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Detail from The Jovial Crew, Thomas Rowlandson, 1786, Royal Collection Trust. |
Years ago, the esteemed Dr. Charles R. Foy was kind enough to write a blog post for this website on the runaway enslaved mariner William Stephens. Foy gave a thorough account of his service and re-enslavement, but more information has come to light since that publication.
When I first read N.A.M. Rodger's excellent The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy I was intrigued by a brief reference to “William Stephens, a Maryland slave” who was serving in the Royal Navy. Somehow his enslaver found out not only that Stephens was in the Royal Navy, but that which ship he was aboard, and appealed to the Admiralty for his return. The attempt to bring Stephens back to slavery was, in the words of Rodger, “refused, for the Admiralty evidently felt that as a volunteer he deserved protection, besides being an experienced seaman, and too valuable to lose.”[1]
Jeffrey W. Bolster, in his well-researched Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, made a similar argument for why “the Admiralty refused to surrender him. Stephens had volunteered for the king's service; he was also a skilled seaman too valuable to lose in time of war.”[2]
I want to give credit where credit is due: these books by Roger and Bolster are pivot points in the study of common sailors and indispensable reading.
But they are wrong in this case. Stephens was returned to his enslaver.
Lena Moser, a maritime scholar and follower of this page, was kind enough to pull some papers for me while conducting her own research at the UK National Archives. She uncovered this entry in the muster book of the Jason from early 1759. William Stephens was discharged on January 11 of that year "by Adm[iralty] Order."[3]
Stephens’ enslaver reached out to Admiral Francis Holburne, himself a plantation owner in Barbados. Not all correspondence from this conversation survives. In fact we do not know who Stephens’ enslaver was; but we do have Holburne’s initial response, dated December 18, 1758:
Agreeable to their Lordships Directions I have enquired into the Case of William Stephens on board His Majesty’s Ship the Jason, who is claim’d as a slave, the Property of a Person in Maryland.[4]
Admiral Holburne penned a remarkably similar letter the day before:
Agreeable to their Lordships Directions to enquire into the case of William Castillo, on board the Neptune, I sent for his Master, at present the master of the Northumberland, who gives the Enclosed Account of him, + to confirm the same sends you his indentures, which he begs may be return’d him again.[5]
While Stephens was returned to slavery by order of the Admiralty with no fanfare, Admiral Holburne trumpeted Castillo’s liberation: “The laws of this country admit of no badges of slavery.”[6] Holburne, despite the lofty rhetoric, himself once managed a plantation in Barbados.
Stephens was returned to slavery while Castillo was liberated. These cases were decided in the same week and nearly the same day. William Castillo’s case is much better known and often lauded as proof in secondary sources that the Royal Navy was on the side of abolition, while Stephens is largely forgotten.
Common people were swept up in economic swings, political movements, and grand strategies. Riding these ebbs and flows, dis-empowered people could negotiate their way to better circumstances. In the end, however, when a focus came on any one enslaved mariner, the Navy nearly always knuckled under. It was almost exclusively in anonymity that enslaved sailors could gain a measure of freedom.
But not always.
Historians agree that black mariners could secure a type of freedom at sea, but one fraught with societal hypocrisy. “The Atlantic Ocean was a site of profound contradictions for Africans in the Age of Sail,” Denver Brunsman wrote in The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, “At once it was the setting for the greatest horrors imaginable for slaves during the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas. But the sea was also the most likely place for slaves to escape their bondage and taste genuine economic opportunity before the era of emancipation in the nineteenth century.”[7]
Bolster highlights a similar contradiction in the wooden world:
That culture created an ambiguous world in which black men simultaneously could assert themselves within their occupation and find with white sailors common ground transcending race, while also being subject to vicious racist acts.[8]
Rodger accurately states the “Navy's attitude toward [black mariners] was liberal by the standards of the societies from which they had come, and it is easy to see the attractions of a world in which a man's professional skill mattered more than his color,” but later acknowledges that “this attitude did not extend to a questioning of the institution of slavery.”[9]
The Royal Navy not only failed to question slavery, it actively supported it. In 1758, Pitt ordered a campaign against the French in West Africa that seized trading posts in Senegal, Gorée, and the Gambia not to end the slave trade but to replace the French with British traders. The protection of British slave ships and forts, as well as the expansion of the trade into formerly French possessions, was all done at the muzzle of Royal Navy guns. Further, naval officers could and did mistreat African and African American seamen for personal gain, out of malice, or both.
We must be careful not to overstate the Royal Navy's role in emancipation. Several academic works on the Seven Years/French and Indian War, the history of the Royal Navy, and the history of slavery in the British empire, place the story of Castillo's liberation in close proximity to the story of Olaudah Equiano. These works imply and sometimes outright state that Equiano may have been inspired by the story of Castillo.
In truth, Equiano's experience with the Royal Navy as an enslaved man is documented in his own Interesting Narrative and is, predictably, all over the map. It was a Royal Navy officer who sold him when he had nearly achieved his freedom, and ordered common seamen to row them from ship to ship so that Equiano might be sold. But he also spoke glowingly of his common sailors, a trend we've examined on this blog in the past.
More to the point for this narrative, Equiano probably never met Castillo, but was a shipmate to Stephens at the moment of his re-enslavement.
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| "Gustavus Vasser (his slave)," ADM 36/5889, Jason Muster Book |
What is more likely: that Equiano was inspired by the lofty rhetoric of the Admiralty who freed a man he'd never met, or that witnessing his shipmate be captured in London and sent across the Atlantic to be re-enslaved at the order of that same Admiralty on virtually the same day?
That the Royal Navy was a potential route to freedom is undeniable, but we must be careful about overstating the case. The Atlantic World was a dangerous and hypocritical place for black sailors.
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