In April 1769, a small British vessel sailing westward along the southern coast of Hispaniola made a disturbing discovery. In the shallow waters be-tween Petit Trou and Cape Mongou, near the French/ Spanish colonial border that today separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic, the crew spotted what appeared to be the hull of a ship stranded on a reef. Upon closer inspection, the sailors identified the remains of a three-mast, British frigate wrecked on the rocks and listing to its side, the hold and lower deck full of water.
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When the crew went onboard to investigate, they discovered a scene that suggested desperation. Two of the ship’s masts had been intentionally cut away; the third was also missing. On the lower deck they found casks full of “Guiney cloths,” blue- and- white checked fabric in high demand on the West African coast, as well as “horse beans,” very large, tasteless legumes that served as the primary sustenance for captives onboard slave ships.
The men also found below decks buckets, screws, and tubs—all implements used in the Atlantic slave trade. Yet these objects were unused, “as no negroes had been on board.” Clearly, the ship had suffered a calamitous fate, but how exactly did it arrive in the treacherous, isolated waters off the coast of southern Hispaniola? And what had become of its crew? The fates of at least two dozen sailors hung in the balance.
The men who discovered the ship’s skeletal remains reported that “there was no person on board, nor any papers to discover whence she sailed from.” The only clue the men found were “some doctor’s logs, in one of which was written, ‘William Dawkins, his book, wrote by me on board the Black Prince, Jan. 2, 1769.’” Since hurricane season ended in November, Dawkins’ diary entry seemed to rule out a major Atlantic storm as the cause of the ship’s demise.
As the British sailors continued to sift through the wreckage for clues, “a great number of people” began to gather onshore near the reef. Some were on horses, others rowing toward them in boats. Fearing that the “French or Spaniards” were coming to seize them, the would-be salvage team abandoned the remains of the Black Prince and beat a hasty retreat out to sea.
Clearly, the ship had suffered a calamitous fate, but how exactly did it arrive in the treacherous, isolated waters off the coast of southern Hispaniola? And what had become of its crew?
Upon arriving in Jamaica a few days later, the sailors reported their troubling findings to British authorities. Officials published an account of the Black Prince wreck in Jamaican newspapers, hoping to elicit information about its missing crew members.
News of the shipwreck eventually made its way to London, appearing in local newspapers on July 4. More than three months after the ship’s remains were discovered, it seemed that the mystery of the Black Prince was destined to remain an archaeological footnote in the annals of British maritime history.
However, just as news of the wreckage reached England, the ship’s crew members surfaced in unexpected places and recounted its demise. First, a sailor in Lisbon provided testimony, then a young cabin boy in London. Over the next eight years, a chorus of voices—from Brazil, St. Domingue, Suriname, Boston, and West Africa—would join in unraveling the mystery of the Black Prince. What started as an eerie silence on a broken ship in a desolate outpost of the Caribbean slowly rose to a crescendo of dramatic stories of Atlantic slaving, mutiny, piracy, and murder.
The Black Prince departed its home port of Bristol in December 1768, seventeen months prior to its discovery on Hispaniola. A prosperous city in southwest England, Bristol served as a principal trading hub for Britain’s colonies in North America and the Caribbean, producing textiles, iron, glass, pottery, and other manufactured goods in exchange for sugar and tobacco. Bristol was also an epicenter of Britain’s Atlantic slave trade. Its ships carried more than 550,000 Africans during the eighteenth century, most destined for sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
The Black Prince’s owner, John Fowler, had spent his adult life in Bristol’s maritime trades, first as a shipboard worker, then as a ship’s captain, and finally as a merchant-trader. As was common in the slave trade, Fowler partnered in the Black Prince voyage, spreading the risk and the reward across six other Bristol investors. Fowler served as the voyage’s managing partner, overseeing finances, supervising the outfit of the ship, and hiring the ship’s captain.
The Black Prince’s commander, William Hawkins, staffed the voyage with a typical “motley crew” of forty-five sailors from England, Ireland, Denmark, and Africa. The ship’s itinerary included a stop at Old Calabar on the southeast coast of present-day Nigeria, where Bristol merchants had forged relationships with their African trading partners across multiple generations.
There, the Black Prince was scheduled to take on a cargo of enslaved Africans, along with other products such as ivory. Then, it would sail for the Caribbean island of Antigua, where Fowler’s financial representatives would arrange the sale of the slaves. The ship would return to Bristol with bills of sale for the slaves, African ivory, and Caribbean freight, especially sugar. The potential for profit (and loss) compounded with each stop along the triangular trade route.
When the Black Prince launched, Fowler held financial stakes in six other slaving vessels already at sea, and he was preparing yet another ship for a voyage to the Windward Coast (present-day Liberia). In the broader context of the Bristol slave trade, the voyage of the Black Prince seemed routine, but it was not.
