13

The Illegal Slave Trade

If the law of 1817 committed the Restoration monarchy to outlawing the slave trade within a few years, reports from both French and foreign naval vessels showed how it was openly, and at times shamelessly, flouted. Merchants continued to trade as their slave ships eluded arrest on the high seas and in the waters off West Africa. And, as the abolitionist lobby repeatedly complained, they did so with apparent impunity, defying the law in pursuit of the generous rewards which slaving continued to offer. An abolitionist tract circulating in Paris in 1824 made the case for considering the legislation a total failure, such was the enthusiasm in commercial circles for sending out yet more vessels to Africa to purchase slaves.¹ The anonymous author cites a number of recent publications, from African newspapers to pamphlets by the Amis des Noirs, claiming to prove high levels of activity by French slavers in African waters. From the Royal Gazette in Sierra Leone, for instance, he extracts a report of the recent voyage by the British cruiser Maidstone off the African coast between Sierra Leone and Cameroon, which had resulted in its crew boarding nineteen ships, ten of them French. Their verdict was uncompromising. Of the schooler La Théonie from Nantes, the Maidstone’s captain observed: ‘General cargo for the slave trade. Boarded on the Bonny River where it was trying to stay in order to take on a cargo of slaves.’ The case of La Sabine, from Bordeaux, was similar. It had been ‘prepared for 200 women and 300 men when we visited her; there were already at least 300 slaves waiting to be taken on board’.² The ships boarded were all provided with French papers to give them a semblance of legality, and the pamphlet concludes, unsurprisingly, with the damning indictment that ‘the facts here speak for themselves, and if the French government does not intervene in a more incisive way that it has done to date, the world will conclude what is, alas, only too true, that this great nation is showing some repugnance at abolishing this odious traffic’.³

This was a reasonable conclusion to draw, given the wealth of evidence that French slave ships continued to ply the Atlantic with apparent impunity, though France’s part in it undeniably declined in comparison with Spain, Portugal, or Brazil. But it remained significant until the end of the Restoration monarchy and the signing of the Anglo-French treaty on abolition in 1831.⁴ These were the peak years of clandestine or illegal slaving, as it is often described by historians of the nineteenth-century Atlantic. But as Serge Daget, the leading specialist in this phase of the French slave trade, explains, the words can be deceptive. It was impossible for slave vessels to operate in total secrecy. In Nantes, indeed, no vessel could engage in the trade without the whole city knowing: the ships were well-known, as were those who owned and insured them, those who captained and manned them, those who fitted them out for the sea and invested in their voyages. Insuring a slave ship required the complicity of large numbers of Nantes merchants, among them some of the leading houses on the Quai de la Fosse: in 1825, thirty-eight merchants were investors, and in 1826 no fewer than forty-six.⁵ Such complicity was not considered in any way shameful in a city where the slave trade still commanded respect and guaranteed social standing. The Chamber of commerce was in the hands of slavers throughout the 1820s, and of the eleven judges on the commercial tribunal in 1825, ten were well known as slavers, including the president.⁶ This was hardly an environment where abolitionists could expect to find a sympathetic ear.

The arguments used by the pro-slaving lobby had not been silenced either by the Revolution in France or by propaganda emanating from the other side of the Channel. The stakes were too high, since for many, especially in Nantes, the only way to rebuild the fortunes of the port was to resume the commerce they had been forced to abandon in 1791. Merchants and armateurs rushed to invest again in voyages to Africa in the hope of exploiting a favourable commercial climate, as planters, deprived of the shiploads of black labour on which they once depended, provided an enthusiastic market for slaves, bringing the expectation of assured prices and high profits. In the first years, of course, there was nothing illegal in their trading, no reason for self-doubt or clandestine activity. The greatest challenge lay in opening up new markets after the loss of Saint-Domingue. Martinique and Guadeloupe were a major market for French slavers, but increasingly French slave ships now moved further afield, especially to Cuba and the Spanish sugar islands. An abolitionist tract published in the late 1820s observed how Nantes merchants had exploited trade links with Cuba which they had not admitted publicly, and claimed that it was only with increased policing from the mid-1820s that their interest in the slave trade finally declined. Until then, the anonymous pamphleteer could see only greed and a shameful expansion of slaving in the port: whereas in 1816 only one vessel had sailed from the Loire to Africa, he claimed, the figures had risen substantially (seven in 1817, four in 1818, twenty-one in 1819, ten in 1820, twenty-one in 1821, six in 1822, fifteen in 1823, thirty-seven in 1824, and in 1825 a further forty up until the end of August). Only then did the numbers start to decline, as merchants were deterred by the risk of seizures and vessels that had been built for slaving out of Nantes were diverted elsewhere—notably, he claims, to ports in Holland.⁷

Abolitionists had, of course, every reason to exaggerate the number of slave voyages and the fortunes that were to be made from them; the pamphlet in question quotes figures of 60 million livres as the profit which Nantes owed to the slave trade, to be shared among the owners, crews, suppliers, and insurers of around 100 slave ships working out of the port. But such figures can claim no real authority; they take no account of shipwrecks, losses to privateers in the Caribbean, or capture by the Royal Navy; they overlook insurance losses, the deaths of crewmen, or the epidemics that customarily decimated the slaves piled up in the hold. They are, in other words, primed to shock, serving to redouble the horror of the slave trade itself. In a pamphlet of 1826, the Société de la Morale Chrétienne expressed outrage at the level of slaving still practised in France, and particularly in Nantes, where, they claimed, what its members had observed ‘makes the hair stand up on the back of our necks’. The French flag flew more and more frequently over the abuses of the traders, they alleged, and the French were corrupting the African peoples with whom they trade. ‘Along the Sherbro river, to the south of Sierra Leone, the misery and devastation that result from the encouragement given by French slavers to violence and looting surpass all description. The native merchants have become so avid for victims that several colonists from Sierra Leone who had come to the Sherbro to trade were seized and sold into slavery.’⁸

