Why is it important to know where the raw cotton came from?

Museums and industrial heritage sites that interpret cotton spinning mills during and after the industrial revolution, have traditionally given little explanation about the origins of the raw cotton that was processed on those sites. Raw cotton spun in British cotton mills, from their formation in the late eighteenth century and through to the 1880s, was frequently sourced from estates that used enslaved labour.

The hesitancy to tell this story can perhaps be explained by a lack of surviving records associated with particular mills, which detail the supply chain of the raw cotton. However, until recent years, there was perhaps also a reluctance or disinterest in explaining the links between cotton spinning and the challenging history of Britain’s connections to the mass enslavement of African people, which disrupts the narrative of “Great” Britain. An explanation of the circumstances under which the commodity of raw cotton was grown, who grew it, where it was grown and how it even arrived at the mill was missing from site interpretation.  As one Legacy Maker explained when research began at Cromford Mill in 2014:

The history of the raw cotton itself, was a big mystery, they might say when we asked where it came from, that it came on a packhorse from Liverpool, but it wasn’t grown in Liverpool, it’s as if it magically appeared from nowhere … it’s as if nobody wanted to talk the truth about cotton. 

There is a keen focus on the heritage of coal mining in Britain which connects the use of that commodity, it’s impact on the development of British industry and economy, with the lived-experience of the people who worked in the mines and the conditions they laboured in, so in a similar vein, it makes sense to focus on the heritage of the lived-experience of those involved in raw cotton cultivation.   The Legacy Makers wanted to explore and expose the hidden (or erased) history of how the commodity of raw cotton was sourced by British cotton spinning mill owners. They wanted to reveal how behind each piece of spun thread, a high price had been paid in the pain and suffering of the enslaved Africans who had been forcibly trafficked to labour on cotton plantations in European colonies in the wider Caribbean and Atlantic region together with the United States of America. 

In recent years, a recognition of the links between cotton spinning mills and enslavement has introduced some interpretation but this is generally focused on the period up to the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 or the abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies in 1833. It is as if, after that date, the site’s connections to slavery came to an end. In reality, even by 1807, it was likely that the majority of raw cotton processed at cotton spinning mills was sourced increasingly from estates in the United States and Brazil, whilst the amount of raw cotton acquired from the British Caribbean had significantly decreased. The abolition of slavery in the United States happened in 1865 and in Brazil, slavery was not abolished until 1888. This means that cotton spinning mills continued to process raw cotton picked by enslaved people as late as the 1860s to 1880s.

Is it possible to pinpoint specific plantations where cotton was sourced from and why does it matter?

The Legacy Makers have worked closely with Dr Susanne Seymour from the University of Nottingham and the Global Cotton Connections project.  In 2018 Dr Seymour’s research, supported by the Legacy Makers, traced the supply chain for cotton processed by the Strutt family of Belper.  A particular supplier was the cotton merchant Thomas Tarleton who owned the cotton plantation or estate, Mount Pleasant on Carriacou,  a Caribbean island close to Grenada, part of the Windward Islands.  It seemed reasonable to draw the conclusion that Tarleton was supplying his clients with cotton from his own estate. This approach helped develop a sense of understanding and personalised the story of where raw cotton was from. To strengthen this, in work carried out by the Legacy Makers and the University of Nottingham, volunteers studied the “Slave Registers” for the Mount Pleasant estate and familarised themselves with the records of the enslaved people working on the estate. In addition, descendants of the enslaved people of Mount Pleasant were identified and interviewed about how they felt about their ancestry. Those interviews were recorded and made available on listening posts in the Visitor Centre at Cromford Mills.

Similarly, the research on Darley Abbey, was able to name some well-known cotton merchants who supplied the mill, in particular John Bolton and the Earle family, who were slave traders and merchants dealing in raw cotton. Ship lists printed in the newspapers recorded bales of raw cotton arriving in the port of Liverpool from named destinations in the wider Caribbean and Atlantic region, assigned to these merchants.

