james rogers and the bristol slave trade

© Institute of Historical Research 2003. Historical Research, vol. 76, no. 192 (May 2003)Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

. . . Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKHISRHistorical Research0950-3471© Institute of Historical Research 200320037621000Original ArticleJames Rogers and the Bristol slave tradeKenneth Morgan

James Rogers and the Bristol slave trade*

Kenneth Morgan

Brunel University

Abstract

This article examines the business failure of James Rogers, a large Bristol slavetrader, within the context of the operation of the late British slave trade in westAfrica, on the Middle Passage, and in the Caribbean. Based on a large cache ofsurviving manuscripts, the article shows that the credit crisis of 1793 led to thedemise of Rogers’s mercantile career but also that his business collapse stemmedfrom over-extending his slave trading activities, from relatively poor profit levels,and from attempts to expand his trading portfolio in the eighteen months before

the national financial crash.

In 1793, during a serious economic crisis, the Bristol slave trading houseof James Rogers & Company was declared bankrupt. Other British busi-nessmen experienced the same fate as credit suffered a rapid contractionon the eve of war with revolutionary France. According to contemporarysources, Rogers owed about £100,000 at the time of his failure.

1

Involvedwith the slave trade intermittently from 1774 until 1783 and more fullyin the following decade, James Rogers & Company dispatched fifty-sixvoyages to Africa to pick up slaves, some of their vessels being accom-panied by ships acting as tenders on bilateral voyages between Bristoland west Africa. Rogers owned various shares on individual slaving ven-tures, combining, as was customary in the trade, with an

ad hoc

groupof partners that often changed by the voyage. In most cases he held asignificant portion of the shares and on fifty-one occasions acted as ship’s

* This article is a by-product of a British Academy Research Readership. It was presentedat a conference on ‘The Atlantic slave trade and provincial Britain’, sponsored by the Universityof the West of England and held at Leigh Court, near Bristol, in April 1999, and at theInternational Commission for Maritime History’s sessions at the 19th International Congress ofHistorical Sciences, University of Oslo, August 2000. Thanks are due to David Ryden forresearch assistance; William R. Erwin, Jr. for help at Duke University Library; the BritishAcademy for a travel grant to attend the Oslo conference; and the Nuffield Foundation for theaward of a social sciences research grant.

1

Public Record Office, B 1/86 and C 107/4, 14, 59; L. S. Pressnell,

Country Banking in theIndustrial Revolution

(Oxford, 1956), pp. 546–7;

The Trade of Bristol in the 18th Century

, ed. W. E.Minchinton (Bristol Record Soc., xx, 1957), pp. 190–1; P. Marshall, ‘The anti-slave trade move-ment in Bristol’, in

Bristol in the 18th Century

, ed. P. V. McGrath (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 212–13; T. S. Ashton,

Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700–1800

(Oxford, 1959), pp. 132–4, 166–9.

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.

190 James Rogers and the Bristol slave trade

husband or managing partner. Between 1785 and 1793 Rogers investedin thirty-seven voyages that delivered 7,205 slaves to the Caribbean. Interms of market share, this made him the twelfth leading British slavetrader and the second largest Bristol slave merchant in the decade after1785.

2

This was a time when the British slave trade was buoyant anddominated by Liverpool merchants. Thus in the period 1780–99 Liver-pudlians were responsible for 1,657 (seventy-five per cent) of the 2,220slave voyages dispatched from the three leading British slaving ports,whereas Londoners only sent out 339 voyages (fifteen per cent) andBristolians 234 (ten per cent).

3

Although Bristol’s share was overshadowedby Liverpool’s involvement, some Bristolians pursued the ‘Guinea’ trafficvigorously in the seventeen-eighties and early seventeen-nineties andothers retained a substantial interest in slavery and Atlantic commerce.

4

Rogers, originally from Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, became afreeman of Bristol in September 1774. He began as an insurance officer,but was trading as a merchant in Bristol at the start of the American Warof Independence. Nothing is known about the initial capital he had at hisdisposal. He was a fairly obscure individual, who paid a fine of £200 tobecome a member of Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers on 5 Sep-tember 1783. He became a warden of the Society in 1788–9 but held nomajor social or political positions in Bristol.

5

Nevertheless, he left a largecache of records that illuminates the conduct of the British slave trade in thepost-1783 period more fully than any other surviving set of merchants’records. The Rogers Papers reveal the reasons for the business failure of

2

D. Richardson,

The Bristol Slave Traders: a Collective Portrait

(Bristol Branch of the HistoricalAssoc., pamphlet no. lx, Bristol, 1985), p. 30;

Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade toAmerica

, iv:

the Final Years, 1770–1807

, ed. D. Richardson (Bristol Record Soc., xlvii, 1996);S. D. Behrendt, ‘The British slave trade, 1785–1807: volume, profitability, and mortality’(unpublished University of Wisconsin Ph.D. thesis, 1993), p. 293; D. Eltis, S. D. Behrendt,D. Richardson and H. S. Klein,

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: a Database on CD-ROM

(Cambridge, 1999).

3

D. Richardson, ‘The 18th-century British slave trade: estimates of its volume and coastaldistribution in Africa’,

Research in Econ. Hist.

, xii (1989), 151–95, at pp. 189–95.

4

Richardson, ‘Eighteenth-century British slave trade’, p. 169; D. Richardson, ‘The Britishempire and the Atlantic slave trade, 1660–1807’, in

The Oxford History of the British Empire

, ii:

the 18th Century

, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), pp. 441–2; K. Morgan,

Bristol and the AtlanticTrade in the 18th Century

(Cambridge, 1993); K. Morgan, ‘Bristol West India merchants in the18th century’,

Trans. Royal Hist. Soc.

, 6th ser., iii (1993), 185–208; Richardson,

Bristol SlaveTraders

; Richardson,

Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade

.

5

D. Richardson, ‘James Rogers’, in

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

, ed. H. C. G.Matthew and B. H. Harrison (Oxford, forthcoming 2004); Richardson,

Bristol, Africa and the18th-Century Slave Trade

, p. xxii; A. B. Beaven,

Bristol Lists: Municipal and Miscellaneous

(Bristol,1899), p. 389;

Politics and the Port of Bristol in the 18th Century: the Petitions of the Society ofMerchant Venturers 1698–1803

, ed. W. E. Minchinton (Bristol Record Soc., xxiii, 1963), p. 215.For brief discussions of Rogers’s trade, see S. Rottenberg, ‘The business of slave trading’,

SouthAtlantic Quarterly

, lxvi (1967), 409–23, and J. A. Rawley,

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: aHistory

(New York, 1981), pp. 186–9. One slave trading venture in which Rogers invested hasbeen analysed in detail (see W. E. Minchinton, ‘The voyage of the snow

Africa

’,

Mariner’sMirror

, xxxvii (1951), 187–96).


James Rogers and the Bristol slave trade 191

a large slave trader; they illuminate the risks and complexities of an in-creasingly changing and dynamic trade in human cargoes; and they pro-vide good material on trading conditions at Sierra Leone and Old Calabarin particular in the late seventeen-eighties and early seventeen-nineties.They can also be placed in a broader context by comparing quantitativedata gleaned from them with the findings for all British slave trading portscontained in the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute’s transatlantic slave tradedatabase. By doing so, one can determine the effectiveness of Rogers asa slave trader compared with his contemporaries. The Rogers Papers willbe analysed here in order to underscore some important features of thelate British slave trade.

6

Since Bristol’s slave trade was overtaken once andfor all by Liverpool’s in the seventeen-forties, no attempt is made here toargue that Rogers’s business failure was symptomatic of wider difficultiesin the Bristol slave trade in the late eighteenth century.

7

The problems besetting transatlantic slaving after the American Rev-olution provide a context for the analysis. By the seventeen-eighties andseventeen-nineties, the British slave trade was subject to various formsof pressure. The supply of slaves was sometimes inelastic on parts of thewest African coast as a result of demographic pressures and warfare inthe interior of the continent – problems that had occurred at times earlierin the century. Competition for buying slaves in west Africa was intense;the prices charged for slaves by African dealers were high; and shipssometimes remained on the coast for many months to complete theslaving process.

8

The mean current prices for slaves purchased by British

6

The Rogers Papers (P.R.O., C 107/1–15, 59) include a considerable amount of informa-tion on the Irish provisions trade and the Newfoundland cod trade because Rogers also pursuedthose branches of Atlantic trade. In addition, there is material on an insurance underwritingbusiness in which Rogers was a partner (see C 107/11). Photocopies of the whole collection(save for C 107/59) are available in Duke University, William R. Perkins Library, MSS.Department. Whereas the original manuscripts consist of unsorted bundles of paper, the copiesat Duke University have been reorganized into 20 boxes arranged under the following head-ings: individual ships’ names, bills, trading firm letters, underwriting books, bankruptcy papersand miscellaneous papers. Each section is arranged chronologically, as far as possible, and thereis an in-house typescript guide. Portions of the Rogers Papers were microfilmed by the VirginiaColonial Records Project (see survey reports nos. 6060–8). The statistical material pertainingto the slave trade in these records has largely been abstracted in Richardson,

Bristol, Africa andthe 18th-Century Slave Trade

and included in Eltis and others,

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

. Theonly other set of extant manuscript records on the Bristol slave trade that match the RogersPapers in their extent are the Bright Papers, which cover transatlantic slaving in a different timeperiod (

c

.1740–1775). They include important material on the marketing of slaves in Jamaicabut have much less information than the Rogers Papers about trade practices on the Africancoast (see K. Morgan, ‘The Bright Family Papers’,

Archives

, xxii (1997), 119–29).

7

Studies that discuss Liverpool’s rise in the slave trade over Bristol include Morgan,

Bristoland the Atlantic Trade

, pp. 143–5; Richardson, ‘The British empire and the Atlantic slave trade’,pp. 448–9; and D. Richardson, ‘Liverpool and the English slave trade’, in

Transatlantic Slavery:Against Human Dignity

, ed. A. Tibbles (1994), pp. 73–4.

