Transforming fortunes? Personal legacies of British slavery at the making of the Swan River colony

Abstract

Throughout the Swan River colony’s foundational years, in another sphere of empire, British slavery was gradually being dismantled. This article links these two discrete processes through the biographical case studies of six early emigrants to the Swan River colony with connections to British slavery. Through an exploration of their aspirations and attempts to seek prosperity through emigration, I argue that the Swan River was viewed as a place that could transform fortunes: for some, a means to emulate the successes of their forebears in other British colonies; for others, simply a way to escape the bonds of slavery itself.

Keywords:

• Swan River
• Western Australia
• British slavery
• biography
• settler colonialism

Introduction

Settler Western Australia has long been attached to the foundational myth of having been built upon ‘free’ labour and investments.¹ Yet the colony’s foundation occurred during the gradual dismantling of British slavery – one of the most significant global shifts of the early nineteenth century. A growing body of scholarship is emerging through the work of the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project which has begun to unravel the colony’s founding myths, interrogating the nature of the legacies of British slavery in terms of wealth, people, attitudes and practices.² In particular, Jane Lydon has recently examined the personal connections of early Swan River colonists including Charles Dawson Ridley, James Walcott, George Leake, Peter Pegus and John Randal Phillips, and their transmission of wealth from slavery ventures in the West Indies to the Swan River.³ Georgina Arnott has similarly explored the connections to slavery of Western Australia’s first governor, James Stirling.⁴ This article builds upon this scholarship through a case study of the aspirations of six early slavery-connected emigrants who sought to transform their fortunes through emigration to the Swan River colony. I scrutinise how early colonists viewed Swan River as a new imperial theatre where slavery-related enterprises might be emulated, particularly for descendants of slave and plantation owners of other British colonies in the West Indies.⁵ I also demonstrate how the Swan River was equally a place where the formerly enslaved could transition from a state of bondage and pursue a free(r) life in the Australian settler colonies. Notably across all examples, transformations in fortune rarely materialised, pointing strongly to the changing nature of imperial wealth-building marked by the wider transmutation of British slavery to settler colonialism.

This article adopts a biographical approach to consider the attempted transformations in fortune of six key individuals – all with previously unidentified or underexplored personal links to British slavery. Each emigrated to the Swan River colony between 1829 and 1832: John Randal Phillips, Peter Pegus, James Somers Rae, Mark John Currie, Robert Dale and an entirely forgotten name, William Hickman.⁶ They range from white, wealthy men who benefited from the industry of British slavery to a man of colour formerly enslaved in Jamaica. Despite their diverse backgrounds, all looked to Swan River for positive transformations in fortune: to bolster wealth, secure land and emulate the successes of their forebears, or simply to find freedom. Yet their fortunes at Swan River never changed quite in alignment with their aspirations. In these case studies, I employ the methods of biographical and genealogical research techniques to map the lives and ancestral histories of these individuals across colonial spheres, particularly the West Indies and the Swan River colony.⁷ My approach, in the vein of pioneering scholars such as Catherine Hall and Emma Christopher who similarly illuminate imperial stories, allows for more intimate transnational histories to (re)emerge, enabling historians to more fully capture the inherent imperial interconnectedness of, and the bridge between, British slavery in the West Indies and the new settler colonies.

The biographical approach carries some limitations. For all six individuals taken as case studies, knowledge about their lives is disjointed, incomplete and rarely appears in their own words or thoughts. Even if they were more complete, no single biography presented here can reveal all of the wider historical processes at play when viewed in isolation.⁸ But in threading disparate archives and fragments of life and intergenerational stories together, and viewing them as a common ‘cluster’, rather than as singular or discrete, the sum is revealed to be considerably more illuminating than its individual parts.⁹ Here, I suggest that this ‘cluster’ biographical approach, though sometimes speculative, highlights narratives of wider historical processes, such as slavery’s legacies, that may be difficult to perceive through the method of individual biography alone.¹⁰

In conducting the biographical and genealogical research for the six case studies presented here, the Legacies of British Slavery (LBS) database has been central in probing global links to British slavery.¹¹ Developed by University College London (UCL), the LBS database functions as a digitised record of all British slavery compensation awards following the abolition of British slavery in 1833, documenting some 50,000 slave and plantation owners, and detailing the amount of compensation they received from the ‘loss’ of their enslaved labour force.¹² Containing specific details of estate ownership and biographical information on most slave- or plantation-owning individuals, the database serves as a useful entry point for identifying the beneficiaries of slavery compensation.¹³ Its search functionality has proved instrumental in identifying and tracing the movement of people and wealth associated with British slavery across the globe, including to Western Australia.¹⁴ However, I suggest the need to engage more closely with the database beyond the search function, which is reliant on connections to various geographies and people already established through the research of the LBS team.¹⁵ By tracing the genealogies of early emigrants to the Swan River (including to individuals not identified in the database) and uncovering their extended family networks, the database becomes useful in identifying more distant and complex intergenerational links to, and legacies of, British slavery in the making of the new settler colonies. Moreover, the database is largely limited to illuminating the lives of slave and plantation owners, rather than enslaved people themselves who are not listed in the database, yet namelessly live on in the records of their owners or the estates that confined them. Performing genealogical research in tandem with the LBS, the database can be used to recover ‘disfigured lives’ and map transnational life histories that existed at strange intersections between ‘slave’ and ‘free’, which is, to draw on Saidiya Hartman, ‘as close as we come to a biography of the captive and the enslaved’.¹⁶

This analysis aims to answer several questions. First, who were the (previously unexamined) individuals that emigrated to the Swan River colony with demonstrable links to British slavery? Second, what aspirations and ambitions did they visualise in the colony? And third, did their fortunes transform in line with their expectations following emigration? In doing so, this article contributes to the emerging body of scholarship substantiating the depth, breadth and diversity of connections between the Australian settler colonies and enduring legacies of British slavery, particularly in the context of Swan River, through the identification of new connections that have not yet been identified or fully explored.¹⁷

Personal legacies of slavery in the Western Australian ‘first fleet’

Governor James Stirling, in his depiction of the earliest colonists of Swan River, observed that they comprised ‘more than the usual number of men of property and family’.¹⁸ Stirling did not draw an explicit link to personal or familial links to British slavery. This may simply have been because, at this point in time, personal connections to slavery were often implicit in the definition of a well-connected ‘man of property and family’.¹⁹ Ann Curthoys, for instance, has observed that ‘family networks were fundamental to the spread of empire, drawing on and contributing to elite connections … and transferring inherited wealth’.²⁰ The need to pay attention to these ‘family networks’ crystallises in the context of the abolition of British slavery, where the futures of slave-owning families were placed in immediate jeopardy.²¹ More specifically, Curthoys has remarked on the tendency for second-in-line sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slave-owning families to pursue new, though more uncertain, futures in emerging settler colonies.²² In extending upon the work of this body of scholarship, most particularly by Lydon and Arnott, I show that the Swan River was no exception. As these individuals arrived in the colony, each brought various legacies of British slavery, whether by personal memory of experience in the West Indies, financial legacies of wealth bolstered by the payment of compensation in the abolition of British slavery, or simply in ambition, to imitate the success of their forebears in other colonial spaces.

The opening two individuals I discuss, John Randal Phillips and Peter Pegus, have been identified by others and their connections to slavery probed, but I offer further detail and insight.²³ The following case studies explore individuals with previously unidentified links between slavery and Swan River.

