A letter from 1847 may indicate illegal transportation of people to Guyana
A letter from 1847 to the Liverpool office of Sandbach, Tinne and Company mentions the arrival in Demerara, now part of Guyana, of a vessel carrying 324 people whom the document’s author called “cargo”. Family historian and writer Malik Al-Nasir believes the letter is evidence of the illegal transportation of enslaved people after slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire, The Guardian World reports.
Contents of the letter
The document was written by Peter Miller Watson, who managed Sandbach Tinne’s interests in Demerara. It refers to the vessel Parker from the company’s fleet. According to the letter, there were 115 adult men, 86 adult women, 82 children under the age of 14 and 41 children under the age of four on board.
Watson also reported three deaths during the voyage — one man and two children. He linked their deaths to the severe condition in which, according to him, the people had been on land before departure.
Al-Nasir noted that the letter refers to the people as cargo rather than passengers. In his view, this wording and the description of deaths as losses during transportation give grounds to suggest that these were people illegally brought from Africa, rather than indentured workers or Africans freed by the Royal Navy.
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Compensation and new research
The 1807 Act banned the slave trade in British territories, while the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act outlawed slavery across most of the British Empire. By 1847, Sandbach Tinne and its subsidiary entities had already received compensation for the “loss” of enslaved people equivalent to millions of pounds sterling at current prices.
The company was a family business of the Sandbach and Tinne families, who, together with partners and relatives from the Gladstone family, dominated the Demerara sugar trade. According to Al-Nasir, John Gladstone received the largest individual compensation payment, while Sandbach Tinne received the second-largest total amount.
Al-Nasir’s research became one of the impulses for the Overwriting-Underwriting project, dedicated to studying financial networks connected with enslavement. It is scheduled to launch at the Museum of Liverpool on the UNESCO-established International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.
