Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The 1674 Capture of the Golden Galley: A Pirate Slave Ship
Transcript
- Lucas: We've covered a lot of ground in this series — from the Bight of Benin to the Caribbean, from the Amistad to the Zong. But there's one story that sits at the messy intersection of piracy, imperial competition, and the slave trade itself: the capture of the Golden Galley in 1674. Luna: I don't think I've heard of that ship. Was it a slave ship? Lucas: It was, but not in the way you'd expect. The Golden Galley was a pirate ship — a vessel that had been raiding Spanish and Portuguese shipping in the Caribbean. But by 1674, its captain, John Pearce, decided to try his hand at the slave trade. He sailed to the coast of West Africa, near modern-day Ghana, to buy captives. Lucas: The problem was, the Royal African Company held a monopoly on English trade in that region. They had forts like Cape Coast Castle, and they didn't take kindly to interlopers — especially not pirates. So when they got word that the Golden Galley was anchored off the coast, they dispatched the HMS Hunter, a naval frigate, to intercept it. Luna: So the English navy was used to protect the slave trade from other European competitors? Lucas: Exactly. And in this case, it was also about suppressing piracy — but the two were deeply intertwined. The Hunter caught up with the Golden Galley near the mouth of the Volta River. After a brief skirmish, the pirates surrendered. On board, the navy found over 200 enslaved Africans, chained in the hold. Lucas: Now, what happened next is fascinating. The captain of the Hunter, a man named Thomas Harman, seized the ship and its human cargo. But instead of freeing the captives, he claimed them as prize — that is, as legitimate spoils of war. Under English law, the Royal African Company had the right to sell them. So the enslaved people on the Golden Galley were simply transferred to the company's forts and sold into the Atlantic trade. Luna: So they went from one form of captivity to another. And the pirates? Lucas: John Pearce and his crew were taken back to London and put on trial at the Old Bailey. They were charged with piracy, not with slave trading — that was perfectly legal. Pearce was convicted and hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping. But the real story is how the capture of the Golden Galley reveals the close relationship between the English state, the navy, and the slave trade. Luna: It's a reminder that the slave trade wasn't just about ships sailing from Africa to the Americas — there was a whole infrastructure of enforcement and monopoly. Lucas: Precisely. And that infrastructure was often brutal. The Royal African Company's agents in Africa were known for their harsh treatment of both captives and their own employees. The company's forts were essentially prisons, where enslaved people were held in dungeons until ships arrived. The conditions were horrific. Lucas: The Golden Galley incident also highlights the competition between European powers. The Dutch, for instance, were also active on the Gold Coast, and they had their own forts. The English were constantly trying to edge them out. In fact, just a few years earlier, the English had captured several Dutch forts, including Cape Coast Castle itself. Luna: So this was part of a larger imperial struggle, not just a one-off pirate story. Lucas: Absolutely. And the enslaved people caught in the middle had no agency. They were commodities, shuffled from one owner to another. The Golden Galley's captives were likely sold to plantations in Barbados or Jamaica, where they would have faced a lifetime of forced labor. Lucas: You know, it's stories like this that make us think about the choices we make in producing this show. We deliberately don't run ads on these episodes. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps keep the show independent and ad-free. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to make sure we can keep telling these stories without any outside pressure. Lucas: So back to the Golden Galley. One detail that sticks with me is that the pirates themselves were often former sailors in the navy or the merchant marine. They knew the slave trade intimately. John Pearce had probably served on slave ships before turning pirate. It's a world where the lines between legal and illegal were very blurry. Luna: And the law was applied selectively — against pirates, but not against the slave traders themselves. Lucas: Exactly. The trial of the Golden Galley's crew was a spectacle. Newspapers in London covered it, and there was public outrage — not at the slave trade, but at the pirates who had disrupted commerce. The Royal African Company was eager to make an example of them. They wanted to send a message that the coast was theirs. Lucas: After the trial, the company auctioned off the enslaved people from the Golden Galley. We don't have records of where they ended up, but they were probably sold in lots to planters. Their names, their languages, their identities — all erased. Luna: It's a small story, but it captures so much about the system. Lucas: It does. And it's a reminder that the slave trade wasn't just a commercial enterprise — it was backed by the full force of the state. The navy, the courts, the press — all of them worked together to protect the trade. The Golden Galley is a window into that world. Luna: I'm glad we covered it. It's an episode that really brings together a lot of the themes we've been exploring. Lucas: Thanks for listening. If you want to dive deeper, we'll have links in the show notes to the trial records and some scholarly articles on the Royal African Company.