The British Parliament passed the Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in March 1807, and within five months royal assent was given to a bill transferring the indebted Sierra Leone colony, which was owned by a corporation, to British Crown control on New Year’s Day 1808. Soon after, Freetown became the base for a Vice-Admiralty Court “for the trial and adjudication of any captures of slaves offered as prizes.” The Africans on board were to be enlisted, apprenticed to members of the earlier settler population, or “disposed of according to the true meaning of the Abolition Act.” Between 1808 and 1819, the Vice Admiralty Court was involved in several hundred cases involving over 15,000 people, who were removed from slave ships, seized from the colony and rescued following attacks on coastal barracoons. Many of the documents to be displayed herein were digitized from the archives at Fourah Bay College as a result of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.

View Cases

In Freetown, captured slave ships were first adjudicated by a British Vice Admiralty Court. After the 1815 Treaty of Paris formally ended the Napoleonic Wars, regular sittings of the Vice-Admiralty Court were suspended. The court, which had operated unilaterally and with few regulations, was replaced by bilateral Courts of Mixed Commission. These international courts, operational from 1819 onward, were the result of a series of treaties between Britain and Portugal (28 July 1817), Spain (23 September 1817), and the Netherlands (4 May 1818) and later Brazil (23 November 1826). There were four Mixed Commissions operating in Sierra Leone: the Anglo-Spanish, the Anglo-Portuguese, the Anglo-Dutch, and after 1828, the Anglo-Brazilian. In these international courts, British judges shared the bench with representatives of these four foreign governments, and prize money was divided between British officers and foreign judges. These tribunals held no jurisdiction over the punishment of the owners, masters, or crew of condemned slave ships. After 1819, these courts were responsible for adjudicating over 500 cases involving the emancipation of over 68,000 people. The courts in Freetown officially closed in 1871. Their records derive mostly from the British Foreign Office and Church Missionary Society.

View Cases