8

Cf. J. E. Inikori, ‘Export versus domestic demand: the determinants of sex ratios in thetransatlantic slave trade’,

Research in Econ. Hist.

, xiv (1992), 117–66, at p. 133.



vessels along the Atlantic coast of Africa rose from £15.6 sterling in 1783–7 to £19.5 in 1788–92; they dropped to £18 in 1793–7 but then roseagain to £27.3 in 1798–1802.

9

Caribbean slave markets were volatile,with the best destinations and prices shifting from year to year accordingto changing market conditions. Competitive pressures existed betweenindividual slave traders, as substantial merchant firms with access to creditdominated the trade.

10

Securing good credit arrangements from Britishsuppliers of trade goods and from agents selling slaves was essential forsuccess in this traffic. The length of credit offered was often one or twoyears, which meant that creditors were a long time out of their funds. Toadd to these economic pressures on slave trading, there were politicalconsiderations to address. The official campaign to abolish the Britishslave trade began in 1787. In the parliamentary sessions of 1787–9 variouscommittees heard evidence on the conduct of the slave trade, some of itgathered from Thomas Clarkson’s trips to Bristol. The material presentedto parliament included much data on slave and crew mortality on theAfrican coast and during the Middle Passage, from Africa to the WestIndies.

11

To counter charges of tight-packing of cargoes, Dolben’s Act(1788) stated that the number of slaves carried should be proportionate tothe tonnage of vessels, and that a surgeon should be employed aboardship, with instructions to keep a detailed logbook on the disease anddeaths occurring on the voyage. By 1792 the momentum behind the anti-slave trade movement was such that the campaigners had secured anacceptance from parliament that in principle the British slave trade shouldbe abolished. Only the coming of the war against revolutionary Francedistracted politicians’ minds from this goal.

12

Economically and politically, therefore, participation in the Britishslave trade in the post-1783 period was fraught with difficulty to add tothe usual risks of such a long and difficult form of oceanic commerce:susceptibility to African diseases; a limited supply of fresh water andprovisions; uncertain political and military conditions in west Africa; thedifficulty of controlling human cargoes shipped against their will; expo-sure to the winds and gales of the Atlantic; timing such long voyages tocoincide with a good supply of slaves in Africa; and timing arrival in theAmericas before harvests of staple crops were gathered. For Rogers andhis partners, the opportunities to strike a bonanza required a broad set of

9

D. Richardson, ‘Prices of slaves in west and west-central Africa: toward an annual series,1698–1807’,

Bull. Econ. Research

, xliii (1991), 21–56, at pp. 33, 39, 55; P. E. Lovejoy andD. Richardson, ‘British abolition and its impact on slave prices along the Atlantic coast ofAfrica, 1783–1850’,

Jour. Econ. Hist.

, lv (1995), 98–119, at p. 105. The real prices for slaves citedin these articles closely mirror trends in current prices.

10

J. E. Inikori, ‘Market structure and the profits of the British African trade in the late 18thcentury’,

Jour. Econ. Hist.

, xli (1981), 745–76.

11

Marshall, ‘Anti-slave trade movement’, pp. 188–94.

12

R. Anstey,

The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810

(1975), pp. 255–78.



business skills on each leg of the slave trading triangle. By examining howthey dealt with rising slave prices in Africa, the provision of longercredits, slave mortality, and shifting markets for slaves in the Caribbean ata time of abolitionist pressure, one can suggest what management skillswere needed by merchants and ship captains in the final years of the legalBritish slave trade.

Like other slave traders, James Rogers selected the African regionswith which to trade through an assessment of their comparative advantagein supplying slaves for export. He traded with several parts of west Africa,but, as Fig. 1 shows, he favoured the Bight of Biafra and Sierra Leonemore than other British slave traders. Between 1785 and 1798, JamesRogers & Company was the seventh largest British merchant firm, interms of slave deliveries, trading at Sierra Leone, and the third largest atOld Calabar: it took 1,322 slaves on ten voyages from the former part of

Fig. 1. Percentage distribution of slave voyages by African regions: Rogers and otherBritish voyages, 1783–93Total number of Rogers voyages = 52. Total number of other British voyages =1,055.Source: D. Eltis, S. D. Behrendt, D. Richardson and H. S. Klein, The Trans-AtlanticSlave Trade: a Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).



the coast and 2,692 slaves on fourteen voyages from the latter.

13

In tradingat both places, Rogers followed in the footsteps of other British mer-chants. British slave traders probably took eighty per cent of all Biafranslaves (including those from Old Calabar) between 1662 and 1807.

14

Between 1780 and 1807 the Bight of Biafra was the most favoured tradelocation in west Africa for British slaving vessels by a considerable margin.Some forty-one per cent of the Africans embarked on British vessels inthat period were loaded there. Sierra Leone, by contrast, accounted foronly six per cent of the captives loaded in the same years; it lay behindwest-central Africa, the Gold Coast and the Windward Coast, in descend-ing order, but ahead of the Bight of Benin and Senegambia in its shareof British slaving activity in Africa.

15

Trading conditions at Sierra Leone and Old Calabar, however, werefar from easy in the decade after 1783. Captains bought captives inwest Africa from white traders, natives and mulattos. Successful tradingdepended on establishing connections with local agents on the coast andworking out mutually advantageous conditions over the delivery of goodsand the supply of slaves. Such liaisons needed to be forged on a basis oftrust: white ship captains and crew rarely ventured beyond coastal hinter-lands because of the political power of African kingdoms.

16

Old Calabartraders frequently provided human pawns, who were often members oftheir family or friends, as collateral or debt bondage to secure the provi-sion of supplies on credit for slaves.

17

These transactions helped to securebonds between ship captains and coastal traders. Implicit in the arrange-ment was the notion that pawns were not to be treated as slaves. Thusin 1793 Jamaican correspondents of James Rogers noted that they thoughtit inadvisable to sell at Montego Bay an African boy aged sixteen put onboard the

African Queen

as a pawn.

18

Masters of vessels set out from British ports with a specific number ofslaves they intended to pick up, but these complements could not alwaysbe gathered. In such cases, captains revised their figures for trading on the

13

Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, pp. 297, 303.

14

D. Eltis and D. Richardson, ‘West Africa and the transatlantic slave trade: new evidenceof long-run trends’,

Slavery and Abolition

, xviii (1997), 16–35, at p. 21; D. Eltis,

The Rise ofAfrican Slavery in the Americas

(Cambridge, 2000), table 7-I, p. 166.

15

S. D. Behrendt, ‘The annual volume and regional distribution of the British slave trade,1780–1807’,

Jour. African Hist.

, xxxviii (1997), 187–211, at p. 198, table 7. These patterns areconfirmed by data in Eltis and others,

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

. For a useful discussion of slavetrading at Old Calabar, see A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar 1600–1891: the Impact of the InternationalEconomy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford, 1973).

16 A point recently re-emphasized in Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, chs. 6, 7.17 P. E. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, ‘Trust, pawnship, and Atlantic history: the institutional

foundations of the Old Calabar slave trade’, American Hist. Rev., civ (1999), 333–55. Eltis, Riseof African Slavery in the Americas, p. 187, notes that pawning was confined largely to OldCalabar.

18 P.R.O., C 107/59, John Cunningham and John Perry to James Rogers, 10 March 1793.



African coast once they arrived there.19 Letters written to James Rogersbetween 1787 and 1792 often noted the scarcity of slaves and the highprices needed to buy them in comparison with earlier decades. Themaster of the Pearl had trouble getting slaves at Old Calabar in theautumn of 1787; because of their scarcity, he expected to stay long onthe coast and fall short of his purchase.20 From the Banana Islands, off thecoast of Sierra Leone, it was noted in February 1788 that ‘times neverwas equal to this present period. Slaves at 180 [copper] Barrs and Exceed-ingly Scarce’.21 A report from Old Calabar in April 1791 referred to thedifficulty of procuring enslaved Africans and the high prices that had tobe paid for them. It was sometimes necessary to offer higher prices asslaving progressed and captives were difficult to acquire. ‘I scarcely expectto get half my complement at 70 & 75 [bars]’, one captain wrote fromBance Island near the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, ‘but I shall beobliged to pay 75 & 80 for the last half ’.22 In June 1792 William Stewartwrote to James Rogers from the Isle de Los, just north of Sierra Leone, thatthe trade in that area was greatly altered from what he had experiencedpreviously: slaves used to sell for eighty-five bars but now they com-manded 160 bars. In July 1792 the captain of the African Queen apologizedto Rogers for not procuring more male slaves at Old Calabar; they were‘so scarce, owing to marching them through the country for the Cam-eroons where they [the African traders] receive a greater price for them’.23

There are many other similar comments scattered throughout the RogersPapers – indeed, a veritable litany of hard times on the African coast. Thenet result was that many bad voyages were made, and some traders wereforced to consider quitting the slave trade altogether.24

Several factors explain the scarcity of slaves and the high prices paidfor them. Such was the demand for slaves in the late seventeen-eightiesand early seventeen-nineties that many vessels clustered together in theirarrival times on different parts of the coast, and were willing to pay highprices for captives. One of Rogers’s captains found it difficult to get slaves

19 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 144.20 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Rogers to James Rogers, 29 Oct. 1787.21 P.R.O., C 107/14, Thomas Walker to James Rogers, 26 Feb. 1788.22 P.R.O., C 107/12 and 13, John Smith to James Rogers, 30 Apr. 1791, and William

Woodville, Jr. to James Rogers & Co., 16 May 1791.23 P.R.O., C 107/6 and 13, William Stewart to James Rogers, 8 June 1792, and Hammett

Forsyth to James Rogers & Co., 9 July 1792.24 P.R.O., C 107/9 and 14, Thomas Walker to James Rogers, 2 July 1787, 14 Jan. 1788, 30

