African Soldiers Aboard a British Ship Policing the Slave Trade at Havana: The Social and Political Story of the HMS Romney

From the mid 1830s to the mid 1840s the British government stationed the HMS Romney in the Havana harbor as a part of its work to enforce Anglo-Spanish treaties prohibiting the Atlantic slave trade. By most accounts, the presence of the ship did little by itself to either hinder the ongoing illegal slave trade or to significantly enhance the legal and humanitarian work involved in the capture of illegally operating slave ships.  The Romney has often appeared almost as a passing shadow in this well-known story of slave trade policing.  However, for all its practical ineffectiveness, this ship in fact provided a unique military and human face to the slave trade suppression campaign at Havana. Particularly interesting-and arguably most provocative to Cuban authorities-was the employment of a crew of free African soldiers as the principal military labor aboard the vessel. The Romney had a white naval crew who were joined by these black soldiers from the British West India Regiments. Most of the soldiers selected were African-born men, many themselves rescued in previous years from illegal slave ships.  This paper traces the experience of both the African and European men who served aboard the Romney, exploring their daily lives, which included interaction with both African-descended and other members of the Cuban population. Those interactions regularly led to controversy with Cuban authorities, as the ship, its British crew and its African soldiers became a tangible, symbolic front in the Anglo-Spanish struggle over the future of slavery in Cuba.