Bristol and the Atlantic trade

What was Bristol like around 1715?

Bristol was the second port in England and, by 1700, its second-largest town, with about 20,000 people. The writer Daniel Defoe ranked it as the best port of trade in Great Britain after London.

Getting there took patience. Ships came up the Bristol Channel and waited at an anchorage called Kingroad until the tide was high enough. Then teams of rowing boats towed them up the narrow, winding Avon Gorge, because sails were of little use there. The tide rose and fell by about 45 feet. In the centre of town a quay about a mile long was lined with ships, warehouses and merchants’ offices.

Trade was organised by the Society of Merchant Venturers, a club of Bristol’s leading merchants with a royal charter from 1552. From 1661 it ran the city’s quays. Its steadiest trade was with Ireland, but its richest was with the colonies across the Atlantic.

How did sugar and tobacco shape Bristol?

From the 1660s, large cargoes of sugar and tobacco were reaching Bristol from plantations in the Caribbean and Virginia, worked more and more by enslaved Africans. Sugar was the port’s most important import, and about half of it came from Jamaica.

Raw brown sugar was boiled and cleaned in “sugar houses”, then set in cone-shaped moulds to make hard white sugar loaves. Bristol already had ten sugar houses by 1695. The number of ships arriving each year from Virginia, the great tobacco colony, doubled between 1660 and 1700.

Other local trades grew with the Atlantic trade. Brass and copper works made pots, pans and wire for ships going to West Africa, and glassworks made bottles for drink. Rich merchants built new homes on Queen Square, laid out between about 1700 and 1718.

How did Bristol get into the slave trade?

Until 1698 English trade with Africa belonged by law to one London firm, the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly (the sole right to trade). Bristol merchants probably traded for captives illegally even before then. In 1690 the Merchant Venturers asked Parliament to let Bristol share in the African trade, and other outports joined the pressure.

An Act of 1698 opened the trade to any English merchant who paid a 10 per cent duty. That same year a Bristol ship called the Beginning sailed to Africa and carried enslaved people to Jamaica. In 1717 eight Bristol ships cleared for Africa. A slave ship in which Woodes Rogers had invested, the Whetstone Gally, carried 270 African captives to Jamaica in 1708.

When was Bristol Britain’s biggest slave-trading port?

London led the British slave trade until about 1725. From then until the early 1740s Bristol was the leading English slaving port. Its peak came around 1732, when almost half the ships sailing to Africa were from Bristol, and in the 1730s an average of 39 Bristol slave ships set out each year. In the 1720s Bristol ships carried twice as many Africans to Virginia as London ships did.

Liverpool overtook Bristol in the 1740s, but Bristol stayed deep in the trade: in 1750 its ships still carried about 8,000 of the 20,000 Africans taken to Britain’s Caribbean and North American colonies that year. Bristol Museums count 2,108 ships that left Bristol for Africa between 1698 and 1807.

About a quarter of the Merchant Venturers took part directly; many more profited through refining, shipbuilding and brass. Black people also lived in Bristol, many of them as servants. Church records name Mary Columbus and Joseph Thomas, from Jamaica, who married in 1702. In nearby Henbury a young man his owners called Scipio Africanus, a servant of the Earl of Suffolk, died in 1720 aged 18. His real name is not known.

Who was Woodes Rogers?

Woodes Rogers was born around 1679 and moved to Bristol with his family as a teenager. He trained as a sailor there and later lived on Queen Square. He was a privateer: a private captain licensed in wartime to attack enemy ships. Bristol sent out 123 privateers during the war of 1702 to 1713.

In August 1708 Rogers left Bristol with two ships, the Duke and the Duchess, paid for by Bristol merchants. In February 1709, on Juan Fernández island in the Pacific off Chile, his crew found Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who had been left there alone at his own request in 1704. Around New Year 1710 Rogers captured a Spanish treasure ship from Manila, and he reached London in October 1711, having sailed round the world.

Later Rogers became royal governor of the Bahamas and arrived at Nassau in July 1718 to end its pirate years. He died there in July 1732.

Was Blackbeard from Bristol?

The idea comes from the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates by “Captain Charles Johnson”, which calls Blackbeard “a Bristol man born”. The book mixes fact with invention, and no birth record has been found.

The historian Baylus Brooks has found records of a respected Thache family in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and believes they were Blackbeard’s family. In his account the family had moved from Bristol when the future pirate was young, which would fit both stories. Brooks himself says he cannot yet prove that this Edward Thache was the pirate.

Who was Edward Colston, and why was his statue pulled down?

Edward Colston was born in Bristol in 1636 but worked mostly as a merchant in London, trading cloth, wine and sugar. From 1680 into the early 1690s he was a leading member of the Royal African Company, and in 1689 he became its deputy governor. While he was involved, the company carried about 84,000 African men, women and children to the Americas, and about 19,000 of them died on the way.

Colston was still alive in 1715, aged about 79. He gave large sums to Bristol for almshouses, schools and churches, and Bristol named streets, schools and a concert hall after him. In 1895 a bronze statue of him went up in the city centre, honouring him as a great giver to charity.

For years many people asked for the statue to be removed or relabelled. On 7 June 2020, during a Black Lives Matter protest, protesters pulled it down and rolled it into the harbour. It was lifted out four days later and is now on display in the city’s M Shed museum.