John Randal Phillips

Among the earliest emigrants to the Swan River colony was John Randal Phillips (1795–1852), who held close personal and familial links to British slavery.²⁴ John Randal was descended from lines of Barbadian settlers involved in slavery enterprise and plantation owning.²⁵ On both the paternal and maternal side, John Randal’s forebears had permanently settled in Barbados during the seventeenth century.²⁶ The Phillips family amassed significant wealth through slavery, some of which was later personally inherited by John Randal.²⁷ The vast majority of this wealth stemmed from his paternal grandfather, also named John Randal Phillips, who participated in the trade of tobacco and sugar, products cultivated in the West Indies through the use of enslaved labour.²⁸

Following his death in 1773, John Randal senior’s wealth was distributed among his immediate family, particularly to his son George Phillips (John Randal’s father), also born in Barbados.²⁹ At this time, if not before, George began to invest and take an active involvement in plantation and slave ownership, a business which he viewed as the key ‘to secure the comforts of his future life’.³⁰ Entries in George’s account book during these years provide insight into this strategy, detailing the earnings he derived from his newly inherited Barbados properties, which included personal ownership of at least 27 enslaved people.³¹ In an effort to increase his profits and perpetuate the familial tradition of slave and plantation owning, George also purchased new land in Barbados, constructing a ‘chaise house, stable and negroe houses [sic]’.³² His account books show that he was in possession of at least three properties that housed enslaved people.³³ George’s direct and personal management over his enslaved human property is clear, but equally are his attempts to ensure that his property not only laboured, but performed reproductive labour in the form of increasing his enslaved labourers: his account books reveal that he frequently organised for midwives to attend to his enslaved women and assist in the delivery of enslaved children.³⁴ Entirely omitted, of course, from the entries in George’s account books and the value and ‘expenses’ of his chattel property is any indication of the experiences of the enslaved people which bolstered the Phillips family wealth and George’s future comforts.

By the time of John Randal’s birth in 1795, the couple had relocated to Winterbourne, near Bristol, but John Randal must have spent time in Barbados during his early adulthood, as after emigrating to the Swan River in 1829 he was described by fellow West Australian settler George Egerton Warburton as an ‘old West Indian’.³⁵ Whether John Randal was directly involved in slavery is yet to be determined. In any case, following George’s death in 1817, this slavery-derived wealth was once again distributed intergenerationally, passing in part to John Randal. He had been bequeathed 450 guineas, a significant sum, though his inheritance was greatly reduced following the settlement of his father’s debts.³⁶ John Randal also received at least two additional bequests deriving from slavery-tied wealth from close family members. In 1830 he received £1,500 from his aunt Elizabeth Lovell (neé Osborne), and he received an additional sum from his grandmother, Margaret Lovell (neé Harris).³⁷

The familial wealth reaped from slave and plantation owning in Barbados over several generations, which had bolstered the family’s status as privileged landed gentry over generations and secured the ‘comforts of … future life’, likely informed Phillips’ own aspirations of positive fortune for the new colony at Swan River. Upon his emigration, he invested an initial £435 in the colony, in addition to holding two letters of credit totalling £700, and was accordingly granted 6,600 acres of land.³⁸ Despite the capacity to transform one’s fortunes that a large, undeveloped grant of land possessed, it held no such promise for John Randal compared to the success of his forefathers in Barbados. John Randal’s agricultural pursuits suffered from soil infertility and from fire damage by local Noongar people, which destroyed ‘the house and several out-buildings’.³⁹ By December 1841, John Randal abandoned agricultural development altogether, selling his remaining ‘Stoke Farm’ property (600 acres, with only 70 under cultivation) to instead assume numerous government positions.⁴⁰

By his death in 1852, the Phillips familial wealth was all but lost. Only upon the sale of his ‘goods, chattels, credits and effects’ did his assets attain the meagre value of £230.⁴¹ In a final echo to his personal experiences and ancestral legacies in Barbados, the texts History of the West Indies and Hortus Jamaicansis (a guide to native plants) were among the items in his possession.⁴² John Randal’s circumstances differed markedly due to the positive transformations of fortune he likely anticipated from a large land grant, laboured upon through new gradations of unfree forms of labour at Swan River, and equally from the successes of his grandfather’s and father’s agricultural operations in the West Indies decades prior. Randal experienced first-hand the fast-foreclosing possibility of traditional wealth-building as the British imperial world tilted on its axis in its transition from slavery to its new imperial formations in the emerging settler colonies.

Peter Pegus

John Randal was far from unique in seeing emigration in the Swan River as imbued with the potential to transform fortunes for those with close personal connections to slavery. Peter Pegus (c.1787–1853), also among the ‘first fleet’ of emigrants to the new colony, was born in Grenada around 1787 to Peter Pegus senior (1746–1803), a London merchant and owner of slave plantations from at least 1772.⁴³ In addition to the ‘Hermitage’ estate, described as ‘one of the finest plantations in Grenada … pleasantly situated … a few miles from the sea shore’, Pegus senior was also in ownership of 97 enslaved people on a Carriacou plantation producing 32,800 pounds of cotton. To give a sense of the scale of the Pegus family slavery ventures, this output was the fourth-largest production of cotton on Carriacou.⁴⁴

Peter Pegus junior’s mother was not identified as his father’s wife, Susannah Henrietta Pegus, suggesting that his mother was most likely an enslaved woman, with Peter being an illegitimate, mixed-race son.⁴⁵ This dual status, of both racial ‘inferiority’ and genealogical illegitimacy, likely informed Peter’s life trajectory and envisioning of a place in which to transform his fortunes. In contrast to his brother, Pegus senior’s younger but legitimate son, Peter William (1792–1860), Peter was on a distinctly lower footing. Peter William married into the British aristocracy, his eligibility for marriage and upward mobility underpinned, both socially and financially, by his status as a legitimate – and white – son.⁴⁶ Peter was left to join the armed service, after a commission was purchased for him following his father’s death.⁴⁷ Despite his lower perceived status, Peter distinguished himself as an excellent soldier and gradually ascended the military – and thereby social – ranks, rising to the position of captain in the 51st regiment.⁴⁸

The opportunities for transforming one’s personal fortunes through a military career alone, particularly following the close of the Napoleonic Wars, were limited. Perhaps for this reason, Peter emigrated to the Swan River colony in 1829, bringing investments worth a substantial total of £1,552.⁴⁹ In accordance he received a grant of 18,053 acres: the twelfth-largest grant of land among the initial grants of 1829–1830.⁵⁰ However, harsh and demanding realities on the ground, particularly the systemic problem of soil infertility and, in Peter’s case, bushfire, led to many challenges, and his time in the colony was later described as where ‘he was ruined’.⁵¹ By 1836, with the realisation that Swan River did not hold the transformation of fortune that he may have envisioned, Peter departed to the colony of Van Diemen’s Land in search of better prospects.⁵²

Usefully illuminating the diverse trajectories of slavery’s legacies, in the same year that Peter departed for Tasmania, his half-brother Peter William came into the receipt of £1,597 in slavery compensation for his share of the Union Estate, Grenada.⁵³ By the time of his death in 1860, Peter William left the legacy of a substantial estate valued at marginally under £5,000, whilst Peter had died several years earlier in Tasmania, with his wife and children left in significant poverty.⁵⁴ Fortunes differed markedly between Peter and his brother. His illegitimacy and his mixed-race status led him to take up a military profession, which in turn drew him to look to the Swan River colony as an avenue to secure status as a landed man of property. We can also speculate upon more explicit continuities at play: Peter may have had his father’s financial successes of West Indian plantation owning in mind with his 18,000-acre acquisition of land at Swan River. Yet how the intricacies of the more complex dynamic – of his racial status and personal experiences of slavery – intersected and informed his aspirations of land ownership and agricultural pursuits at Swan River is less easy to speculate upon.

