Inside the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s North Wing, alongside stately portraits of the apostle from whom London’s oldest hospital takes its name and King Henry VIII, extravagant commemorative boards adorn the walls. The Great Hall was a grand, formal space where governors weighed their philanthropic donations and drafted their wills, many while investing in the stock of companies built on the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Today, many of those donors are commemorated in acrylic gold paint on the boards.
The Register of British Slave Traders, a joint venture between Lancaster University, the University of Manchester and University College London, includes biographical data on every known investor in Britain’s transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people from the 16th to 19th centuries. It reveals how wealthy individuals, often enriched by the proceeds from racialised chattel enslavement, donated to hundreds of church parishes and helped to fund schools, hospitals and charities across the country. Prof William Pettigrew, who led the project, said the register had established connections with roughly 900 organisations.
The register reveals at least 50 people with deep financial ties to St Barts who are directly linked to this history. Among the names etched on to the boards in the Great Hall is Sir Jeffrey Jeffreys, a London merchant who left an unspecified sum to the hospital in his will. In 1694, the Jeffreys-funded ship Hannibal, commanded by Capt Thomas Phillips, docked in Barbados.
This concluded a harrowing journey in which only 372 of the 700 enslaved African people bought at Whydah (Ouidah in modern-day Benin) survived the Atlantic crossing. Phillips’s journal, one of the few surviving records of the voyage, details the horrors onboard, where captives were subjected to branding and calculated psychological cruelty. The Africans on his ship, he recorded, held “a more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we have of hell”.
Phillips recalled using African overseers, who were enslaved themselves, to keep order, whipping any plotters of mutiny. There were grave consequences of the squalid conditions on the ship; many who died on the Hannibal were killed by smallpox, dysentery, starvation and suicide. Some were thrown overboard when dead or dying to prevent the spread of disease and to protect profits.
The voyage’s mortality rate was close to 50%, cementing its place as one of the deadliest crossings in the history of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. The 1694 Hannibal crossing was one of 13 to which Jeffreys was financially linked. The London merchant was a director of the Royal African Company from 1684-86, and from 1692-98.
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