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PROLOGUE “This African Monster” Cape Coast Castle,West African Coast, February 1685 When a wave broke directly onto the outer wall of the castle prison, its force conducted along the arches of the ceiling, drowning out the noise as much as the darkness obscured the captives’ sight of one another.The vibration and the wind that followed it nonetheless provided some comfort to those contained within. They were a small group of captives, perhaps a dozen. Seized near the Gambia River on pretense of theft, they awaited the unknown, their goods taken from them. Starved and “harassed with the hardships of Imprisonment . . . [and] Sickness,” the men were further taunted by the “violent Heats . . . [and] Pestilent Air” of the castle’s dungeon. Their confinement presented “a continual Scene of Miseries of all sorts.”1 Nearly a hundred Royal African Company soldiers paraded around the stone platforms and parapets above the prison. Henry Nurse, the company’s chief agent at Cape Coast Castle, presided over the garrison and the prisoners . Captain John Castell, commander of the frigate Orange Tree, patrolled the length of the coast looking for more to stock the castle’s human stores. For those already detained, the likelihood of death equaled the chances of a return home “by reason of the barbarous usage.” The “extream hardships” of their situation led one of their number into a state of desperate depression. “The companion of his sorrows; not being able to endure the hardships imposed by Captain John Castell,” he took his own life. Suicide evidently provided the best prospect of a homeward voyage.2 These captives at Cape Coast Castle were not African slaves, however, but English slave traders. They were detained, not because of the immorality of their trading activity, but because of its dubious legality. Since 1672, the Royal 1. This captive narrative is from William Wilkinson, Systema Africanum . . . (London, 1690), 3, 18, 19; and Wilkinson, The Caseof WilliamWilkinson, Late Commanderof the Ship Henryand William of London, 1684–1685 . . . ([London, 1690?]), 1. 2. Wilkinson, Systema Africanum, 3; Wilkinson, Case of William Wilkinson, 1. For an account of the soldiers employed at Cape Coast Castle in the late seventeenth century, see William St Clair, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (London, 2006), 13. 2 . PROLOGUE African Company had enjoyed a monopoly of all English trade with the west coast of Africa and of the slave trade to the American colonies as well as a predominant position in the trade that imported Caribbean sugar into England. Those who sought to infringe upon the company’s monopoly (like the suicidal Henry Wilkinson) were subject to interception by Royal Navy frigates (like the Orange Tree), the seizure of their vessels and cargoes (in the above case, valued at three thousand pounds), a trial without jury in an Admiralty court, and indefinite imprisonment. Company officials, like Captain Castell, swore to “shew more mercy to a TURK than to an INTERLOPER.” The above account, by freed captive and brother of Henry,William Wilkinson, went one step further by depicting the victims of the African Company’s monopoly as chattel slaves—captured, imprisoned, starved, and reduced to suicide.3 Henry Wilkinson’s suicide led William to seek vengeance against the Royal African Company. He did not seek redress in combat or in the law courts. He chose to mount a propaganda campaign in print against what he called “this African Monster.” Wilkinson believed that William III and Mary II “together with the present Parliament now Assembled” ought to be appealed to “for a Redress of these Abuses.” His strategy worked. Other merchants came forward with petitions to Parliament detailing that the Royal African Company had “beaten, abused, and imprisoned” them and that their attempts to sue the African Company to recover the property the company had seized from them had led to their imprisonment in England.4 This political dispute between the Royal African Company and its independent slave-trading opponents would politicize the transatlantic slave trade. It would place discussion of the regulation of that trade into a shifting and uncertain political context in which both sides in the dispute would use contrasting political strategies and polarized ideologies to advance their interests. By 1712, opponents of the African Company’s monopoly had succeeded in their aim. They had deregulated Britain’s transatlantic slave trade. They did so by mounting a lobbying campaign that championed the right to trade in African slaves as a deeply cherished English liberty. Freedom...

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