The Welsh and American Slavery

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• The Slave Trade
  • Whose ships were Used?
  • Who bought Slaves?
  • Captain Thomas Phillips
  • The Pwllheli Ship
  • The Second Middle Passage
  • The Slaves
  • Slave Owners
  • Abolitionists
  • Places to visit

Y Gaethfasnach

A slave ship Captain from Brecon

Thomas Phillips' book, "A Journal of a Voyage made in the Hannibal" is one of the most detailed and most famous records of life on a slave ship. It describes a voyage between September 1693 and June 1695, but there is comparatively little information about the captain himself, apart from this volume.

He is an enigmatic figure for us today. We know that he had to retire from the sea after this voyage due to a series of fits which caused him to lose his hearing:

Being render'd unfit for my employment, by my deafness, I settled my affairs in London, took my leave of it, and came down to Wales, among my relations in Brecknock, my native town, there to spend the rest of my life as easily as I can, under my hard misfortune.

According to a local history column (Brecon County Times August 13th 1925) after returning to the town, Phillips was made an alderman, and it is he who lent his name to Captains Walk which leads down to the river. He had a black servant called Scipio, and died childless in 1713, leaving his house to his niece.

Captain of the Hannibal

The Hannibal was a 450 ton ship with 36 cannon. The ship was owned by a cartel of merchants, and Phillips himself had a share in it too. He travelled to Africa on behalf of the Royal African Company of England.

We do not know how old he was during the voyage. In one sensitive section, he describes burying his brother at sea, at the age of only seventeen:

The prayers of the church being read, I help'd to commit his body to the deep, which was the last office lay in my power to do for my dear brother. Then the Hannibal fired sixteen guns at half minute distance of time, which was the number of years he had liv'd in this uncertain world

His brother's age leads one to think of Thomas Phillips as a comparatively young man, nevertheless he was a ship's captain.

Certainly, he displays the attitude of a person who is young at heart, in recording what he saw in Africa.

Their way of welcoming and saluting here...is by taking one's thumb and forefinger, and making them snap, in the mean time crying Acky O! Acky O!

He was given a different greeting by the whores of Capo Verde:

Negroe women who talk'd to us many smutty English words, making lascivious undecent gestures with their bodies...

Nevertheless, Thomas Philips was not visiting African countries as a tourist, but to purchase slaves ? 692 of them to be sold in Barbados. Welsh cloth was among the goods he exchanged for the Africans. He describes the method of loading them aboard ship and feeding them, and forcing them to dance on the deck every night to keep them agile. Occasionally, you almost sense that he had some sympathy towards the poor people in his care.

I can't think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so;[...]the blacks[...]say the devil is white, and so paint him.

And yet, he branded each one of them "in the breast or shoulder, with a hot iron, having the letter of the ship's name on it".

When about three hundred of them died during the voyage, all he did was complain that this was "great detriment to our voyage, the Royal African Company losing ten pounds by every slave that died". And that was, he said, after he had suffered months of foul smells from "a parcel of creatures nastier than swine"!

Is it possible to excuse him at all? Hardly. Perhaps it was a more cruel age; certainly it was a period of war, and the Hannibal was attacked by a French warship. Philips had to be thick skinned in the face of death.

Last night Thomas Cronow (o Grono neu Goronwy) an honest stout Welshman, one of our sailors, died of his wounds received in the late engagement; one of his legs being carry'd off about the ancle, and half his other foot by the same shot.

And yet, despite his unemotional description, Phillips at least names his fellow countryman and keeps his memory alive. He does not name any of his fellow passengers who were black. And that's the enigma. He had a vivid interest in the customs of the Africans in their own lands, but once he had paid for them, they ceased to exist as people. They were simply "Cargo".