Prior to 1807 and the abolition of slavery, it is possible to trace the voyages of these British-owned ships, and identify how they completed the “triangular trade” from ports like Liverpool, to the coast of West Africa, where their captain and crew bartered for the lives of men, women and child captives, then forcibly trafficked them across the Atlantic to a pre-arranged port, where they traded them, often in exchange for raw cotton and other commodities, like sugar, coffee and spices which they took back to Britain.  

A case study on John Bolton, supplying the Darley Abbey Mill:

The Nicholas Waterhouse accounts provide evidence that the cotton merchant,  John Bolton was a supplier to the Evans mill.  

According to Alexey Kritchtal,  John Bolton was a formidable player in the cotton import market.  He was key in establishing Guyana as a place for cotton importation for British markets.   Kritchal’s research suggests Bolton imported 6,528,331 lbs of cotton from Guyana between 1796 and 1815 to Britain. Evidence from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, suggests that he was the first person to plot the trafficking of African captives to the colony of Demerara.

Kritchal notes:

Bolton serviced mortgages to a number of Demerara plantations as published in the EDRG, suggesting
he also acted as a commission agent for the disposal of their sugar and cotton harvests in Liverpool.
Examples include: Charles Lamont Robertson and John Noble – Plantation Maryville & Liberty, 23
December 1815; Robert Williamson – Plantation Glazer‘s Lust, 28 March 1812; E. C. Overbrook –
Plantation Nismes, 18 March 1815; John Walcott – Batchelor‘s Adventure, 17 February 1816; Edward
Barnwell – St. Christopher, 20 April 1816. (p.46)

When these estates, and others that he held an interest in, defaulted on their loans or mortgages, he could take ownership.

Kritchal notes that by 1815, John Bolton, owned at least one estate in Demerara: Plantation Belvidere. Another later acquisition, following a loan default, is identified as the Waterloo plantation in Demerara. In theory, any of the estates listed here could have been suppliers of raw cotton to Darley Abbey, further research is required to find out more about these estates.

Bolton was an absentee estate owner and in Britain, the boy that had grown up as the son of an apothecary, in the Furness port town of Ulverston, invested his huge profits in a 1,000-acre estate, Storrs Hall as his summer retreat, on eastern bank of Lake Windermere.

John Bolton, owned a ship called The Bolton. This ship was active in forcibly trafficking people from Africa across the Atlantic to the wider Caribbean region and operated from 1793 to 1803. Find out more about its voyages here by using the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, select ‘Bolton’ for owner and ‘Bolton’ for ship’s name. The Bolton was one of several ships that he owned or co-owned. Between 1787 and 1807 (when the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was abolished in Britain), he was linked to nearly 70 voyages that left Liverpool for Africa. Many of these were bound for Demerara. Further research is needed to investigate these voyages in more detail.

On 15 Feb 1799, the Evans mill wrote to Nicholas Waterhouse in Liverpool:

You will please to bear in mind that we must have a clean good coloured cotton and a good staple, and relying upon your attention we shall leave it to you respecting the 5 tonnes either to purchase Demarara or part of Demararas & part of Gaudaloups. 

Waterhouse sourced this cotton for the Evans, using John Bolton as his supplier.

In the Evans account, Waterhouse noted on 3 April 1799 the entry ‘ J Bolton for 35 Demaras £1512.15.6 ‘.

Where had John Bolton sourced this cotton?

