When King’s Lynn Ships Sailed for Africa

On 18 November 1738, the Elizabeth was entered in King’s Lynn’s Town Dues Book. Part of her business looked unremarkable. Edward Everard, a leading Lynn merchant, was sending 1,000 quarters of wheat to Lisbon. An Admiralty pass also named Lisbon as the vessel’s destination and identified her master as John Dickson.

Another government record gave a different destination: the coast of Africa.

The King’s Lynn Port Book was plainer. Beside the Elizabeth appeared the words “Trip to Africa”. Her cargo included sixty garments, aqua vitae, gunpowder, woollen cloth, calicoes, German and English linen, iron, lead shot, cotton goods, and other merchandise. These were among the commodities commonly exchanged for enslaved Africans.

Taken together, the Town Dues Book, Port Book, Admiralty pass, and Treasury record provide the clearest surviving evidence that a King’s Lynn ship was prepared for participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

Which Samuel Browne owned the Elizabeth?

The Port Book names the ship’s owner as Samuel Browne. Several generations of this prominent Lynn merchant family bore the same name, so the distinction is important.

The owner in 1738 was Samuel Browne IV, father of Samuel Browne V. Browne V was born around 1729 and was only about nine years old when the Elizabeth sailed. He cannot have been the merchant directing the voyage.

Samuel Browne IV worked repeatedly with Edward Everard. Their commercial partnership supports the conclusion that Everard’s wheat shipment and Browne’s African voyage formed parts of the same enterprise.

The Samuel Browne who married Hester Case, served as mayor, died in 1784, and was commemorated in St Nicholas’ Chapel was Samuel Browne V. The surviving will dated 1784 also belongs to him. It provides evidence of the later Browne family’s considerable wealth, but it cannot be used as direct evidence about ownership of the Elizabeth in 1738. The numerals were not used by the merchants themselves. They are a later genealogical convention for distinguishing members of the Browne dynasty.

The voyage of 1738

The Treasury record described the Elizabeth as a ship of 200 tons, carrying nineteen crewmen and four guns. Other records put her at about 90 tons. Such discrepancies were common because officials estimated tonnage in different ways.

Nineteen men would have been a large crew for an ordinary merchant vessel of 90 tons. Ships trading for captives needed additional men to operate boats along the African coast, guard prisoners, and replace crew members lost through disease or violence.

Lisbon was probably an intermediate destination. The Elizabeth could unload wheat there before acquiring further merchandise and information for the voyage south. British and Portuguese Atlantic commerce frequently overlapped, although each country operated under its own imperial regulations.

The surviving documents do not reveal where the Elizabeth traded in Africa, how many people her merchants intended to purchase, or whether captives were successfully carried across the Atlantic. Her final destination is also unknown. Those gaps require caution, but the voyage cannot be dismissed as ordinary trade with Portugal. An African destination, nineteen crewmen, four guns, and a cargo suited to exchange on the African coast form a persuasive body of evidence. Historian Richard C. Maguire therefore identifies the expedition as an apparent slave-trading voyage.

A further voyage to Africa was recorded in 1740. It appears in the Treasury series listing ships sent to the African coast between 1734 and 1754, and Maguire describes it as a repetition of the 1738 journey. The published evidence for 1740 is less detailed. Until the original Port Book, Town Dues, customs papers, and Admiralty records have been compared, its cargo, ownership, master, and intended route should not be assumed to have been identical.

Neither journey appears in the principal SlaveVoyages database. A voyage may be missing because its surviving documentation is incomplete, because it was recorded under Lisbon rather than Africa, or because relevant local records have not yet been incorporated.

Lisbon as a partial disguise

The Elizabeth shows how easily Lynn’s involvement could disappear from the historical record. Locally, she was entered for Lisbon. Elsewhere, she was listed for Africa.

The Lynn books contain numerous voyages to Lisbon and Oporto during the late 1730s and early 1740s. It would be wrong to classify these automatically as slave-trading expeditions. Portugal was an important market for English grain and manufactured goods. The Elizabeth nevertheless proves that a declared Iberian destination could form only the first stage of a longer journey. Other Lynn ships may have continued from Portugal to Africa without that intention being recorded clearly in the town’s books. Admiralty passes, correspondence, insurance records, foreign port documents, and customs papers would be needed to identify them.

The Charming Sally of Lynn

The human cargo carried by the Charming Sally is more clearly documented.

In 1759 the vessel sailed to the Gold Coast. At Cape Coast Castle and Anomabu, it embarked 100 enslaved Africans before heading towards the West Indies. Cape Coast Castle was one of the principal British centres where captives were imprisoned before being sold and forced aboard Atlantic vessels.

Government papers described the Charming Sally as a London ship. Local evidence reveals its connection with Lynn.

After French privateers captured the vessel near Antigua, its captain, William Ayres, and a crewman, Richard Jenson, gave statements to trustees in King’s Lynn. The trustees administered a scheme assisting injured seamen and the families of men lost at sea. Both witnesses described their vessel as the “Charming Sally of Lynn”, and the trustees accepted it as such when considering compensation.

Ayres and Jenson stated that the first part of the African voyage had been undertaken on government orders. The passage from Africa to the West Indies was merchant service. Whatever its earlier official employment, the ship’s departure from the Gold Coast with 100 captive Africans was unmistakably a slave-trading operation.

The French capture brings the surviving account to an abrupt halt. The fate of the Africans aboard has not been established. They may have been transferred to another vessel or taken into a French colonial port. Some may have died during the seizure or its aftermath. The available Lynn records do not say.

A slave ship built at Lynn

Lynn’s involvement extended beyond locally owned ships. The Galem, built at King’s Lynn in 1761, later entered the slave trade while registered at Liverpool. SlaveVoyages associates it with three voyages.

Construction, registration, ownership, and commercial direction were separate relationships. The Galem should therefore be described as a Lynn-built slave ship, rather than automatically as a Lynn-financed one.

Its history still connects the town’s shipyards and maritime workforce to the trade. Liverpool merchants organised the voyages, but the vessel carrying captives had been produced beside the Great Ouse by Lynn shipbuilders and associated craftsmen.

The Brownes and the West Indies

Ships belonging to the Browne family were regular visitors to the West Indies, where plantation production depended upon enslaved labour. During the 1760s, the family attempted to establish a trading network involving the Grafton and Crisp Molineux, a wealthy plantation owner from St Christopher, now St Kitts.

By this period, the Browne involved was probably Samuel Browne V, although particular transactions should not be assigned to him without checking the original papers. Browne V was then an adult merchant and a prominent figure in the town.

Molineux’s relationship with Lynn became political. He represented the borough in Parliament from 1774 until 1790. His plantation interests placed him among the West Indian proprietors who resisted measures threatening the slave economy.

Trading with the West Indies was not the same as transporting captive Africans. Lynn ships carried provisions and manufactured goods to plantation colonies, returning with commodities such as sugar and rum. These trades nevertheless supported an economy in which land, processing, shipping, credit, and imperial policy depended heavily upon enslaved labour.

Africans in seventeenth-century Lynn

African people were present in Lynn long before the documented voyages of the Elizabeth.

On 20 May 1643, a boy aged about eleven was baptised at St Margaret’s. The register named him Peter Lynn and described him with the contemporary words “Moore or Mulatto”. An account compiled in 1726 called him “A Blackmore of Mr Seth Hawley’s” and stated that he was bound as an apprentice on the same day.

The language suggests that Seth Hawley exercised considerable control over Peter. Hawley’s family had Atlantic connections, making it possible that the boy had arrived from Barbados, Virginia, or another colony. The surname Lynn, apparently bestowed at baptism, may also indicate that others controlled his identity.

Peter may previously have been enslaved, but this cannot be proved. Apprenticeship in England was legally different from chattel slavery, although it imposed its own restrictions. Nothing certain is known about Peter’s birthplace, parents, route to England, master after apprenticeship, or later life.

A different position appears in the case of Bedfer, described in the 1689 poll tax as “ye Blackamore”. He lived in the Chequer Ward, close to the Custom House and merchants’ warehouses, and was assessed separately for one shilling.

Bedfer was not listed as a servant, apprentice, dependent, or pauper. He appears to have maintained his own household and to have been employed, perhaps in maritime work. In 1690 he was recorded simply as Bedfer, without the racial description. The evidence points to an independent African working man rather than someone held as property.

Their contrasting experiences warn against assuming that every African living in early modern England had the same legal or social position.

Sir Benjamin Keene and the South Sea Company

Another Lynn connection arose through Sir Benjamin Keene, who was born in the town and became a leading British diplomat in Spain.

From 1723 Keene represented the South Sea Company’s interests in Spain. The company held the British asiento, the contract granting it the right to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America. Keene’s work placed him inside the diplomatic arrangements supporting an international slave-trading monopoly.

There is no firm evidence that Keene personally owned a plantation or financed slave voyages from his private fortune. His connection was official and institutional, rather than proven personal ownership.

Lynn was involved, but it was not Liverpool

King’s Lynn did not become a slave-trading centre comparable with Liverpool, Bristol, or London. No evidence suggests that slave voyages dominated the town’s economy.

The surviving documents still demonstrate direct involvement. The Elizabeth was prepared for an African trading voyage in 1738, and another voyage followed in 1740. The Charming Sally carried 100 enslaved Africans in 1759. A ship built at Lynn later made slave voyages from Liverpool, while Lynn merchants traded extensively with plantation colonies.

The scattered nature of the evidence reflects the organisation of Atlantic commerce. A ship could be built in one place, owned elsewhere, registered in London, cleared for Lisbon, and sent onwards to Africa. Searching only the register of ships formally belonging to Lynn will miss some of the town’s connections.

A Lynn opponent of slavery

Lynn also produced opposition to slavery. William Richards, the Baptist minister and author of the 1812 History of Lynn, supported emancipation and became an honorary member of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

Richards does not cancel the activities of Browne, Everard, Molineux, or the merchants behind the Charming Sally. Neither should the actions of those merchants be presented as the view of the entire town. Lynn contained people who profited from slave societies, others who opposed them, African residents whose lives cannot be reduced to slavery, and many inhabitants whose opinions were never recorded.

The strongest history remains attached to particular people and surviving documents. On 18 November 1738, Lynn’s officers recorded the Elizabeth carrying wheat to Lisbon. Other officials recorded her African destination, guns, unusually large crew, and cargo of trade goods. Her owner was Samuel Browne IV.

The names of the people whom his merchants intended to purchase were not written in the Lynn books.

© James Rye 2026

Book a Guided Tour with a Trained and Qualified King’s Lynn Guide Through Historic Lynn

References

Barney, John. “Shipping and Trade in King’s Lynn, 1702–1763.” PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1992.

Maguire, Richard C. Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2021. https://dokumen.pub/africans-in-east-anglia-1467-1833-studies-in-early-modern-cultural-political-and-social-history-41-9781783276332-9781800103160-1783276339.html.

Maguire, Richard C. “Presenting the History of Africans in Provincial Britain: Norfolk as a Case Study.” History 99, no. 338 (2014): 819–838. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-229X.12086.

Richards, William. The History of Lynn. 2 vols. Lynn: W. G. Whittingham, 1812. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62365.

SlaveVoyages. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Accessed 16 September 2026. https://www.slavevoyages.org/.

The National Archives. ADM 7/83, no. 111, Admiralty passes.

The National Archives. BT 6/3156 and T 70/1263, records concerning the Charming Sally.

The National Archives. E 190, King’s Lynn Port Books.

The National Archives. T 64/276A/273, record of ships sailing to the coast of Africa, 1734–1754.

Norfolk Record Office. BL/X6/21, Crisp Molineux to George Irvine, 26 September 1769.

Norfolk Record Office. KL/C44/59, King’s Lynn Town Dues Book, 18 November 1738.

Norfolk Record Office. KL/C44/60, King’s Lynn Town Dues Book.

Norfolk Record Office. KL/C47, King’s Lynn poll-tax records, 1689–1690.

Norfolk Record Office. KL/TS/8, statements of Richard Jenson and William Ayres, 5 and 30 June 1760.

Norfolk Record Office. PD/39/1, baptism of Peter Lynn, St Margaret’s, 20 May 1643.

“King’s Lynn Merchant Houses.” Merchant Houses Trail. https://kingslynn.u3asite.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/marriottswarehousetrustsmerchanthousestrailleaflet.pdf.