Slave Trade | Correspondence relating to British slaving voyages, especially the brig Sally, 1806-07

Slave Trade

A collection of 114 letters and documents addressed to W and M Smith and Co of Liverpool, on slave trading ventures

including letters from captains reporting on their passage, observations on profits from slaving ("...We sold on the 20th Inst. a Cargo of 225 Negroes from Angola at an average of £73 10s. but they were all young healthy People..." 27 May 1806), correspondence on financing and insurance, much of the correspondence relating to the final voyage of the brig Sally, captained by John Mortimer, which took 195 enslaved persons across the Atlantic to Barbados "after a tedious passage of 45 days" (15 October 1806), the ship subsequently being briefly seized by Spanish privateers on her return voyage, then recaptured and brought to Padstow for salvage, where she was broken up and her remaining cargo ("about a Ton & a half of Ivory & two & a half of wood & 130 teeth") sold, several hundred pages, chiefly 4to, 27 January 1806-19 November 1807

[with:] transcriptions, photocopies, and research notes relating to the slave trade, Liverpool, the brig Sally, and members of her crew

the collection housed in five boxes

These letters to a Liverpool merchant reveals a firm actively involved in the slave trade shortly before its abolition in the British Empire. The Napoleonic Wars were then at their height and one slave ship, the Sally, was briefly captured by a Spanish privateer on her return from Barbados and badly damaged.