Dundas, Slavery and the Royal Navy

Sir Henry Dundas was a man who opposed slavery and led a navy that went on to fight slavery. Unlike "Sankofa", that is an important part of our real history.

The city of Toronto under its woke Mayor Olivia Chow recently considered renaming Dundas Street, a major street running through the centre of the city, ostensibly because the street’s namesake Sir Henry Dundas supported slavery, but really because the woke dislike our heritage. Splitting differences as politicians do, they have settled for renaming Dundas Square and a couple of subway stations.

It has now emerged that Dundas was an abolitionist, albeit a pragmatic one, who like most practical politicians wanted bills to pass and legislation to achieve its object.¹ More embarrassing, the deracinated new name of Dundas Square, “Sankofa” Square, aside from being an inauthentic import that no one had heard of a week ago, is taken from a tribe of slave traders. You could not make this up.

Aside from his current fame, or perhaps notoriety, Dundas was a key ally and effectively Scottish lieutenant of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, the second-longest-serving (after Sir Robert Walpole) Prime Minister in history. Dundas served as the first Secretary of State for War and Colonies (good Canadian values, I have always thought) when that office was created in 1794, at the beginning of the Wars of the French Revolution and Empire. In 1804 (having been created Viscount Melville) he became First Lord of the Admiralty, in other words Navy minister.

As First Lord, Dundas did much to replenish a fleet run down by the previous administration. In direct communication with Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson, the commander at sea, Dundas/Melville deserves much of the credit for creating the fleet that won the battle of Trafalgar.² Trafalgar was one of greatest naval triumphs in history, a battle that secured England’s independence from Napoleon’s empire.

“England has saved herself by her exertions… Europe by her example,” was Pitt’s epigrammatic verdict on Trafalgar, and Dundas deserves some of the credit for that decisive victory. His name should remind us that sometimes a man in an office can do useful work, however apparently unheroic and later forgotten his efforts may be, a reminder not altogether irrelevant to the office towers of Toronto.

Dundas' connection to the Royal Navy recalls the prominent role of the Royal Navy in the suppression of slavery. Initially, as very few know, this involved the suppression of the slavery of Englishmen. Until the early nineteenth century, Britons and many other Europeans and Anglo-Americans were held as slaves in Muslim North Africa, then under Turkish suzerainty. I don’t believe anyone has asked the Turks for an apology.

The famously uplifting anthem Rule Britannia of 1740 refers to this reality (video copied without permission from the Twitter account of the estimable Isabel Oakeshott).

The key lyrics are:

  Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
  Britons never will be slaves.

“Britons never will be slaves,” was not a metaphor. In the 17th century, North African pirates raided south-western England for slaves. Throughout the 18th and into the 19th century British, American and other ships were attacked and crews sold into slavery in the Barbary states of North Africa. This was the cause of the Barbary Wars, where Stephen Decatur of the U.S. Navy made his name fighting pirates, and also the origin the latter half of the famous line in the U.S. Marine hymn, “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” (the first phrase referring to the Mexican campaign of 1914.)

In 1816, Admiral Lord Exmouth (better known for his exploits during the Napoleonic Wars as Sir Edward Pellew) led an Anglo-Dutch fleet into Algiers, reduced the fort and town to rubble, liberated thousands of slaves, and ended the enslavement of Britons and Dutchmen. Henceforward, the Beys of Algiers preyed on French shipping, which was the beginning of another story.

The Muslims were (and are, slavery still existing in parts of the Muslim world) not unique. It is often forgotten that slavery has been a widespread, almost universal, institution throughout history. Even John Locke, the famous seventeenth-century theorist of constitutional government, justified slavery under some conditions (prisoners captured in a just war being his example). Until the late eighteenth century, most societies regarded slavery as a normal and even necessary institution. The great classical authors, from Aristotle forward, could be and often were cited in support.

