Conclusion

Summary

We, as Englishmen, may pride ourselves that this country gloriously vindicated the slur which for generations lay upon the fair page of its history by the noble part our Navy played in the work of suppression. Britannia never ruled the waves more triumphantly than when her sons accomplished their mission of achieving for the defenceless blacks that most priceless of God's gifts – freedom.

This was one analysis of the Royal Navy's campaign to suppress the transatlantic slave trade, written in 1896. Such partisan sentiments would be thoroughly questioned now, but the inclusion of key terms – ‘vindicated’, ‘noble’, ‘freedom’ – says much about how the squadron's legacy was perceived in the short term. A more current assessment of the significance of the West Africa squadron might start with facts and figures. In this context, the contribution of naval forces in enforcing abolition was extensive and expensive; scholars have termed the naval effort ‘costly international moral action’, and moreover, the ‘most expensive example recorded in modern history’. One contemporary poster claimed that ‘The African Slave Trade in 1862 costs British tax payers 1,000,000 a year’. The campaign also incurred the loss of around 5,000 British lives, and the death of a significant number of recaptives, mostly through disease. Furthermore, the squadron's ‘success’ – in terms of the proportion of slave ships captured and captives released – is debatable. Estimates of nearly 200,000 African men, women and children released by the navy represent a relatively small share of the estimated 3.2 million embarked as slaves between 1808 and 1863. The Atlantic slave trade was by and large at an end by the late 1860s, although there is some debate as to whether political changes within nations that continued to trade in enslaved Africans were more influential in its demise than the British naval effort. The accession of the Lincoln administration in the United States in 1861 (and the acceptance of the reciprocal ‘right of search’) was certainly highly influential, as was Cuba's decision to end participation in the slave trade in 1867. Nevertheless, the work of the West Africa squadron was the first chapter in a long history of British naval campaigns directed against international slavery, including the Indian Ocean slave trade from the 1860s; against ‘black-birding’ (coercion through trickery or kidnapping) in the Western Pacific; and numerous naval campaigns against slave trades across the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in the 1920s and 1930s.