In one of the collections of pictures Samuel Chidwick donated to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth; a photograph shows a sailor removing the leg chains from a newly freed slave.
His father, Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick, was born in 1881 and served aboard HMS Sphinx. Most of the Africans in the picture collection escaped from a slave-trading village with a canoe after hearing that the Royal Navy ship was close.
Commander Litchfield, in his report from October 15th, 1907, noted that the ship took ‘six fugitives’ while sailing close to Batineh Coast, Oman, between the 10th and 14th of October. He wrote that one of the fugitives had been on chains for three years and escaped with his leg irons still on.
Samuel Chidwick also said: “The pictures were taken by my father who was serving aboard HMS Sphinx while on armed patrol of the Zanzibar and Mozambique coast in about 1907. They caught quite a few slavers, and those particular slaves in the pictures happened while he was on watch. That night a dhow (sailing vessel) sailed by, and the enslaved people were all chained together.
He raised the alarm and got them onto the ship, and the chains were knocked off them. They then questioned them and sent a party of marines ashore to try to track the slave traders down.
They caught two of them, and I believe they were of Arabic origin. My father thought the slave trade was a despicable thing that was going on; the enslaved people were maltreated, so when they got the slavers, they didn’t give them a lovely time”.
The Royal Navy controlled the world’s seas at the time. It also established the West Africa Squadron in 1808 to secure the West African coast. Between 1808 and 1860, they seized about 1,600 slave ships and freed over 150,000 Africans on them.
Most of these sea vessels with enslaved people were going to South America because Brazil was the biggest importer of enslaved people and because the trade winds made it difficult for ships to sail straight to North America.
While the 1807 Act of Congress technically abolished the intercontinental slave trade in the United States, the ban was not being enforced. Many of the slave ships that came in and were caught were headed for the southern United States. The civil war eventually ended the slave trade.
