A CIVIC reception hosted by Edinburgh’s Lord Provost (The National, Aug 25) remembered the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. The occasion was the launch of the work of a review implementation group on Edinburgh’s historic links with slavery and colonialism.
I don’t know what the scope of the review has been but would hope it included those many hundreds of Scots transported by Scottish and Edinburgh authorities to work as slaves in plantations. After the Battle of Rullion Green in 1666, some 100 Covenanter prisoners were captured. Were not two-thirds sent to Barbados, the rest hanged? Of the hundreds of Covenanters imprisoned in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Churchyard after the Battle of Bothwell Brig in 1679 were not 257 taken to Leith and battened down in the ship Crown of London to be sold as slaves to the Virginia Plantations?
“It is apparent,” commented the antiquary William Moir Bryce on this transportation, “that the proposed banishment of many of the prisoners as white slaves in the plantations – if not also to make use of torture – originated in the suggestion of the Privy Council in Edinburgh.”
Elsewhere it is written of the Leith-owned Crown of London that the English captain was “a profane wretch” who used his human cargo barbarously ... stowing them between decks such that “they could not get up their heads except to sit or lean ... allowing little or no drink so that many of them fainted ...”
Some of the parched had to drink their own urine. Sailing for America in vile winter weather, the ship was wrecked in fierce seas at Mull of Deerness, Orkneys. The captain, crew and a few prisoners escaped, reaching shore by means of a mast between ship and rocks but leaving some 200 prisoners trapped below, the captain having refused to open the hatches. A survivor wrote of the “lamentable cries of dying men”.
The ship’s owner, merchant William Patterson, later petitioned the Privy Council for the loss of ship and prisoners. The few surviving prisoners, recaptured, were sent to Jamaica. The names of the 200 drowned can be found online. In 1746, in the brutal repression following the defeat of the Jacobite army at the Battle of Culloden, according to historian John Prebble, nearly 700 men, women and children died in gaol or in the abominable holds of Tilbury hulks, from wounds, fever, starvation or neglect. Two hundred were banished and almost 1000 were sold to the American plantations.
CS Lincoln
Edinburgh
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