Apr. 1789; C 107/14, Edward Walker to James Rogers, 20 Jan. 1788; C 107/5, William Roperto James Rogers, 12 Dec. 1789, and Capt. John Goodrich to James Rogers, 4 Feb. 1790; C107/13, W. Woodville, Jr. to James Rogers & Co., 16 May 1791; C 107/14, William Roperto James Rogers, 17 June 1791; C 107/5, Capt. John Goodrich to James Rogers & Co., 20June 1791. A tabular breakdown of the age and sex of slaves and the unit price in copper barspaid for them on one of Rogers’s voyages is given in Inikori, ‘Export versus domestic demand’,pp. 142–5.



in the autumn of 1790 because French traders were offering ‘extravagantprices’.25 A glut of ships arriving could cause trading difficulties. At BanceIsland in 1787 Captain Thomas Walker wrote that ‘times on the Coast isby no means as favourable as I expected. Slaves is at the Price of 150Barrs, and the Coast seems to be pretty well lin’d with Vessels of all kind’.Walker had already bought eleven prime slaves, and was going downriver, staying a day or two at every place of trade, but did not expect toleave the coast for five or six months.26 A Liverpool merchant thoughtJames Rogers should desist from sending ships to Old Calabar in late 1787because there was a glut of London and Liverpool ships there.27 AtAnnamaboe Road in February 1791 it was reported that high prices werecurrently given for slaves by factory ships and private traders.28 In January1792 Captain John Neilson of the Recovery noted that he had bought onlytwo slaves in eight days at Cape Mount on the Grain Coast, ‘there havingbeen so many Americans & giving such prices that it is out of my powerto do anything’.29 William Prosser reported from the River Gabon inApril 1792 that there was great competition for slaves and goods there,with twelve vessels competing with one another.30

Several of these remarks suggest that Rogers’s vessels found consider-able competition on the west African coast from other traders, particularlyFrench vessels and Liverpool ships.31 The problem for Rogers in enteringthe slave trade with Sierra Leone and Old Calabar after 1783 was that hisvessels had to compete with well-established trading connections alreadyset up there by rivals.32 It also seems that Rogers’s captains were outbidin the prices they paid for slaves in Old Calabar. Although, as notedabove, slave prices were generally rising in west Africa in the late eight-eenth century, significant differences in prices occurred across regions.Evidence from the Rogers Papers suggest that slave prices for SierraLeone were broadly consistent with the overall level of such prices along

25 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Martin to James Rogers, 9 Sept. 1790.26 P.R.O., C 107/7, Thomas Walker to James Rogers, 23 June 1787.27 P.R.O., C 107/9, Joseph Daltera to James Rogers, 21 Nov. 1787.28 P.R.O., C 107/12, John Smith to James Rogers, 27 Feb. 1791.29 P.R.O., C 107/5, Capt. John Neilson to James Rogers, 1 Jan. 1792. For other examples

of the difficulty of buying Africans on reasonable terms because of high prices, see C 107/5,William Roper to James Rogers, 12 Dec. 1789, and Capt. John Goodrich to James Rogers,4 Feb. 1790.

30 P.R.O., C 107/6, William Prosser to James Rogers, 10 Apr. 1792.31 Cf. J. E. Inikori, ‘The sources of supply for the Atlantic slave exports from the Bight

of Benin and the Bight of Bonny (Biafra)’, in De la Traite à l’esclavage du XVIIIème siècle, ed.S. Daget (Actes du colloques international sur la traite des Noirs, Bibliothèque d’histoired’outre-mer, nouvelle série, Etudes vii–viii, 2 vols., Nantes, 1985), ii. 31.

32 Significantly, the ship captains mentioned in the one surviving west African trading chief ’sdiary detailing the purchase of slaves at Old Calabar in the 1780s were all from Liverpool vessels(compare Efik Traders of Old Calabar, Containing the Diary of Antera Duke an Efik Slave-TradingChief of the 18th Century, ed. D. Forde (1956) with Eltis and others, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).



the west African coast c.1788–92.33 However, between 1787 and 1792slave prices for Old Calabar were between twelve and fourteen pounds,the cheapest range found at that time anywhere in west Africa apart fromat the Cameroons and Cape Lopez.34 The regular complaints by Rogers’scaptains about the high prices they paid to purchase slaves from OldCalabar at this time can be explained in two ways. One explanation isthat competitors had already bargained for captives at more favourableprices and that when Rogers’s vessels began trading a reduced supply ofAfricans meant that prices increased. Another possibility is that othervessels had better assortments of trade goods for barter in Old Calabarand could therefore buy Africans more cheaply because they offeredcommodities that were in demand. It may be, of course, that a mixtureof both explanations accounts for the competitive disadvantage found byRogers’s captains.

Like other slave traders, Rogers’s ships supplied East Indian and Eng-lish textiles, bar iron, hardware, beads, arms, gunpowder and liquor tothe Atlantic coast of Africa. These commodities usually comprised themost valuable part of the outset costs on each voyage. Thus, for instance,£96,936 out of the £159,347 initial investment (sixty-one per cent) onnineteen of Rogers’s voyages to Africa – the only voyages for which dataare available – consisted of trade goods.35 Textiles comprised easily thelargest category of these commodities, accounting for over seventy percent of the export cargoes sent out by British slaving vessels in the period1779–1808.36 East Indian textiles – niccanees, romals and the like –generally dominated the cargoes sent out by Rogers and his partners toAfrica, with Manchester goods, predominantly cottons and linens, beingsecond in importance.37 Such goods were acquired mainly from Londonbut also from suppliers in Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol.38

African demand for goods from slaving vessels varied over time andamong different coastal regions. Judging the right mixture of commoditiesfor African markets was essential for successful trade with slave vendors,

33 Richardson, ‘Prices of slaves’, pp. 38–9.34 S. D. Behrendt, ‘British merchants and the marketing of slaves in the Americas’ (paper

presented to the Social Science History Association conference, New Orleans, October 1996),p. 4.

35 Based on data reported in Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade.36 Relevant statistics are given in M. Johnson, Anglo-African Trade in the 18th Century, ed.

J. T. Lindblad and R. Ross (Leiden, 1990).37 D. Richardson, ‘West African consumption patterns and their influence on the 18th-

century slave trade’, in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic SlaveTrade, ed. H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn (New York, 1979), table 12.2, pp. 313–15.

38 E.g., P.R.O., C 107/7, William and Samuel Rawlinson to Richard Fydell & Co., 11 June1787; C 107/9, Ludlam Parry & Son to James Rogers, 11 Dec. 1787; C 107/7, WilliamRawlinson to Richard Fydell & Co., 23 Feb. 1788; C 107/9, John Whately to Rogers, Blake& Co., 22 Oct. 1789; C 107/8, Richard Powell to James Rogers & Co., 14 May 1791.



but it involved an intricate knowledge of changing patterns of demand.39

A snapshot of the purchase of slaves through vending an array of goodsand through contacts with slave suppliers survives in the wages book ofthe ship Jupiter, which Rogers co-owned with Sir James Laroche andRichard Fydell. This ship picked up slaves at Bonny in early 1792 beforeproceeding across the Atlantic to Jamaica.40 Forty-four suppliers delivered380 slaves to the vessel in Bonny. Thirty-three different types of goodswere assorted for each batch of slaves and these commodities weretotalled to an equivalent in bars. In some purchases textiles predominatedover, say, guns and powder, but for each batch of slaves bought the entirespectrum of goods was offered, emphasizing the need to keep up a goodassortment of a range of commodities for slave purchases.41

Rogers’s vessels encountered a number of problems on the Africancoast. Some difficulties stemmed from poor decisions made by Rogersand his captains; others lay beyond their control. Rogers’s captains some-times listed the goods in demand at various parts of the west Africancoast. Unfortunately, on several occasions they could not purchase theslaves they wanted through lack of a vital type of trade goods – anexample of poor business foresight at a time when plenty of competitionfrom other slave trading firms existed. One captain failed to completehis slave complement, after purchasing 425 Africans, because he hadno assortment of cloths. Another vessel found its cargo of trade goodsunsuited for Old Calabar.42 In late 1787 Captain Richard Rogers reportedfrom Old Calabar that ‘the Trade is much altered, my Chintz is not theleast in demand which was the commanding Article last voyage’.43 InMay 1792 the Mermaid arrived at Junccacunda on the Gambia River shortof India bafts and amber, although they were much in demand.44 CaptainEdward Taylor, having purchased sixty slaves for the same vessel, wouldhave bought more ‘only for want of India bafts, in the stead of my IndiaByramparts which are scarse look’d on’.45 In June 1792 Captain WilliamStewart found himself short of guns, powder, rum and tobacco, althoughhe had many other light bars to mix with his heavy ones.46

It seems that Rogers’s vessels faced stiff competition from otherquarters in vending their manufactured goods to natives in Africa. Slave

39 Richardson, ‘West African consumption patterns’, pp. 303–30; J. E. Inikori, ‘The importof firearms into West Africa, 1750–1807: a quantitative analysis’, Jour. African Hist., xviii (1977),339–68.

40 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 215.41 P.R.O., C 107/59, ship Jupiter’s wages book.42 P.R.O., C 107/12 and 13, John Smith to James Rogers & Co., 24 May 1791, and Samuel

Forsyth to James Rogers, 11 June 1792; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century SlaveTrade, p. 183.

