Kent and the Slave Trade: Who Owned the Ships, Who Made the Money and Who Fought Back

From the merchants of Deal to the shipyards of Folkestone and Gravesend, Kent and Medway were part of Britain’s transatlantic slave trade. Newly examined records reveal the names, the money and the numbers of enslaved Africans carried aboard vessels linked to local merchants. But there’s another side to this history: the people of Kent who challenged the trade and helped bring about its abolition.

In 1719, a ship called the Samuel left London for West Africa. According to surviving voyage records, 110 enslaved Africans were taken aboard. Just 98 were recorded as disembarked.

The vessel’s ownership leads straight to Deal, where the merchant Tobias Bowles and his son-in-law, Henry Alexander Primrose, were involved in Atlantic commerce. There is, however, a historical discrepancy worth knowing about. The Register of British Slave-Traders records Veracruz, in modern-day Mexico, as the principal landing place, while historian David Killingray describes the vessel delivering 98 enslaved people to a merchant in Barbados. The Register also acknowledges uncertainty over which man should be credited with ownership. The two accounts agree on the 98 people delivered, but not every detail of the journey.

That uncertainty shouldn’t obscure what the voyage represented. African men, women and children were forcibly transported across the Atlantic as commodities in an international business. The merchants involved calculated costs, cargoes and returns. The people aboard the ships had no comparable choice.

And Deal was hardly alone.

Newly examined records, combined with historical research, reveal connections extending from the Kent coast into London, West Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. There were shipowners, investors, plantation proprietors, merchants, sailors and people who inherited shares in companies involved in the trade. Their involvement wasn’t identical, and treating them all as personally responsible for the same activities would be poor history. But taken together, they show how widely Kent’s economy intersected with Atlantic commerce.

The Deal voyage that left hundreds dead

In October 1726, William Boys of Deal sailed aboard the Luxborough Galley to Cabinda, on the west-central African coast.

There, the ship loaded 600 enslaved Africans.

By the time it reached Jamaica, approximately one-third had died during the Atlantic crossing. That means somewhere around 200 human beings perished on the journey, although the historical account provides a proportion rather than an individually verified death count. On the homeward voyage, carrying rum and sugar, the vessel caught fire and was abandoned, with further loss of life among its crew.

The Luxborough Galley captures something easily overlooked when discussing the trade purely in financial terms. Slave trading was commercially organised, but never a predictable or universally profitable business. Disease, shipwreck, warfare, piracy, resistance and changing markets could turn anticipated profits into losses.

For those forcibly transported, the consequences were immeasurably worse.

Deal had already established considerable connections with African and American commerce. The Bowles family traded sugar and tobacco with Maryland, while relatives and associates were involved with the Royal African Company. In 1704, the family imported African ivory valued at £430. Eleven years later, Tobias and George Bowles sent a Deal-registered vessel to the River Gambia. Family relationships connected local merchants with larger trading enterprises, extending their interests far beyond Kent.

It wasn’t necessary to own a plantation or personally command a slave ship to participate in this economy. Supplying a voyage, advancing money, selling equipment or arranging its cargo could also create commercial connections.

One merchant, 104 voyages — and what the records reveal

One of the most striking names in the newly examined material is Anthony Calvert, a London slave trader and shipowner who spent his final years in Ramsgate.

Calvert, who died in 1808, had begun his career as a slave-ship captain. The Register credits him with ownership or part-ownership of 104 slave-trading voyages: 89 departing from London and another 15 from ports elsewhere in Europe and the Caribbean. Many involved partnerships with fellow merchants William Camden and Thomas King. Calvert also had interests in whaling and the transportation of convicts to Australia.

That figure of 104 voyages is important. So are the numbers of enslaved people carried.

We traced 88 individual voyages directly linked to Calvert in the Register records. Of these, 82 contain embarkation figures totalling 25,794 enslaved Africans. Disembarkation numbers are available for 81 voyages, totalling 23,623. On the 81 voyages where both figures exist, 25,435 were recorded as embarked and 23,623 as disembarked. These are substantial numbers, but they’re not a complete count for all 104 voyages credited to Calvert. Nor can the difference automatically be described as deaths: incomplete and inconsistent voyage records require individual checking.