The Société de la Morale Chrétienne was one of the most influential pressure groups for abolition in Restoration France, and much of its force came from the association it made between Christian ideals and the cause of anti-slavery. In this it was much closer to the English non-conformist tradition of abolitionism than the enlightened discourses which had predominated in eighteenth-century France, and much of the material it published was, indeed, drawn from British sources. An inventory of the titles in the Society’s library in 1824 showed that no more than ten originated in France, a small number when compared with the thirty authored by English abolitionists like Clarkson, Forster, and Wilberforce, or the many anonymous tracts that had been sent as gifts from their British counterparts.⁹ The Society published a regular newspaper in which, once again, great emphasis was placed on the progress of the abolition movement across the Channel, and it is surely significant that the leaders of the English movement—notably Clarkson and Wilberforce—hastened to join the French Society, seeing it as a valued ally in the international campaign against the slave trade, and using its networks to press home the shame of France’s continued exploitation of Africans in pursuit of profit. They also published tracts and treatises in French right up until the moment in 1848 when the Second Republic voted the total abolition of slavery, pointing to the increasing isolation of France in a world that was turning against involvement in the trade. Abolitionists had achieved successes in countries seldom associated with the Rights of Man, they noted, and for France to be an anomaly was a source of curiosity and humiliation. In a tract printed in Cambrai in the late 1840s, signed by Clarkson under the title Quelques mots aux amis de l’humanité sur l’esclavage et la traite des nègres, those countries that had abolished slavery were listed: they included, most recently, Hong Kong in 1844 and the Swedish colony of Saint-Barthélemy in 1845. The pamphlet noted that the Bey of Tunis had taken the initiative of ending slavery in the territories he controlled. These were no longer exceptional cases; so surely the time was long past when France should accept the moral arguments and fall into line?¹⁰

The Society’s newspaper campaigned relentlessly against the slave trade and French involvement in the human degradation it caused. It repeatedly informed its readers of the progress that was being made across the world in their shared crusade against the slave-owners, bringing news of abolition movements in Surinam, providing accounts of policing activities off Sierra Leone, and citing petitions by abolitionists from provincial towns across England. It railed against French government obfuscation of the issue. Above all, the Society drew the attention of its readers to abuses committed by the French in pursuance of the slave trade and to the reassuringly long list of slave ships reported captured at sea. The paper quoted a report from a Welsh sea captain, Captain Pince, who had just returned from Bonny on the Senegal coast and had brought what he regarded as incontrovertible proof of French misconduct. Not only had he encountered a slave ship with around 500 Africans on board, bound, he believed, for the Caribbean; he had also sighted a French corvette with more than 600 captives on its way to Réunion. This was not a simple slaver. It was a warship with twenty-two guns on board, and was commanded by an officer of the French navy. What greater proof could be needed of French government connivance?¹¹

In abolitionist eyes, no crime was too heinous for the slavers, whose sole motivation was greed. But what caused the greatest shock was less the fact that Frenchmen were still engaged in the slave trade—that they had always suspected—than the apparent impunity with which they continued slaving even after it was outlawed by royal decrees. They took no notice, for instance, of the words of the French governor in Senegal in 1817 when he read the royal ordinance abolishing the slave trade. Almost immediately slaving was resumed with even greater intensity, and within days a French ship on Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, embarked 150 Africans to be sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The law was simply being ignored, since it was in no one’s interest to enforce it. A petition to the Chamber of Deputies outlined some of the indignities to which the African population was subjected. In October 1817, it alleged, a slave ship from Saint-Louis got the prince of a rival tribe to attack a local village, supplying him with everything he would require to launch the attack—a boat, arms, munitions, and a crew of black sailors. ‘The village was burned down, and in a single night 47 Africans were taken into captivity while 65 perished defending their huts and their liberty.’¹² Most damningly, the petition added that it would be impossible for this trade to flourish along the valley of the Senegal River unless the administration was complicit and French government employees were deriving profit from it. Local opinion, adds the writer, was unanimous in its belief that everyone, from the governor down, had an interest in the slave trade.¹³ As a consequence, everyone also had an interest in concealing it from the eyes of the world.

If there was indeed political connivance of this sort, it was a serious embarrassment to the French government, which had entered into binding commitments with Britain to support the Royal Navy in rooting out the slave trade. The law seemed quite unambiguous. Any part played in the slave trade by French subjects or French vessels, no matter where in the world, or by foreign nationals living in territory owned by France, would be punished ‘by the confiscation of the ship and its cargo’; where the ship was French, it was to be banned from operating in French waters. These offences would be judged by French courts that specialized in contraventions of trade and customs. And, to show the sincerity of its commitment, the French administration sent a copy of the law to London so that its terms would be understood by the British authorities.¹⁴ Throughout the years that followed, Britain maintained diplomatic exchanges with Paris on alleged breaches of the law, passing on reports of illegal slaving by French ships, often from a network of correspondents whom it maintained in Africa. They made repeated criticisms of French customs officers who had allegedly taken bribes to turn a blind eye; and provided Paris with lists of French vessels that supposedly carried slaves. And yet, despite harbouring doubts about the good will of French officials, they also accepted French assurances that the accusations were exaggerated.¹⁵

In such circumstances, it is impossible to know with any certainty how many French ships may have engaged in the slave trade in the years after 1815. Too much business was conducted in the shadows, too many vessels and destinations deliberately concealed from the official record. But such figures as we have, the product of Serge Daget’s painstaking research on the years from 1814 to 1850, suggest that some 730 vessels were involved in the illegal trade, leaving from French ports or from France’s colonies in the West indies, Réunion or Senegal, with a number of them making repeat voyages to West Africa and on to the Caribbean.¹⁶ The information on some of the vessels is understandably patchy. For 143 of the voyages we do not know the port of origin, or, for a fifth of the vessels, the name of its home port. But it is incontestable that the dominant slaving port in these years remained Nantes, which (even after discounting the large number of voyages where a vessel’s home port is unknown) accounted for 43.6 per cent of the illegal traffic. Nantes merchants saw little reason to abort what were for many the habits of a lifetime, and in 1824 the port sent forty-seven expeditions to the west coast of Africa—a number that was one of the highest in its history, including in the final years of the Ancien Régime before Saint-Domingue was lost.¹⁷

In the eyes of many merchants, the law was there to be flouted. They decried their government’s efforts to criminalize slaving when it was still flourishing across so much of the Atlantic world, and when others were so clearly continuing to make huge profits from the trade. After the revolution in Haiti and the abolition of slavery on the island, the market in slaves simply moved elsewhere. Cuba, as we have seen, benefited from the crisis in Saint-Domingue to build up its own plantation economy, and it was hungry for new shiploads of African slave labour. But Cuba did not act alone. Farther south, the slave trade between West Africa and Brazil went on uninterrupted: during the first half of the nineteenth century, Portuguese and Brazilian slave ships transported more than 2 million captives, the vast majority of them to Brazil.¹⁸ Nor did it pass unnoticed that, even in countries that had officially banned the slave trade, slaving continued and illicit profits were amassed. The United States was perhaps the clearest instance of public hypocrisy on the issue. While the US government officially deplored the slave trade, it did not succeed in policing its own coastline, and smugglers continued to bring enslaved Africans into Southern ports long after 1808. More significantly, American ships played a critical role in importing slaves to Cuba and Brazil across much of the nineteenth century, thus maintaining the international market in slaves and fuelling the rapid economic growth of slave economies.¹⁹