James Somers Rae

Early emigrant James Somers Rae (1788–1833) also had a family history of plantation owning through his connection to his uncle, William Rae (1764–1837), a large-scale slave owner.⁵⁵ William Rae amassed a considerable fortune, which was bolstered by slavery compensation through the receipt of £19,186 between 1836 and 1838.⁵⁶ Whilst the Rae family resided primarily in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, William Rae owned multiple plantations across Jamaica: Arntully, Brook Lodge, Eccleston, River Head and Sherwood Forest (all in St. David), Petersfield (Port Royal) and Unity Valley (St. Ann).⁵⁷ William’s plantations operated on significant scale, with the total compensation for the above plantations also reflecting the ‘value’ of 535 enslaved individuals.⁵⁸

James Somers Rae arrived in the Swan River colony aboard the Emelia and Ellen in March 1830, accompanied by his wife Henrietta, their two children and four servants: Sarah Farrell, John and Maria Bastide, and Petro Barvide.⁵⁹ James Rae’s investment in the Swan River represented an unexceptional £482, and it is unclear if any of the Rae family’s slavery-derived wealth made its way directly to James Somers or the Swan River. William Rae’s will, dated 1834, indicates he bequeathed his properties across England and Scotland, his Jamaican ‘plantations houses lands and real estate’, the ‘apprenticed labourers attached’, and all cash, to be distributed among the nephews and nieces of his (deceased) sister, Mrs Newall. No provision appears to have been made for his brother John Rae – James Somers’ father – apart from the small sum of £150 a year which he left in a codicil, on the condition that John forfeit claim to any of his properties in Scotland.⁶⁰ Indeed, circulations of the Rae family wealth, predominantly accumulated through William’s 50-year residence in Jamaica and extensive ownership of enslaved people and plantations, remained a point of contention between William and John.⁶¹ The recognition of the importance of colonial ventures to securing wealth was a fact that the Rae brothers were cognisant of, and was in all likelihood adopted by James Somers. The potential to transform and reverse personal and familial fortunes for James Rae at Swan River must be placed within this history of familial tension and dispute.

Any attempts to emulate his uncle’s transformation of fortune in Jamaica were to remain both aspirational and also fleeting. James Somers, riddled with debts to other Swan River colonists, swiftly left the colony with his wife and children in 1831 for Mauritius, a mere 15 months after his arrival, forfeiting all claims to land.⁶² He died just two short years later, in Srivilliputhur, India.⁶³

At this juncture, it is worth reflecting upon the transforming fortunes of family members in different spaces of empire occurring simultaneously during the 1830s. Whilst James Somers was attempting to find success in the settler colony of Swan River, his uncle, still in the declining Jamaican colony, was registering ownership of over 500 enslaved persons as late as 1832. In a testimony to William’s faith in the continuation of the institution despite the looming prospect of abolition, he purchased a further 57 enslaved people at auction. Meanwhile, James Somers had exhausted his faith in the Swan River, and had moved on to Mauritius, another British colony where slavery remained in operation.⁶⁴

Mark John Currie

(Captain) Mark John Currie (1795–1874) was also linked to a family history of slavery, with several of his close relations reaping the financial benefits of slavery compensation. Although Mark John does not appear to have personal experience in the West Indies, born and raised in Surrey, he was the nephew of Isaac Currie (1760–1843) who had financial, and likely personal connections to slave estates in Jamaica.⁶⁵ Isaac’s involvement in slavery enterprise was significant in scale. In 1837, he was the executor of multiple claims of slavery compensation: Roslin Estate, Brimmer Hall Estate, Trinity Estate and Tryall Estate – all in St Mary’s parish, Jamaica. When put together, these claims reach a total of £15,381 – a huge sum reflecting the ‘worth’ of over 800 enslaved people.⁶⁶ Moreover, Isaac’s son, Isaac George Currie (1792–1858) – Mark John’s cousin – also appears in the LBS as trustee for several estates in Westmoreland, Jamaica, receiving £20,031 in slavery compensation.⁶⁷ Upon his death in 1858, Isaac George Currie left a total of around £200,000.⁶⁸ Further, William Currie (1756–1829), Mark John’s uncle, is also of note for connections to British slavery through his marriage to Percy Gore, daughter of Colonel Francis Gore (1769–1852), the first Governor of Grenada.⁶⁹

Much of the Curries’ familial wealth stemmed from profits associated with the family banking venture Curries & Co, established in 1773.⁷⁰ The Currie family dominated the business with William Currie (1721–1781), Mark John’s grandfather, the primary provider of initial capital.⁷¹ The extent to which Curries & Co financed slavery and slavery-related industries merits further investigation, but the bank was sufficiently embroiled to earn an identification in the LBS for its role as mortgagee for several West Indian estates.⁷² Whether any wealth associated with Curries & Co specifically made its way to the Swan River with Mark John, following his arrival aboard the Parmelia in 1829, is yet to be determined.⁷³ Nevertheless, Mark John did provide enough capital to assure him of a substantive grant of 12,000 acres, and was also accompanied by a number of servants: Frederick Ludlow (b.1796), Mildred Ludlow (1803–1834) and Jane Fruin.⁷⁴

Situating Mark John’s investment in Swan River within a wider familial strategy of imperial wealth-building, it is not implausible to speculate that capital associated with Curries & Co may have been reinvested in the colony. Mark John’s cousin, Raikes Currie (1801–1881), also turned to the Australian colonies for transformations in fortune and the reinvestment of capital, in his instance to neighbouring South Australia. Raikes was one of the founders of the South Australian Company, although he does not appear to have ever resided in the colony personally.⁷⁵ Nevertheless, Raikes’ wealth, and colonial investments, were great. At his death, Raikes’ ‘personalty’ was valued at around £280,000, a very significant amount for the period.⁷⁶ A Raikes Currie also appears in the LBS, for a (contested) claim of seven enslaved people in the Cape of Good Hope, although it is unclear whether this refers to the same Raikes Currie.⁷⁷

For Mark John, his prospects at Swan River, as for so many early colonial emigrants, never quite matched expectations. It also differed markedly from the successful transformations in fortune of his forebears in the West Indies, and, equally, from his cousin Isaac’s fate in the neighbouring new settler colony of South Australia. Mark John quit the Swan River colony in August 1832 to resume his naval career, which proved more fruitful.⁷⁸ Upon his death in England in 1874, his personal effects were valued at under £3,000.⁷⁹

