On this day ...
Today is the 119th anniversary of the act becoming law which abolished the slave trade.
On this day, 25th March, in 1807, the Abolition of Slave Trade act gained Royal assent making the trade in slaves illegal throughout the British Empire.
The Royal Navy's West African squadron was tasked with exterminating this evil trade and freeing the slaves.
In the decades that followed units of the Royal Navy, mostly from that squadron, captured over 1600 slave trader ships, freeing over 150,000 slaves.
There were costs in money but more importantly there was a cost in lives, mostly from disease, as it required the navy to operate in areas such as the Bight of Benin were there was a high disease risk. The navy lost about 1,587 sailors who died on slavery suppression operations between 1830 and 1865, which is just under one sailor for every slave trader ship captured or about one for every nine slaves freed.
The total financial cost of slavery suppression operations over the sixty-year period from 1808 to 1867 was approximately £40 million in contemporary money, which is estimated to be around £2 billion in today's money.
At its peak in the 1840s and 1850s, the West Africa Squadron's squadron's operations consumed as much as half of the entire Royal Navy's annual budget. This peak expenditure reached an estimated two per cent of Great Britain's entire GDP at its height, a figure described as equivalent to today's entire UK defence budget.
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