#history
Slavery in England.
The accompanying 1907 photo shows a British sailor removing the manacle from a newly freed slave.
The picture is part of a collection donated by Samuel Chidwick to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth. His father Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick, born in 1881, was serving aboard HMS Sphinx.
The Africans featured in the photos escaped in a canoe from a slave-trading village on the coast on hearing that the Royal Navy ship was in the area.
In his report dated 15th October 1907, Commander Litchfield wrote that the ship received ‘six fugitives’ on a cruise off the Batineh Coast, Oman, between the 10th and 14th of October. One of the fugitives had been manacled for three years and had escaped with his leg irons still on.
Samuel Chidwick wrote:
“The pictures were taken by my father who was serving aboard HMS Sphinx while on armed patrol off the Zanzibar and Mozambique coast in about 1907. They caught quite a few slaves and those particular slaves that are in the pictures happened while he was on watch. That night a dhow (sailing vessel) sailed by and the slaves were all chained together.
He raised the alarm and they got them onto the ship and got the chains knocked off them. They then questioned them and sent a party of marines ashore to try to track down the slave traders.
They caught two of them and I believe they were of Arabic origin. My father thought the slave trade was a despicable thing that was going on. The slaves were treated very badly, so when they got the slaves they didn’t give them a very nice time”.