There was little that governments could do when so many interests connived to keep the trade profitable. In 1826, for instance, Britain and Brazil signed a treaty outlawing the trade in slaves, but this had only a limited impact, in part due to events in Brazil itself. In 1825, Uruguay declared its independence from Brazil, before founding an independent Uruguayan state in 1830—a state, moreover, that was desperately in need of agricultural labour. The outcome was predictable, as large numbers of African slaves, mainly children, were shipped to Montevideo as ‘colonists’ in order to avoid both Brazil’s constitutional ban on the slave trade and the British cruisers patrolling the Atlantic.²⁰

Especially in the early years after the Vienna Settlement, the law remained porous while the potential profits to be extracted from slaving proved a constant temptation. No country was above suspicion, and even some British slavers returned to illegal trading in defiance of their own navy and of public opinion at home.²¹ Besides, in the immediate aftermath of war there was what Peter Grindal calls a ‘period of aimlessness’ in the naval campaign against the slave trade. The fleet had been reduced to peacetime levels. Ships were retired or sent to the breaker’s yard, officers and men were paid off, and Britain’s naval presence along the African coast reduced to a mere token, while the Jamaica and Leeward Islands squadrons were preoccupied with suppressing piracy in the Caribbean.²² During the period of their special dispensation, French traders eagerly returned to slaving, and they found a ready market in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and beyond, with planters keen to buy a new generation of African slaves after the disruption of the war years. And when France finally started suppressing the trade in its colonies, French merchants and planters in the Antilles looked to circumvent the law, and, despite diplomatic protests, there was nothing the French could do to prevent it. In 1819, for instance, when a plantation owner in Guadeloupe, a widow, felt threatened by France’s more punitive approach to the slave trade, she responded by selling her land and part of her sugar mill and leaving Guadeloupe for the Spanish territory of Puerto Rico, taking with her the twenty-two slaves who constituted her household. The French government demanded that Spain send her and her slaves back to Guadeloupe, but they received no satisfaction, in this as in similar cases.²³ The Spanish authorities had no interest in acceding to France’s request. This was a New World where Old World rules simply did not apply.

The illegal trade was concentrated in three main periods. The first began in 1814 and continued until 1818, the years when slaving was officially discouraged but still technically legal. At this time there was little need to hide a ship’s identity, or to fit out vessels in the colonies, removed from metropolitan France. A second phase, between 1819 and around 1828, saw the bulk of the illegal trade of the Restoration years, with 386 slave ships leaving from metropolitan France and several hundred more from the colonies or from unknown ports. A major feature of these years was the greater reliance on colonial ports for fitting out and harbouring slave ships, and the increased number leaving for Africa from Martinique or Guadeloupe rather than from Bordeaux or Honfleur. This trend continued into the third period, the years of government repression that followed the 1830 revolution, when slavers increasingly brought female slaves to the Antilles to compensate for the lack of able-bodied males and stimulate the birth rate in the enslaved population.²⁴ To avoid detection, they spread their net more widely, purchasing slaves in ports in east Africa to ship round the Cape of Good Hope and into the Atlantic. In addition, they began importing indentured labour from the Indian Ocean and the Indian sub-continent in an attempt to compensate for the fall in slave numbers: what became known as the ‘coolie trade’. This must be seen as a complement to the traditional Atlantic slave trade, since Africans had also been taken to French possessions in the East Indies. On the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, for instance, the number of African slaves rose from 50,000 in 1804 to 59,000 in 1825 and 71,000 in 1830.²⁵ These developments made the work of patrolling the slave routes all the more difficult. Preventing slaves from east Africa entering the Atlantic, and stopping others being trafficked around the Indian Ocean, would be crucial elements in the war against slaving.²⁶

In ports other than Nantes, the psychological attachment of commercial circles to slaving was less persistent, and the merchants who had engaged in the triangular trade in the last decades of the eighteenth century were less likely to return to it in the Restoration era. Some ports, like Lorient and Honfleur, were forced out of the slave trade altogether by competition from elsewhere or else they never recovered from the loss of Saint-Domingue. Bordeaux enjoyed greater diversity, as it had other trading interests, in the Baltic and North America, and found new markets in the Levant and the Far East. Marseille, stimulated by the colonization of Algeria, turned more towards the Mediterranean and North Africa. Nantes, suffering perhaps from the lack of a rich wine-growing hinterland to rival Bordeaux, seemed less able, and certainly less willing, to seek new challenges and it remained more dependent on the traditional slave trade to the Americas. Its sea captains and ship-owners had agents in Africa; they knew the currents and the coastline; they understood African tastes and the workings of the African market. Throughout the 1820s, ships would continue to leave from the Loire estuary for the trading posts of the Slave Coast and the Bight of Benin, many of them resuming what they still assumed to be the most lucrative form of Atlantic commerce. But were these all slave voyages? From the information available to us—information on the port of departure, the destination, or the cargo taken on board at Nantes or down-river at Pornic—it is tempting to assume so. But Serge Daget is surely right to counsel caution, since, even where a captain and a vessel had previously been engaged in the slave trade, trading conditions changed rapidly, the increased threat of prosecution posed a deterrent, and there is no necessary link between commerce with West Africa and the buying and selling of slaves. He has examined the log book of a Nantes vessel, L’Africain, in 1827, a ship whose earlier voyages had certainly been for slaving. But, just as in the eighteenth century, the slave trade was not an exclusive occupation, and this voyage was very different, carrying wood and tobacco, not guns, and trading with African merchants along the Akan coast for gold and metal currency.²⁷ Surprising as this might seem from a captain who had been deeply engaged with the slave trade in the past, his was a legitimate voyage which the law had no reason to repress. He could not be condemned on his reputation alone.