Calvert wasn’t simply someone who happened to inherit shares in a trading company. His documented career involved organising and financing slave voyages on a considerable scale. Yet the ships were generally operating from London and other ports, not Ramsgate. His later residence in Kent establishes an important local connection without turning Ramsgate into the departure point for those voyages.

That distinction matters enormously.

Another family with roots in Ramsgate, the Curlings, presents a smaller but revealing example. Brothers Jesse, John and Robert Curling were London merchants and shipowners with substantial interests in shipping, shipbuilding and marine supplies along the Thames. The Register identifies all three as co-owners of the Earl of Effingham, which sailed from London in 1790 towards the Gold Coast and Jamaica. They shared ownership with other merchants, including John Deffell and Rose Fuller, and the captain and slave factor Robert Moulton.

The Earl of Effingham’s voyage record contains an apparent inconsistency: 280 embarked and 295 disembarked. It would be tempting to quietly correct the difference or ignore it altogether. We haven’t done either. The figures are recorded that way in the source and need further investigation. Crucially, this was one jointly owned voyage, not three separate voyages simply because three Curling brothers were involved.

What the named owners’ ships actually carried

The following figures come from matching named individuals with the specific voyages linked to their profiles. They are voyage totals associated with owners or co-owners, not numbers of people each individual personally transported, purchased or sold. Several ships had multiple owners, so their figures cannot simply be added together as though each represents a separate voyage.

William Coleman is particularly interesting. The Register attributes six voyages to the merchant of Lee, historically part of Kent but now within Greater London. These involved vessels including the Anne Galley, Hare and Wiltshire. Their recorded totals were 1,359 embarked and 1,040 disembarked. A seventh voyage, by the Anne in 1745, is identified as a possibility rather than a firm attribution. Including that voyage would raise the figures to 1,599 embarked and 1,237 disembarked, but presenting all seven as conclusively his would overstate the evidence.

Then there’s James Eales of Northfleet. He commanded four voyages by the Prince Frederick between 1731 and 1736, on which 1,035 enslaved Africans were recorded as embarked and 870 disembarked. His will was proved in 1743 and places him within a Northfleet family connected to the local lime trade. But Eales was a captain, and at least one of the voyages was undertaken for shipowner Thomas Hebert. Calling Eales the owner of all four would be wrong. The distinction between captains and the merchants who financed their voyages is essential to understanding how the trade functioned.

Other names emerge. Edward Louisa Mann, whose family had substantial Kent connections and whose nephew represented Maidstone and Sandwich in Parliament, owned the Black Prince on a 1763 voyage carrying 350 enslaved Africans aboard and recording 297 disembarked. Benjamin Scott, probably the merchant of Eltham identified in the Register, was associated with the Unity and Constant Friend, whose three voyages recorded 623 embarked and 499 disembarked. In Scott’s case, the identification is considered highly likely, but it isn’t beyond historical doubt.

There’s a lesson in those individual examples. The trade wasn’t operated by an imaginary collection of faceless villains. It involved identifiable people, often working through partnerships, companies and family connections, who undertook different roles at different times.

Some also lost their money.

The 1,863 voyages and the danger of a misleading total

Across the entire Kent and Medway extract, we identified 1,863 distinct slave-trading crossings linked by the database’s selection process to local people, places or organisations. Their available embarkation figures total 529,884, while disembarkation figures total 440,678, a difference of 89,206.

Those are the figures in the extracted records. They are not the total number of people carried by Kent-owned ships. Many voyages entered the dataset because someone connected with Kent held shares in a trading company whose vessels operated from elsewhere.

There’s another complication. Embarkation information is missing for 80 crossings, while disembarkation information is absent from 98. Restricting the calculation to the 1,765 voyages with both recorded figures gives 525,182 embarked and 440,678 disembarked. Yet some voyage records contain estimates, unresolved discrepancies or figures that apparently exceed the number originally embarked. Subtracting one overall total from another and declaring the result a Kent death toll would be unsound.

It would also be wrong to assume that every voyage associated with a shareholder was one that shareholder personally commissioned. An investor in the Royal African Company could be linked to dozens or hundreds of crossings simply because they occurred while that person held stock. Ownership of a company share was not the same as ownership of each vessel it dispatched. The database is invaluable for tracing those connections, provided the distinctions aren’t lost.

