Interview with Dr. Richard Stone: Finding Thomas Colston, the less known brother of Edward
By Milan Perera, Third Year English and History
Bristol, Edward Colston and the transatlantic slave trade – they are all inextricably linked like a triple helix. There is the tendency to park the collective blame and guilt at the feet of Edward Colston. The unceremonious toppling of his monument that stood in the city centre during the Black Lives Matter rally in June 2020 attests to this. What if Edward Colston was one of the many hundreds who benefited from the slave trade? What if he wasn’t even the first member of his family to be involved in this dark chapter of Bristol’s history?
It reads like a detective story. There are many pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but no one seems to have attempted to complete it. Perhaps, because the pieces were housed in the wrong boxes. When Dr. Richard Stone was transcribing a Bristol customs account from 1662 that was incorrectly filed in the National Archives, two particular entries caught his attention. His surprise was palatable as this would change our understanding of Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade seismically. The Bristorian met Dr. Richard Stone, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol, to expand on his discovery.
Dr. Stone unveiled his findings in a public lecture organised by the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in Spring 2023 but he has been sitting over them for nearly eight years. When we asked the reasons behind the long gap between initial discovery and the public lecture, Dr Stone said: “Since I started this research, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue by Black Lives Matter protesters has brought more attention to Bristol’s role in the transatlantic traffic of enslaved Africans than ever before.”
When asked how he stumbled upon this discovery, he said: “I was transcribing a Bristol customs account from 1662, which had long been overlooked as it was misfiled at the National Archives. Two intriguing ships caught my eye, the Endeavour and the Mary Fortune.”
“Their destination was labelled as São Tomé, an island off the west coast of Africa! This immediately caught my attention, as I don’t normally see ships heading that far south, and they also had some unusual commodities on board such as glass beads and Indian cloth. So, I added a note saying, ‘slave trader?’, and went on with the transcription.”
The year in question (1662) is significant as until 1698, the Royal African Company (and its predecessor the Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa) had the exclusive rights to African trade. Dr. Stone said: “Just because something was illegal doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Later that year, he was due to teach a class on Bristol’s slave trade, which gave him the window to do some more detective work on these two ships. The first thing he did was to go to the customs records for the following year to see if he could trace when the Endeavour and Mary Fortune came back to Bristol and to see if he could work out where they had been in between. Dr. Stone explained:
“And there they were. Eight months after her departure the Endeavour arrived back in Bristol, and the Mary Fortune returned after 10 months at sea. This was towards the shorter end of the timescale for slave trafficking voyages, which usually took a year to 18 months at the height of the trade, but was certainly plausible at this early stage.
The clincher, though, was what they had on board: “The available records, unfortunately, don’t record the itinerary or last port of call. Still, the cargos of sugar with a smattering of ginger and cotton which filled the holds of both vessels can only have come from one place: the Caribbean!”
It was at this point that he spotted that Thomas Colston was one of two principal investors in the Endeavor voyage. Dr Stone went on: “Like his older brother Edward and his father William, Thomas was a merchant specialising in trade with Spain, where he would have come into contact with the idea that people could be bought and sold. He would also go on to work with the Royal African Company, supplying glass beads to fill the holds of their slave trafficking vessels.”
On connecting the dots, he said: “The combination of the triangular voyage to the Caribbean, the presence of signature slave trafficked goods such as glass beads, felt hats, and Indian cloth, and the involvement of the Colstons left me convinced: I’d discovered Bristol’s first recorded slave trafficking voyages and pushed the date of the city’s entry into the trade back by 35 years.”
On the number of enslaved people taken on each journey, Dr Stone said: “Taking a conservative estimate of the number of enslaved people carried on each voyage, this would equate to more than 10,000 people taken from their lives in Africa to ones of enslavement in the Caribbean. That’s the equivalent of half of the population of Bristol at that time condemned to either death, or a life of enslavement, backbreaking toil, and degradation thousands of miles from home.”
When we asked what he would like the public to take from this startling discovery, he said: “When it comes to Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, there is one name that enters the conversation. But there were around approximately 500 people involved in the slave trade from Bristol.”
According to Dr Stone, there is a direct correlation between the swelling of Bristol’s fortunes in the 17th and 18th centuries and the transatlantic slave trade. He hopes that his discovery would help to unearth less-trodden avenues in Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade to provide a complete picture of this dark chapter in Bristol’s history.
Dr. Stone’s much-awaited book, a comprehensive history of Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, is due to be released in spring 2024, a project he was extremely excited about.