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Far North historical figures who profited from the slave trade


By Alan Hendry

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A Victorian engraving of Africans being taken by slave traders.
A Victorian engraving of Africans being taken by slave traders.

It has been dubbed Scotland’s forgotten shame – the role played by Scots in the transatlantic slave trade of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Historical links and legacies run deep across Scotland but have been hidden from public view for decades by the rebranding of Britain since the 19th century as an abolitionist state.

The rise in 2020 of the Black Lives Matter campaign has led many institutions to reassess their relationship with slave-trade benefactors and how their legacies reverberate today in place names, street names and statues in towns and cities across Britain.

Today, the Northern Times can shed new light on some of the families in Caithness and north Sutherland associated with the slave trade.

They include Gunns from Wick, MacDonalds and Hornes from Halkirk, Mackays from north Sutherland and Strachans, Sobers and Traills from Thurso.

The historical trail also reaches into the aristocratic ancestry of Caithness, with Sir John Sinclair, arguably Thurso’s most revered citizen, among those identified in the records.

The transatlantic slave trade generated huge wealth but treated its black workforce like modern-day cattle.

The 1707 Act of Union that created the British state gave Scots access to the colonies of England and the transatlantic slave trade for the first time.

Over the next century, Scots participated in the trade as investors, as owners of plantations and its slave workforce, as slave traders, owners of slave ships and as a crew, surgeons, lawyers and accountants.

The transatlantic slave trade was a triangular business that generated huge wealth in Britain but treated its black workforce like modern-day cattle.

Slave ships sailed from the ports of Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol and London to the west coast of Africa, carrying goods that were exchanged for Africans in chains. These ships carried millions of Africans across the Atlantic to British colonies in the Americas – one in every four or five perished on the crossing – for sale to plantation owners.

The third leg of the trade brought the produce of the plantations – sugar, cotton and other commodities – to Britain for sale.

One of the biggest players in the 18th-century trade was Dunnet-born Richard Oswald, a British diplomat who amassed a fortune from slavery equivalent to $65 million today. His role is well documented, particularly in operation of the notorious Bunce Island trading post off the coast of Sierra Leone.

By the start of the 19th century, the British slave trade focused on the West Indies after the loss of US plantations to American independence. At home, opposition to slavery was growing.

Britain’s property-owning classes resisted abolition for decades. Increasing rebellion among slaves in the colonies and growing resentment among the working classes of Britain increased pressure to act. Eventually, an offer of compensation swung the argument and parliament passed legislation to phase out slavery.

The compensation for loss of “property” amounted to £20 million – 40 per cent of the entire annual expenditure of the British government in 1833 – and equivalent to £2.4 billion today. The slaves received none.

A commission was established to disburse the money, prompting a frenzy of claims and evidence gathered of “losses” suffered by plantation owners.

The records of the commission have been obtained by University College London and published as part of its Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership.

While the role of Oswald in the 18th century is well documented, less well known are the names of other people in Caithness and north Sutherland who lodged claims for compensation when the British parliament outlawed slavery.

The following details are held by the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership:

Major Colin Campbell Mackay

Bighouse, north Sutherland

A claim for £8,753 7s 11d for 329 slaves on the Richmond Estate, St Vincent, as trustee for James Cruickshank, dated February 29, 1836

Isabella McLeay (née Horne)

Halkirk

A claim for £1981 0s 11d for 39 slaves in British Guiana, dated February 29, 1836

(McLeay was the daughter of John Horne of Stirkoke and wife of Kenneth McLeay of Newmore. She was awarded compensation as his co-trustee with her brother Donald Horne.)

Donald (or David) Horne

Edinburgh

A claim for £1981 0s 11d for 39 slaves in British Guiana, dated February 29, 1836

(The second son of John Horne of Stirkoke, David Horne WS of Edinburgh was trustee with his sister Isabella McLeay to the estate of his late brother-in-law Kenneth McLeay of Newmore. Inherited the Langwell estate in Caithness from his uncle James Horne in 1831.)

John Strachan

Thurso

A claim for £275 2s 6d for 14 slaves at St Ann, Jamaica, dated December 14, 1835

(Letters from John Strachan from Thurso dated 18/11/1835 and 20/11/1835: "I hope there will be no stopage [sic] in paying me, I am truly a native of St Ann Jamaica or say a Creole, the above is my property left me by Father and mother." )

Anna Gordon Goding (née Sober)

Thurso

Two claims for £91 5s 5d and £38 16s 9d for a total of six slaves in Barbados, dated May 23, 1836

(Born to John and Anna Sober and christened in Thurso on March 15, 1802, she married John Cummins Goding in 1821 in St Peters, Barbados. Children John Gay Goding and Mary Prescod Goding baptised in St Peter's, Barbados in 1822 and 1824.)