43 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Rogers to James Rogers, 10 Nov. 1787.44 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 219.45 P.R.O., C 107/6, Edward Taylor to James Rogers, 2 July 1792.46 P.R.O., C 107/6, William Stewart to James Rogers, 8 June 1792.



traders from London and Liverpool included merchants who had goodcontacts with fixed factories on parts of the west African coast, notably atthe Isle des Los; this enabled them to centralize the barter of goods forAfricans.47 These factories had advantages over private traders such asRogers. A comment from Annamaboe Road in March 1791 revealed that‘the Factory’s get such a Constant Supply of Goods from England thatthey Cutt the other ships out in a Regular & Common Assortment’.48

Rogers’s ships, however, appear to have suffered not just from competi-tion with Liverpudlians who had connections with slave trade factoriesin Sierra Leone, but also from supplying goods at uncompetitive prices.Thomas Cleveland, a white trader in Africa with whom Rogers’s captainsliaised frequently, found many articles were overpriced compared withthose sent on Liverpool ships: he argued that Liverpudlians sold theircargoes twenty-five per cent cheaper in Africa than did Bristolians.49

There were also problems beyond the control of James Rogers andhis ship captains that caused trading difficulties on the African coast. Tradestopped at Annamaboe Road in the spring of 1791 because RichardMiles, governor of Annamaboe Fort, had disagreed with the natives,who then attempted to block the fort from all communication and trade.Around the same time, the Ruby left the Sierra Leone coast some forty-six slaves short of its complement owing to the sudden death of the whitetrader James Cleveland, resident at Sherbro river, with whom it hadtransacted business and to whom it had advanced large amounts of tradegoods on credit. A similar fate befell the Fame, which left the Banana Islandsforty-six short of its complement of slaves, also because of Cleveland’sdeath.50 At Cape Coast in September 1791 the slackness of the slave trade wasattributed to a lack of war, and hence of captives, in the interior part ofthe country: the ‘palaver with the natives’ was still unsettled and there was‘very little Prospect of it being otherwise’.51 Trade only began to recoverat Bonny in early 1793 when the death was reported of two powerfullocal kings, who had been keeping slave prices high for some time.52

By the early seventeen-nineties competition for slaves was so fierce inOld Calabar and Sierra Leone that Rogers and his partners followed thepractice adopted by other private slave traders, namely that of gettingsome of their vessels to trade in pairs on the African coast. This was an

47 Behrendt, ‘British merchants and the marketing of slaves in the Americas’, p. 17;Behrendt, ‘The British slave trade’, pp. 117–18; B. L. Mouser, ‘Iles de Los as bulking centerin the slave trade 1750–1800’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, lxxxiii (1996), 84–90.

48 P.R.O., C 107/12, John Smith to James Rogers, 10 March 1791.49 P.R.O., C 107/14, Thomas Walker to James Rogers, 20 June 1789.50 P.R.O., C 107/12, John Smith to James Rogers & Co., 17 Apr. 1791; Richardson, Bristol,

Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. xxxiii, 166, 176. Zachary Macaulay referred toJames Cleveland as ‘an eminent capital slave trader’ (House of Lords Sessional Papers, ed. F. W.Torrington (repr. edn., 3 vols., Dobbs Ferry, N. Y., 1974), session 1798–9, iii. 350).

51 P.R.O., C 107/12, John Smith to James Rogers & Co., 24 Sept. 1791.52 P.R.O., C 107/59, John Goodrich to James Rogers, 24 Jan. 1793.



attempt to gain market power over west African regions without factoriesor forts.53 Thus in 1790 the Jupiter and the Dragon traded together at CapeCoast and the Ruby and the Crescent liaised at the Banana Islands. In 1791the Daniel and the Pearl anchored together at Old Calabar. These vesselsworked their way along the coast, picking up slaves here and there. Theywere expected to help each other in terms of supplying goods for barter,transferring goods from one vessel to another if necessary, arranging smallboats to bring Africans aboard, and sharing provisions. By adopting thesepractices, they could trade on the west African coast to mutual advantage.One pair of ships bought slaves at Bassau, Baffoo Bay, Cape Mount andOld Calabar. Another pair took aboard slaves at Cape Mount and theBanana Islands and then sailed eastward to the Gold Coast to pick upmore Africans at Annamaboe and Cape Coast Castle. In one instancethree ships worked together: in 1791 the Crescent assisted the Fame andthe Ruby in loading slaves at the Isle de Los, while trading itself at SierraLeone and Bassa.54 This liaison between ships does not seem to haveworked very well, however, because they appear to have spent a longtime on the African coast. This resulted not just from delays in collectingslaves but from taking time to load commodities on board ship.

Rogers’s ships were typical in their size, being on average 188 tons.55

Table 1 shows, however, that the size of a slave cargo carried by Rogers’sships averaged less than the imputed total of slaves embarked on ordisembarked from other Bristol slaving vessels in the decade after 1783.Rogers’s vessels accordingly carried fewer slaves per ton than did vesselson other British slave voyages. His ships also had poor delivery ratescompared with other Bristol slave traders – an important business consid-eration given that voyage profits increased with the proportion of slavesallowed that were landed. Under Dolben’s Act vessels were allowed tocarry a fixed ratio of five slaves per three tons up to 200 tons, and oneslave for each additional ton thereafter. Between 1789 and 1793 theaverage ratio of slave deliveries to slaves allowed on Bristol slave tradingvessels was 81.3 per cent. Rogers and his partners only achieved a deliveryrate of seventy-three per cent, placing them behind three other leadingBristol competitors – John Anderson, James Jones and Thomas Jones.56

There appears to have been significant mortality among the crew ofRogers’s vessels. Heavy crew mortality was reported at Old Calabar inDecember 1787. In the same year the Fly lost all its crew except one inwest Africa (and also reported thirteen slaves dying before leaving the

53 Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, p. 117.54 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. 163–4, 169, 176, 182–3.55 Based on 59 of Rogers’s vessels compared with 2,999 other British slave ships for the

period 1766–93 (calculated from Eltis and others, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).56 Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, pp. 119–20; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century

Slave Trade, p. xxxii. Inikori (‘Market structure’, p. 752) notes the leading role played by theJones brothers in the late Bristol slave trade.



coast). On a voyage of the Pearl, thirty-one out of fifty-one crew died onthe African coast between May and December 1790.57 Of all the locationsassociated with slaving voyages, the African coast was the most deadly; itaccounted for seventy-eight per cent of all crew deaths in the Bristol andLiverpool slave trade in 1792 and for fifty-four per cent in 1793.58 Thusit is not surprising that some seamen on one of Rogers’s vessels declinedto return to the African coast because of the extensive mortality there.59

Some of Rogers’s voyages also experienced very heavy slave mortality.The Jupiter picked up 390 slaves at Old Calabar in the summer of 1789and lost 170 during the ocean crossing. The Rodney buried sixty-two outof 371 slaves acquired at Bonny in the early summer of 1791. In Marchthe same year the Pearl sailed from Africa with 472 slaves and arrived atJamaica with 356. In the autumn of 1792 the same ship took on board400 slaves at Bonny and delivered only 140 to Barbados.60 Before thepassage of Dolben’s Act in 1788 the mortality loss on Rogers’s ships cameto 18.8 per cent.61 Overall the proportion of slave deaths on Rogers’s

57 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. 123, 130, 172.58 Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, p. 348.59 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Martin to James Rogers & Co., 14, 21 Dec. 1790.60 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. 140, 172, 195, 222.61 Based on information collated in Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave

Trade, passim. Where two contemporary numbers are cited, the figures have been averaged.Cargoes where three or more conflicting figures are given in contemporary sources have beenignored, since the discrepancy between them is usually too wide to be meaningful.

Table 1. Statistics for Rogers and other British slave trade voyages, 1783–93

Rogers Voyage

Other British Voyages

Mean N Mean N

Imputed number of slaves embarked 271.6 52 313.4 1,234Imputed number of slaves disembarked 225.6 52 270.0 1,233Mortality loss 14.1 37 8.5 400Average number of slaves per ton 1.6 52 1.8 1,216Percentage male 56.6 29 62.2 505Percentage children 20.0 28 20.0 382Average length of voyage from English port to destined point of sale

278.7 45 285.2 904

Average length of Middle Passage 56.9 20 56.7 369

N = total voyages. The number of voyages varies because the information for each category is not available for all journeys.Total number of Rogers voyages = 52. Total number of other British voyages = 1,284.Source: D. Eltis, S. D. Behrendt, D. Richardson and H. S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: a Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).



voyages exceeded that commonly found in the ‘Guinea’ traffic in the lateeighteenth century. This was the case even though Rogers’s vessels hadan almost identical length of Middle Passage to that of other slave tradersand even though his vessels sailed for shorter average lengths of timebetween leaving England and disembarking their cargoes in the Carib-bean. Table 1 shows these statistically significant trends.

Since most of Rogers’s voyages went to Bonny and Old Calabar, itwas likely that they would attract higher than average slave mortalitybecause the Bight of Biafra, despite its popularity among British slavetraders, was a notoriously unhealthy region. Available estimates pointto higher mortality among slaves picked up there in the late eighteenthcentury compared with most other parts of the west African coast. OldCalabar, in particular, provided slaves that experienced heavy mortalityloss on the Middle Passage.62 These high rates of mortality loss werecharacteristic of the Bight of Biafra, in fact, over a long time period.63

Even allowing for these factors, however, Rogers’s slaving ventures hadhigher mortality rates than was the norm: a detailed study of the lateBritish slave trade found that the upper estimate of mortality on theMiddle Passage was sixteen per cent in 1788, declining thereafter tolevels that were always under ten per cent, and often considerably lessthan that, after 1792.64

The implication of this varied evidence appears to be that JamesRogers’s slaving ventures were not well managed; as a result, health andmortality problems were exacerbated. Evidence of problems with someof the white personnel on these voyages surfaces in numerous letters. Abad voyage made by the Jupiter in 1788 was attributed to a master who‘was not fit for the task’.65 Captain Thomas Walker, arriving at CapeMount in October 1787, complained of trouble caused by three mateswho ‘turn’d out a set of the Biggest Drunken Thieving Villains onEarth’.66 The requirement that a surgeon should sail aboard vessels afterthe passage of Dolben’s Act was no guarantee that slaves would receiveprofessional treatment. On one Atlantic crossing there was a complaintabout a doctor drinking wine instead of giving it to the sick crew and

62 Richardson, ‘Eighteenth-century British slave trade’, p. 176; H. S. Klein and S. L. Engerman,‘Slave mortality on British ships, 1791–97’, in Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition,ed. R. Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool, 1976), pp. 113–25; Behrendt, ‘Annual volumeand regional distribution’, table 4, p. 193.

