Captain Evan Seys descended from a distinguished and prosperous Welsh family.[1]  His great-grandfather, Roger Seys (1539-1599), had served Queen Elizabeth I as Under-Sheriff of Glamorgan and then as Attorney General for Wales.  Roger Seys married well, with the estate of Boverton as part of the dowery of Elizabeth Voss (1540-1599).[2]  Their son, Richard Seys (1564-1639) continued in this line, practicing law and marrying the heiress Mary Evans (1570-1641).  Richard and Mary Seys were very prolific, with thirteen children born between 1595 and 1610.  One of these children received the common Welsh name of Evan (1604-1681).  Like his grandfather, Evan Seys took to law and politics.  If anything, Evan Seys was more adept than was Roger because the times were more troubled.[3]  He served both Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate and in the parliaments of King Charles II.[4] 

            William Seys (1610-1691) figured as the last-born of Richard Seys’s brood.  Looking around at all the uncles and cousins ahead of him in the hunt for opportunity, he did the sensible thing.  He moved to London and found work.  Doubtless he benefitted from the position, connections, and knowledge of his older brother Evan.  He married an Englishwoman, Jane Turberville (1612–?).  With her, he had two sons, (Charles Seys, 1631–?) and William Seys (1633—1686).  Jane died at some point before 1655.  William Seys later re-married, to Mary Hakewell, a young widow with a daughter from her first marriage.  The future Captain Evan Seys was born to this couple in 1655. 

            This Evan Seys was the younger son of a younger son.  It is unlikely that he could have expected a rich inheritance.  He would have had to find useful work.  From an early age, his mind turned toward the sea.  He lived in London, the greatest port in Britain, and his father’s business may have had some connection with overseas trade or with the supplying of ships.  Either of these could have put him in contact with sailors and their stories.[5]  It seems likely that he first went to sea at a young age, perhaps as early as age twelve.[6] 

            Starting working so early in life, men could reach positions of authority at what contemporary people would regard as a very young age.  In 1678, at age twenty-three, Evan Seys took command of his first ship, the Royal African Company (RAC) slave ship “Swallow.”  

Going to sea is one thing; going to sea in a slaver is another; and going to sea as a slave ship officer is yet another.  Seys must have had previous experience as an officer on a slave ship for the RAC to have entrusted a ship and its cargo to him.  Sailors on slave ships shared with all sailors the usual rigors of a pre-modern life at sea, increased in their case by the dangers inherent in spending long periods in the Tropics.[7] Added to these was the role of the “Middle Passage” in reducing “captives” to “slaves.”  This involved the crew inflicting immense brutality upon their captives.  The psychological effects on slave ship crews cannot have been healthy.  Still, it wasn’t an uncommon career choice among mariners.  By one estimate, 330,000 sailors served on British slave ships between 1600 and 1800.[8] 

How did Seys compare to other slave ship captains?  For this period. there seems to be no study of the officers and commanders of slave ships equivalent to the work of Emma Christopher on the common sailors.[9] 

His family belonged to the gentry, valuing education and property.  His uncle, a Member of Parliament from 1671 to 1681, was often in London.  This might have given Captain Evan Seys some entree into the halls of power, even if it was only with hat in hand.  If the circumstances demanded it, he could pass for a “gentleman.”[10]  It would have been only human of him to have envied the better-situated members of his own family.

On the other hand, he lived in the Hamlet of Ratcliffe, one of the disreputable Tower Hamlets.  Commonly called “Sailor Town,” Ratcliffe contained boarding houses occupied by men either home from a voyage or looking for a ship, and by taverns, brothels, and pawn shops. 

