 1839-1841 HCA 35/50 1840 HCA 35/51 1840-1841 HCA 35/52 1840-1842 HCA 35/53 1840-1852 HCA 35/54 1840-1843 HCA 35/55 1840-1841 HCA 35/56 1840-1842 HCA 35/57 1840-1852 HCA 35/58 1841-1843 HCA 35/59 1841-1843 HCA 35/60 1842-1843
HCA 35/61 1841-1854 HCA 35/62 1842-1843 HCA 35/63 1842-1844 HCA 35/64 1843-1850 HCA 35/65 1843-1845 HCA 35/66 1843-1845 HCA 35/67 1844-1850 HCA 35/68 1845 HCA 35/69 1845-1847 HCA 35/70 1845-1846 HCA 35/71 1845-1847 HCA 35/72 1846-1848 HCA 35/73 1846-1848 HCA 35/74 1848-1849 HCA 35/75 1849-1851 HCA 35/76 1854-1857 HCA 35/77 1857-1860 HCA 35/78 1860-1863 HCA 35/79 1863-1864 HCA 35/80 1864-1865 HCA 35/81 1865-1868 HCA 35/82 1868-1871 HCA 35/83 1872-1874 HCA 35/84 1874-1876 HCA 35/85 1876-1878 HCA 35/86 1878-1881 HCA 35/87 1881-1886 HCA 35/88 1887-1891 HCA 35/89 1860-1869
For tips on how to read the documents in the HCA series, please see the Working with the HCA 35 appendix below at the end of these guidelines. Slave Voyages Next, find your ship in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) using the Vessel Name query field from under the Ship, Nation, Owners basic variables and limiting the date range to a few years around your ships capture date.
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Record the specific Voyage ID number for this exercise. But dont stop here. Look at the very bottom of the page under Sources and identify which Parliamentary Papers (PP) volumes (e.g., XLIX) or Irish University Press (IUP) slave trade volumes the Slave Voyages database used to create this page. Make a note of the specific volume and page numbers of this reference and head to the Kennedy Library to view these documents in person. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database will allow you to make comparisons between your ships voyage and more than 36,000 other voyages. You will be able to determine how common your ships itinerary was and make comparative observations about its size, the number of captives aboard, and the frequency with which similar voyages were made. You may also be able to draw conclusions about the ratio of adults to children, and males to females aboard the ship in comparison with other ships in the same period. You can also explore the African Names database. Irish University Press Parliamentary Papers Volumes Your next step is to visit the third floor of Kennedy Library and locate HT 1161.I73. In recent years, Cal Poly has acquired nearly all of the 95 volumes in the Irish University Press Parliamentary Papers – Slave Trade series. These volumes reprint facsimiles of the documentation related to the slave trade ordered to be published by the House of Commons in the nineteenth century. In the easiest cases, the Slave Voyages sources field will give you the precise volume and pages of the reference to you need preceded by the abbreviation IUP. However, in other cases, you will need to find the specific reference by exploring the Irish University Press volumes by date and series. Note that when an IUP volume number is not given, a PP volume may be along with a date. Browse the IUP volumes corresponding to your date range and check the table of contents for your particular PP volume. This may take a while, but dont lose heart you may discover some interesting related material during your search. These volumes may be checked out like regular library books. However, please take good care of them if you choose to take them out of the library. You may need to inquire of your classmates if your desired volume is checked out. In addition, on the website, I have scanned into a PDF file a full copy of the 55-page subject set description, which was published as a separate volume in 1969. If you have the PP number from Slave Voyages but not the Irish University Press volume and page number, it may be helpful to consult this important reference, which is available on the course website. This PDF is fully searchable, so you may be able to quickly identify the appropriate volume of the IUP series by using Control+F in this file and searching for the Roman numeral corresponding to the Parliamentary Paper you need.
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For example: If Slave Voyages gives the reference PP 1939 XXXI (162), you could search for XXXI in the scanned PDF of the IUP Slave Trade volumes guide and be directed to Vol. 68. Liberated Africans Next, search Dr. Henry Lovejoys Liberated Africans database (www.liberatedafricans.org) and try to find the registers of liberated Africans taken from your ship. The database is most thorough for ships taken to Sierra Leone, but the website is constantly being updated to include sources from all around the world. From the homepage do a keyword search in the main search field using the name of your ship. Documents about ships typically are listed as a case, which when clicked will take you to historical documents including registers of liberated Africans. Note that there may be multiple records for each ship. In general, sources described as event or individual will be less helpful for this essay than the sources that are labeled historical documents. Treaties Now that you have found a wealth of primary sources on your ship, try your hand at identifying the international treaty or law that allowed your ship to be captured. You may start by reviewing the HCA, PP, or IUP documents you have already found to see which laws that the slave ship was condemned for violating. Look for words such as in violation of or in contravention of before the names of specific treaties or international agreements. If the ship is Spanish, Portuguese, or Brazilian, there will be a bilateral treaty of mutual search or a treaty to set up a Court of Mixed Commission. For this research paper, you will need to find at least one primary source related to the particular treaty or law that permitted your ship to be seized. To do this, try searching the following online sources linked through the course website: Hertslet’s Treaties (via Hathi Trust), English Admiralty Reports (via Hathi Trust), Slavery in America and
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the World (via Hein Online), and Hansard (UK Parliamentary Debates). At least one of these databases should help you find the original text of your treaty and any debate surrounding it. If you get stuck, try Appendix B or C of Grindals Opposing the Slavers, a PDF of which is on the website as Grindal Appendix B-C List of s & Treaties. It gives a chronological list of laws and treaties. Or see Maeve Ryans chapter cited above under Secondary Sources. The best source for most of the ships you will research this term will be Hertslets Treaties in Hathi Trust (see the link on the course website). Although his sour

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