63 S. L. Engerman and H. S. Klein, ‘Long-term trends in African mortality in the transat-lantic slave trade’, Slavery and Abolition, xviii (1997), 36–47, at p. 44, and Eltis, Rise of AfricanSlavery in the Americas, pp. 185–6.

64 Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, pp. 170–1. Cf. Richardson, ‘Eighteenth-century Britishslave trade’, pp. 156–7, which argues for a drop in the mean level of mortality on British slaversfrom the 1770s onwards.

65 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 140.66 P.R.O., C 107/14, Capt. Thomas Walker to James Rogers, 14 Oct. 1787.



slaves.67 On another voyage it was reported that the doctor was a drunkenrascal and argumentative. Captain John Goodrich of the Sarah complainedof a doctor ‘who I find to be [too] fond of Liquor to expect any goodof him, however [I] shall make him do his duty towards attending theslaves’.68 There are instances of surgeons getting ill, dying or running offtemporarily from ships. Moreover, the medical training of these doctorsdid not always fit them for handling slave health problems. CaptainWilliam Woodville, Jr. reported from Bance Island in 1791 that surgeonswere so unfamiliar with slave diets, which were mainly vegetarian, thatthey had little idea how to treat them medically ‘with propriety’.69

Other problems affecting slave health and survival beset Rogers’svoyages. Occasionally, the seasonal acquisition of black cargoes was mis-managed and unfortunate delays occurred. In 1791 Francis Grant, agentfor slave sales in Jamaica, considered that the high mortality on theRodney, with eighty-seven out of 371 slaves loaded being lost, reflectedthe season of the year when the slaves were bought. ‘Not one cargo inten comes here’, he suggested, ‘in a healthy condition which is laid in atthe time he [the captain] got his’.70 Delays during the slaving processtended to be counterproductive: on one voyage it was noted that slaveswere confined in such a miserable condition in west Africa through themistaken notion of purchasing cheap provisions. On the African coastRogers’s slave ships bought camwood, ivory, beeswax, palm oil, redwoodand slave provisions.71 These commodities appear to have been boughtwith trade goods left after slaves had been purchased.72 Rogers’s captainshad to decide whether to stay on the African coast to buy these extracommodities or whether to make expeditious sailings across the Atlantic.This was a difficult decision. African goods could be sold for profit, andprovisions such as yams and dried fish provided nourishment for slaves.Yet the speed with which slaves could be loaded and ships dispatchedhelped to cut down provision and supervision costs, and possibly alsooutbreaks of disease among crew and slaves, on the coast.73 A fine balancehad to be struck, therefore, between staying on the African coast and not

67 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Rogers to James Rogers & Co., 28 Dec. 1788.68 P.R.O., C 107/2, William Roper to James Rogers, 14 March 1790.69 P.R.O., C 107/13, Samuel Stribling to James Rogers, 6 May 1792; C 107/6, Capt.

Robert Peak to James Rogers, 18 July, 10 Sept. 1792; C 107/13, John Shilstone to JamesRogers, 8 Jan. 1793, and William Woodville, Jr. to James Rogers & Co., 16 May 1791(quotation).

70 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 195. The Rodney left Bonnyon about 25 June 1791.

71 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, passim; P.R.O., C 107/15,African Trade Book; D. Richardson, ‘The costs of survival: the transport of slaves in the MiddlePassage and the profitability of the 18th-century British slave trade’, Explorations in Econ. Hist.,xxiv (1987), 178–96, at p. 187.

72 P.R.O., C 107/5, John Burnell to James Rogers, 8 June 1791.73 E.g., Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 126.



delaying the Middle Passage too long. Yet it could be difficult gettingprovisions in parts of west Africa. In 1788 the Juba remained at OldCalabar for three weeks after slaving had been completed to secure‘Wholesom & Strong’ yams – a strategy that backfired because the vesselhad a difficult ocean crossing with above average slave mortality. Evenwhen provisions were gathered, they sometimes only just lasted thelength of the voyage. Conditions on these voyages rarely led to significantproblems of control, but during the Middle Passage of the Mermaid in1792 a serious insurrection occurred, leading to the loss of thirty slavesand four crew.74

Most slave mortality arose from diseases caught by slaves during theloading period when they were chained and confined. It then followedthe pattern of an epidemic whereby deaths peaked during the first thirdof a voyage. Gastroenteritic complaints, flourishing in dirty, unhygienicconditions, were the major cause of death, although various fevers werealso prevalent.75 We do not know for certain whether Rogers’s slavingvoyages followed this pattern, but there are several references in his papersto slaves suffering from fevers, the flux and yaws (a contagious skindisease). No doubt some fevers were caught when there were continualrains.76 Thus in 1793 the Rodney lost sixty-one slaves ‘in consequence ofa putrid Flux which has raged thro’ the ship during the Passage, andwhich we attribute to the heavy rains which fell, in turning out of theBite’. The disorder had affected the crew as well as the slaves. The masterreported that, despite the help of the surgeon, he had, at one stage, onlytwo crew members, exclusive of the mates, capable of climbing to theship’s deck and that he himself had had a bout of the illness. The strongerslaves survived the ordeal but ‘the weaker ones, on being taken ill, allwaysfell into a melancholy languour, from which there was no possibility ofrousing them’.77 Whatever the precise causes of these complaints, mastersof ships commented on the debilitation resulting from the Middle Pas-sage. In 1792 the captain of the Fame noted that ‘there never was a worsecargo of slaves ship’d from Africa’, adding that ‘I have Bline [blind], one

74 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Martin to James Rogers & Co., 14 Dec. 1790; C 107/2, JohnKennedy to James Rogers, 7 Nov. 1788; C 107/5, William Roper to James Rogers, 12 Dec.1789; C 107/13, Edward Taylor to James Rogers, 27 Aug. 1792, and Munro McFarlane &Co. to James Rogers & Co., 18 Nov. 1792; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-CenturySlave Trade, pp. 126, 219.

75 R. H. Steckel and R. A. Jensen, ‘New evidence on the causes of slave and crew mortalityin the Atlantic slave trade’, Jour. Econ. Hist., xlvi (1986), 57–77.

76 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. 157, 182; P.R.O., C 107/12, Capt. John Garrett to James Rogers, 10 Oct. 1790, and Richard Martin to James Rogers& Co., 14 Dec. 1790; C 107/13, Francis Grant to James Rogers & Co., 11 Sept. 1791, JohnPerry to James Rogers, 21 Jan. 1793, and Capt. William Woodville to James Rogers & Co.,25 May 1791.

77 P.R.O., C 107/59, J. C. Hunt to James Rogers & Co., 11 May 1793.



eye, Some Loosing fingers some toas [toes]’.78 The master of the Jubareferred to one voyage as the worst he had ever sailed on, although inthis case 201 out of 230 slaves loaded in Africa survived for sale.79 A badocean crossing did not, however, always lead to heavy mortality. Onecaptain who sold all the slaves he loaded in Africa stated that ‘they havehad a dreadful passage, being under water the whole way from the coast’,yet they still survived this ‘destructive circumstance’.80

Fig. 2 shows that the main Caribbean markets for the sale of Rogers’sslave cargoes were Jamaica and Grenada: Rogers’s voyages frequented

78 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 208. Cf. P.R.O., C 107/13,John Cunningham to James Rogers, 21 Jan. 1793.

79 P.R.O., C 107/2, John Kennedy to James Rogers, 7 Nov. 1788.80 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 164.

Fig. 2. Distribution of slave trade destinations for Rogers and other British voyagesto the West Indies, 1783–93Total number of Rogers voyages = 51. Total number of other British voyages =1,089.Source: D. Eltis, S. D. Behrendt, D. Richardson and H. S. Klein, The Trans-AtlanticSlave Trade: a Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).



those islands more than was the norm for other British slave traders inthe decade after 1783. In fact, twenty-six of the forty-five voyages wherewe have accurate information delivered their black cargoes to Jamaica,where they traded primarily with ports on the northern shore, such asMartha Brae, Montego Bay, Port Antonio and Falmouth, although a fewships sailed into Kingston harbour on the southern side of the island.Grenada took twelve shipments; St. Vincent, Tortola and Antigua twoeach; and Dominica one.81 There were several reasons why some marketsonly attracted a handful of Rogers’s ships. Of the two voyages thatdelivered slaves to Antigua, the first experienced problems in paymentsfor slaves, while the second put in to the island in distress, having reachedBarbados after losing 260 slaves, and was then broken up and condemned.The slave cargo sold at Dominica arrived there in a crisis: the master ofthe Pearl reached Barbados having lost 104 slaves on the Middle Passageout of 449 acquired at Old Calabar, and the vessel put in at Dominicabecause the slaves were not in good enough health to continue toJamaica.82 Barbados often served as a first port of call for Rogers’s shipsentering the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic ocean. It was an islandwhere new provisions could be taken on board, sailors discharged and let-ters of instruction picked up about the destination for slave sales. Rogersand his partners, however, never saw it as a market for vending slaves,possibly because absolute decline in Barbados’s sugar exports – and, byimplication, its sugar production – had set in by the seventeen-seventies.83

Rogers’s ships concentrated their slave deliveries on Jamaica and Gre-nada because they seemed good markets for sales. Jamaica was the largestsugar island in the British Caribbean and traditionally the best market forslaves sent in Bristol ships. There were several reasons for the buoyantdemand on both islands for newly imported Africans in the seventeen-eighties and seventeen-nineties. In Jamaica little progress had been madein implementing policies of amelioration and reproduction among theenslaved labour force. Sugar and coffee output was increasing rapidly inJamaica in the late seventeen-eighties and early seventeen-nineties. Thenumber of plantations grew from 775 in 1772 to 1,061 in 1786. Hurri-canes destroyed provision grounds on the island in several years duringthe American revolutionary war and in three post-war years in a row –1784, 1785 and 1786. Moreover slave mortality throughout the British

81 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, passim; Eltis and others, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

82 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. 130, 222; P.R.O., C 107/1, Jacob Jarvis to James Rogers, 2 Apr. 1787.