Just weeks into their journey to West Africa, the crew seized control of the ship, dispatching the captain and his officers out to sea to die in the ship’s longboat. The crew had multiple motivations for the mutiny—some broadly political, others economic, and others deeply personal—but all of the sailors feared the dangers that awaited them at Old Calabar.
The West African port of Old Calabar held a long- standing reputation as a place of illness, disease, and death. During the 1760s, the region steadily descended into political chaos, as two local factions vied for the spoils of the European trade. Fierce economic competition between the two African sides bred jealousy, hostage-taking, kidnapping, and murder.
British traders were not spared this violence. African merchants seized ship captains and held them hostage until their ransom demands were met. In response, British traders commandeered African canoes on the Calabar River and held their occupants hostage until local merchants filled their ships with slaves destined for the Americas.
In August 1767, just sixteen months before the Black Prince departed Bristol, simmering tensions among the competing factions in Old Calabar exploded. In a surprise attack, British sailors and their local allies massacred more than three hundred of their African commercial rivals. Only a handful of the vanquished group’s principal merchants survived the slaughter. British ships carried some of these elite African traders into slavery in the Caribbean.
After the ships involved in the massacre started arriving back in Bristol in January 1768, sailors shared tales of the Calabar massacre in the city’s pubs and boarding houses. Meanwhile, the war between the Old Calabar factions continued, wreaking financial havoc on British merchants like Fowler. Of John Fowler’s six ships at sea prior to the launch of the Black Prince, two were destined for Old Calabar; neither returned home.
Viewed from the perspective of Old Calabar, the mutiny onboard the Black Prince was just one battle in an African-Atlantic slaving war that began in the early 1760s and continued for nearly a decade.
This slaving violence unfolded not solely at the juncture of Euro-African coastal interactions but also in response to local political and economic conditions, both in England and in Africa. Europeans’ interdependence on African politics offered opportunities for unimaginable wealth for merchants involved in the trade in human cargos, but often at grave risk to merchants’ immediate clients and kin.
The voyage of the Black Prince, and the circumstances surrounding it, demonstrate how African and European actors challenged the logics of warfare and death that were often at the center of the slave trade.
As the Black Prince sailors basked in the collective glory of seizing the ship, they immediately elected new leaders and voted to sail for Brazil. This strategy of sailors overthrowing the ship’s officers and asserting democratic control of the vessel was not uncommon during the era of Atlantic revolutions. From 1789 to 1802, the British, French, and Dutch navies experienced more than a hundred and fifty single-ship mutinies, as well as a half-dozen fleet-wide mutinies.
These mutinies by seaborne soldiers generated a form of “maritime republicanism” that formed the leading edge of revolutionary movements across the wider Atlantic world.
The brutal coercion and financial exploitation of the African slave trade seemingly would have inspired similar patterns of shipboard solidarities and revolt. But they did not. During the four-hundred-year history of the Atlantic slave trade, across more than thirty-six thousand slaving voyages, historians have recorded only nineteen instances in which crew members mutinied.
The reason for this lack of overt resistance is fairly simple: maritime law extended near-absolute authority to ship captains in maintaining order on their vessels. Captains ruled their wooden, seaborne fiefdoms with strict discipline, often through coercion and violence inflicted on ordinary sailors.
During the four-hundred-year history of the Atlantic slave trade, across more than thirty-six thousand slaving voyages, historians have recorded only nineteen instances in which crew members mutinied.
Meanwhile, the British Crown treated acts of mutiny and piracy as capital crimes. The decaying bodies of executed seamen hung in full public view at the entry of most English ports, a gruesome reminder of the consequences of breaching the authority of the British Admiralty.
But the rarity of sailor mutinies onboard slave ships also points to crucial distinctions between political revolutions and economic ones. Even as sailors led the charge for liberty and political equality during the eighteenth century, their influence on broader economic transformations was far more limited.
Mutinies like the one on the Black Prince often have been characterized as instances of working-class solidarity. Such approaches at once overstate early class consciousness and ignore how solidarity often disintegrated in the face of ethnic, racial, and religious divisions, as well as those of occupational rank. The ship’s ultimate fate in the Caribbean was a testament to the failure of crew members’ solidarity, dashed on the shoals of individual greed and self-interest.
For the next eight years after the discovery of the Black Prince on the rocks of Hispaniola, Fowler and another of the ship’s financiers, Member of Parliament James Laroche Jr., monitored the movements of the mutineers and zealously pursued them across the Atlantic world. The merchants’ extraordinary efforts to bring the mutineers to justice provide insight into why mutinies against slave ships were so rare and why working people’s attempts at revolutionary economic transformation so often failed.