But the majority of voyages in these years were not legitimate, and both the British and increasingly the French navies scoured the seas in search of vessels that flouted the law by trading in ‘black ebony’. It was not always easy to prove, unless the slaves were actually uncovered on board or the ships’ papers contained an explicit reference to slave purchases. Ships found off the African coast risked being stopped and searched by naval vessels, but in the majority of cases, captains and crews could still hope to escape without charge. Where no firm evidence was found, the navy hesitated to make arrests, and even in those cases where it did, it was unlikely that the courts would convict. Without being able to produce a human cargo, prosecutors faced insuperable legal difficulties, and the merchants back in the French ports were unlikely to be troubled. Such evidence as there was generally focused on the ship, and ships could be got rid of, or reinvented. Of the vessels that plied the waters from Africa to the Antilles in the Restoration years, indeed, few made more than a single voyage before being sold or transferred to other business. And while this could, of course, reflect the harsh conditions of the crossing or suggest that the risks were becoming too great to sustain, it was often a means of avoiding capture and the confiscation of the vessel that would follow. For a ship-owner faced with a criminal charge, selling his ship could seem a cheaper option, even at a reduced price. His captain would be assigned to another vessel; the crew would be disbanded and disperse. Once sold, the ship would be renamed and assume a new identity; it would have a new owner; and there was no provision to pass convictions or penalties from ship to ship, or from owner to owner. Vessels suspected of involvement in the traite often changed names before going to auction. In this way they conveniently disappeared both from the clutches of their naval prosecutors and from the historical record.²⁸

The fact that so much of the slave trade was conducted in clandestine circumstances, with ships and cargoes under threat of seizure, inevitably resulted in fraud and obfuscation which make ships difficult to identify and slaving expeditions difficult to track down. French captains turned to flags of convenience to hide their true identity; they sailed from neutral ports or returned to Europe through Holland or Denmark; they worked for foreign owners abroad; they falsified papers or engaged in other forms of fraud, often using willing agents on other Caribbean islands like Sainte-Eustache or Saint-Thomas. The Caribbean islands had a long tradition of contraband and tariff evasion that was there to exploit. French vessels were reported docking in Saint-Barthélemy to sell their cargoes, or of landing Africans by night along the coast of Guadeloupe, while customs officials obligingly turned a blind eye.²⁹ Even the official records held by the French port authorities (the papers of the Inscription maritime) could be rendered more or less eloquent about the precise destinations of ships leaving the French Atlantic ports. The legally required declarations were duly made—to Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Guadeloupe, or wherever—for voyages out of Nantes. In the ten years from 1824 these tables record 1,140 voyages (though their accuracy is uncertain: for the same years, 1,327 were reported in the annual returns to the ministry). But what do they tell us? The largest numbers were for Caribbean destinations (239 to Guadeloupe, 205 to Martinique, 102 to Cayenne), or to France’s colonies of Réunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean (219 departures). But a considerable number of others sailed—or admitted sailing—for Africa: 128 to West or South Africa, thirty-eight to Senegal, and a further five to Madeira or the Cape Verde Islands.³⁰ These were almost certainly engaged in the slave trade.

What is most interesting here is less the admission of some Nantes merchants that they were embarking for Africa than the multiple ways in which others, faced by tougher policing by the French authorities after 1826, sought to conceal their activities and to obfuscate their true intentions. When a vessel left the Loire estuary on a transatlantic voyage, who really knew its purpose, or its final destination? Voyages to Martinique and Guadeloupe could easily be diverted by way of West Africa and a cargo ship converted for slaving at sea. Many of the vessels leaving port were of a size and build that perfectly suited the slave trade; some, indeed, had already an established history of slaving. Besides, it is clear that the vessels that openly declared their destination as Africa were not alone in going there. As Daget pertinently observes, ‘A ship that declared for Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Rio or Surinam – to say nothing of Bourbon, Cayenne or the French West Indies – would probably dock at one of these destinations; but how many of them did so with their human cargo?’³¹ Where vessels diverted to West Africa to pick up slaves, how much of this activity got into their log books or into the historical record?

Like any commercial venture, a slave voyage was an investment, an investment on which it could be hoped that the investor would make a substantial return, and as long as the prospects of profit remained high, there would be men tempted by the risks involved. But how real were these risks? Slave ships were rarely stopped on the high seas, or in mid-Atlantic. Rather, searches were concentrated around the African coast, at those points like the Bight of Benin or the Bight of Biafra that were the centres of trade with African kings and slavers; in the waters off the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique; or on the approaches to Cuba, where so many French planters had settled.³² Off West Africa, the British had the added advantage of a string of forts, whereas the French had only one, on Gorée.³³ Here a number of French slave ships were stopped and arrested, and the volume of French slaving declined as a consequence. But the trade was not eliminated; rather, the presence of British patrols off traditional slaving regions of West Africa, like Seregambia and the Gold Coast, forced the slave ships further south, to West Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra. From there vessels of all the European slaving nations—the French included—continued to ship their African captives to the Caribbean, with Cuba the favoured slave market. In the twenty years to 1835, nearly 40,000 captives were taken from the Bight of Biafra into slavery in the Americas.³⁴ In this context, Britain’s supposed victory on the issue at Vienna and in the bilateral treaties that followed must have seemed insignificant.

In the years after 1815, the principal threat to the slavers continued to come, as it had throughout the war years, from Britain, which had no intention of renouncing its bid to force foreign slave ships from the seas. Britain had started to pursue this policy in 1807, as we have seen, when it abolished its own slave trade, and during the war years it had taken upon itself to police the Atlantic shipping routes and the waters off the west coast of Africa, claiming the right to board and arrest the vessels of other nations, including neutrals, which were engaged in slaving. Even in wartime, judicial opinion was divided on the right of arrest outside British waters.³⁵ And with the return of peace, it was widely perceived by other nations as a blatant assault on their sovereignty.³⁶ For what Britain was claiming was unprecedented: the right to police the seas and to arrest ships suspected of engaging in the slave trade, a right that was not intended to be reciprocal and which had never previously been exercised in peacetime when the normal conventions of maritime law pertained. The distinction is a critical one. In wartime, states might exercise the right to board the ships of belligerent powers or those suspected of working for the enemy: that was more or less acceptable under international law. But for other rulers to accept Britain’s claims in a world at peace would imply an acceptance of their diminished sovereignty, which might easily be regarded—as it was by Louis XVIII—as something of a humiliation. If Britain got her way on this matter, it would present a political challenge to the French government as much as an economic challenge to the prosperity of Nantes or Bordeaux.