Robert Dale

Ensign Robert Dale (1810–1853) was among the early colonists, arriving aboard the Sulphur in June 1829. For his investment in the colony, he was granted 4,480 acres.⁸⁰ Dale, of the 63rd Regiment, was connected to two longstanding familial lineages – the Dales and the Dyotts – aptly described as ‘landed gentry’.⁸¹ Robert was the son of Major Thurston Dale (1776–1850), who was the nephew of General William Dyott (1761–1847).⁸² Although William Dyott does not have his own entry in the LBS, he appears in the entry of Samuel Thompson. Here, it was recorded that ‘the Dyott family is reported to have gained possession of a quarter share in ‘Betty’s Hope’ in St. Croix, through the marriage of William Dyott (1761–1847) and Eleanor Thompson.’⁸³ The son born of that union, Richard Dyott – Robert Dale’s cousin – would go on to be a member of the British parliament, and inherited a share of the estate (including specific compensation for several enslaved persons) in 1847.⁸⁴

Whether any of this financial investment accompanied Robert Dale to the Swan River remains speculative, but it is clear that the Dale family looked favourably upon investing in slavery enterprises as a method to bolster familial wealth.⁸⁵ Dale later directly benefited from the financial support of his grandfather and his father. Whilst the origins of this wealth in this line are not as concretely linked to slavery enterprise, his grandfather was an investor in cotton mills around Ashbourne, which in the context of global capitalism was inherently linked to slavery.⁸⁶ In 1835, Robert received a £500 bequest from his grandfather in addition to expressing the hope that his son Thurstan would ‘handsomely provide’ for him ‘according as circumstances will allow’.⁸⁷ Thurstan did indeed provide for Robert Dale, bequeathing a further £500 and citing a prior transfer of £1,000.⁸⁸ He did not inherit any of his father’s property, though, which instead passed to Robert’s brother and eldest son, also named Thurstan. Indeed, their father’s will went so far as to note that, in the event of Thurstan junior’s decease, property should fall not to Robert, the second son, but to Thurston’s own sons, ‘according to priority of birth’.⁸⁹

Again, the necessity for second and other sons to seek independent fortunes in other imperial spheres, rather than to rely on the transferral of familial wealth, crystallises. The wealth that did pass to Dale eventuated after his departure from Swan River in August 1833, once he had experienced first-hand the thoroughly unspectacular reality of the colony.⁹⁰ Although Dale returned to England to pursue a more lucrative career as a merchant, he retained ownership of land in York, an extensive holding of 2,560 acres, perhaps in some hope that transformations in fortune remained possible.⁹¹ Dale appears to have retained this investment until his death, his will noting that he held property ‘situate in Great Britain [and] Australia’.⁹²

Aspirations in the Swan River

The foregoing case studies demonstrate the continuing nature of personal legacies of slavery – whether familial, financial or a combination of the two – in the making of the Swan River colony. There are clear continuities between the ambitions of the founding men of Swan River and their forebears in colonies of British slavery. Equally, however, they also point to ruptures, demonstrated by the fact that realities for the former remained aspirational. Here, attempts to transform fortunes at Swan River can be seen to conform to a global re-orientation of networks of imperial wealth and influence that were sparked, at least partially, from slavery and its gradual abolition, and the need to secure generational wealth through alternate means.⁹³

For the sons, grandsons, nephews and great-nephews of slave and plantation owners, the Swan River colony was viewed as a space to transform fortunes into those that emulated the hyper-successful enterprises of their fathers, grandfathers and uncles in other imperial spaces. As Curthoys has observed, for the descendants of slave owners, the economic transformations triggered by the gradual abolition of British slavery were actively in the process of ‘turning their lives upside down, and settler colonialism provided many alternative pathways for them to follow’.⁹⁴ With specific reference to Swan River, Michael Bourke has argued that individuals perceived emigration to the colony as a way to ‘regain their landed gentry status’, particularly for second and other sons not in line to inherit familial wealth or estates.⁹⁵ Moreover, Penelope Hetherington points to the exaggerated size of early land grants, often covering thousands of acres, as evidence that ‘ambitious men hoped to establish vast land-holdings, comparable in size with those owned by the feudal aristocracy of earlier times or with the great estates of the high gentry in the eighteenth century’.⁹⁶ Early colonists were undeniably cognisant of these potentialities. An 1833 letter from settler T.P. Jun remarked that ‘I do not know a better way of investing a small sum of money, than in land on the Swan’.⁹⁷

Building upon Bourke and Hetherington, I suggest that these ‘ambitious’ settlers encompassed those with direct personal (and in some cases, financial) links to slavery. The Swan River represented a prime opportunity to gain land, wealth and status of their own. They likely drew personal inspiration from their connection to plantations of West Indian colonies. The fact that these settlers all acquired land with the intention to cultivate it, whether through agriculture or pastoralism, with a labour force under a degree of servitude (rather than simply acquiring landholdings to emulate English estates) further supports this conclusion. James Somers Rae, for instance, may have had his uncle’s numerous estates across Jamaica in mind when envisioning his own fortunes at Swan River. Peter Pegus, cognisant of his status as an illegitimate son and his step-brother’s claim to reparations following the dismantling of slavery, may have taken this into consideration when evaluating the prospects of emigration to a new colonial vista. John Randal Phillips, imbued with knowledge of his father’s drastic and damaging transformation of fortune, ending his inheritance, may have seen the Swan River as the key to the reversal of his own fortunes.

Recognising these connections is important not only to acknowledge the connection to slavery per se. Even if these individuals were not part of a direct transmission of slavery-generated intergenerational wealth to the new settler colonies, they continued to view new imperial spaces as critical to transformations in fortune. It is also clear that ambitions of emulating other British colonies at Swan River remained predominantly theoretical. Aspirations never completely aligned with practicalities on the ground, and realities for early colonists diverged markedly – and consistently negatively – from the successful plantation ventures of their forebears in the West Indies. When it became evident that the Swan River was not a ‘land of milk and honey’, where practices and industries of other colonies, including plantation production, were not as easily transposed, many colonists looked elsewhere for higher returns and the promise of more secure future profits.⁹⁸ As Pamela Statham observes, 698 settlers had left the colony by 1835.⁹⁹

Legacies of slavery in the context of Swan River often appear as more opaque and less fulfilled compared to more direct legacies identified elsewhere. This does not negate the importance of recognising these connections, aspirations and intentions at Swan River, or the role that seeking transformations in fortune in new colonial vistas played in shaping the wider re-orientation and adaptation of the imperial world. Rather, it provides us with a deeper understanding of the contours of the transition from British slavery to settler colonialism: in new colonies like Swan River, practices and techniques of wealth-building and generational preservation associated with British slavery could not be as easily replicated. As the door closed on British slavery, and settler colonialism opened other opportunities in its wake, the fortunes of families of empire could never quite be made or sustained in the same way. While the connections to slavery outlined here elucidate significant continuities between British slavery and the new settler colonies, they also point to important ruptures. Settler colonialism in the new colonies would never gain the same traction, structural supports or thrust of global racial capitalism in the mode it had been articulated during British slavery. As a result, these transformations of fortunes remained aspirational.

Significantly, however, as these avenues fell out of favour, the gradual abolition of British slavery also created new opportunities for transformation of fortune for others, including those that had for centuries found themselves the most marginalised in the system of British slavery and global racial capitalism: enslaved people.

