Exploring our archives

Last Sunday marked two hundred years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Like many men of their social class at the time, the members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had connections to the slave trade. As Govier has pointed out, the Royal Society invested their first substantial endowment, 1,300 pounds from the sale of Trinity College, in the Royal Africa and East India Companies, both of whom were involved in enslaving Africans for sale or work on their plantations. Several members of the Royal Society were involved with these companies: for example Paul Neile FRS was prominent in the RAC, while Jeremy Sambrooke and Sir John Lawrence are prominent in both the Council meetings of the early Royal Society and the correspondence of the East India Company, of whom both were Commissioners.

References to slavery in the early records of the Royal Society also reveal some degree of practical involvement in the mechanics of the trade. One example that occurs in the Hooke folio appears to refer to the making of ‘trade beads’ or ’slave bead’, glass beads used to trade with Africans in exchange for slaves. For example, at a meeting of April 22 1680 Robert Hooke presented his efforts to replicate a bead made of a blue stone said to be ‘much esteemed by those of Guiny’, which was testing along with some glass beads designed to counterfeit these beads. Apparently the fake bead was unconvincing, being reportly ‘[in] noe wise soe beautyfull & cleer of colour as that of Guiney’. An experiment of heating the bead in the flame also proved the superiority of the real stone, while it ‘could not be melted but it flawed & crackd like a Stone. the counterfeit ones melted very easily.’ Hooke promised to make a more convincing replica of the stone.

Some of the implications of slavery were a cause for concern for the deeply religious mathematician, Robert Boyle, as papers in his collection reveal. A copy in the Boyle Papers (Vol. 4 f. 118) of a draft Act of Parliament proposed in 1670 notes that the principle that a Christian should not be enslaved by another men of the faith has led to planters and owners of slaves actively discouraging the conversion of slaves for fear of losing their property and investment. The proposed solution was not the abolition of slavery, however, but the provision that the baptism of slaves would not affect the ’service’ due from them to their ‘former masters’. Proposals (f. 127-8) that seem to have been drafted by Boyle himself the same year list two proposal, which may have been regarded as alternatives, as their provisions are otherwise contradictory. The first allows for the freeing of a Christian slave but not the offspring of this slave while the second proposes rights for a Christian slave, including the ownership of goods and the right to seek legal redress against mistreatment by a master. The final document (f. 144) refering to slavery in this collection of papers is a copy of a letter of the East India Company to their colony at St Helena dated 9 December 1670. This orders that Christian slave who are able to demonstrate their knowledge of the faith should remain slaves for seven years, after which they should become free planters. There does not seem to be any evidence that this command, remarkably enlightened for its time, was followed and slavery continued to be a mainstay of the income Britain received from its plantations for over a century.

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