Nigel Tattersfield’s The Forgotten Trade (Cape 1991; Pimlico 1998) is the log of the slave ship Daniel and Henry of 1700, along with accounts of slave/Africa traders in small English ports 1698-1725. The details are illuminating – local ships took English wool and the manufactures of Germany, Belgium, France and India to trade in Africa and the Caribbean, raising interesting questions about the slave trade’s impact on the British economy at that time.

Lyme Regis, a quiet seaside resort perhaps famous for the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and as a US army base prior to the D-Day invasion of France (1944) fitted out the ship John in 1717, bound for Africa and then Maryland. In fact it went from Africa to Barbados, and then to Maryland (taking 22 black slaves from Barbados to America). She loaded £1,200 of tobacco and was back in Lyme Regis in June 1718. On this voyage via Africa was ‘Harry, a Negro belonging to John Pitts, a merchant of Lyme Regis’ (p 268).

In April 1722 strong winds battered the coast and brought the Northampton into Topsham where it sought shelter. It was on its way to Falmouth to collect Cornish miners who were to work in Delagoa Bay in southern Africa (now Maputo, Mozambique). The ship was chartered by the Royal African Company, and they had sent two black youths, Prince James and Prince John, who had been in London for several months, part of the continuing relationships between African rulers and European merchants. James became nervous when the Northampton grounded at Exmouth, and on 4 May 1722 he hanged himself. He was buried on shore. John was taken safely to Delagoa Bay after extensive repairs to the Northampton (pages 295-296).

Neither Topsham or Lyme Regis normally come to mind when considering black sailors.