Britain's war on the slave ships

In the early 19th century, a Royal Navy squadron was sent to west Africa to hunt down ships carrying enslaved people to the Americas. The operation was hailed as an act of "pure unselfish philanthropy". Yet, writes Mary Wills, the reality was far more tangled

- Mary Wills

In March 1821, the Royal Navy vessel Tartar exchanged fire with a Spanish ship, Anna Maria. Such a tussle was not unusual in this period of British naval supremacy, fewer than 20 years after victory at the battle of Trafalgar. Yet this was an intervention in a very different kind of war, unlike anything British naval personnel had previously encountered. For Anna Maria was a slave vessel, with more than 400 enslaved African men, women and children crowded on board.

The Anna Maria had just embarked from the river Bonny in what is now Nigeria; its human cargo intended for forcible transportation to the Americas’ plantations. In a report to the Admiralty, the Tartar’s captain, Commodore Sir George Ralph Collier, a veteran of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, struggled to put into words the human suffering he had witnessed on boarding such slave vessels. “No description I could give would convey a true picture of its baseness and atrocity,” he reported.

This was neither the first nor the last time that Collier would witness such horrors, for he belonged to the West Africa Squadron, a detachment of Royal Navy vessels formed to enforce the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, passed by Britain’s parliament in 1807. From its formal establishment in 1818 to its disbandment in the 1860s, the squadron pursued and captured around 1,500 slaving ships along 2,000 miles of west African coastline – all with the aim of suppressing the prolific trade in human lives prosecuted by other nations.

It was an endeavour that set London at loggerheads with a number of rival powers and saw its sailors engaged in a series of cat-and-mouse battles with the slavers. What’s more, it’s an episode that shines a light on Britain’s view of its place in the world in the first half of the 19th century.