Between 1808 and 1867, the Royal Navy maintained a permanent squadron off the West African coast with the specific mission of intercepting slave ships and suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. This was the West Africa Squadron, and it represents one of the most significant, costly, and largely unacknowledged dimensions of Britain’s relationship with slavery.
The Squadron was established in the year after the 1807 Slave Trade Act came into force. Its task was enormous. The Atlantic is a vast ocean. Slave traders were motivated by enormous profits and used fast ships specifically designed to evade naval patrols. The legal basis for intercepting ships of other nations was contested. And the West African coast, where the Squadron was based, was one of the most disease-ridden environments on earth.
Over its sixty-year operation, the West Africa Squadron intercepted approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed over 150,000 people who would otherwise have been transported into slavery. It did so at a cost of over 1,000 British sailors dead, most from tropical diseases contracted on the coast.
No other nation made anything like this commitment. The United States, France, Portugal, Spain, and Brazil all continued the trade after Britain abolished it, and none invested in enforcement on anything approaching the scale of the West Africa Squadron. Britain lobbied, cajoled, pressured, and eventually forced other nations into agreements to suppress the trade, often through diplomatic pressure backed by naval presence.
The West Africa Squadron is almost entirely absent from the reparations debate. It does not fit the narrative. A nation that spent sixty years and over a thousand lives actively stopping the slave trade at sea does not fit neatly into the role of unredeemed perpetrator.