The “Swallow” wasn’t big, displacing 70 tons.[11]  Between September 1678 and June 1679, Seys sailed his ship to New Calabar,[12] purchased 179 souls, and carried them to slavery in Virginia.[13]  Along the way, he called at Barbados because his food supply for the captives had begun to rot.  He would have been back in London by Fall 1679.[14] 

            The RAC seems to have been pleased with his performance for they soon gave him another voyage.  Between March 1680 and January 1681, again in the “Swallow,” Seys sailed from London to New Calabar, purchased 146 souls, and sailed for Nevis in the West Indies.  This voyage proved much less successful than his first.  The RAC had instructed him to try to purchase 220 souls, but the best he could manage was 146.  Then only 101 of the captives survived the journey.  That amounted to a 30 percent death rate.[15]  The death rate on his first voyage had been 10 percent.  He might have been back in London by April 1681.

At Nevis, Seys purchased one of the captives for himself.[16]  His reasons for doing so are unknown.  Perhaps he intended the person as a gift to some young woman of means whom he hoped to impress.  More likely, he wanted a servant who might be useful, either as a translator in future voyages to the Bight or as a “guardian” who could help keep the captives tranquil during the sea voyage.[17] 

            Not until more than four years later, in August 1685, did Evan Seys command a ship in the service of the RAC.  Four years is a long time for a sailor to spend ashore with no income.  Perhaps he had wanted a break—temporary or permanent—from the slave trade.[18]  He may have commanded another ship or ships not involved in the slave trade[19] or he may have tried his hand at some business enterprise ashore.[20]  In any event, the comparative failure of the second voyage seems not to have soured the RAC on Evan Seys.  His next command marked a step upward. 

The “Oxford” was a larger vessel of 100 tons displacement and 12 guns.  Moreover, his orders took him not to the familiar Bight of Biafra, but much farther south to Cabinda near the mouth of the Congo River.  From there he would carry his captives to Jamaica, deep in the Caribbean.  It was a much longer voyage to an unfamiliar coast and then on to an unfamiliar destination with a bigger ship, so it represented a vote of confidence by the RAC in Seys’s abilities. 

It also amounted to a plum job.  A slave-ship captain’s pay “averaged £0.43 per slave who left Africa….”  In addition, the price of slaves delivered to Jamaica, rather than Barbados, was higher.  As a result, “captains on the Jamaican voyages received 20 percent more in commissions.”[21]  With the ship capacity to carry over 400 captives, and pay in the area of L0.5 per slave loaded in Africa, Seys could expect to be paid-off at the end of the voyage with about L200 Sterling. 

            The “Oxford” sailed from London on 20 August 1685.[22]  Seys called at one or more RAC post on the coast of West Africa on the way down.[23]  He would have bought additional food for his captives.  On a normal slave voyage to Barbados or Nevis, he would have tried to buy gold and other African products to fill out the profit earned from the slaves.  Bound for Jamaica, his ship faced a much greater danger of attack by pirates.  As a result, RAC ships sailing for Jamaica usually did not buy gold.[24]  Finally, he added a sloop to his command at one of the RAC forts.[25]  A sloop is a smaller, single-masted vessel which does not draw as much water as does a ship.  It is faster than a square-rigged ship and with a fore-and-aft rig that made it more handy in confined areas.[26]  It could be used either for in-shore work or for going up-river.  The RAC maintained a number of them in their West Africa posts for the river trade, but they could be detailed to larger ships.[27]  Then he sailed for Cabinda. 

            Seys earned L242 on the voyage of the “Oxford.”  This exceeded the average compensation for captains on the Jamaica voyages (L175) or the Barbados voyages (L155).[28]  Adjusted for inflation, it would be the equivalent of approximately L62,000 today.[29] 

            There are several ways of thinking about this figure.  On the one hand, it was effectively pay for two year’s work, so it amounted to L121 per year.  On the other hand, he had few personal living expenses during the voyage.  He lived aboard the ship; he ate the company-supplied rations that the crew ate, improved by whatever personal stores he had bought before the voyage began or when in foreign ports; and he wore whatever simple, durable gear that he had brought on board with him.  Most of the money he spent during the voyage would have gone for benders and brothels in Port Royal.  He would have received the L242 as a lump sum paid to him after completion of the voyage. 

