A British corporation with ties to the largest recipients of taxpayer-funded slavery compensation continued to traffic enslaved Africans to Guyana decades after the practice was outlawed, according to newly revealed evidence. A letter from 1847, unearthed by author Malik Al Nasir, shows Sandbach, Tinne and Company engaged in the illegal trade 40 years after the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and 14 years after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
Letter reveals illegal cargo of enslaved people
The letter, written by Peter Miller Watson, who managed the company's interests in Demerara, Guyana, and addressed to Sandbach Tinne's Liverpool office, describes a ship from the company's own fleet arriving with a “cargo of negroes.” The vessel, called “the Parker,” carried “115 adult males, 86 adult females, 82 under 14 years, and 41 under 4 years,” according to the letter. Watson noted “only three casualties during the passage – 1 man and 2 children – which Captain R. says may be attributed to the wretched state in which they had lived ashore.”
Al Nasir, author of the book Searching for My Slave Roots, argues the language used in the letter proves the people were enslaved, not indentured labourers or liberated Africans. “Slavery had been abolished, so how do we know the people on the Parker weren't indentured, or Africans liberated by the Royal Navy?” he said. “Firstly, Watson specifically refers to them as cargo, and not passengers, when liberated Africans were not regarded as cargo, enslaved people were called cargo.”
He added: “In referring to the ‘wretched state’ in which they had lived ashore, he's saying they were shipped from land and are the architects of their own condition – if they had been previously enslaved blame would have been on their former masters, and they would not have been bought if they were sick. When [Watson] talks about casualties, he's attributing the deaths as a loss of property. By process of deduction, we can see these are people illegally trafficked from Africa.”
Compensation and family connections
Sandbach Tinne, which was wound up in 1975, was the family business of the Sandbach and Tinne families. Along with their collaborators and relatives in the Gladstone family, they dominated the Demerara sugar trade. By the time of the 1847 letter, Sandbach Tinne and their subsidiaries had already received compensation equivalent to millions of pounds today for the “loss” of the people they enslaved before abolition. While family patriarch Samuel Sandbach had left the partnership in 1833, his son William Robertson Sandbach and son-in-law Charles Stuart Parker Jr were principal shareholders in 1847.
“John Gladstone, the father of William Gladstone who owned plantations in Guyana and Jamaica, got the biggest single individual payout, while Sandbach Tinne got the second largest on aggregate – both were among architects of the compensation scheme,” Al Nasir said. British taxpayers' debt for compensation payments to enslavers was only paid off in 2015.
Peter Miller Watson was a distant cousin of Prime Minister William Gladstone and the father of Andrew Watson, who became the first Black international footballer when he captained Scotland in the 1880s.
Historical context and resistance
An 1823 uprising in Demerara, staged by enslaved abolitionists, was a pivotal event in the fight to abolish slavery and began on a plantation owned by John Gladstone. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron was tasked with intercepting slavers' ships from 1808, with 1,600 sailors losing their lives. However, it is estimated that fewer than 10% of ships involved in enslaving people were intercepted. Even when ships were successfully stopped, “liberated Africans” faced military conscription and hard, unpaid labour under the apprenticeship and indentured labour systems.
Al Nasir said an 1847 missionary account detailed how unregulated trading in enslaved people existed “south of the line” – meaning enslavers evading the Royal Navy's blockade continued to traffic people from countries below the equator, such as Angola.
New research project launches
The findings have inspired a new research project, Overwriting-Underwriting, which aims to uncover the financial networks behind enslavement. It launches on Sunday, the International Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, at the Museum of Liverpool. The event features renowned Jamaican academic Prof Verene Shepherd as keynote speaker, and a panel including Al Nasir and Lucy Moynihan from the University of Liverpool, chaired by Michelle Charters, the head of the International Slavery Museum.
The initiative is inspired by research from Moynihan into John Gladstone's insurance “risk books” as well as Al Nasir's research into Sandbach Tinne. It is a pilot for the Connector project, a National Museums Liverpool initiative to develop understanding of transatlantic slavery's legacies, supported by a £1m grant from Lloyd's Register Foundation. Maritime group Lloyd's Register apologised for its historical role in transatlantic slavery last year, and descendants of the Sandbach family and Gladstone family have both apologised for their ancestors' involvement in slavery.