The Folkestone shipyards and the profits coming home

Kent’s involvement stretched well beyond its merchants and investors. The county’s shipyards, particularly along the Thames and Medway, were well placed to support the Atlantic trading economy.

David Killingray identifies three vessels constructed locally: the schooner Peggy, built at Folkestone in 1783; the clinker-built Comet, also built at Folkestone in 1787; and the Queen Esther, a West Indian trading vessel built at Gravesend in 1789. These were involved either directly in slave trading or in the transportation of products grown through enslaved labour. The precise functions of each require care: transporting sugar from the Caribbean wasn’t the same activity as carrying enslaved Africans from West Africa.

Yet both belonged to an interconnected Atlantic economy. Ships carried enslaved people westwards, while other vessels returned with goods including sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton and coffee. Merchants, shipbuilders, chandlers, financiers and insurers could earn money without participating directly in the purchase or sale of human beings.

At Margate, the brewing and commercial interests of Francis Cobb senior and his partner Hooper illustrate that relationship. In September 1782, the Emperor, returning from Jamaica with sugar, rum, cotton and pimento, was wrecked on the Mouve Sands. Salvaging the cargo required two sloops, three large boats and more than 50 men. Cobb’s businesses also supplied drink for Caribbean markets. The evidence connects Margate commerce with Atlantic trading networks, although it doesn’t prove that every cargo or transaction was itself slave trading.

Meanwhile, substantial wealth associated with slavery was entering Kent through estates, inheritance and marriage.

Duncan Campbell, who owned the Saltspring plantation in Jamaica, purchased approximately 2,000 acres at West Kingsdown for £21,458. The Romney family of Mote Place near Maidstone acquired interests in estates on St Kitts valued at £19,000 in 1740. James Beckford Wildman, who bought Chilham Castle in 1792, owned three Jamaican properties with a combined enslaved population of 640 people. Those 640 were plantation labourers held in slavery, not a voyage total, and mustn’t be added to the numbers carried across the Atlantic.

John Boyd’s West Indian interests helped support his wealth and the construction of Danson House at Bexley. Others, including John Sargent, acquired Kent estates after involvement in commercial enterprises linked to the African and Caribbean trades. These examples demonstrate how colonial fortunes entered Kent’s property market. They don’t establish what proportion of every building was funded by slave-produced profits — a question for which the surviving evidence is often inadequate.

The share certificates tell another story

The Register also identifies investments in enterprises such as the Royal African Company, which held monopoly rights over much of England’s African trade between 1672 and 1698.

Some transactions are surprisingly specific. Aaron Harrington, later resident at Southfleet, transferred Royal African Company shares valued at £900 in 1723. Charles Yarwood, associated with Hayes, received £2,000 in company stock in December 1725 before transferring two £1,000 holdings the following January. Robert Wilford of Rochester held shares valued at £400 around 1720–21, while Nathaniel Denew of Canterbury was recorded with £1,000 of stock. These sums are historical face values of holdings, not necessarily fresh money invested or profits realised.

Across the stronger-linked individuals, 197 positive-valued investment entries add mechanically to £149,651.80 – approximately £31.43 million in 2025 money. But it would be misleading to publish that as the total capital invested by Kent residents. Purchases and sales can concern the same shares, while the dataset also includes transactions involving people whose local connection is indirect. Historical investment registers record movement as well as ownership. Adding every entry together could count the same underlying capital several times.

Women weren’t absent from this financial world. Lady Anne Dawes held £1,000 in Royal African Company stock from 1672 to 1677. Mary Dering appears with holdings valued between £500 and £1,000 around the turn of the eighteenth century, although researchers have not conclusively identified which woman of that name was involved. Their records illustrate why individual circumstances matter. Some women acquired or managed investments themselves; others inherited holdings or had assets administered through trustees and relatives. Those are different kinds of participation.

But how important was the trade to Britain?

That question has become part of a contemporary historical argument.