            Where did it place him among contemporary British income-earners?  According to the calculations of Gregory King, L121 per year would have fallen between the average L154 earned by “Persons of the Law” and the average L72 earned by “Eminent Clergymen.”[30]  On the other hand, he wasn’t a barrister, a solicitor, a dean, or a priest with a favored living.  He was a slave-ship captain living in a rough part of London.  What he may have lacked in traditional social standing, he made up for in the chief measure of a class society.  Seys’s L121 annual income put him in the top 4 percent of “Heads of Families” in terms of income. 

NB: Did he live to enjoy it? 

            The “Oxford” was a hired ship, rather than owned by the RAC.[31]  NB: So had Seys been in the employ of the ship’s owners during the four year gap? 

The Royal African Company’s net income on the Jamaican voyages of £1,133 was nearly twice what the company earned from the voyages to Barbados. The greater risk of piracy on voyages to Jamaica and risk of attack from the Spanish, which likely reduced the trade in gold, may explain part of the difference in returns.” Eltis, “Accounting,” p. 954.  NB: Go back and look up the bit on purchasing gold in West Africa on the way down. 

The time between a ship’s departure from London and its arrival in the Caribbean averaged just over nine and a half months, and ranged from the 182-day voyage of the Mary to Jamaica, to the 386 days it took the Owners Adventure to reach Nevis.(8)  Based on when the final accounts were recorded, it appears that ships reached London about six months after their arrival in the Caribbean. Thus, depending on the African port of embarkation, the entire voyage took between 15 and 17 months.  (p. 942.)  NB: What was I calculating? 

            P. 944, n 8. Ten voyages were to the Eastern Caribbean (nine to Barbados, one to Nevis) and 12 to the Western Caribbean (Jamaica). The Mary went to Senegambia, the most northerly of the African trading regions. Differences in the combined length of the first two legs of the voyage had more to do with the time spent sailing to Africa and purchasing and boarding slaves than with the middle passage. In the mid- 1680s Africa to Jamaica averaged 85 days, which was about two weeks longer than the voyage to Barbados.

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[1] The broad history of the Seys family’s strategy of ascent can be discerned in Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1983).  For the particulars of the genealogy, see:The Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian Glamorgan Monmouth and Brecon Gazette, 10 July 1863, p. 8, “Glamorgan Pedigrees (Part One)” and 17 July 1863, p. 8, “Glamorgan Pedigrees (Part Two).”  https://newspapers.library.wales/view/3093641/3093649   

[2] See: https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/richard-seys-24-2kj9yz6 

[3] On Evan Seys, see http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/seys-evan-1604-85  and Clive Jenkins, “Evan Seys (1604-1685)” at http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/clivejenkins/evan_seys.pdf 

[4] The long history of pragmatic adaptation offers many examples, as does popular culture.  See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rWuJ3eD6Qc  Apparently there wasn’t a Roundhead Slim Charles to clap a stopper on his tricks. 

[5] See the illustration at: https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/sir-walter-raleigh/#gs.nmlvxv 

[6] For most of human history, children went to work at an early age.  Apprenticeships in the trades often began at age twelve.  Midshipmen (officer trainees) in the Royal Navy commonly joined their first ship at age twelve.  Sir Horatio Nelson offers an example.  Thereafter, they attended the “school of the sea.”  There is an English folk-song called “The Shoals of Herring” about the life of a fisherman who started as a cabin-boy.  https://mainlynorfolk.info/ewan.maccoll/songs/theshoalsofherring.html 

[7] NAM Rodger,The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York: WW Norton & Co, 1996). 

[8] Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).  On average, that would have been 1,650 sailors in any given year.  The crew of H.M.S. “Bounty” was 44 officers and men; the crew of H.M.S. “Beagle” on its famous second voyage was 65 officers and men, plus 9 supernumeraries. 

[9] For a later period, see Stephen Behrendt, “The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire #140 (1991), pp. 70–140.  See also: Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007).

[10] The near-gentle status of slave-ship captains and surgeons is a point made in passing by Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 637-670. 

