Between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, a motley band of men were ensconced in a fort on the Gold Coast of West Africa, which is Ghana today. These men were members of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading with Africa, trading commodities with local communities – the area was, as the name suggests, home to gold as well as mahogany. For a long time, however, they also traded people: they were slave traders.

Their main base was Cape Coast Castle, whose description as a commercial fort was far more salubrious than its other name – that of a slave castle. Cape Coast Castle developed an unenviable reputation as a place where local men, women and children were holed up in appalling conditions, in dungeons underneath where the European traders lived a better and very unequal life. Local women were deemed fair game to these white men, who sometimes paired themselves to them on their arrival on the Gold Coast – gaining an unofficial ‘wife’, although obviously this was nothing like a relationship of equals, and women had little choice but to comply with decisions made by the fort’s slave-trading inhabitants. Various sexual abuses also took place in the fort’s infamous dungeons, where individuals were held before being shipped out as slaves. Today, we recognise the behaviour of these company men as being far from honourable in terms of how they perceived those they came into contact with, seeing locals as commodities rather than fellow humans.

Cape Coast Castle had been established in the 17th century, initially by the Swedish Africa Company. It had then become a Dutch establishment, before the English conquered it at the end of the century, using it as a military base. It had a fearsome reputation even at this point: in the 1680s, one pirate, Duncan Mackintosh, was hanged there with some of his crew; and 40 years later, the infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts and his crew were condemned to death, with 52 men being hanged as a result.

The fort was extended a few times over the mid to late 18th century, but after the Seven Years’ War, there was no longer a military function to the buildings, and it became a slave and goods trading castle, with slave dungeons being established under two bastions that had not long been built. This was the Gold Coast home of the Royal Adventurers, who were headed by a governor, assisted by a committee, and with a number of staff, all with separate functions and military-sounding ranks.

To get an indication of who was working for the Royal Adventurers in the early 19th century, we can look to the Royal Kalendar of Court and City Register. In 1819, it listed the officers at Cape Coast Castle, who all came under the remit of the Governor in Chief, John Hope Smith. Under him was a council, which comprised a vice-president, William Mollan, who was also governor of the Anamaboe Fort, and four other council members. Three of these were also governors of local forts – Fort Tantum, Fort Accra and Fort Discove. The governors of Forts Apollonia, Succondee and Komenda (or Commenda) did not sit on the council.

Then, beyond the council and fort governors, there were administrative staff: an accountant and his deputy; a surveyor and his deputy; a warehouse keeper and gunner, registrar, and captain of the guard. There were also medical professionals – a chief surgeon and his four assistant surgeons; plus writers, clerks and a schoolmaster; and the one female employee, employed as a hospital matron.

These men were drawn from various backgrounds, although they appear to have been educated, and many would make if not a fortune from their employment, then certainly enough to live on once they returned to England. Samuel Banks, who in 1819 was one of the assistant surgeons at Cape Coast Castle, had been born in the 1780s, and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1803, when the organisation was only a few years old. He had retired by the early 1830s, when he relocated to Jersey. As with many of these officers, there is little clue in the censuses of their past lives; it’s not clear whether some hid their pasts, in an awareness that it might not be seen in a good light by a more enlightened, post-slavery society, or whether it was simply their past and no longer relevant. Samuel Banks is recorded in the 1841 and 1851 censuses simply as a retired surgeon, and so to simply rely on these records gives a sanitised and very partial account of his working life.

In some cases, however, the way in which these individuals continued to describe themselves makes for interesting reading. John Heather, who worked his way up the company ladder from accountant to governor of Fort Komenda, spent his post-African life in Kensington, where he described himself as a captain. One newspaper report of him as an elderly man acerbically noted that ‘he terms himself a “captain”’, which would be odd if he really had been an army captain, as the title suggests; but in fact, the Cape Coast Castle men had military-style ranks, and it is clear that Heather wanted the respectability he thought his former status in Africa gave him.

Staff turnover
Of course, the officers were only able to make money and later live off their gains if they were lucky enough to survive – not only was the voyage to the Gold Coast long and arduous, but the conditions at the fort were not conducive to health. It was hot; there were diseases; but more than that, the way of life was so different to home that some failed to adjust. It was known that young men lasted longer than older ones, but also that there was such a high turnover in staff due to death that young employees could gain promotions in a far shorter period of time than they would normally at home. One officer had drowned off the coast when still young, apparently forgetting that he was unable to swim. One feels, given the condition that slaves were held in, that this was a bit of divine retribution.

The company had its UK base at 2 Frederick’s Place on Old Jewry in the City of London. From there, it would regularly advertise in the press, stating when its ships were due to leave for the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, on the coast, the accountant and his assistant would assiduously write up alphabetised accounts of expenditure to send back home to London. These are held at The National Archives and make for uncomfortable reading. There are records of payments on fort repairs and care for the sick and wounded, alongside ‘white men’s salaries’, ‘black men’s pay’ and ‘castle slaves’. Local men were also employed to undertake canoe journeys for the company, and payments both for new canoes and for pay for the canoemen are also recorded in the accounts. Contrasting with such payments are the lists of items ordered to make Englishmen’s lives more comfortable in the fort: items including haberdashery, silks, wine corks, rum, and food – from pickles, pepper and mustard to tongue.

Then there are more obvious items that a fort would need: iron, lead and gunpowder; swords; topsails and boats; clothing items such as uniforms, stockings and shoes; and cleaning products (starch and ‘blue’). Interspersed with such mundane items are references to burial expenses and deceased members of the company. Death was never far away, both for the officers and, probably more frequently, those people who had been enslaved or were being held in the dungeons, destined for lands far away from their friends and families.

By the mid-19th century, the Royal Adventurers’ time in Ghana was drawing to a close. British involvement in the slave trade officially ended with the abolition laws of the early part of the century, but traders in Ghana still participated in slavery – as either participants or creditors, as Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz have described it – until 1874, when it was explicitly abolished on the Gold Coast. In the 20th century, Cape Coast Castle was restored by the Ghanaian government, with money from the US and the UN, and since 1974, it has been a museum. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For those of us with ancestors involved with the Company of Royal Adventurers, there is little to be proud of; I find it hard to reconcile the fact that my own 5x-great-grandfather, John Heather, was so proud of his stint as governor of Fort Commenda that he named his eldest daughter after it (my 4x-great-grandmother, his second daughter, took Banksia as her middle name, after her godfather – Cape Castle surgeon Samuel Banks). He was a young man, possibly illegitimate, who had gone halfway round the world to make his mark on the world. He did so in a way that we would see as appalling and shameful, yet he – and many in his world – saw it as perfectly acceptable. In old age, suffering from various infirmities, did he ever think about the mental and physical pain that was meted out on the slaves who were once held at Cape Coast Castle? He might not, but we do today, and the blunt accounts of expenditure on slaves that The National Archives preserves will ensure that our descendants will similarly remember.