On March 6, 1732, John Hogg, captain of the Sarah , a slave ship belonging to Humphry Morice, was in a fix at the port of Annamaboe on the Gold Coast—modern-day Ghana. Hogg had been in West Africa for more than six months, offering African merchants at the port towns up and down the coast the chance to purchase goods from the cargo of European and Asian manufactures he had brought from London. He sought gold in exchange, as well as enslaved human beings, whom he then intended to transport across the Atlantic and sell to the sugar planters on the Caribbean isle of Barbados. But the going had been slow—unusually slow for a ship owned by Humphry Morice, who for nearly three decades had prided himself on lading his ships at London with goods that would sell in Africa quickly and at high prices, allowing his ships to depart the coast in relatively few months with a cargo of slaves for the West Indies or, better yet, a cargo of gold that could come directly back to London. Hogg, however, was finding that few of the African slave-sellers showed much interest in his outbound cargo and the letter he wrote that day began with his complaint about “being so Long upon the Coast and to so Little a purpose.”
Hogg also noted a piece of “very unwelcome news” that he had heard three weeks before, “of the Death of Mr: Morrice.” Having heard this from a competing slave trader, Hogg hoped that it was “a fals Report, and only as they would have it.” But Humphry Morice had indeed died nearly five months before on November 16, 1731—by his own hand, as the rumor around London had it. The reaction in Africa to the news, as recorded by Hogg, is startling to our eyes: “The Negroes is all Lamenting their Loss as Much as his own Servants.”1 But the “Negroes” in question had received all manner of luxurious import items from Morice’s ships over the years, in exchange for the other “Negroes” they had sold him as slaves.
So despite the regard of merchants in both Africa and Europe for Humphry Morice, bankruptcy and probable suicide were his end. Disgrace as well, though not for the nature of his trade, almost universally recognized as morally abhorrent in the twenty-first century but not in the eighteenth. Instead, shortly after his death, it became public knowledge that Morice —a director of the Bank of England for many years—had defrauded that institution of the colossal sum of £29,000 over the last six months of his life. For the much longer spell of 11 years, he had also been entrusted with £16,500 worth of legacies to his five young daughters from a favorite uncle who died in 1720, not a penny of which they had seen even in adulthood. These were but the two most notorious of the several financial gimmicks by which Morice for over a decade had been staving off his final catastrophe.
This was a strange finale to the life and career of a prolific entrepreneur whose esteem among the wider London merchant community had been so great that in 1727 they had elected him to a two-year term as the Bank of England’s Governor. Indeed, Morice’s social ambitions extended beyond eminence among his mercantile peers: he had seriously entertained the notion of penetrating the charmed circle of the English landed elite, an almost impossible feat for a London merchant in the early eighteenth century. But certainly Morice was eminent among London slave traders. Beginning in 1704, he had invested in 103 voyages to Africa, which between them transported something like 30,000 human beings against their will from their home continent of Africa into lifelong servitude in the plantation colonies of British America. These numbers far exceeded those of any of the thousand or so other British entrepreneurs who had invested in the slave trade since Parliament had ended the monopoly of the old Royal African Company in 1698.
Though previous historians of the slave trade have not attempted the sustained analysis of Morice’s life and career, they have at least recognized Morice’s preeminence in his day. For instance, it was Hugh Thomas, in his vast 1997 survey of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, who dubbed Humphry Morice “the prince of London slave merchants in these days.”2 Likewise, James Rawley, whose brief 2003 essay and briefer entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography make up most of the previous scholarly output on Morice , named him the “foremost London slave merchant of his time.”3 Without naming Morice , David Eltis has hinted at one of the main reasons he succeeded beyond his peers, or at least seemed to, in the years after Parliament revoked the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the British transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans in 1698. “The decline of the RAC,” writes Eltis, “was probably linked to the ability of major London and Bristol slave traders to match the range of information at the company’s disposal.”4
More than any of his contemporaries, Humphry Morice sought a way of matching the RAC’s range of information at less expense. Where the RAC had kept abreast of African demand for cloth, metal goods, guns, liquor and other European and Asian trading articles by maintaining a ruinously expensive chain of fortified trading posts, Morice did the same through the multiple-ship strategy that he devised in its final form by 1719. By keeping several ships in motion around the Atlantic Ocean and organizing them to minimize the time that any one ship was at sea, Morice ensured that at any given time, a ship was on its way from Africa—directly if possible, rather than by way of America—laden with homebound goods and market information fresh from the source. By this means, Morice was able to figure out what coastal African merchants wanted in exchange for their slaves and then to bring it to them.
While James Rawley’s work sketched out, in brief, these reasons for Morice’s brilliant early success, it attempted no answer to the puzzle of how to account for his devastating later failure, stating only that
Rawley added that “Humphry Morice deserves to be better known by students of the transatlantic slave trade.” Indeed, I would argue that in order to understand the long-term development of the Britain’s trade in enslaved Africans, one must understand Morice, given that his career occupied the crucial transition period between the end of the Royal African Company monopoly in 1698 and the rise of the slavers from Bristol and Liverpool who would usurp London’s dominance in the British slave trade and drive it to its highest volumes in the late eighteenth century. The path between these two better-studied phases in the chronology of the trade runs through Morice .The materials seen by this writer do not make it possible to document profits and losses. The fact that Morice long continued in the trade suggests he thought the trade to be profitable. However, the fact that he died deeply in debt (he owed nearly £150,000) suggests either mismanagement of his affairs or losses in the trade.5
Fortunately, the Bank of England preserved the papers of its onetime Governor, making Humphry Morice by far the best-documented slave trader of his day. The majority of these materials have since 2000 been available in a set of four reels of microfilm available from Adam Matthew Publications, though a small yet crucial subset must be sought in the archives at Threadneedle Street. These primary documents, together with the indispensable online Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database , are the main tools necessary for studying the rise and fall of Humphry Morice.
The story that emerges from these thus-far underused sources is one of Morice’s early innovations giving way to stagnation, which then allowed other innovators to overtake him. His multiple-ship system for producing information on African consumer demand, though it was less expensive than the Royal African Company’s chain of forts, still was ruinously expensive. This left the way open ...