William Hickman

Whilst privileged men comprise the majority of connections to slavery and Swan River, among the earliest emigrants were also people of colour with personal links to slavery, including William Hickman (c.1800–1850), a previously enslaved individual from Jamaica transported to the colony as an indentured servant. Born in Trelawney, Jamaica, around 1800, Hickman was most likely born into enslavement.¹⁰⁰ He first appears on a register of slaves in June 1817 under the ownership of Elizabeth Dunn (1762–1839) on the Chester Estate, a sugar and rum plantation.¹⁰¹ Aged 21, Hickman was listed as ‘mulatto’ and ‘creole’, indicating that he was probably of mixed racial heritage.¹⁰² Hickman’s movements after 1817 are unclear. In November 1820, the Chester Estate passed to John Kenyon, Elizabeth’s nephew, following the death of her husband James Virgo Dunn.¹⁰³ The will named several enslaved people to be bequeathed to Elizabeth: ‘all those my female Negro slaves … Augusta with her three children Polly Luna and Cynthia, Caroline with her child Sarah, and Eliza with her child Lucy … and their present and future issue and increase unto my said wife Elizabeth Dunn’.¹⁰⁴ Yet no mention was made of the enslaved men on the Chester Estate, so it is unclear whether Hickman was still residing on the plantation. Individuals continued to be enslaved on the plantation until well into the 1830s. In 1828, for instance, the plantation held 166 bondspersons, and in 1837, after abolition, the estate still held 135 individuals in a state of servitude, now known as ‘apprentices’.¹⁰⁵ Given that slavery was in operation in Jamaica when Hickman appears in records of Swan River, and that individuals continued to be enslaved on the Chester plantation until after abolition, Hickman had either been manumitted, transferred through sale, or escaped through his own volition.

Hickman first surfaces in Swan River in January 1830, described as a servant to Peter Nicholas Brown (Broun) (1797–1846), Colonial Secretary.¹⁰⁶ It is unclear exactly how Hickman came to be Brown’s servant. He may have been hired by Brown in Britain shortly before departure, been a longstanding servant of Brown’s household, or been recruited at the Cape of Good Hope en route.¹⁰⁷ However, as most masters recruited their servants close to home, we can speculate that Hickman was likely living in Scotland, where Brown spent his early years.¹⁰⁸ Hickman probably arrived in the Swan River on the same vessel that brought Brown to the colony, the Parmelia, arriving on 1 June 1829. As steerage passengers went unrecorded, Hickman’s arrival in the Swan River is untraceable.¹⁰⁹ By 1832, however, Hickman appears on the colony’s first census: described as a labourer, single, aged 29, and listing his birthplace as Jamaica.¹¹⁰

At Swan River, Hickman was confronted with a state of bondage that shared many parallels to his enslavement in Jamaica, though to a lesser degree. For one, indentured labourers were bound by contracts that generally lasted between five and seven years.¹¹¹ For another, indentured servants required explicit permission to leave the colony (sought only from the colonial secretary, who was, incidentally, his master). Indeed, this parallel did not go unnoticed: indenture was specifically considered a form of ‘limited slavery’.¹¹² But for Hickman, as a formerly enslaved man of colour, his experience of indenture in particular held more acute similarities to slavery compared with his white counterparts under similar contracts of indenture. By 1834, Hickman gained familiarity with the criminal justice system, convicted of stealing ‘a piece of rope to the value of one shilling’. For the theft, Hickman was imprisoned for three months with hard labour, in what may have felt in some ways like a return to his forced labour performed on the Chester Estate.¹¹³ In 1840, Hickman again appeared before the court, accused of stealing clothing belonging to his employers Robert and William Habgood. Described as a ‘man of colour’, Hickman explained that he stole the clothes only ‘for the purpose of being given to the natives’.¹¹⁴ Once again, he was subject to imprisonment and hard labour, this time for 12 months.¹¹⁵

Hickman’s sentences of hard labour and incarceration bear strong resemblances to his enslavement in Jamaica, including the use of irons and whippings, features of the colonial penal system at the time of Hickman’s confinements.¹¹⁶ But reflecting upon his testimony, and justification for his appropriation of goods, reveals further insights. It is tempting to speculate that, as a man of colour with intimate familiarity with various practices of racialised labour and thinking throughout his life, he may have felt sympathy for, even an allegiance with, local Noongar people similarly experiencing dispossession and displacement. Further evidence of early racial divisions between white men and men of colour, and a mutual solidarity between non-whites, can be seen through evidence of an 1833 conflict on racial grounds. After ‘black men’ were subject to racial slurs, ‘being teased for some time’ and acts of violence, the ‘black men … went to their own fire place, white men to … [the] public house’.¹¹⁷

Hickman’s journey leads us to an important identification: legacies of slavery in the Swan River could be as direct and deeply personal as embodying experiences of slavery. Moreover, his story reveals Swan River as not simply a place of ambition and aspiration for white men of status. It was also a place that witnessed other people see changing fortunes at Swan River, including, in at least one instance, an individual who was previously enslaved in the slave colony of Jamaica and went on to experience another form of bonded servitude in a settler colony. As the British Empire actively underwent transformation, so too did Hickman. His fortunes transformed, along with the empire, during and within a liminal, thoroughly ambiguous space between ‘bond’ and ‘free’. In highlighting this, I complicate the narrative of personal legacies of slavery at Swan River as belonging purely to white men of the elite. Rather, the personal legacies of slavery present at Swan River were diverse and, in some senses, even competing. While some individuals viewed Swan River as a space on which to graft practices of slavery, colonialism and profit, others, such as Hickman, may have viewed the colony as a place to escape it. Evidently, in the end, neither reality quite manifested. Rather, at Swan River, these personal legacies and aspirations mingled, creating a unique set of circumstances in the new colony.

Conclusion

Utilising biographical and genealogical research techniques, this article presents a ‘cluster’ case study of six early emigrants to the Swan River colony, and traces their aspirations of transformations in fortunes following emigration and the extent to which this aligned with realities on the ground. In addition to identifying several personal and familial echoes of slavery present at the making of the colony that have remained absent in the historiography of Swan River, I demonstrate how the Swan River was viewed as a new imperial space with the capacity to transform personal fortunes, particularly for the illegitimate and second sons, grandsons, nephews and great-nephews of successful slave and plantation owners of the declining British colonies. Equally, through highlighting the presence of a previously enslaved individual at Swan River, I show that these personal legacies of slavery did not exclusively pertain to white (or white-passing) men of privilege. Rather, they included more intimate entanglements and relationships to the state of enslavement and its adaptations in the settler colonies. In this sense, the legacies of slavery operating at Swan River were not always indirect or generations removed. They ranged from those with personal memories and lived experience of British slavery (such as Peter Pegus) to coloured individuals who moved between one gradation of unfreedom to another at Swan River (William Hickman). Importantly, although all sought transformations in fortune in the new colony, these were rarely successful.

The transformation of empire, following the abolition of slavery, can be seen to be embodied within the life histories of these individuals, where the dismantling of British slavery and the construction of the new settler colonies are revealed as entwined.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express their deep gratitude to Bronte Jones, Jane Lydon, Jeremy Martens, David Gilchrist and the anonymous reviewers and editors of History Australia for their guidance and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xavier Reader

Xavier Reader is an honorary research fellow for the West Australian Legacies of British Slavery Project (School of Humanities, UWA). Xavier’s research explores various intersections between slavery, colonialism and race through a variety of interdisciplinary frames.

