A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica : The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794

Captain Samuel Gamble recorded in his ship's log a record of a nearly failed slaving venture to Africa and Jamaica. Gamble's account is one of the best first-hand narratives of the slave trade to survive. This book presents a faithfully transcribed and carefully annotated edition of Gamble's log and provides a haunting and remarkable perspective of slave trading at the end of the eighteenth century.

Gamble was captain of the British merchant Sandown. During 1793-1794, the ship embarked on a commercial venture from England to Upper Guinea in West Africa to buy slaves and to transport them for sale in Kingston, Jamaica.

In his detailed and carefully maintained ship-log, Gamble describes shipping patterns at London at the beginning of the Anglo-French war in 1793, naval and nautical procedures followed in the English-African-West Indian commerce, and the slave trading patterns and institutions on the African coast and at Kingston. The log recounts the beginnings and spread of a yellow fever epidemic that swept the Atlantic and crippled commerce on both sides of the ocean. Bruce L. Mouser's extensive annotations place Gamble's account within the historical context of the late eighteenth century and explain Gamble's observations of commerce, diseases, and Africa people along the Upper Guinea coast.