Even as European, African, and Native American laborers challenged their exploitation during the era of revolutions, slaving interests systematically captured crucial parts of the state apparatus, protecting their economic capital and expanding their political power. John Fowler and James Laroche Jr. leveraged state surveillance, policing, the judiciary, and international diplomacy in order to bring the Black Prince mutineers to justice.
This book chronicles that history of quiet violence in intimate detail, through broad patterns of state capture stretching from London to Lisbon, Calabar to the Caribbean, Brazil to Boston. Despite the constancy of enslaved and working people’s resistance in the eighteenth- century Atlantic world, British merchants found ingenious ways to co- opt strategic instruments of governance that were once the preserve of monarchs.
In tracing the apparently divergent strategies of merchants and sailors, Black Prince demonstrates that the juxtaposition of maritime oppressor and oppressed often falls apart. Merchants and ship captains were capable of genuine empathy and humane behavior toward their workers.
In some instances, like that of John Fowler, slave ship laborers rose to become powerful merchants, carrying some measure of worker sensibilities with them as they climbed the socioeconomic ladder. Shipboard workers could act in solidarity against their bosses in one moment, but then turn on each other in the next, often in an effort to become the next ship captain or merchant “king.”
Finally, powerful African traders frequently partnered with European merchants to expand slaving markets, and the enslaved sometimes served as armed soldiers on the very ships that carried them to their enslavement. These contradictory histories of violence and power must be told in order to better understand the social and economic structures that bound together merchants, workers, and enslaved across the Atlantic world.
Black Prince takes the entanglements of empires (and peoples) for granted, naturalizing multiple, overlapping relationships of British, Calabar, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch as the norm in the Atlantic world. Indeed, the story of the Black Prince mutiny and its aftermath demonstrates that in the late eighteenth century, British imperial power was increasingly subordinated to the demands of merchants, whose webs of influence spanned oceans and empires.
Viewed differently, the “center” of political power resided in international networks of British merchants and their agents, while the “periphery” consisted of equally cosmopolitan groups of urban vagrants, slaves, corvée laborers, and sailors, regardless of national subject status. In this way, the mutiny becomes a unique window onto the ways British merchants harnessed the power of the state to control labor, land, natural resources, and even other European empires.
Black Prince also interrupts familiar political approaches to the era of Atlantic revolutions. To be sure, the overturning of monarchical, ecclesiastical, and slave-holding regimes transformed the Atlantic world, but did these changes create economic opportunity or mobility for the masses of enslaved and working people?
At the very moment that the American Revolution inspired calls for liberty and political freedom, the Black Prince’s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. In this way, even in the era of professed enlightenment, freedom, and individual liberty, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies and heralding a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world.
This corporate power extended well beyond the realm of economic protectionism into corporate diplomacy, surveillance, arrest, extradition, and even capital punishment. Historian Eric Williams long ago argued for the centrality of slaving in the British origins of global industrialization.
Recent books further demonstrate how slaving wealth propelled industry, banking, insurance, and even state-sponsored warfare. These works have mostly focused on cotton production in the nineteenth-century United States, ignoring the longer history of British merchant capitalism fueled by sugar, tobacco, and other colonial commodities. Moreover, they tend to emphasize macro-economic trends, largely to the neglect of the politics of everyday life.
Black Prince shifts the focus of the global capital debates back to eighteenth-century Great Britain, providing an intimate portrait of the individual merchants, members of Parliament, governors, kings, ship captains, sailors, African slaves, and Native American laborers, whose interpersonal relationships provided the foundation for new systems of corporate governance. Ironically, even as peoples on the “periphery” asserted their freedom, liberty, and emancipation from the state, they became subjects to a new, more insidious master—the state of corporate “capital.”
Ironically, even as peoples on the “periphery” asserted their freedom, liberty, and emancipation from the state, they became subjects to a new, more insidious master—the state of corporate “capital.”
When the British finally abolished the slave trade in 1807, the descendants of slaving merchants like John Fowler simply shifted their investments to places like South America, where unfree labor continued to build corporate wealth through state- sponsored colonial projects. Slaving interests also continued to wield disproportionate power in local and national politics and even in sacred institutions like the Anglican Church.
Slave trading families invested their earnings in “legitimate” enterprises, claimed positions in Britain’s most prestigious social and political institutions, and sanitized their forefathers’ involvement in the slave trade. These violent, extractive legacies have been woven so seamlessly into modern life that they appear almost natural.
By tracing the threads of these legacies, Mutiny on the Black Prince reveals an exploitative state-corporate system that persists to this day.
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Mutiny on the Black Prince by James H. Sweet is available via Oxford University Press.