Notes

1 Pamela Statham, ‘Swan River Colony 1829–1850’, in A New History of Western Australia, ed. C.T Stannage (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1981), 181–210; Pamela Statham, ‘The Economic Development of Swan River Colony 1829–1850’ (PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 1980); James Cameron, Ambition’s Fire: The Agricultural Colonization of Pre-Convict Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1981); Tim Mazzarol, ‘Tradition, Environment and the Indentured Labourer in Early Western Australia’, Studies in Western Australian History 3, no. 1 (1978): 30–37; Frank Crowley, ‘Master and Servant in Western Australia’, Early Days: Journal and Proceedings of the Western Australian Historical Society 4, no. 5 (1953): 94–115.

2 Georgina Arnott, Zoë Laidlaw, and Jane Lydon, ‘Introduction (Special Issue)’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 6, no. 1 (2022): 3–22.

3 Jane Lydon, ‘From Demerara to Swan River: Charles Dawson Ridley and James Walcott in Western Australia’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 6, no. 1 (2022): 23–50; Jane Lydon, ‘Racial Punishment from Slavery to Settler Colonialism: John Picton Beete in Demerara and Swan River’, Slavery and Abolition 44, no. 1 (2022): 1–25; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 8–9, 12–13. See also Jane Lydon, ‘A Secret Longing for a Trade in Human Flesh: The Decline of British Slavery and the Making of the Settler Colonies’, History Workshop Journal 90, no. 1 (2020): 189–210.

4 Georgina Arnott, ‘Slavery, Trade and Settler Colonialism: The Stirling Family and Britain’s Empire, c.1730–1840’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 6, no. 1 (2022): 51–78.

5 I refer exclusively to British slavery and its gradual abolition in 1833 following the Slavery Abolition Act. See Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Catherine Hall, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

6 The links to slavery of John Randal Phillips and Peter Pegus have been previously explored by Lydon. I build upon Lydon’s analysis to explore a fuller scope of involvement, with particular emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of fortune. See Lydon, ‘From Demerara to Swan River’, 8–9, 12–13.

7 This method primarily involves tracing archival records of these individuals and families through discrete archives of the West Indies, Britain and Western Australia. I draw on extensive collections of primary sources: birth and baptism records, registers of marriage, death and burial records, wills, testaments and probate records, account books, land registers, property records, newspapers and registers of slave ownership.

8 See Barbara Caine’s discussion of the utility of group, collective and prosopographical biography in illuminating broader social and historical patterns, especially when individuals are poor biographical candidates in isolation. Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 61–62.

9 Caine, Biography and History, 62.

10 Ibid., 61; Melanie Nolan, Biography: An Historiography (London: Routledge, 2023), 225, 246.

11 Legacies of British Slavery Online Database, UCL (hereafter LBS), https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

12 ‘Context’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context. The Commission records are based on the latest triennial returns: censuses listing the names, ages and genders of enslaved people, their owners, and the increase or decrease of the enslaved population.

13 ‘Context’, LBS; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 7–9.

14 See Lydon, ‘From Demerara to Swan River’.

15 Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 7–8.

16 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26, no. 1 (2008): 2–3.

17 Lydon, ‘From Demerara to Swan River’; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’; Lydon, ‘Racial Punishment from Slavery to Settler Colonialism’; Arnott, ‘Slavery, Trade and Settler Colonialism’; Emma Christopher, ‘An Illegitimate Offspring: South Sea Islanders, Queensland Sugar, and the Heirs of the British Atlantic Slave Complex’, History Workshop Journal 90, no. 1 (2021): 233–52; Emma Christopher, ‘Far More than Money: British West Indian Slavery, Emancipation and Australia’s Sugar Industry’, Australian Historical Studies 52, no. 4 (2021): 491–508; Alan Lester and Nikita Vanderbyl, ‘The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8’, History Workshop Journal 90, no. 1 (2020): 165–88; Catherine Hall, ‘Writing History, Making “Race”: Slave-Owners and Their Stories’, Australian Historical Studies 47 (2016): 365–80.

18 James Stirling, quoted in Edward Shan, An Economic History of Australia (Melbourne: Georgian House, [1830] 1967), 138; Ann Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia: The Intersecting Histories of Caribbean Slave-Owning Families, Transported British Radicals, and Indigenous Peoples’, History Workshop Journal 90, no. 2 (2020): 211–32.

19 Stirling, in Shan, An Economic History of Australia, 138.

20 Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia’, 226.

21 Catherine Hall, ‘The Slave-Owner and the Settler’, in Indigenous Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (London: Routledge, 2014), 29.

22 Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia’, 225–26.

23 Lydon, ‘From Demerara to Swan River’; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’.

24 Several works have explored Phillips’ life in the Swan River colony and connection to the West Indies. My discussion offers greater detail regarding Phillips’ familial links to the West Indies. See Tom Chapman and Sally Grundy, ‘Speeches about John Randall Phillips and George Braithwaite Phillips’, State Library of Western Australia (SLWA), Acc 9645AD/1: Synopsis of John Randall Phillips, 30 June 2017, https://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/%20slwa_b5089179_1.pdf; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 8–9; Lydon, ‘From Demerara to Swan River’, 24.

25 ‘John Randal, Son of George Phillips’, Transcript of Baptisms 1750–1799, Register no. 5, Winterbourne Parish Records, Gloucestershire, Frenchay Museum Archives.

26 Note that John senior’s middle name is recorded in the baptism record as Randolph, not Randal. ‘John Randolph Phillips’, Barbados Baptisms, St Michael’s Parish, 4 December 1724, Barbados Archives, RLI/2 1724, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 15 July 2023; ‘John Randal Phillips’, Burials, Parish of St Michael, 1773, Barbados Church Records, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 15 July 2023. On the maternal side, John Randal was descended from the early Barbadian emigrant and merchant Philip Lovel of Skelton: William Dugdale, ‘Lovell of Skelton’, in The Visitation of the County of York, Begun in 1665 and Finished in 1666, vol. 36 (London: Surtees Society, 1859), 157; Daniel Parsons, ‘Dugdale’s Visitation. 1665–66’, in Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, General Readers, etc, series 4, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1868), 216–17.

27 Will of George Phillips of Chiswick, Middlesex, 19 December 1817, National Archives, Kew, UK (hereafter NAUK), PROB 11/1599/284, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D224627.

28 Chapman and Grundy, ‘Speeches about John Randall Phillips’, SLWA, Acc 9645AD/1.

29 John Pollard to Walter Pollard, 25 April 1773, Hardwicke Collection, British Library (BL), MS35655, ff 3–59.

30 Ibid.

31 George Phillips’ Account Book, 1771–1778, Daniel Parsons Collection, Downside Abbey Archives, 1294; Diane Brunning, ‘If You Really Wish to Be a Gentleman, It Is in Your Own Power to Make Yourself One’ (MA thesis, Bath Spa University, 2016), 1.

32 George Phillips’ Account Book, 39; Brunning, ‘If You Really Wish to Be a Gentleman’, 10; John Pollard to Walter Pollard, 25 April 1773, Hardwicke Collection, BL, MS35655, ff. 3–59.

33 Brunning, ‘If You Really Wish to Be a Gentleman’, 12.

34 George Phillips’ Account Book, 1294. See also Brunning, ‘If You Really Wish to Be a Gentleman’, 11.

35 ‘John Randal, Son of George Phillips’, Transcript of Baptisms 1750–1799; George Egerton-Warburton, King Georges’ Sound, Albany, to Emma Egerton Warburton, Chester (transcript from original privately held), 17 April 1841, ‘Egerton-Warburton Family Papers’, SLWA, Acc 1179A, https://catalogue.slwa.wa.gov.au/record=b1679703∼S2.