83 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Martin to James Rogers & Co., 14 Dec. 1790, and SamuelRichards to James Rogers & Co., 26 Sept. 1791; B. W. Higman, ‘Economic and socialdevelopment of the British West Indies, from settlement to c.1850’, in The Cambridge EconomicHistory of the United States, i: the Colonial Era, ed. S. L. Engerman and R. E. Gallman (Cam-bridge, 1996), p. 317.



Caribbean was unusually high during the American War of Independencebecause of a drop in the supply of foodstuffs from the American mainlandand a consequent spate of malnutrition among slaves. Grenada was themost productive of the Ceded Islands acquired by Britain at the end ofthe Seven Years’ War. It expanded its sugar and coffee production in thelate eighteenth century, attracting much capital investment, and dependedon fresh supplies of slaves, given the consistently heavy demographicdecline among Africans imported to the Caribbean. Slave imports intothe Ceded Islands and Jamaica recovered especially strongly in the decadeafter 1783, the main period for Rogers’s transatlantic slave trading.84

The agents that Rogers’s captains dealt with in the Caribbean includedFrancis Grant, Alexander MacLeod and John Cunningham in Jamaica;Munro McFarlane, James Baillie & Company, and Campbell, Baillie &Company in Grenada; William Webb in Dominica; James Maud in Anti-gua; George Baillie & Company in St. Vincent; and William Grumley inTortola. Attempts were made to establish regular contacts with expertlocal knowledge about the demand for slaves and the prospects for returncargoes. As was common in the final years of the British slave trade,remittances for slaves were sometimes made with sugar and rum butgenerally with post-dated bills of exchange that allowed extensive creditperiods: this helped to keep up the price of slaves and to attract purchas-ers. These bills were often guaranteed by substantial British merchanthouses (that is, they were accepted and paid at sight on presentation).85

Sometimes remittances were fixed with bills at fifteen, eighteen andtwenty-one months, on occasions as much as twelve, eighteen, twenty-four and thirty months. In 1793, when a large influx of enslaved Africansoccurred throughout the British Caribbean, factors could only vend slavesfor good prices by offering anything up to three years’ credit.86 Longercredit periods encouraged planters to buy when Old Calabar slaves were

84 N. Deerr, The History of Sugar (2 vols., 1949–50), i. 198; R. B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery:an Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Barbados, 1974), pp. 223, 458–9; R. B.Sheridan, ‘The commercial and financial organization of the British slave trade, 1750–1807’,Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xi (1958), 249–63, at pp. 258–9; R. B. Sheridan, ‘The crisis of slavesubsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution’, William andMary Quarterly, 3rd ser., xxxiii (1976), 615–41; R. B. Sheridan, ‘The slave trade to Jamaica,1702–1808’, in Trade, Government and Society: Caribbean History 1700–1920, ed. B. W. Higman(Kingston, 1983), pp. 2, 12; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade,pp. xxvi–xxviii; Richardson, ‘The British empire and the Atlantic slave trade’, p. 457.

85 Sheridan, ‘Commercial and financial organization’, p. 262; J. M. Price, ‘Credit in the slavetrade and plantation economies’, in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. B. L. Solow(Cambridge, 1991), p. 313, n. 45; T. Burnard and K. Morgan, ‘The dynamics of the slavemarket and slave purchasing patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rdser., lviii (2001), 205–28. The correspondence of a Bristol guarantee can be found in ‘Calendarof correspondence from William Miles to John Tharp, 1770–89’, ed. K. Morgan, in A BristolMiscellany, ed. P. V. McGrath (Bristol Record Soc., xxxvii, 1985), pp. 81–121.

86 P.R.O., C 107/59, Taylor, Ballantine & Fairlie to John Anderson, 5 Sept. 1793, andaccount sales from the Jupiter by Francis Grant, 10 July 1793.



imported, which lengthened the sight of bills.87 Rogers made private dis-count arrangements to deal with the longer bills by tapping the resourcesof semi-retired London merchants and country bankers who could convertthe bills into cash. Sometimes he did this for sets of bills amounting tobetween £3,000 and £5,000 at a time.88

Rogers expected his slave factors to achieve a specified average saleprice for a lot of slaves. With access to varied reports of Atlantic-wideprices in newspapers, correspondence and through word of mouth, slavemerchants could estimate, in relation to transport costs and crew’s wages,the average level of prices needed at slave sales to turn a profit. Captainshad considerable discretionary power in deciding whether the expectedmean price was worth pursuing for any cargo. One of Rogers’s vesselswas offered thirty-nine pounds sterling maximum as an average for slavesales at Grenada; but the captain decided this was insufficient and so hesailed on to Jamaica. Another ship was instructed to sell slaves at Dom-inica provided they fetched an average of between forty and forty-fivepounds; failing that, the ship was given orders to proceed to St. Vincent,and if the same prices could not be agreed there it was to sail to Jamaica.89

The major decision in choosing between slave markets within theCaribbean lay in calculating whether to send ships to islands in the LesserAntilles, most of which were within a day or two’s sail of one another,or to risk dispatching a ship 1,000 miles to the west in search of goodprofits in Jamaica. The extra distance to Jamaica added to shipping costsand could be especially risky with unhealthy slave cargoes. Yet Jamaica,as the largest slave market in the British Caribbean, was more likely toabsorb large cargoes of slaves than any other single island owned by theBritish.

Unfortunately for Rogers and his associates, slave deliveries to theCaribbean were relatively poorly handled. True, there were successfulvoyages. From Grenada in April 1786 it was noted that slaves sold fromthe Pearl were generally well chosen. They sold quickly, some 385 beingaccounted for within three hours on a single day. In June 1788 WilliamGrumley reported that slave sales at Tortola were equal to those Rogerswould have made at Jamaica, especially as the bills taken as payment were

87 P.R.O., C 107/10, Francis & Robert Smyth to James Rogers, 26 Jan. 1788; C 107/14,Thomas Walker to James Rogers & Co., 25 Dec. 1789; C 107/5, Capt. John Goodrich toJames Rogers, 13 Nov. 1791; C 107/6, Allan White & Co. to James Rogers & Co., 3 Jan.1790; C 107/7, George Baillie & Co. to James Rogers & Co., 6 Nov. 1788; C 107/9,Alexander Lindo to James Rogers & Co., 26 Aug. 1789; C 107/59, John Cunningham to JamesRogers, 4 Feb. 1793, Grove, Harris & Papps to James Rogers, 9 June 1793, and J. C. Hunt toJames Rogers & Co., 14 July 1793; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade,p. 172.

88 Price, ‘Credit in the slave trade and plantation economies’, p. 318.89 P.R.O., C 107/13 and 14, Capt. William Woodville to James Rogers & Co., 10 Aug.

1791, and Thomas Walker to James Rogers, 31 Dec. 1790.



at longer sight.90 A report from Dominica in February 1792 stated that‘slaves commands [sic] very great prices here. We have now in the roadnear 1,000 slaves all of which will be sold in one day at very pleasingprices’.91 These voyages, though, were the exception to the rule. It wasmore common for Caribbean factors to comment on the poor quality andhealth of the Africans received from Rogers’s vessels. Agents disliked thesheer number of captives shipped from Old Calabar; they noted thediseases and mortality that had ravaged some voyages; and they queriedthe demographic composition of the slave cargoes. Throughout the Car-ibbean, purchasers preferred all other types of slaves to those from OldCalabar. Gold Coast slaves were especially wanted in Jamaica and fetchedhigher prices than those from virtually any other part of Africa. Captivesfrom Benin and Bonny were also in demand at Jamaica, but Angolanslaves usually were not. Agents at St. Vincent wanted to sell Windwardand Gold Coast slaves, as well as Eboes from Bonny.92 From Grenada inApril 1792 it was noted that ‘our marketts for Calabar Negroes being sobad . . . prime healthy slaves from every other part of the Coast sell aswell we believe in this Island, as anywhere to Windward’.93 Slaves fromOld Calabar were not esteemed by Jamaican planters: one factor declinedselling them on guarantee in order to save commissions on that type ofcargo.94 Even when Rogers’s cargoes from Old Calabar sold reasonablywell, the agents added a reluctant note. A Grenada factor referred toselling slaves at ‘a midling Average’ which, he added, considering ‘thegeneral prejedice they have against Old Calabar cargoes’ was satisfactory.95

‘Our averages here have lately been high’, an agent in Dominica notedin July 1788, ‘and we have no doubt that if the Juba’s cargo should provehealthy we shall effect as good a sale of it as can be done with the OldCalabar nation’.96 In fact, because this particular cargo arrived in ‘mer-chantable’ condition, it was sold ‘much higher than is Common for OldCalabars to do’.97

90 P.R.O., C 107/8 and 5, Campbell, Baillie & Co. to James Rogers, 2 Apr. 1786, andWilliam Grumley to James Rogers, 24 June 1788; Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 105.

91 P.R.O., C 107/8, Francis & Robert Smyth to James Rogers, 3 Feb. 1792.92 P.R.O., C 107/8, Francis & Robert Smyth to James Rogers, 22 Feb. 1788; C 107/9,

Baillie, Bannatyne & Co. to James Rogers, 5 Dec. 1790; C 107/12, James Baillie & Co. toJames Rogers & Co., 14 Dec. 1790; C 107/9, Francis Grant to James Rogers, 30 Dec. 1788,4 Aug. 1789, and Alexander MacLeod to James Rogers, 28 June 1790; C 107/5, John Fowlerto James Rogers & Co., 8 Sept. 1790; C 107/6, John Cunningham to James Rogers, 20 Apr.1792; C 107/6, George Baillie & Co. to James Rogers, 20 Apr. 1792; C 107/59, Taylor,Ballantine & Fairlie to John Anderson, 9 Oct. 1793.