The Right Hon Sir John Sinclair

Ulbster, Thurso East

A claim for £6767 4s 8d for 264 slaves in St Vincent, dated February 15, 1836

(Joint claim with Vans Hathorn as part of the compensation for the Argyle, Calder and Calder Ridge estates in St Vincent as co-trustees of the marriage settlement of the Hon Archibald Macdonald and Jane Campbell. Sir John Sinclair died in 1835 and the award was made to Hathorn alone.)

Other people from Caithness who are identified by UCL:

John Innes Gunn (1799-1841)

Wick

John Gunn spent nearly 20 years in Jamaica where he worked as an attorney, operating primarily in the parishes of Trelawny and St James. In 1831 he was responsible for five plantations on which a total of 1163 enslaved people lived and worked. He resided in St James, being recorded in the 1831 Jamaica Almanac as owning four enslaved persons.

He gained notoriety during the 1831/32 Christmas Rebellion during which he served as a captain in the Trelawny militia. On January 15, 1832, he ordered the summary execution of a slave named John Allen on the Lima estate (St James), for which he acted as attorney. Gunn was court-martialled and sent to trial because the enslaved on the estate had, only an hour before, been pardoned for their participation in the uprising by the head of Crown forces, General Sir Willoughby Cotton.

Gunn was tried by a local court but ultimately cleared of any crime. Henry Bleby includes a detailed account of the crime and trial in his 1853 account. He concludes: "It may be safely asserted that none but a court composed of Jamaica planters would have dared to return such a verdict; and only the planters of that time, drunken as they were with the blood of the slave, would have outraged humanity, truth and justice, by coming to such a conclusion."

Gunn was hailed as a hero by the local white community and awarded the "Trelawny Sword", paid for through a collection amongst his regiment that raised £300. The sword is now displayed in the Gunn heritage museum in Nova Scotia. His obituary recorded him as being of "determined resolution and undaunted courage".

On leaving Jamaica in the early 1830s Gunn returned to Wick, where he married Jessie Old [Auld] in 1834. They had three daughters, Johnina (1837), Catherine (1839) and Jessie (1840). The family subsequently emigrated to Pictou, Nova Scotia, where John Gunn died in 1841.

Richard Oswald (1705-1784)

London

One of the "Citizens of the World", and co-owner of the Bunce Island slave-trading factory in West Africa. Richard Oswald (1705-1784) was advisor to the British government on trade regulations and the conduct of the American War of Independence and was a British peace commissioner who negotiated the Peace of Paris in 1782.

His wife, Mary Oswald was the daughter of Alexander Ramsay, and grew up in Jamaica. On her father's death she inherited his substantial estate and business. She returned to Britain with her mother, leaving the business in the hands of trustees. She died in 1788.

She is the subject of a portrait by Johann Zoffany, Mrs Oswald (1763-64), which is in the National Gallery. Her will, as Mary Oswald or Ramsay of Auchincruive proved 19/12/1788, deals in detail with the settlement by her husband and her property but is silent on slave property in Jamaica.

Gordon MacDonald (1804-1859)

Halkirk

Baptised in Halkirk in 1804, he left Scotland after 1840, possibly for Canada, where his mother is known to have moved after her husband's death, and arrived in Surinam from Demerara in February 1848. He became director of Waterloo estate in Nickerie in succession to Robert Kirke in 1849. In 1853 he moved to Coronie where he had purchased plantation Moy with about 130 enslaved people from the heirs of Alexander Ferrier of Surinam. He returned to Scotland April 1858 and died June 1859 at Burntisland. Robert Kirke was reportedly the only person present at his funeral.

In 1855 Gordon MacDonald had a child, Catherina, born 15/09/1855, with an enslaved woman named Mary, a "private [domestic] slave" of Mary C Hamilton, the owner and administrator of plantation Hamilton in Coronie. Catherina was manumitted (set free) on 09/03/1858 with the names Mary Classina Namilton (sic); her name was later changed to Mary Classina MacDonald based on the terms of her father's will. Gordon MacDonald's estate, including Moy, Perserverance (sic) and his land at Totness, were sold at auction in 1861.

In addition, the following entry is found in The Price of Emancipation – Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery, by Nicholas Draper, a teaching fellow at UCL: “Mary Salter Dehany, the heiress of the slave-owner Philip Dehany, was engaged to the 11th Earl of Caithness. When the Earl died before their marriage, Dehany adopted the Earl’s niece Wilhelmina Traill, and bequeathed the estates and enslaved in Barbados and Jamaica to her. Traill was awarded £4,361 11s 9d for 205 enslaved on the Salters estate in Barbados. She died at Hayes Place, the house left to her by Mary Salter Dehany, in 1862, aged 77 (The Times, August 12, 1862).”


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