[11] That didn’t make the “Swallow” tiny.  It’s just that it is tricky.  Today’s Cal40 sloops displace 7.5 tons.  The H.M.S. “Bounty” was 90 feet long and displaced 215 tons.  The U.S.S. “Constitution” is 175 feet in length at the waterline and displaces 2,200 tons. 

[12] That is the mouth of the New Calabar River in the Niger River delta.  It was at that time the center of the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra. 

[13] The voyage formed a part of the RAC’s floundering, inconstant effort to develop the Chesapeake Bay slave market.  See Charles Killinger, III, “The Royal African Company Slave Trade to Virginia, 1689-1713,” M.A. Thesis, College of William and Mary, 1969, pp. 11, 94-95.  Killinger calculates that, between 1673 and 1688, the Chesapeake took only 3 percent of the slaves delivered to the Americas by the RAC. 

[14] Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database (slavevoyages.org): Voyage 15065.  See also Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie, 1930) Vol. I, Document #83, p. 250. 

[15] Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database (slavevoyages.org): Voyage 9914. 

[16] Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Vol. I, Document #88: “Accounts of the Swallow, 1679-1681,” pp. 256-258.

[17] See: Stephanie Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 64, #4 (October 2007), pp. 679-716.  The terms “probably” and “may” begin to appear frequently in her discussion.  Which is convenient for me. 

[18] Seys had spent about 22 months out of 29 months at sea as captain of a sailing ship, loaded with all the responsibilities that such a position involves.  You don’t have to sympathize with a bad man involved in a brutal business.  But Eric Muhsfeld, one of the SS guards in the crematoria in Auschwitz, had to be treated for high blood pressure.  However we regard such people, they usually regard themselves as normal human beings. 

[19] Seys’s command in 1685, the “Oxford,” was a ship hired, rather than owned, by the RAC.  Seys may have been serving as captain of that ship during the years after commanding the “Swallow.”  David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kimberley McIntyre, “Accounting for the Traffic in Africans: Transport Costs on Slaving Voyages,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 70, #4 (December 2010), p. 953, Table 4, Column 3. 

[20] In Spring 1685 he brought suit against three other men (two merchants and one “Gentleman”) over responsibility for a bond.  See: Case #111: Seys v. Bellwood, ‘Pleadings, 1685-1686: nos 91-120’, in London and Middlesex Exchequer Equity Pleadings, 1685-6 and 1784-5, ed. Henry Horwitz and Jessica Cooke (London, 2000), pp. 33-43. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol35/pp33-43. 

[21] David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kimberley McIntyre, “Accounting for the Traffic in Africans: Transport Costs on Slaving Voyages,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 70, #4 (December 2010), p. 951.  The sample of voyages studied by the authors include the voyage of the “Oxford.” 

[22] Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database (slavevoyages.org) Voyage 9861. 

[23] Likely Fort George/Fort Secondee at Takoradi in what is now Ghana. 

[24] David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kimberley McIntyre, “Accounting for the Traffic in Africans: Transport Costs on Slaving Voyages,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 70, #4 (December 2010), p. 942, 952 n. 20. 

[25] Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database (slavevoyages.org) Voyage 21077, “Sloop to Oxford.”  Followed the same itinerary as the “Oxford.” 

[26] Think of just about any sailboat that you may have seen on the Chesapeake Bay or Puget Sound or the Charles River basin. 

[27] Kenneth G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green: 1957), pp. 194-195. 

[28] David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kimberley McIntyre, “Accounting for the Traffic in Africans: Transport Costs on Slaving Voyages,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 70, #4 (December 2010), p. 953, Table 4. 

[29] See the Consumer Price Index calculator at https://www.officialdata.org/1760-GBP-in-2018?amount=100  The CPI calculator takes 1760

[30] “A General View of the National Income and State of Society, in England and Wales,” Robert Forster and Elborg Forster, eds., European Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper and row, 1969), pp. 239-240. 

[31] David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kimberley McIntyre, “Accounting for the Traffic in Africans: Transport Costs on Slaving Voyages,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 70, #4 (December 2010), p. 953, Table 4, Column 3.