93 P.R.O., C 107/7, James Baillie, Jr. to James Rogers, 4 Apr. 1792.94 P.R.O., C 107/7, Francis Grant to James Rogers & Co., 30 Dec. 1788.95 P.R.O., C 107/12, Richard Martin to James Rogers, 21 Dec. 1790.96 P.R.O., C 107/7, Samuel Chollet & Co. to James Rogers & Co., 12 July 1788.97 P.R.O., C 107/7, George Baillie & Co. to James Rogers & Co., 6, 26 Nov. (quotation)

1788.



Although factors and buyers in the Caribbean expressed preferencesfor Africans from particular ethnic backgrounds, the crucial factor over-riding this matter at slave sales was the demographic mix and perceivedhealth of the Africans for sale. There is, in other words, little evidencegenerally that African captives did not sell because their ethnicity was notwhat purchasers wanted.98 A significant number of slaves arrived in anunhealthy or inferior state, which is perhaps not surprising given the highmortality rates mentioned above for Rogers’s voyages. Alexander Lindoreported from Kingston, Jamaica in April 1791 that ‘the slaves were of avery inferior quality many of them aged & infirm as you may conceivefrom his having lost near 120 on the Middle Passage’.99 In September1792 Munro McFarlane went on board the Fame, recently arrived atGrenada with slaves from Old Calabar, and informed Rogers that ‘wescarse ever saw so bad a one [cargo] even from that part of the Coast.Whether they have lost their best slaves, or whatever may be the causeof it, we can assure you there is not at present one good slave in theship’.100 In July 1793 an indifferent, poorly assorted cargo of adult slavesarrived at Kingston on the Rodney, only for fifty-four of the cargo to besold at vendue because of their emaciated state.101 Correspondentsreproached a captain who had delivered slaves to Grenada only for someof them to die within twenty-four hours.102

Historians have provided different ratios on the proportion of maleand female captives in the Atlantic slave trade. Nonetheless they areagreed that more males than females were exported from Africa, and thatthe main demand for slaves in the New World was for healthy, youngadults.103 Considerable variation can be found, however, in Africanregional sex ratios. Data assembled for British voyages that sailed from1780 until the end of 1792 show that proportionally more females wereexported from the Bight of Biafra than from any other slave tradingregion in west Africa. The ratio of children to adults among British slavetrading voyages also varied according to the period considered and to theAfrican region under investigation.104 There is evidence that Caribbean

98 Cf. Burnard and Morgan, ‘The dynamics of the slave market and slave purchasing patternsin Jamaica’.

99 P.R.O., C 107/10, Alexander Lindo to James Rogers, 10 Apr. 1791.100 P.R.O., C 107/5, Munro McFarlane to James Rogers, 4 Sept. 1792.101 P.R.O., C 107/59, Grove, Harris & Papps to James Rogers, 14 July 1793. Vendues were

auction sales where low prices were common for rapid sale of batches of weak, ill or elderlyslaves.

102 P.R.O., C 107/7, James Baillie, Jr. & Co. to James Rogers, 31 Oct. 1791.103 Inikori, ‘Export versus domestic demand’, pp. 117–18; D. Eltis and S. L. Engerman, ‘Was

the slave trade dominated by men?’, Jour. Interdisciplinary Hist., xxiii (1992), 237–57; D. Eltisand S. L. Engerman, ‘Fluctuations in sex and age ratios in the transatlantic slave trade, 1663–1864’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xlvi (1993), 308–23.

104 Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, pp. 359–66.



agents with whom Rogers traded discussed with ship captains the suitablesize of slave shipments plus their sex and age composition.105 Althoughdata for Rogers’s ships are thin, they show that his vessels delivered morewomen to the Caribbean than the norm and the same proportion ofchildren found on other British voyages (see Table 1 above). The findingthat Rogers’s captains bought more female slaves than the average Britishslave trader seems related to trade with specific west African regions: theBight of Benin and the Bight of Bonny (including Bonny, Old Calabarand Cameroon) were areas that exported proportionately more femalesthan other parts of west Africa.106

Correspondence by West Indian factors to Rogers discussed Africansas if they were commodities whose main purpose was the profits theycould generate for white businessmen. Factors complained when cargoescontained too many elderly slaves or children: such shipments werereferred to as bad parcels.107 William Grumley noted from Tortola in thesummer of 1788 that slave sales from the Lion would have been higher‘had there not been such a number of children’, more than half of whomwere ‘fit for nothing but to feed’.108 The master of the Fame arrived atGrenada in September 1792 with 128 female slaves among his cargo, ‘allfallen Brest & gray hears [hairs]’.109 In some cases factors handled whatthey unpleasantly termed ‘refuse’ slaves; these, if they could be sold at all,were destined for vendue sales.110 In June 1793 ten meagre slaves fromthe Rodney – a vessel that had buried eighty-nine black captives andfourteen crew on the African coast – were sold at vendue after theKingston agents decided they would probably have died if kept longer onboard ship. The disposal of these sick slaves, plus the high proportion ofolder male slaves in this cargo, reduced the average prices achieved atthis sale.111 A local factor thought that sixty-eight unsold slaves of the189 delivered by the Daniel to Grenada in December 1790 ‘will reducethe average considerably. They are so low in flesh & so many old peopleamong them that we cannot with precision ascertain their value’.112 JamesRogers was informed in October 1791 that the remaining twenty-oneslaves from one of his vessels would be sold at vendue ‘where they will

105 P.R.O., C 107/8, James R. Maud to James Rogers, 30 July 1786.106 Inikori, ‘Sources of supply’, ii. 33.107 P.R.O., C 107/59, Lytton & Maxwell to James Rogers, 3 March 1789; C 107/9, Francis

Grant to James Rogers, 10 Apr. 1789, and Thomas & William Salmon to James Rogers,26 June 1789; C 107/6, John Cunningham to James Rogers, 3 May 1792.

108 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 128.109 P.R.O., C 107/5, Capt. William Jenkins to James Rogers, 4 Sept. 1792.110 E.g., P.R.O., C 107/8, Campbell, Baillie & Co. to James Rogers, 3 Oct. 1785; C 107/

13, Francis Grant to James Rogers & Co., 11 Sept. 1791; C 107/7, [?] to James Rogers & Co.,23 Oct. 1791.

111 P.R.O., C 107/59, Grove, Harris & Papps to James Rogers, 9 June 1793, and J. C. Huntto James Rogers & Co., 14 July 1793.

112 P.R.O., C 107/12, James Baillie, Jr. & Co. to James Rogers & Co., 14 Dec. 1790.



sell for a Triffle the rest are infants so small, that nobody will look atthem’.113 These comments emphasize the Caribbean agents’ probing ofthe precise age and sex mixture of slave cargoes, the desire to achievegood average prices at sales, and the attempt to secure money even forthe most sickly or elderly slaves: all black captives, whatever their healthor condition, had a price that the market could offer.

Some correspondents dealing with Rogers refused to sell his cargoesif they arrived sickly or with too many older and young slaves. In early1793 the African Queen arrived at Montego Bay from Old Calabar underthe command of the third mate after a Middle Passage in which morethan a hundred slaves plus the captain and the first two mates had died.Several local ‘Guinea’ factors would not accept the sale of the remaininghuman cargo because of this mortality.114 The partner of Mr. Baillie ofSt. Vincent, who was in Barbados when the Pearl arrived from Bonny,refused to have anything to do with the sale after finding out that adisorder had broken out among the slaves, with about eighty dying in thebay after the Atlantic crossing.115 Agents were wary of accepting slaves forsale if they knew another West Indian correspondent had already rejectedthe cargo. Francis Grant refused to sell cargoes at all before he hadinspected them. He also would not guarantee some commissions on slavessent from Old Calabar to Jamaica because they were not in demandamong customers in that island. In addition, some agents were veryannoyed with Rogers for sending unsolicited slave shipments and fortrying to pass off a Windward slave cargo for one from the Gold Coast.116

Indeed, there seems to have been a degree of poor co-ordination betweenRogers, his captains and agents in the Caribbean, for on several occasionscorrespondents noted that they had not been contacted about the destina-tions for Rogers’s ships or about slave sales.117 It was vital that thisshould occur for, as one agent put it, ‘it’s from early advice People in theMercantal Line in this Country reaps every advantage’.118

James Rogers’s business collapsed during the financial crisis of 1793,when Bristol’s more prominent bankrupts failed for a total of

113 P.R.O., C 107/7, [?] to James Rogers & Co., 23 Oct. 1791.114 P.R.O., C 107/59, John Cunningham to James Rogers & Co., 21 Jan. 1793; Richardson,

Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. 203.115 P.R.O., C 107/59, William Barton to James Rogers & Co., 6 March 1793.116 P.R.O., C 107/12, James Laroche to James Rogers & Co., 1 Oct. 1791; C 107/5, Capt.

William Jenkins to James Rogers & Co., 4 Sept. 1792; C 107/13, John Perry to James Rogers,21 Jan. 1793; C 107/7, James Baillie, Jr. & Co. to James Rogers & Co., 31 Oct. 1791; C 107/9 and 10, Francis Grant to James Rogers, 10 Apr. 1789, 15 March 1791; C 107/7, Francis Grantto James Rogers & Co., 30 Dec. 1788; C 107/5, Francis Grant to Alexander MacLeod, 12 July1791, and Alexander MacLeod to James Rogers, 15 July 1791.

117 P.R.O., C 107/5, William Grumley to James Rogers, 9 Jan. 1788; C 107/10, Francis &Robert Smyth to James Rogers, 4 Feb. 1791; C 107/12, John Seasbrick to James Rogers,9 June 1791; C 107/7, Samuel Rich to James Rogers, 1 Nov. 1791.

