Online Maritime History and Culture Seminar
Posted: Tuesday 13th October 2026
Event date: 27 October
Location: Online
Organisers: Royal Museums Greenwich
African experience on slaving vessels captured by the West Africa Squadron, 1808-1867
A free online talk by Dr Jane Webster. This talk is part of the 2026/7 series of the Maritime History and Culture Seminar.
In 1807, the British Parliament passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the Royal Navy began to suppress 'ilegal' trading off the coasts of West and Southern Africa, the Caribbean and Brazil. Over the next sixty years, the West Africa Squadron intercepted 1,600 vessels, and 'liberated' an estimated 160,000 African people from slavery, who now endured a journey to shore known as a 'prize' voyage'.
Despite its 'liberating' purpose, this journey bore notable similarities to the transatlantic Middle Passage, and resulted in a qualified, displaced kind of freedom.
In this talk, Jane Webster will consider how the texts and images produced by naval personnel and held in the collections of Royal Museums Greenwich might be interrogated to reveal African experiences of the 'prize' voyage.
About the speaker: Dr Jane Webster
Jane Webster is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Newcastle University, where she was Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology from 2004 to 2024. She is also undertaking a Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum. Her current research focuses on curated artefacts of both Roman and transatlantic slavery in British museum collections.
