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The ArchivesSourcesThe Royal African Company Records (TNA T70)

The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70)

The surviving business archive of the English, then British, chartered Africa companies, held at The National Archives, Kew, as series T 70, about 1,696 volumes of correspondence, accounts, minutes, registers and fort papers covering 1660 to 1833, and the institutional record of Cape Coast Castle and the Gold Coast forts on whose shore the crew of Bartholomew Roberts was tried in 1722.

Also writtenT 70; TNA T70; Records of the African Companies; Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and successors: Records; Royal African Company archive, The National Archives

T 70 is the class reference at The National Archives, Kew, for the records of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and its successors. It is a series, not a book: the principal surviving corporate archive of the chartered companies that ran the crown's Africa trade, with covering dates 1660 to 1833 and an extent of about 1,696 volumes. The lettering is T, for Treasury: the papers passed there when the last company was wound up.1

The three companies

Three successive bodies made the records in the ordinary course of business. The Company of Royal Adventurers was active in the 1660s, catalogued as about 1663 to 1672. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 with a monopoly of the Africa trade that was opened to separate traders in 1698, succeeded it and ran to about 1750. The regulated Company of Merchants Trading to Africa then held the forts until they passed to the crown in the early 1820s. Those ranges are the catalogue's approximations.2

What sits in the series

The papers accumulated at two poles. London produced minutes of the Court of Assistants and its committees, ledgers, journals and cash accounts, invoice and abstract books. Overseas, at Cape Coast Castle and the subordinate forts of the Gold Coast, Slave Coast, River Gambia and Sierra Leone, the records are letter-books, fort accounts and inventories, registers of servants, soldiers and shipping, name-index volumes called alphabets, and registers of ships' passes giving voyages, captains and crew numbers. The National Archives slave-trade guide cites the duty ledgers at T 70/349 to T 70/356 for about 1698 to 1713, and notes that few Company log books survive here. The class reference alone locates nothing; pieces carry numbers.3

The ledgers and the enslaved

This is a first-order primary source, contemporaneous and internally generated, written to settle accounts rather than to persuade posterity. It is also the archive of a slaving corporation, and it records enslaved people overwhelmingly as commodities: numbers shipped, prices paid, losses through death on the Middle Passage, entries in a cargo. The same guide points to T 70 for slave losses. Whatever can be recovered about the enslaved has to be read against the grain of categories that are the trafficker's own. The accounting is a further difficulty: entries follow bookkeeping conventions, trade-goods unit prices and shifting money of account.4

Cape Coast Castle and 1722

For golden-age piracy the series is oblique: it documents the institutional stage rather than the crews on it. That stage is above all Cape Coast Castle, the Company's Gold Coast headquarters and the site of the mass trial of 1722 of the surviving crew of Bartholomew Roberts, taken after Captain Chaloner Ogle of HMS Swallow beat Roberts's squadron off Cape Lopez in February 1722. The court sat at the Castle under a piracy commission.5

Reported outcomes run to some fifty-two hanged and about twenty sentenced to servitude for the Royal African Company, with a substantial number acquitted. The figures differ between popular and scholarly accounts and are approximate.6

The trial record proper is not in T 70. It survives chiefly in the 1723 print, A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, and in the court's own file in the High Court of Admiralty papers at HCA 1/99; the General History of the Pyrates appendix of 1724 carries a later reprint. What the series supplies is the surrounding institution: the fort's command, its garrison and its correspondence in the weeks around the trial.

Getting at it

There is no edition of the series as a whole. Its series description sits in Discovery as record C13807, under the Treasury division node C3489576, and consultation means a visit to Kew. Parts are digitised: a commercial publisher has issued images and an index for about 1694 to 1743. Robin Law has edited the overseas correspondence in Fontes Historiae Africanae as The English in West Africa, from the letter-books of the 1680s and 1690s; K. G. Davies built the Company's standard history on the same accounts and minutes.

How the Archive uses it

T 70 is cited here for the shore context of the Gold Coast, the fort that held the prisoners and the corporation that received the convicted as servants, and paired with Admiralty, High Court of Admiralty and printed trial sources for the pirates themselves. Correspondence about piracy, desertion or losses was written by men defending their own conduct, and is corroborated.