In the event both governments played their hand cautiously, fully aware that a major diplomatic incident was to no one’s benefit. The British took pride, publicly, in the seeming willingness of Louis XVIII to cooperate in suppressing the slave trade, while privately putting pressure on the French to curb slaving by French vessels, especially in Senegal, which had been returned to France in 1815. In a memorandum of 1817, the British governor of Sierra Leone, on the basis of reports he had received from private individuals ‘upon whom I can place great reliance’, concluded, somewhat chauvinistically, that the resumption of trading in Senegal and Gorée dated from the return of the territories to France. ‘The slave trade had not only been entirely abandoned by the whole of the native merchants at Senegal and Gorée,’ he announced, ‘but they had turned their industry to more honourable means of earning their living.’ But now he had been informed of large-scale abuse, with slaves being taken on board ships from all over France, from Le Havre and Honfleur, Marseille and Nantes.³⁷ It was, he felt, for France to take action, especially as Britain felt that her own hands were tied by maritime law and international agreements. She could not continue to board and arrest foreign vessels at will.

With the return of peace, Britain felt obliged to respect maritime law and to moderate the behaviour of its naval commanders, not only in West Africa but across the entire Atlantic world. Some, clearly, did so with the greatest reluctance. A circular letter marked ‘confidential’ and sent to the commanders of a number of foreign stations on 14 July 1816 prescribed the use of common sense and restraint. It instructed them to abandon their policy of arresting the ships of friendly nations suspected of carrying slaves on account of the serious damage to British interests which the vigorous enforcement of that policy would entail. The officers were reminded that the right of search was a belligerent right that existed only in time of war, and that using it in peacetime could have consequences. At no other time, the Admiralty insisted, should ‘any foreign vessel on the high seas be brought to and examined, much less detained, captured or sent in for condemnation’. If they did so, the letter continued, the Admiralty could offer them no protection or privileged status, since ‘besides the displeasure of their own government, they would incur by such proceedings the risk of legal prosecutions on the part of the persons whose ships or vessels they might detain’.³⁸ The letter concluded by asking that the contents be passed confidentially to the captains of the ships under their command, and was a timely reminder that war against the slave trade would in future have to be pursued within the law, by other means. With this, the Court of Vice-Admiralty was wound up, and Britain concentrated its efforts to end the slave trade on exerting diplomatic pressure on its allies.

Britain’s policy of search and arrest had been of doubtful legality since the end of hostilities in Europe. The other slaving nations, especially Spain and Portugal, challenged the right of Royal Navy vessels to stop their ships on the high seas, and so, of course, did France, which had been very specifically granted a five-year breathing space before its merchants were required to abandon the trade. Off the West African coast, however, naval activity did not cease, and French slave ships continued to be arrested and escorted to Sierra Leone despite legal uncertainties. A good instance is that of a Nantes vessel, Le Cultivateur, which left the Loire estuary in April 1815 on a voyage to Bonny and Guadeloupe, laden with the guns, powder, and gifts that were customary for trade with African princes. The purpose of the voyage was not in doubt, but that did not mean that the ship or its owners were breaking any law. They had prepared the voyage carefully, sailing during the period that was specified at Vienna for legal slaving and respecting the territorial limits that had been placed on French slave ships. But the Cultivateur was still arrested by a British schooner and its cargo seized. It was taken first to Sierra Leone, then to Plymouth for trial, where the owners, by now sure of their rights, instructed lawyers for the defence. Although legal proceedings were expensive, they were exonerated by the High Court of Admiralty, which duly released the Cultivateur on 16 November and returned it to its owners.³⁹ It was a salutary reminder that the Navy did not always work within the law and that it could not assume that all its actions would be upheld by the justice system. The cavalier days of Robert Thorpe were over, and both the Navy and the British government recognized that they had to proceed with caution, and in accordance with treaty arrangements between the maritime nations.

That message was conveyed most succinctly in December 1817 by the High Court of Admiralty in London, to which the case of another French vessel arrested off the African coast, the Louis, had been sent on appeal. The Louis had sailed from Martinique in January 1816 bound for the coast of Africa, where it was captured off Cape Mesurado, in what is now Liberia, by a British naval cutter, the Queen Charlotte. The Louis was then taken to Freetown, where she was condemned by the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone. The case was based on a number of premises: that the slave trade was illegal in her home country, France, and banned by a treaty with Britain, as well as being ‘contrary to the law of nations’; that as such, the Louis could seek no protection from the French or any other flag; and that her crew, in resisting the naval vessel, had ‘piratically’ killed eight of her crew and wounded twelve others.⁴⁰ But again the Admiralty judges were unimpressed, and the judgement was overturned, undermining the Navy’s right to stop and search neutral shipping. The Court threw out any suggestion that engagement in the slave trade could be equated with piracy; and if it was not piracy, then where were the grounds for ‘the right of forcible inquiry and search’?⁴¹ How could Britain be justified in interfering with the free navigation of the seas to which all nations had an equal right? And how—before the search had been carried out—could the Navy know that a vessel had slave cargoes on board? In the opinion of the Admiralty judge, William Scott, so long as Britain’s own security was not jeopardized by the slave trade, ‘you have no right to prevent a suspected injustice towards another by committing an actual injustice of your own’.⁴² Even if the British government viewed the slave trade as abhorrent, that was no reason in law for imposing a unilateral ban on the trade when it was exercised by others. Imposing its will on the nationals of other states, as Robert Thorpe had done in Freetown, was illegal and would be deemed an abuse of power.

The adjudication on the Louis was a landmark decision that spelt the end for Britain’s unilateral efforts to repress the slave trade in the Atlantic, and marked the beginning of a new, multilateral approach by the countries most involved in slaving. Through a series of bilateral treaties between Britain, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, they established Mixed Prize Commissions, with judges drawn from the participating jurisdictions, in an attempt to suppress the slave trade across the Atlantic world. Commissions sat in New York, Havana, Surinam, Rio de Janeiro, and various African ports, most notably Freetown. These commissions had no legal jurisdiction over individuals: the captain and crew of slave ships were to be handed over to the states to which they belonged for trial and sentence. But they did, crucially, have jurisdiction over the ships and their cargoes, which could be seized, impounded, and confiscated on order of the court.⁴³ Their role across the nineteenth century would be significant. By increasing the likelihood of confiscation, they lessened the viability of the slave trade for the French and other slaving nations and discouraged merchants from taking what they saw as exaggerated risks. But this came at a cost. On board slave ships, tension and desperation tended to increase, as fear of arrest pressed crews to cut journey times and impose firmer discipline on board. Where abuses occurred, where fevers and diseases broke out on board, where slaves or crewmen died, or mutiny threatened, there was no legal authority to which they could with any confidence turn. The years of illegal slaving were not easy for anyone, whether the slaves and slave-traders in West Africa or the captains and crews from Nantes. Voyages were often perilous, and life on board both violent and brutalizing. In the West Indies, crewmen were often reported as missing, abandoning the voyage or looking for another ship on which to return to France. But precise figures are difficult to verify. Slave ships had a long history of keeping inaccurate records, in part to maintain a degree of discretion about their activities, in part to minimize their costs in a bid to win over investors.⁴⁴ The clandestine conditions in which they were forced to trade merely made obfuscation, not to say outright denial, seem more tempting.