36 Will of George Phillips of Chiswick. George’s will noted that: ‘what disappointment finds … me in the close of life to experience a change of fortune & to be much encumbered with debt’.

37 Will of Elizabeth Lovell, Widow of Winterbourne, 12 June 1830, Records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, NAUK, PROB 11/1772/309, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D240287; ‘Elizabeth Lovell (neé Osborne)’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146654443; Will of George Phillips of Chiswick; ‘John Randal Phillips’, UK Articles of Clerkship 1756–1874, Court of Kings Bench: Plea side. Affidavits of the due execution of clerkship, NAUK, Series 1, KB 105, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C10047. The total amount Randal received from Margaret Lovell is unclear.

38 Protector Passenger List, State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA), Cons36/5/89–36/5/150; ‘Return of property on which land has been claimed from 01/06/1829–30/06/1830’, SROWA, Cons5000, 683/02; ‘Return of Lands in Western Australia assigned up to the 20^th day of July 1832’, SROWA, Cons5000, 683/03. Interestingly, John Randal’s grant was £300 greater than his investment. According to the method of granting land based on the value of assets they introduced (set at 40 acres for every 3 pounds of investment), John Randal was only entitled to claim 2,600 acres of land.

39 Inquirer, 24 February 1841, 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/6593934.

40 Perth Gazette, 9 May 1840, 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/1600.

41 Will of John Randall Phillips, SROWA, Cons3458, 1853/66.

42 Ibid.

43 Declaration of the Merchants, Bankers, Traders, and Other Inhabitants of London (London: Philanthropic Reform, 1795), 94; ‘Peter Pegus’, LBS, http://ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146637485; Table 4, ‘Peter Phellusson’s Property-related Transactions in Grenada, 1763–1797 (part c)’, in Susanna Haggerty, ‘Slavery Connections of Brodsworth Hall (1600–c.1830)’, Final Report, University of Nottingham, 2010, 111; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 12–13.

44 Glenys Bolland, Mary Jane McNaughton Manuscript Papers, SLWA, Acc 9884A, 2; John Sherburne Sleeper, Jack in the Forecastle, or, Incidents in the Early Life of Hawser Martingale (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Lee, 1860), 342; David Ryden, ‘“One of the Finest and Most Fruitful Spots in America”: An Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Carriacou’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (2013): 560–62.

45 ‘Marriages and Deaths of Eminent Persons’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 70 (1791): 775; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 13.

46 ‘Rev. Peter William Pegus’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/45621.

47 ‘General Return of the Names, Country, Age and Service of the Officers of the I Battalion, 88^th Regiment’, 20 October 1815, Regimental Registers of Service, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 15 July 2023.

48 ‘Local’, Tasmanian Colonist, 7 November 1853, 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/22365758.

49 ‘Return of Property on which Land has been Claimed from 01/06/1829–30/06/1830’.

50 ‘Return of Lands in Western Australia assigned up to the 20^th day of July 1832’.

51 Launceston Examiner, 15 November 1853, 1, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/3616756; Arnott, Laidlaw, and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 13.

52 ‘Peter Pegus’, The Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians, pre-1829–1988, ed. Rica Erickson (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1987), hereafter WABD.

53 ‘Grenada 955 (Union Estate)’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/10810.

54 ‘Rev. Peter William Pegus’, LBS; ‘Deaths in the District of Oatlands’, Libraries Tasmania Archives, RGD35/1/22, no. 58, https://stors.tas.gov.au/RGD35-1-22p81j2k; ‘Local’, Tasmanian Colonist.

55 ‘James Somers Rae’, Scotland Baptisms, 1788, Kirkbean, Kirkcudbright, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 3 May 2024; ‘James Somers Rae’, WABD; ‘William Rae’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/12891.

56 ‘Finding Aid’, Rae Family Estate Collection, 1800–1857, Princeton University Library Archive, C1222, https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C1222_c0007; ‘William Rae’, Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1764, Dumfries, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 3 May 2024; ‘William Rae’, LBS. William Rae resided in Jamaica for over half a century, until his passing in 1837.

57 ‘John Rae’ and ‘Mary Rae’, Scotland Census of 1841, Scotland’s People Online Database, 882/8/1; ‘William Rae’, LBS. See also James Delle, An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 97. There were 83 enslaved persons on William Rae’s Arntully plantation, and by 1828 this number had increased to 93, whilst a further 118 were enslaved on his Sherwood Forest plantation: see ‘Returns of Givings-In for the March Quarter’, Jamaica Almanac, 1820, Jamaican Family Search Genealogy Research Library, http://www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/Al20p11.htm; ‘Return of Proprietors, Properties, etc’, Jamaica Almanac, 1828, Jamaican Family Search, http://www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/1828al12.htm. For the 1831 Almanac, return of 1830, 193 enslaved persons were present on the Unity Valley estate, and by 1832 only 186 were present: see ‘Return of Proprietors, Properties, etc’, Jamaica Almanac, 1831, Jamaican Family Search, http://www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/1/1831ann.htm, and ‘Return of Givings-In for the March Quarter’, Jamaica Almanac, 1832, Jamaican Family Search, http://www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/a/AL33Ann.htm.

58 ‘Jamaica St David 15 (Sherwood Forest, Brook Lodge, Eccleston, Arntully, and River Head)’, LBS, http://ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/12855.

59 ‘James Somers Rae’, WABD; Emelia and Ellen Passenger List, Passengers WA Arrivals and Departures, SROWA, Cons36/6/107.

60 ‘William Rae’, LBS. See also ‘Last Will and Testament of William Rae, 1837’, Rae Family Estate Collection, 1800–1857, C1222, Princeton University Library Archive, https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C1222_c0007. William Rae did not pass away until 1837, seven years after James Somers’ arrival in the Swan River. The passages and distribution of wealth before William Rae’s death are likely areas inviting further investigation.

61 ‘Correspondence’, Rae Family Estate Collection.

62 ‘James Somers Rae’, WABD.

63 ‘James Rae’, India Deaths and Burials, 1833, Ellore, Madras, 521841, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 15 July 2023.

64 ‘Bremen Valley’, LBS, http://ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/16425.

65 Bernard Burke, Burke’s 107^th Peerage: Burke’s Dormant Peerage (London: Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, 2008), 1002.

66 Clinton Fernandes, Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 14; ‘Isaac Currie’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/14445. Isaac Currie was the executor to his brother-in-law, Job Mathew Raikes, who held a mortgage over Roslin, Brimmer Hall, Trinity and Tryall Estates. According to the LBS, the compensation was paid to Job Mathew Raikes’ executors, including Isaac Currie: see ‘Job Mathew Raikes’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/-1055845506.

67 ‘Isaac George Currie’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/43760. Researchers from the LBS have substantiated Isaac George Currie as Isaac Currie’s son.

68 Ibid.

69 William Rubenstein, Who Were the Rich? A Biographical Directory of British Wealth-Holders, vol. 1, 1809–39, revised ed. (Brighton, UK: Edward Everett Root, 2017), 295.

70 C.J. Coventry, ‘Links in the Chain: British Slavery, Victoria and South Australia’, Before/Now 1, no. 1 (2019): 34. The firm’s original name was Mason, Currie, James & Yallowley.