What this source cannot yet give is precision at its edges: the extent and covering dates are the catalogue's own, revised as cataloguing proceeds; the ranges for the three creating companies are approximate rather than taken from the charters; the publication dates of the Law edition and of Davies's history are not yet verified; and the 1722 sentencing figures and the presiding officers at Cape Coast Castle would have to be settled from the 1723 print and the High Court of Admiralty file.

What the evidence does not settle

1722 Cape Coast Castle trial

  • The 1722 Cape Coast trial's sentencing figures vary by accountPossible
  • The presiding officers at the 1722 Cape Coast trial are unnamed

T70 scholarly editions publication details

  • The exact publication dates of Law's and Davies's editions are unclear

Authorship of the General History of the Pyrates

  • The authorship of the General History of the Pyrates is contested

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. T 70 is the class reference at The National Archives, Kew, for the records of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and its successors, the principal surviving corporate archive of the chartered companies that ran the crown's Africa trade, given covering dates of 1660 to 1833 and an extent of about 1,696 volumes. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Archive catalogue: The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of series T 70, Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and successors: Records, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576
  2. The series was generated by three successive chartered bodies: the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa, active in the 1660s and dated in the catalogue to about 1663 to 1672; the Royal African Company of England, chartered in 1672 with a monopoly of the Africa trade that was opened to separate traders in 1698 and running to about 1750; and the regulated Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, which administered the forts from 1750 until they passed to the crown in the early 1820s, all three date ranges being catalogue approximations. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Archive catalogue: The National Archives, Discovery catalogue administrative history for series T 70, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576
  3. T 70 holds the London records of the Court of Assistants and its committees together with ledgers, journals, cash accounts and invoice and abstract books, and the overseas records of Cape Coast Castle and the subordinate forts and factories of the Gold Coast, Slave Coast, River Gambia and Sierra Leone, comprising inward and outward letter-books, fort accounts and inventories, registers of servants, soldiers and shipping, name-index volumes called alphabets and registers of ships' passes, with the Company's duty ledgers at T 70/349 to T 70/356 for about 1698 to 1713 and only a small number of surviving Company log books. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Archive catalogue and research guide: The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of series T 70, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576; The National Archives, Slavery and the British transatlantic slave trade records research guide
  4. T 70 is a first-order primary source of contemporaneous, internally generated business records, and it is also the core archive of the Company's slave trade, recording enslaved people overwhelmingly as commodities through numbers shipped, prices paid, losses through death on the Middle Passage and cargo entries rather than as named persons. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Archive catalogue and research guide: The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of series T 70, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576; The National Archives, Slavery and the British transatlantic slave trade records research guide
  5. Cape Coast Castle, the Royal African Company's Gold Coast headquarters documented throughout T 70, was the site of the mass trial in 1722 of the surviving crew of Bartholomew Roberts, taken after Captain Chaloner Ogle of HMS Swallow defeated Roberts's squadron off Cape Lopez in February 1722, the court sitting at the Castle under a piracy commission; the trial record proper survives chiefly in the 1723 print, A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, and in the court's own manuscript file in the High Court of Admiralty papers at HCA 1/99, with the 1724 appendix to the General History of the Pyrates carrying a later reprint, while T 70 supplies the surrounding institutional context. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Trial pamphlet, court file and digitised source description: A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of All the Pyrates, Lately Taken by Captain Ogle, on Board the Swallow Man of War, on the Coast of Guinea, printed and sold by J. Roberts, London, 1723, with the court's manuscript proceedings at HCA 1/99; The Social History Archive, Royal African Company 1694 to 1743 primary-source series description; the trial appendix to A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724, as a secondary carrier
  6. Reported outcomes of the 1722 Cape Coast Castle trial run to something on the order of fifty-two of the prisoners hanged and about twenty sentenced to servitude for the Royal African Company, with a substantial number acquitted, but the figures vary between popular and scholarly accounts and are approximate. Possible Consistent with the evidence, not established. Trial pamphlet and secondary accounts: A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of All the Pyrates, Lately Taken by Captain Ogle, on Board the Swallow Man of War, on the Coast of Guinea, printed and sold by J. Roberts, London, 1723; Royal Museums Greenwich, Death of Bartholomew Roberts; the trial appendix to A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, as a secondary carrier