Ethnolinguistic Patterns on Atlantic Slaving Vessels in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone

Between 1808 and 1844, British antislavery cruisers intercepted more than forty Atlantic slaving vessels that had purchased enslaved Africans at ports in the Sierra Leone region.  Through trials at Vice Admiralty and later Mixed Commission Courts, British officials liberated thousands of Africans confined in the holds of these “illegal” slavers, recording intimate details about them that included their Africans names, ages, sexes, heights and descriptions of prominent scarification markings.  Scholars have used the Registers of Liberated Africans – the records in which this data was kept – to drew conclusions about the likely interior origins of enslaved Africans from the Cameroons, Sierra Leone, and Angola.  This paper examines the details captured in the Registers in a different way, analyzing it on a vessel-by-vessel basis to consider the likely ethnolinguistic composition of slaving vessels sailing from Sierra Leone in the 19^th century.  It draws on extensive collaboration with communities in Sierra Leone, significantly extending earlier work on the ethnolinguistic origins of enslaved people from the region.   The research raises questions about the extent to which captives drawn into the slave trade in 19^th century Sierra Leone came from similar backgrounds.  The conclusions therefore have broad implications for issues including resistance on slave vessels, shipboard bonding and the movement of cultural systems across the Atlantic.