71 ‘Curries & Co’, Heritage Hub: Companies, NatWest Group, https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/companies/curries-and-co.html, and ‘William Currie’, Heritage Hub: People, NatWest Group, https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/people/william-currie.html.

72 ‘Curries & Co, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/firm/view/1660752256; Nicholas Draper, ‘The City of London and Slavery: Evidence from the First Dock Companies, 1795–1800’, The Economic History Review 60, no. 2 (2005): 450.

73 Parmelia Passenger List, Passengers WA Arrivals and Departures, SROWA, Cons5000/567 Acc36/2/25; ‘Mark John Currie’, WABD; ‘Jane Fruin’, WABD; ‘Frederick Ludlow’, WABD.

74 ‘Mark John Currie’, WABD; Parmelia Passenger List.

75 Ian Mattison, Minley Manor (Milton Keynes, UK: Authorhouse Publishing, 2018).

76 Frederic Boase, Modern English Biography, vol. 1 (London: Frank Cass & Co, [1965] 2017), 1236.

77 ‘Cape of Good Hope 2969’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/2120014421. Here, Raikes is listed as ‘awardee (trustee)’.

78 ‘Mark John Currie’, WABD.

79 ‘Currie, Mark John’, National Probate Calendar of England and Wales, 1874, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 15 July 2023.

80 ‘Robert Dale’, WABD; Karen Cook, ‘The Secret Agenda of Western Australian Explorer, Robert Dale’, The Globe 54, no. 1 (2003): 23–34; Jeremy Martens, ‘“In a State of War”: Governor James Stirling, Extrajudicial Violence and the Conquest of Western Australia’s Avon Valley, 1830–1840’, History Australia 19, no. 4 (2022): 668–86.

81 Cook, ‘The Secret Agenda’, 23.

82 Reginald Jeffrey, ed., Dyott’s Diary 1781–1845, vol. 1 (London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1907), 237, xi; Cook, ‘The Secret Agenda’, 23.

83 ‘Samuel Thompson’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146630535.

84 Ibid. Joseph Kelly has pointed out that whilst the slave ownership of William Dyott (and later, of Richard) was ‘passive’, they nevertheless ‘kept in regular correspondence with the various attorneys who administered Betty’s Hope’ estate. See Joseph Kelly, ‘The Problem of Anti-Slavery in the Age of Capital, c. 1830–1888’ (PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 2017), 181.

85 Familial networks definitely assisted Dale, if not financially: his uncle, General William Dyott, wielded his influential position to promote Robert’s army career. General Dyott recorded the direct influence he had in securing Robert’s ensigncy in his diary: ‘my chief errand was for the purpose of obtaining an ensigncy for Robert Dale … my interview was satisfactory, and fair promise made of success’. Jeffrey, Dyott’s Diary, vol. 1, 385.

86 ‘Discover Ashbourne: Georgian Buildings (1710–1830)’, Ashbourne Town Council, 3, https://global-uploads.webflow.com/6043c5a83f9b3a99a4c4718c/6114071189ce7a7bc8383e56_Ashbourne%20Walks%20.pdf.

87 Will of Robert Dale of Ashbourne, Staffordshire Record Office, D661/18/20; Cook, ‘The Secret Agenda’, 29.

88 Will of Thurstan Dale of Ashbourne, NAUK, PROB 11/2120/235, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D1841.

89 Ibid.

90 ‘Robert Dale’, WABD.

91 Ibid.; Cook, ‘The Secret Agenda’, 30.

92 Will of Robert Dale, NAUK, PROB 11/2178/41, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D13743.

93 See Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Edinburgh: Pearson, 1989); and Lester and Vanderbyl, ‘Restructuring of the British Empire’.

94 Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia’, 225–26.

95 Michael Bourke, On the Swan: A History of the Swan District Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1987), 39.

96 Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants, and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-Century Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), 23.

97 T.P. Jun, ‘Extract of a Letter from Swan River, dated 27^th January, 1833’, in Journals of Several Expeditions Made in Western Australia during the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1832, ed. Joseph Cross (London: Joseph Cross, 1833), 230.

98 James Cameron, ‘Coming to Terms: The Development of Agriculture in Pre-Convict Western Australia’, Geowest: Working Papers of the Department of Geography, University of Western Australia, no. 11 (1977): 19.

99 Statham, ‘Swan River Colony 1829–1850’, 181.

100 ‘Return of Slaves in the Parish of Trelawney’, Slave Registers, Former British Colonial Dependencies 1813–1834, T71, piece no. 225, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 15 July 2023; ‘Wm Hickman’, in A Colony Detailed: The First Census of Western Australia 1832, ed. Ian Berryman (North Perth: Creative Research Publishing, 1979), 72; William Hickman, WABD.

101 ‘Elizabeth Dunn (Simpson),’ Burials in the Parish of Leamington Priors, 1839, Warwickshire County Record Office, DR514/36, Ancestry.com Online Database, accessed 19 May 2024; ‘Elizabeth Dunn (nee Simpson)’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/15205; ‘Return of Slaves in the Parish of Trelawney’, Slave Registers, Former British Colonial Dependencies 1813–1834, NAUK, T71, piece no. 225.

102 ‘Return of Slaves in the Parish of Trelawney’. At this time a ‘mulatto’ was anyone less than four generations removed from African ancestry. Daniel Livesay, ‘Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750–1820’ (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2010), 87, https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/77875/livesayd_1.pdf.

103 ‘Elizabeth Dunn (nee Simpson)’, LBS; ‘Will of James Virgo Dunn of No. 10 Devonshire Street Portland Place’, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills, England and Wales, NAUK, PROB 11/1636/282, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D195813.

104 ‘Will of James Virgo Dunn’.

105 ‘Chester Estate’, LBS, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/25; Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 42.

106 ‘Supplementary List of Persons actually in the Colony, but whose Names had not been entered in the General Muster Book at the End of the Year’, Returns Relative to the Settlement on the Swan River … 1831, SLWA, Q994.1 RET, 26, https://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b1225657_1.pdf; ‘Peter Nicholas Broun’, WABD.

107 Robert Shell, ‘A Family Matter: The Sale and Transfer of Human Beings at the Cape, 1658 to 1830’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (1992): 285–336.

108 Malcolm Uren, ‘Peter Nicholas Broun (1797–1846)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/broun-peter-nicholas-1833.

109 Parmelia Passenger List.

110 Berryman, A Colony Detailed, 72.

111 Mazzarol, ‘Tradition, Environment, and the Indentured Labourer’, 30.

112 Lydon, ‘A Secret Longing for a Trade in Human Flesh’, 198.

113 ‘J.H. Monger vs William Hickman, Indictment for Larceny’, April General Quarter Sessions, 1834, Supreme Court Indictment Files, SROWA, Cons3472, case 82.

114 ‘Magistrates Court’, Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 31 October 1840, 2–3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/1704.

115 ‘Quarter Sessions’, Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 9 January 1841, 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/1763.

116 Blue Book of Statistics: Swan River Colony, 1834, NAUK, CO22/10, 175; Blue Book of Statistics: Swan River Colony, 1840, SROWA, Cons1855, series 4148, 199.

117 ‘Court of Quarter Sessions’, Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 5 January 1833, 3–4, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/4. The instigator of the violent attack, John Velvick, was a white agricultural labourer later killed by Noongar. ‘Murder of Thomas and John Velvick by a Party of Natives’, Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 4 May 1833, 1–4, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/72.