Although we cannot say for certain, how the ’35 (bales of) Demeraras’ were sourced by John Bolton and came into the hands of Waterhouse, we can look at the lists of ships coming from Demerara, shortly before Waterhouse recorded the transaction with John Bolton.  We can see that in The Manchester Mercury on 26 March 1799,  the lists of ships arriving in British ports published in the newspaper, announced the safe arrival of ships at Liverpool and described their exact cargos. On this list is a ship called The Molly, captained by J Tobin which had arrived at Liverpool, completing a triangular route via ‘Africa and Demerara’.   Checking the database www.slavevoyages.com reveals that this ship was co-owned by the captain John Tobin together with the brothers, John Gregson and James Gregson, their brother-in-law, George Case as well as their friends, the father and son, John Bridge Aspinall and James Aspinall.  Each of these men, including Bolton,  has been recognised by historians as being heavily involved in the exploitation and murder of African people through establishing businesses where they profited from the  Transatlantic Slave Trade, including owning shares in multiple “slave ships”.  The Gregson brothers along with their father, William Gregson, had been part of a syndicate of slave traders who co-owned the infamous ship, the Zong and during his lifetime, William Gregson was reputed to have forcibly trafficked upwards of 58,201 African captives, of whom 9,148 are documented to have died on board his ships.

We learn from www.slavevoyages.com that the Molly, a ship of 302 tonnage, had left Liverpool on 27 May 1798 and had sailed to Anomabu, on the coast of what is now central Ghana and then known as Fort William, a British trading fort.  From reaching Fort William on 18 December 1798,  Captain John Tobin and crew, then forcibly trafficked at least 432 African men, women and children captives across the Atlantic to Demerara. This was not a one-off trip for the Molly but one of 18 voyages that the ship’s owners profited from between 1788 and 1807.  In that time, she regularly made annual voyages and the  records of www.slavevoyages.org.uk demonstrate that the owners, forcibly trafficked over 7,000 Africans to the British colonies from the West coast of what is now known as Ghana.  The first voyage is not recorded on this database, and one journey that is logged does not record how many enslaved people were taken.

When the Molly reached Demerara,  Tobin sold or traded the lives of the 400 Africans and filled the ship’s hull with sugar, coffee and 135 cotton bales as well as the 58 elephant tusks he had carried from Africa and a quantity of ‘barwood’,  an African redwood that could be used for violin bow making.  48 of these cotton bales were the property of John Bolton and would have been carried in the same place that the incarcerated African people had endured untold fear and misery on the “middle passage” across the Atlantic.  The “exchange” of the African captives with the bales of raw cotton, creates a clear connection between the the supply of raw cotton and the misery endured by the captives. The bales of cotton that were hauled on board ship destined for the British cotton spinning mills such as the Evans mill, were not magically produced from tropical thin air, but cultivated by generation after generation of enslaved Africans that ships like the Molly had trafficked.  

We have no idea what happened to those people that Tobin had taken from Ghana. Where did they spend the rest of their lives and how long did they live in suffering? The ship had returned to Liverpool by the 18 March, and the announcement of its cargo was made on 26 March in the Manchester Mercury. On 3 April 1799, Waterhouse recorded in his account for Evans that J Bolton had been paid for ‘35 Demaras £1512.15.6’.  Were these from the 48 cotton bales on the slave ship, the Molly? We cannot be sure but by tracing the voyage of the Molly, and piecing together the events connected to the arrival of Bolton’s bales of cotton in Liverpool, it reveals the direct connection with the horror and misery of enslavement that Bolton and ship owners like Tobin, the Gregsons, Case and the Aspinalls, were exploiting when supplying cotton to the British cotton spinning mills.

In 1803, further proof emerges that John Bolton is still supplying cotton to the Evans from Demerara. In May, a letter was sent to the broker, George Marsden complaining about the quality of the cotton:

We have lately began upon the lot of 40 Demararas of J Bolton, and we are sorry to say we have not had so bad a lot of many years both as to dirt, color and staple, and we think you could not have examined it yourself.  You know our orders are always for the first quality, and we cannot dispence with inferior cottons on any terms and we must not have any such purchased for us.

We have very seldom troubled you with complains, but we hope you are not the less attentive on this account.

As the archival material relating to the raw cotton supply orders at Darley Abbey, do not survive beyond 1810, further research is needed to see if orders to the mill can be detected in surviving archival material relating to cotton brokers. This will help confirm whether merchants like Bolton continued to supply the mill and as the nineteenth century progressed, who else was involved? Please get in touch if you can add to our understanding of these supply chains.