118 P.R.O., C 107/5, William Grumley to James Rogers, 28 June 1788.



£1,100,000.119 Correspondence between his business associates suggeststhat the failure, which occurred on 8 March, had been anticipated forsome time, and that Rogers’s co-partners in trade would not be exemptfrom personal debts (owing to the fact that there was no limit in Britainon legal liability until Queen Victoria’s reign).120 A reconstruction ofvoyage data on bankrupt British slaving merchants from 1785 to 1807indicates that Rogers was by far the most prominent slaving merchant tocrash during the final years of British involvement in the trade.121 Someof Rogers’s partners in other business ventures failed around the sametime.122 The Bristol merchant Lowbridge Bright wrote to an associate inJamaica that he could not ‘pretend to give you a detail of all the Peoplewho are become B[ankrupt] or have stopt payment . . . the number hereis very great, & for such sums as wd. astonish you’.123 Largely induced bya contraction of credit at the outbreak of war with revolutionary France,the financial crisis of 1793 spread rapidly, affecting other ports such asLiverpool and London, and sending shock waves across the businesssector throughout the nation.124

Although the credit crisis of 1793 led to the demise of Rogers’smercantile career, his business collapse was not entirely due to over-extension and relatively poor profits in the slave trade; it also stemmedfrom his attempts to expand his trading portfolio in the eighteen monthsbefore the national financial crash. In October 1792, for instance, Rogersbecame a joint purchaser and adventurer with Peter Wade, mariner ofBristol, in a ship called the Orange Valley, which was fitted out at Bristolfor a voyage to Honduras Bay.125 It made poor business sense to investin a vessel bound for a destination with which Rogers had not previouslytraded when he was concurrently advancing money for several slavetrading voyages. More importantly, in September 1791 James Rogers andJames Cross, a banker in Bath, had entered into an agreement to pur-chase large parcels of cotton from a Liverpool firm of brokers for some£38,700. Cross’s banking firm had advanced the money for Rogers’sshare, allowing him to borrow at a discount of five per cent, but afterCross sold his share of the cotton on 30 March 1792, Rogers owed

119 Marshall, ‘The anti-slave trade movement in Bristol’, pp. 212–13. Bristol’s merchantbankrupts are listed in Minchinton, The Trade of Bristol in the 18th Century, p. 190.

120 P.R.O., C 107/59, Robert Shedden & Sons to John Goodrich, 9 March 1793. Rogers’smisfortunes in the slave trade were known in west Africa before his crash occurred (see C 107/59, Samuel Richards to Anderson, Gibbons & Dyer, assignees to James Rogers, 12 June 1793).

121 Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, p. 126.122 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, p. xxx.123 University of Melbourne Archives, Bright Family Papers, box 17, Lowbridge Bright to

David Duncombe, 14 March 1793.124 F. E. Hyde, B. B. Parkinson and S. Marriner, ‘The port of Liverpool and the crisis of

1793’, Economica, xviii (1951), 363–78; J. Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800(Cambridge, 1987), ch. 8.

125 P.R.O., C 107/59, loose document.



£29,649 3s 8d to Cross’s banking partners for his portion. On 20 Febru-ary 1793 Rogers agreed to pay twenty-seven promissory notes to settlethe then outstanding debt of £27,205 19s 10d with Cross and his part-ners.126 Within a fortnight, however, the national credit crisis causedmany of Rogers’s creditors to call in their funds, which he was unable tosupply in an emergency.

Rogers’s papers include many petitions from creditors seeking moneyor security for the money owed them when Rogers was declared bank-rupt on 22 March 1793. Some creditors were banks that had lent money,such as James Cross & Company; others were suppliers of goods needingpayment at a time when they themselves experienced a credit squeeze.Claims were also submitted by those owed insurance payments, wagesand fees for the use of floating docks at Bristol.127 Rogers was owedmoney by some of the co-owners of his slave ships and one of his leadingcreditors, Richard Fydell of Chepstow, had died on 4 March 1793, justbefore Rogers became insolvent. Disputes arose over the sums owed byRogers to his creditors and how payment should be effected, whichexplains why this large cache of business papers came before the chancerycourt.128 It was an abrupt, ignominious end to Rogers’s business career.He died on 16 December 1801 and Bristol newspapers printed obituarynotices referring to the death of ‘James Rogers, insurance broker, andformerly an eminent merchant of this city’.129

The Rogers Papers provide us with some interesting insights into thesuccess and failure factors of the late Bristol slave trade. The slave voyagessent out by James Rogers and his partners exhibited signs of poor man-agement: they failed to take on board their full complement of slaves;their record on the ratio of slaves delivered to slaves shipped in Africawas poorer than that achieved by other leading Bristol slave traders; theyhad a higher than average mortality rate on the Middle Passage at a timewhen death rates on British slaving vessels were falling; they failed tocompete effectively with other firms gathering captives from Old Calabar,an African region not favoured by slave purchasers throughout the Car-ibbean; their slave cargoes often arrived wracked with disease and sick-ness; and it seems that they contained too high a proportion of adultfemales and children to fetch good average prices consistently. Besidespoor management, Rogers’s slave trading career also met with its share ofbad luck. Two white traders with whom he had extensive connections onthe African coast died suddenly, leaving large amounts of Rogers’s goodsunaccounted for in credit transactions. There were trading difficulties

126 P.R.O., C 107/4, petition and affidavits relating to an agreement made between JamesRogers and James Cross in Sept. 1791.

127 See P.R.O., C 107/59, ‘Claims and unsettled accounts on the estate of James Rogers’.128 Full details are given in the bundles of papers in P.R.O., C 107/4.129 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 19 Dec. 1801; Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 19 Dec.

1801.



caused by general slumps in the supply of African slaves owing to difficultrelations between African coastal agents and particular kingdoms. Inaddition, Rogers was unfortunate in trying to build up his trade at OldCalabar at a period when Liverpool rivals had already established solidtrade connections there.

Profits were still achieved by many of Rogers’s slaving voyages on thetwenty ventures for which data are available: they yielded an averageprofit rate per voyage of 2.1 per cent between 1780 and 1787 and 4.8 percent between 1788 and 1792. Clearly, Rogers and his partners wereimproving their returns as their experience in the slave trade deepened.No doubt the lure of profits explains why Rogers invested in twelveslaving voyages from Bristol in 1792 alone, but this attempt to expandtrade overstretched his capacity and the financial crisis of early 1793 sealedhis fate as a businessman. Surviving evidence on the profits achieved byother Bristol slave trading firms of the late eighteenth century is ratherthin, but David Richardson suggests that the annual rate of return onBristol’s slave trading voyages c.1790 lay between a lower limit of 7.8 percent and an upper limit of 19.8 per cent.130 These were significantlyhigher gains than Rogers’s ventures achieved. Rogers’s slave trading pro-fits were, for example, lower than those achieved by William Davenport,a leading Liverpool slave merchant of the mid eighteenth century whoseaccounts survive. They were also lower than the average rate of profit ofeight to ten per cent for the final years of the British slave trade, asestablished by modern historians using mainly evidence from Liverpool.131

For Rogers and his partners to continue trading extensively to OldCalabar in the face of stiff competition might seem perverse, except thatother British slave merchants carried this out successfully. For Rogers andhis partners to be relatively lax in controlling the condition of the slavesthey acquired and to be slack in their correspondence with factors in theCaribbean also points to poor management. The evidence of James Rogers’sslave trading career does, however, present us with a paradox. Despite allhis deficiencies as a slave trader, it is striking that a merchant who mis-calculated so badly in his choice of slave cargoes and the arrangements forcaring for them and disposing of them in the West Indies should haveachieved an average profit rate for the period 1780–92 of 3.5 per cent.This was the average rate of return on Three Per Cent government

130 Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. xxxiv–xxxv.131 Data on the profitability of Rogers’s voyages is given in Richardson, Bristol, Africa and

the 18th-Century Slave Trade, pp. xxviii–xxix, which suggests that at least 5% of these profit ratesneeds to be deducted to estimate annual rates of return. For other estimates of British slavetrading firms’ profits, see D. Richardson, ‘Profits in the Liverpool slave trade: the accounts ofWilliam Davenport, 1757–84’, in Anstey and Hair, pp. 60–90; Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Tradeand British Abolition, p. 47; Behrendt, ‘British slave trade’, pp. 100–31; Inikori, ‘Market structure’,pp. 771–3. The technical difficulties in making these estimates are discussed in K. Morgan,Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 36–44.



consols of 1752, an annuity investment free of the risk of default, for mostof the eighteenth century.132 For a slave merchant who got so many thingswrong, and who paid the price by going bankrupt, there was at least theconsolation, while his trade was still active, that an average rate of profitcould be achieved on slave trading voyages that matched the gains possiblefrom investing in government funds. One could conclude with the sur-prising speculation that the much–vaunted risks of the eighteenth-centuryslave trade may have been over-emphasized by historians; for if it waspossible to make so many business mistakes and still return profitablevoyages, clearly for successful slave traders there was considerable scopefor error. The inherent riskiness of slave trading needs no further emphasis,but it could be argued that merchants engaged in the ‘Guinea’ trafficattuned themselves to risks over a series of ventures in the expectationthat gains and losses could be balanced. The risks of the slave trade wereundeniably greater for merchants than investing in the funds for a safereturn on one’s capital – as one would expect given the difference inopportunity costs – but if higher profits could be achieved in slave trad-ing by merchants who made serious business errors one can see why the‘Guinea’ traffic lured so many investors into its net for such a long time.

132 L. Neal, ‘The finance of business during the Industrial Revolution’, in The EconomicHistory of Britain since 1700, i: 1700–1860, ed. R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey (2nd edn.,Cambridge, 1994), pp. 172–3.

james rogers and the bristol slave trade

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