Relatively few of these illicit slave voyages are fully documented through the ship’s log book, the account books of the owners, or the registers of correspondence between the ship’s captain and the merchant back in Bordeaux or Nantes. But one example may serve to illustrate the extent of deceit that was deemed necessary to turn a profit from slaving by the mid-1820s. In 1824, a prominent Bordeaux armateur, François Fernandes, fitted out one of his vessels, the Jeune Louis, for a slaving voyage to the coast of Africa and Havana in Cuba.⁴⁵ Unusually for this period, the voyage is copiously documented, with the ship’s log, the crew roll, the accounts for the voyage, a list of cargo loaded on departure, the correspondence exchanged between the captain and the owner, and even the interrogation of the captain on his return in 1825, all carefully preserved in the Huntington Library in California.⁴⁶ What these documents expose is the general air of fear and insecurity that was shared by all the parties concerned, as they sought, even when the voyage hit serious problems, to hide their identity and shield their activities from the eyes of the authorities. Illegality left everyone on board, as well as the owners and investors back in the French Atlantic ports, feeling that they were financially exposed and legally insecure. A slave ship could founder, could be captured by privateers, or could suffer mutiny on board, and the crew were in no position to appeal to the authorities or claim compensation from the courts. As a consequence, they had difficulty finding insurance for the voyage: no company would accept the risk, and this resulted in higher premiums and policies shared by thirty-nine different partners.⁴⁷ They feared their own government as much as the Royal Navy, since slaving was now officially illegal in both countries. When they were faced with disaster, they had, quite simply, nowhere to turn.

And disasters they certainly faced during what proved to be an ill-fated voyage. Though registered in Bordeaux, the Jeune Louis sailed from the Loire in the spring of 1824 with a captain and crew recruited in Nantes and across southern Brittany. Even as they sailed, the captain broke his hand and was unable to write, while two members of the crew did not even come aboard the ship, deciding at the last moment that it would be more prudent to remain on shore in Paimboeuf.⁴⁸ Their instincts were sound, for once at sea the ship was overtaken by persistent misfortune. The first master of the vessel died during the outward voyage and had to be replaced by the second-in-command, François Demouy, whose brutal discipline almost drove the crew to mutiny.⁴⁹ The death of the captain meant more than a change of command: it risked spreading panic among the ship’s company, who knew that they were engaged in illegal activity and who had looked to the master to provide them with legal cover. Then the ship’s surgeon caught a fever and died in early May, leaving the crew without the medical knowledge to fight disease. They enjoyed little luck, as a succession of tropical fevers tracked the ship on its voyage, both off the coast of Africa and in the West Indies. The master carpenter, the cook, and four seamen died of fever on the Gold Coast in West Africa; others reached Havana so weakened by dysentery that they were unable to continue the voyage and sought refuge in port. Like many other ships at this time, the Jeune Louis arrived in the Caribbean with a crew ravaged by disease and lacking even the most basic medical competence. It had lost eight members of its crew, was barely able to crawl into port, and left the stand-in captain with no choice but to take on additional crewmen in Cuba for the return voyage.⁵⁰

If crew losses mounted, they were as nothing compared to the havoc being wreaked in the ship’s hull, where 106 slaves died during the voyage of the 376 who had been taken on board in Africa, a death rate sufficiently horrifying to require some justification to the Cuban authorities. The captain maintained that the slaves had died of ‘dysentery and natural causes’, adding by way of explanation that the crew had themselves been so weakened by fevers that they had been unable to care for the men and women in the hold and had barely been able to steer the ship to harbour.⁵¹ But this was not the whole story, for elsewhere we learn that nine of the deaths were suicides: eight of the captives had thrown themselves overboard into the ocean, while the ninth had chosen death by hanging, driven to despair by the condition he found himself in on board ship. Weakly, the captain sought to excuse himself by saying that there was nothing the crew could have done to prevent it, given that the slaves had been determined to escape their fate and had chosen death over a life in the plantations. But it is clear that he was unmoved by the loss of human life: slaves to him were cargo, men and women whose deaths drew no emotional response. Their deaths meant simply a financial loss to himself and the crew at the end of the voyage, and as he turned for home he was already considering how much income he had lost and how he might seek compensation from the ship’s insurers.⁵² The success of a slave voyage was, like any other, assessed through the final balance sheet.

It is hard to deny, however, that the straitened circumstances in which they operated had contributed to their vulnerability and put the success of the voyage at risk. At sea they had to watch out for naval vessels as well as foreign privateers as they sought to steer a safe passage to the Caribbean. Other captains knew that they had no recourse to the law, just as slave-traders in West Africa understood that they had no real interest in dallying in African waters to haggle for a better deal. The Jeune Louis was typical in this regard: according to Demouy, relations with the African princes with whom they traded had soured as they and their agents sought to take advantage of the French crew’s need to trade quickly and to achieve a rapid turn-around. He had, he wrote, been forced to accept poor-quality slaves who had been turned down by other ships, which he blamed as a factor in the high number of deaths registered during the Atlantic crossing. The king with whom he had been trading, Jacquette, had, Demouy believed, held him and his crew to ransom, imposing ‘mediocre’ trading conditions on the French, knowing that Demouy had little choice but to accept. ‘We could not stay on any longer,’ he wrote in the ship’s log, ‘we had to trade at any price and leave in a deplorable condition.’⁵³ In Cuba, again, he would complain that he was paid under the market price for his cargo, with the merchants and planters again exploiting the weakness of his bargaining position. For the danger of attack and interception never left him. Already off the African coast Demouy’s vessel had been visited by an English warship, though on that occasion he had managed to prevaricate and avoid arrest. Nothing could be openly admitted, and during the entire voyage, when writing to the owner back in France, he carefully avoided all reference to the nature of his cargo. The risk of arrest was just as great on his return journey, and as he approached European waters Demouy had an important choice to make. Rather than dock in a French port, where he might be recognized and questioned, he chose to enter Europe through Antwerp, hoping in this way to avoid detection and the lengthy period of quarantine that might follow. Fear and insecurity were his constant companions.