In September 2026, historian Lawrence Goldman, writing for History Reclaimed, challenged the claims accompanying the Register’s launch. Drawing on figures presented by abolitionist Henry Brougham in the early nineteenth century, Goldman argued that the direct slave trade represented approximately 3% of British exports, 1.6% of imperial shipping tonnage and 4.35% of seamen. He contends that identifying thousands of investors doesn’t establish that the slave trade was fundamental to Britain’s industrial development. The criticism raises a legitimate demand for proportional evidence rather than sweeping claims about national prosperity.

But there’s an equally important qualification. Brougham’s estimates dealt with the direct traffic in enslaved people, not the entire economic value of plantation production, manufacturing, insurance, finance and colonial commerce. Nor can a snapshot around 1804 measure the trade’s economic significance over two-and-a-half centuries. Establishing individual connections and calculating the overall contribution of slavery to industrialisation are different historical exercises. Neither automatically answers the other.

Goldman has also criticised the Register for including people who inherited company shares, including children and women whose holdings were administered by others. His central concern is that being a recorded investor or beneficiary isn’t necessarily equivalent to knowingly financing a slave voyage. That’s a distinction worth preserving. It does not follow, however, that women generally lacked the ability to make financial decisions, or that inherited shares had no economic significance. The responsible approach is to identify what each person owned, controlled or did, rather than assume identical responsibility from their appearance in a database.

L. P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country: people did things differently there. The observation is particularly relevant here. We cannot simply impose today’s expectations on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lives without understanding the laws, commercial arrangements and social conventions of their time.

Yet there is a twist in Kent’s history.

Many people living during the slave trade opposed it on the moral and political grounds available to them at the time. They didn’t need twenty-first-century principles to recognise its cruelty.

Maidstone and Folkestone refused to stay silent

Long before the British slave trade was abolished in 1807, a campaign developed to challenge it. It drew strength from religious communities, reformers, political activists and ordinary people prepared to petition Parliament.

And Kent played its part.

Maidstone sent an abolition petition in 1788. Folkestone followed in 1792.

Killingray’s examination of contemporary parliamentary records identifies these as the two Kent boroughs whose petitions demanding an end to the slave trade reached Parliament. Canterbury’s civic leaders also unanimously agreed to organise a petition in 1788, although the study did not identify a corresponding submitted petition. That’s not evidence that Canterbury was indifferent; it’s a distinction between recorded political intention and a petition confirmed as presented.

The campaign had important roots around Teston, near Maidstone. The Reverend James Ramsay, who had witnessed slavery during his years in St Kitts, published influential works opposing aspects of the system in 1784. Thomas Clarkson spent time with him in 1786, discussing how the campaign could advance. Their work helped transform individual objections into an organised movement capable of influencing Parliament.

It wasn’t easy. Clarkson’s attempt to establish wider support in Kent during 1788 encountered resistance. In Rochester, some potential supporters were reluctant to challenge established political loyalties. The county’s naval, commercial and political interests could make public opposition awkward. Yet Quakers in Dover and Canterbury were involved, and in 1789 a Baptist congregation in Tenterden asked its minister to preach against the African slave trade.

In time, those campaigning efforts helped change the political landscape. Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, but slavery itself continued legally within Britain’s colonies until emancipation legislation followed in 1833, with full freedom for apprentices coming in 1838.

And abolition didn’t immediately stop illegal trading. Killingray records that the Ramsgate vessel Emma was condemned at Sierra Leone in October 1822 for engaging in the slave trade — fifteen years after Britain had prohibited its participation.

That is perhaps the most revealing contradiction in Kent’s story. A county whose ships, merchants and landowners had participated in Atlantic commerce also produced people who helped confront the trade. Deal had its merchant families, Folkestone its shipyards, Ramsgate its shipowners and Maidstone its colonial-connected fortunes.

But Maidstone and Folkestone also sent petitions demanding change.

History isn’t improved by treating every person connected to slavery as equally responsible, any more than it is improved by minimising the suffering involved. The records show different actions, different motives and different degrees of responsibility. Some people commissioned voyages. Others simply held shares. Some opposed abolition. Others helped achieve it.

And for Kent and Medway, the most useful outcome of this research isn’t a claim that an entire county was guilty or innocent. It’s that named people, individual ships, financial transactions and parliamentary petitions can now be examined together, with their uncertainties acknowledged.

The ships carried human beings. The merchants counted money. And eventually, people in Kent helped change the law.

That’s the history worth telling.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime