J&A Anderson

Description: John and Alexander Anderson of J&A Anderson are brokers of a voyage in the Clagett risk book as well as owners of one ship. Alexander is also a signatory to the Guipuzcoa slaving voyage agreement. Alexander was a subscriber to Lloyd’s and both were the nephews of Richard Oswald who operated a Counting House on Philpot Lane. In the late 1740’s Oswald, as part of a partnership Grant, Oswald and Co. purchased Bance (or Bunce) Island, a “slave factory” once owned but left in disrepair by the Royal Africa Company. Bance Island was a key site along the Sierra Leone River for imprisoning and loading captured Africans onto slaving ships. Oswald and his partners were responsible for investing heavily in Bance Island’s defensive capacities, purchasing many guns as well as shackles and technologies of imprisonment, while expanding the holding spaces for enslaved people as well as European factors and agents who managed the operations of the factory. It is estimated that Grant, Oswald and Co. trafficked over 12,000 people from Bunce Island on their ships and others between 1748 and 1784. In addition Oswald also owned a 20,000-acre plantation in Florida south of St. Augustine which he significantly populated by enslaved people trafficked through Bunce Island. The trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database notes 40 slaving voyages where Bance Island was the port where captives were purchased between 1784 when the Anderson brothers took ownership of the fort and 1807. They also note that John and Alexander Anderson owned 5 slaving vessels which made 20 voyages between 1787 and 1808. Horatio Clagett underwrites a voyage of the ship Anderson(s) on page 2 of his risk book, brokered by J&A Anderson sailing from London to Africa. This is most likely the last slaving voyage that the Andersons conducted which left London in February 1807 and disembarked enslaved captives in Kingston Jamaica in May 1808.
Citations/Sources: Hancock, David. Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. |Daniel L. Schafer, “‘A Swamp of an Investment’? Richard Oswald’s British East Florida Experiment,” in Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, ed. Jane Landers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).