When he docked in Antwerp in October 1825, Demouy’s problems were not over. Antwerp was well known for its discretion in matters of illegal slaving, but the sudden arrival of an Atlantic commercial vessel of the size of the Jeune Louis could not fail to arouse local suspicions. Why was it in Antwerp? Where had it been during the previous months at sea? It looked like a slave ship, and the captain could not produce the paperwork he needed to prove his innocence. The log book showed that it had spent nearly four months off the African coast without, seemingly, engaging in any commercial activity; and the captain was subjected to close interrogation as to his movements and activities.⁵⁴ His story may have sounded plausible, but it was unprovable. He claimed to have gone to West Africa with a cargo of cloth, gunpowder, and alcohol, which he had sold in exchange for palm oil to take to the Americas. There, he said, he had sold the palm oil and taken on his present cargo of sugar and coffee. Since he could produce no bills or receipts to prove his claims, however, the port authorities were unconvinced, accusing him directly of having traded in slaves. But they, too, lacked proof and were therefore forced to release the ship after a short period of quarantine. For the captain and owner, this came as a welcome release, and, along with the majority of the crewmen, they returned to France. But the voyage could scarcely be hailed as a triumph. The costs which it had incurred had exceeded budget by nearly 20,000 francs, although the voyage still returned a healthy profit. That was what counted, as, despite the risks and the social stigma involved, the armateur Fernandes fitted out another slave ship for Africa.⁵⁵

He was not, as we have seen, alone, though by 1825 the risks of illegal slaving were becoming greater and the profits less tempting than they had been in the early years of the Restoration. But for a minority these risks still seemed worth taking, and it was not until 1831, when France stepped up its repressive measures against the slavers, that opinion in the merchant communities finally turned. In the more liberal mood of the July Monarchy, the illegal slave trade came under serious attack, so that it no longer held much appeal for the merchants of France’s port cities. The shipping companies that had supplied vessels for the triangular trade either turned their attention elsewhere or quietly accepted defeat as the end of the slave trade became an inevitability. Some, like Guillet de la Brosse in Nantes, bought plantations in Réunion or invested in the coolie trade, the closest legal form of human trafficking still available.⁵⁶ The Atlantic slave trade had ceased to be viable as, two decades before Victor Schœlcher introduced legislation abolishing both the slave trade and slavery in France’s colonies in 1848, the economic foundations that had sustained slavery were pulled away.

Emancipation had brought few economic benefits to the people of Haiti, however, as Schœlcher himself noted in 1839, when he became the first abolitionist to visit and write about the independent republic it had become. He returned a thoroughly disillusioned man, finding not the civilization he dreamed of, but a dictatorship that kept its people in poverty and ignorance. Few had work; there were no freedoms to be enjoyed; and ‘Cap Haïtien is nothing more than the skeleton of the former Cap Français’.⁵⁷ The black population were, he believed, no better off than they had been before the first emancipation decree in 1794. But still he looked forward in hope. With a second abolition, he believed, they and the people of Guadeloupe and Martinique would be given new opportunities and would soon emerge from their current state of ‘degradation’.⁵⁸

Slowly and reluctantly, France had accepted the fact of Haitian independence and had renounced its claim to its former colony. But bitterness lingered long after 1804, in particular the bitterness expressed by the former colons who had drifted back to France, and to whom the government finally offered financial compensation for what they had lost. Its treatment of the new Haitian republic was notably less generous. At first, in common with the other colonial nations and with the United States, France did nothing to recognize the independence of Haiti or to establish diplomatic relations with men they still viewed as rebels and murderers. They seemed reluctant to accept what was for many a humiliating truth: that their army had been defeated by a slave insurrection, and that they faced a revolution they were powerless to oppose. But in reality much had changed. The vision they once cherished of an American empire was now illusory, ended as much by the sale of Louisiana as by the loss of Saint-Domingue; and in 1825 the Restoration monarchy accepted the inevitable. France recognized Haiti as an independent state and thus allowed it to join the community of nations. Economic considerations played a part here, as they feared for their colonial commerce, anxious lest a combination of the Monroe Doctrine and Britain’s colonial expansion shut French traders out of the Atlantic market.⁵⁹ But they showed little grace or generosity, imposing a huge indemnity of 150 million francs on the young Haitian republic as the price of recognition. It was a decision that condemned Haiti to a future of grinding poverty, and which, in Alyssa Sepinwall’s words, ‘turned Haiti’s de facto political independence into a crippling financial dependency’.⁶⁰

¹ Anon, Traite des Nègres—Renseignemens tendant à prouver la continuation de ce trafic illégal (12pp., Paris: imprimerie de Crapelet, 1825).

² ‘Liste des vaisseaux abordés par les embarcations du vaisseau de S.M. le Maidstone, Charles Bullen Esq., capitaine’, annexe to the pamphlet.

³ Renseignemens tendant à prouver la continuation de ce trafic illégal, 3.

⁴ Serge Daget, ‘British Repression of the Illegal French Slave Trade: some considerations’, in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (eds), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 430.

⁵ Serge Daget, ‘Armateurs nantais et trafic négrier illégal: une histoire sans petite boîte verte’, Enquêtes et Documents, 13 (1987), 69.

⁶ Ibid., 79.

⁷ AD Loire-Atlantique, 1J 191, ‘Mémoire sur le commerce de Nantes sous la Restauration avec nos vieilles colonies, l’Amérique du Sud, les États-Unis, etc’.

⁸ Bibliothèque Historique de Nantes, Fonds du Musée des Salorges, FMS B 238, Société de la Morale Chrétienne, ‘Faits relatifs à la traite des noirs’ (Paris, 1826), 54–5.

⁹ Marie-Laure Aurenche, Le combat pour la liberté des Noirs dans le Journal de la Société de la Morale Chrétienne (2 vols, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), vol. 1, xi.

¹⁰ Bibliothèque Historique de Nantes, Fonds du Musée des Salorges, G326 AFF, Thomas Clarkson, Quelques mots aux amis de l’humanité sur l’esclavage et la traite des nègres (Cambrai, n.d.).

¹¹ Extract from the Morning Herald, 28 December 1824, in Aurenche, Le combat pour la liberté des Noirs, vol. 1, 173.

¹² ‘Pétition contre la traite des noirs qui se fait au Sénégal, présentée à la Chambre des Députés le 14 juin 1820’, 4.

¹³ Ibid., 13.

¹⁴ Affaires Étrangères, Nantes, Ambassade de France en Grande-Bretagne, A 93, Law of 15 April 1818 and covering letter to the British government.

¹⁵ Affaires Étrangères, Nantes, Ambassade de France en Grande-Bretagne, A 93, letter to the governor of Guadeloupe from the directeur-général des Douanes in Pointe-à-Pitre, 29 March 1821.

¹⁶ Serge Daget, Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises à la traite illégale, 1814–1850 (Nantes: Centre de Recherche sur l’histoire du monde atlantique, 1988).

¹⁷ Éric Saugera, ‘De Sidoine à Sophie Raphel, ou les lettres d’un capitaine négrier à sa femme pendant la traite illégale, 1824–1831’, in Hubert Gerbeau and Éric Saugera (eds), La dernière traite: Fragments d’histoire en hommage à Serge Daget (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1994), 126.

¹⁸ João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, ‘Repercussions of the Haitian revolution in Brazil, 1791–1850’, in David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (eds), The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington, IN, 2009), 285.

¹⁹ Randy J. Sparks, ‘Blind justice: the United States’ failure to curb the illegal slave trade’, Law and History Review, 35 (2017), 53–79.

²⁰ A. Borucki, ‘The “African colonists” of Montevideo: new light on the illegal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro and the Rio de la Plata (1830–42)’, Slavery & Abolition, 30 (2009), 427–44.

²¹ M. Sherwood, ‘The British illegal slave trade, 1808–1830’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (2008), 293–305.

²² Grindal, Opposing the Slavers, 231.

²³ AD Guadeloupe, 1 Mi 699, letter from the Comte de Lardenoy on the illegal transfer of slaves to Porto Rico, Basse-Terre, 13 September 1819.

²⁴ Serge Daget, La répression de la traite des Noirs au 19e siècle: L’action des croisières françaises sur les côtes occidentales de l’Afrique, 1817–1850 (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 96–9.

²⁵ Jacques Weber, ‘Entre traite et coolie trade: l’affaire de L’Auguste, 1854’, in Gerbeau and Saugera (eds), La dernière traite, 151.

²⁶ Douglas Hamilton, ‘Representing Slavery in British Museums: the Challenges of 2007’, in Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield (eds), Imagining Transatlantic Slavery (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 139.

²⁷ Serge Daget, Un document exceptionnel: Le ‘livre de l’or’ d’une troque légitime sur le rivage Akan, en 1827 (Bondoukou: Université d’Abidjan, 1974), passim.

²⁸ Daget, ‘Armateurs nantais et trafic négrier illégal’, 83.

²⁹ AD Guadeloupe, 1 MI 699, letter from the French governor in Basse-Terre on illegal slaving operations on the island, 6 July 1831.

³⁰ Serge Daget, ‘Long cours et négriers nantais du trafic illégal, 1814 – 1833’, Revue française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer, 62 (1975), nos. 226–7, 100.

³¹ Ibid., 103.

³² Agnès Renault, D’une île rebelle à une île fidèle: les Français de Santiago-de-Cuba, 1791–1825 (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2012); Maria Elena Orozco Lamore et Maria Teresa Fleitas Monnar, Formation d’une ville caraïbe: Urbanisme et architecture à Santiago de Cuba (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011).

³³ Gaston-Martin, Nantes au dix-huitième siècle: l’ère des négriers (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 227.

³⁴ Oscar Grandío Moráguez, ‘The African origins of slaves arriving in Cuba, 1789–1865’, in David Eltis and David Richardson (eds), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Database (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 184.

³⁵ Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 63.

³⁶ For an overview of the Navy’s role, see Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers, passim.

³⁷ Affaires Étrangères, Nantes, Ambassade de France en Grande-Bretagne, A 93, ‘Memorandum on the increase of the contraband slave trade since the restoration of Senegal and Gorée to the French’, 8 November 1817.

³⁸ Affaires Étrangères, Nantes, Ambassade de France en Grande-Bretagne, A 93, Circular letter from the Admiralty to British commanders on foreign stations, 24 July 1816.

³⁹ Éric Saugera, ‘Une expédition négrière nantaise sous la Restauration: les comptes du Cultivateur, 1814–1818’, Enquêtes et Documents, 16 (1989), 28–9.

⁴⁰ John Dodson, A Report of the Case of the Louis, appealed from the Vice-Admiralty Court at Sierra Leone and determined at the High court of Admiralty, on 15 December 1817 (London, 1817), 2.

⁴¹ Ibid., 40.

⁴² Helfman, ‘The Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone’, 1151.

⁴³ Ibid., 1152–6.

⁴⁴ Saugera, ‘Une expédition négrière nantaise sous la Restauration’, 16.

⁴⁵ Alan Forrest, ‘La traite négrière sous la Restauration: à bord du «Jeune Louis» de Nantes’, in Reynal Abad et al. (eds), Les passions d’un historien: Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean-Pierre Poussou (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010), 493–503.

⁴⁶ Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, Huntington Manuscripts (HM), French Slave Trade Papers, 1824–25, ‘Voyage du Jeune Louis à la côte d’Afrique’.

⁴⁷ HM 44026, police d’assurance du brick «Le Jeune Louis», 1824.

⁴⁸ HM 43993, rôle de l’équipage du «Jeune Louis».

⁴⁹ HM 43991, rôle de l’équipage du «Jeune Louis», le 17 avril 1825.

⁵⁰ HM 43995, «État des paiements pour soldes et décomptes».

⁵¹ HM 43996, death certificate for slaves on board, 5 June 1825.

⁵² HM 43987, letter from François Demouy to the owner, François Fernandes.

⁵³ HM 43991, report by François Demouy on his trade with the African kings, 1825.

⁵⁴ HM 44000, interrogation of Demouy on his return to Antwerp, 4 October 1825.

⁵⁵ HM 44013, letter from Fernandes to Demouy, 24 January 1826.

⁵⁶ Jacques Fiéran, ‘Continuités familiales et ruptures dans la construction navale nantaise’, Enquêtes et documents, 17 (1990), 155.

⁵⁷ Nelly Schmidt, ‘Un témoignage original sur Haïti au 19^e siècle: celui de l’abolitionniste Victor Schœlcher’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 8 (1991), 334.

⁵⁸ Germain Saint-Ruf, L’épopée Delgrès. La Guadeloupe sous la Révolution française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), 54.

⁵⁹ Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, ‘The Specter of Saint-Domingue: American and French Reactions to the Haitian revolution’, in Geggus and Fiering (eds), The World of the Haitian Revolution, 327.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 318.