Paquete da Bahia (1825)

Voyage Overview

The Portuguese Brig, Paquete de Bahia, left Bahia on 4 September 1824 and purchased an unknown number of enslaved people at Ouidah by 22 November 1825. The captain, Bento Francisco de Carvalho, sailed the vessel toward Cuba when Captain John C. Giles of the HMS Swinger captured the vessel somewhere off the coast of West Africa. Although the ship’s owners, João Vítor Moreira and Manoel José de Magalhães, were never formerly charged, the British and Portuguese Court of Mixed Commission, Sierra Leone condemned this vessel and registered 388 Liberated Africans by 10 January 1826. For more information, see Map of 1825.

Archival Resources

1826-01-10 Paquete de Bahia V2954 FO315-31 f244-255

1826-01-10 Paquete de Bahia V2954 Register2 SLR20935-21319

1826-01-10 Paquete de Bahia V2954 Register1 SLR20935-21319

Creator Title

Meyer-Heiselberg, Richard, Notes from Liberated African Department: Extracts from Sources on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade 1808-1860 from the Archives at Fourah Bay College, The University College of Sierra Leone, Freetown, Sierra Leone (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1967).

Description

In 1966, Meyer-Heiselberg compiled a preliminary inventory of the registers’ contents, including systematic notes on the age and gender distribution of Liberated Africans. He projected that the overall total was 94,329 individuals. Of that total, just over 30,000 departed from ports in the Bight of Benin, whereby over 20,000 likely had Yoruba names documented therein. Scholars continue to work on the story of Liberated Africans, which amounts to over 225,000 worldwide and made accessible via www.LiberatedAfricans.org.

Creator

Verger, Pierre, Trade Relations Between the Bight of Benin and Bahia, 17th to 19th Century (Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, 1976), 421-423, 568-575.

Description

This ship list derives from Pierre Fatumbi Verger's footnotes on slave voyages leaving the Bight of Benin for Bahia. Verger (4 November 1902, in Paris – 11 February 1996, in Salvador, Brazil) was a photographer, self-taught ethnographer, and babalawo (Yoruba priest of Ifà) who devoted most of his life to the study of the African diaspora — the slave trade, the African-based religions of the new world, and the resulting cultural and economical flows from and to Africa. Verger continued to study and document his chosen subject right until his death in Salvador, at the age of 93. He was a professor at the Federal University of Bahia since 1973. He was responsible for the establishment of the African-Brazilian Museum in Salvador; and served as visiting professor at the University of Ifé in Nigeria, too. The non-profit Pierre Verger Foundation in Salvador, which he established to continue his work, holds more than 63,000 photos and negatives, as well as his papers and correspondence. For more information see Fundação Pierre Verger http://www.pierreverger.org/en/homepageen-2.html.

As Referenced in Voyages

Parliamentary Papers, Accounts and Papers, vol. 30, (1826), 126. 

TNA, FO84/63, Campbell, Reffel, 27.01.15.

Verger, Pierre, Trade Relations Between the Bight of Benin and Bahia, 17th to 19th Century, (Ibadan, 1976), 569.

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers: Slave Trade, IUPST,11/A1 (Shannon, 1969-74), 10, 40-41, 60.

Meyer-Heiselberg, R., Notes from the Liberated African Department in the Archives at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone (Uppsala, 1967), 21.