Britain, with the support of Sir Henry Dundas, was one of the first countries to even consider the possibility of the abolition of slavery. France to its credit was another, actually being the first country to abolish slavery tout court. This was the true historical departure. Were we not mired in a fit of cultural self-hatred, we might celebrate western civilization as the emancipatory force that it has been.

In the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy fought a long and difficult campaign against the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Britain deployed a great deal of diplomatic capital securing agreements with France, Spain, Portugal and the United States, allowing it to stop and search potential slave ships off the coast of West Africa and elsewhere in the Atlantic. Lord Palmerston is now remembered for gunboat diplomacy, but many of his gunboats were chasing slavers, and near the end of his long and storied career, he declared that the suppression of slavery was one of his proudest achievements.

It was a long and difficult campaign lasting from the 1820s to the the 1860s, when Union victory in the American Civil War and British pressure on Brazil, exercised by Palmerston’s gunboats, finally ended the Atlantic slave trade. The navy’s campaign against slavery was not a photo op or a gesture or a symbol: it was a policy pursued at some cost and with no reward, and with unusual persistence, over a fifty year period.

Over 2,000 sailors of the Royal Navy died fighting the slave trade, first off west Africa, and toward the end of the century in the Indian Ocean. The vast majority of the 2,000 died of tropical diseases, malaria chief among them, but many also from accidents, storms and combat. Most of those who died did so on the west coast of Africa, around the bight of Benin and the outlets of the Niger River, on the so-called slave coast.³ The anti-slavery patrol was boring, painstaking and dangerous work. The patrol was sustained, year in year out, by a squadron of smaller ships able to enter African rivers and harbors, but fast enough to catch slave ships. It involved little glamour, and given the smaller ships employed, small prospect of high promotion. Later in the nineteenth century, the British also actively suppressed the Indian Ocean slave trade, largely run by Muslims out of Zanzibar, moving slaves from east Africa to Arabia and the Persian Gulf, a campaign less deadly but even farther away.

Toronto’s woke politicians have now renamed Dundas Square (but not Dundas Street), calling it “Sankofa Square,” a name deriving from a tribe in Ghana, the old Gold Coast. The only problem is that this tribe were themselves slave catchers. The Atlantic slave trade always depended on Africans to capture and enslave other Africans. Very arguably, slavery grew more severe and more widespread as the Atlantic slave trade created demand for slaves and hence for slave-raiding wars in the interior of the continent. But the Atlantic slave trade could never have existed without African slavers, and it ended because England and the Royal Navy under the leadership of men like Dundas ended it.

If ever we tire of pulling down statues, perhaps we could erect one to the West Africa squadron, and the other anti-slavery patrols of the Royal Navy.

What we are seeing in the current burst of iconoclasm has little to do with slavery or even with the problems of the black community today, and much to do with a collapse of cultural self-confidence across the English-speaking or Anglo-Saxon worlds. Renaming things is a way of displaying ostentatious obeisance to current orthodoxy. Beneath that, if we have no history to be proud of, then we shall need a class of state bureaucrats to create another one, however contrived. The element of inauthenticity, of sheer phoniness, in names like “Sankofa” is almost desired, as though to say, “if you don’t know what this is, then shut up.” As I have argued in connection with gender ideology, this is not a coincidence.

Beneath the rhetoric of diversity lies the deep structure of bureaucratic authoritarianism, telling us what to think and who to obey. The many towns, roads, and squares once or still named for an old Scotch Tory are best seen as toponymic reminders of patriotic service and great deeds long ago, and also of the cultural self-confidence of our ancestors.

1. Jennifer Dundas, and descendant of Henry Dundas, has put together much material, https://hdcommittee.medium.com/; she’s on Rebel, here, and X/Twitter, here.

2. Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievements of Horatio Nelson, London: Allen Lane, 2005, pp. 471-72.

3. For casualty figures, see Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1969 (1949), appendix F, p. 289.