Beschreibung:

SLAVERY] Nicholas OWEN (d. 1759). Autograph manuscript signed, narrative and journal of voyages between England, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, the West Indies and West Africa, and of five years' residence in Sierra Leone as a slave trader on the Sherbro River, with a short continuation by his brother Blayney after his death, Sierra Leone, 1756 - June 1759, decorated autograph title, 'A View of Some remarkable axcedents In The Life of Nic s Owen on the coast of Africa and america from the Year 1746 to the Year 1757', illustrated with 20 drawings by Owen, in pen and ink, half- and full-page, showing islands and landscapes of the West African coast, as well as indigenous customs, notable characters, artefacts and wildlife, with some maritime scenes and caricatures, 109 pages, 4to (numbered 1-107 in autograph) , (lacking one leaf, pp. 75-76, occasional staining, not affecting legibility, wear and tears to outer margins), morocco backed boards (worn). Provenance . Mr Commissioner Marsh, Chairman of the Navy Board, d.1800 (note on inner cover); and by descent. A JOURNAL OF THE LIFE OF A SIERRA LEONE SLAVE-TRADER IN THE 1750s. Owen, son of an impoverished Irish gentry family, describes first, as a warning to others, his early shipboard life on six slaving voyages between 1746 and c.1754, including such incidents as his involvement in a mutiny and the eventual capture and confiscation of his ship by natives of Sierra Leone. Disillusioned by such adventures, Owen and his brother settle down to make their fortune by slave trading, based initially on Sherbro Island and later at York Island, off the north-west corner of Sherbro. Owen takes a perceptive interest in the lives and customs of the Buloms of the Sherbro region, describing their laws, in particular the curious power of the 'Pora' secret society and of the 'Mandingo' (i.e. Mandinka, a term used for virtually any West African Muslim) diviners, the customs and usages accompanying death and marriage, and the manner of clothing and food. Owen's zoological observations are also of interest, somewhat marred by his indiscriminate use of the word 'worm' to describe creeping things. Owen failed to make his fortune, owing in part to the ill effects on trade of colonial ramifications of the Seven Years' War (1756-63); he died after recurrent fevers on 26 March 1759. There was an English 'factory' in the Sherbro by 1628, and the area was for a time granted to the Royal African Company, which had its base at York Island until 1719. The Company abandoned Sierra Leone in 1728, and was wound up in 1754, being incorporated into the Company of Merchants Trading into Africa. The absence of a central trading company gave an opening for a number of fortune-seeking opportunists to set up as slave-traders on the Sierra Leone coast. Sherbro Island remained a centre of the slave trade until General Charles Turner brought the island and adjacent areas under British protection in 1825. The peculiar influence of the Poro, described by Owen, is reported to survive along the West African coast to this day. The lot also includes Nicholas Owen, Journal of a Slave-Dealer (ed. Eveline Martin, London, 1930). (2)