Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research | UK news

His diaries would become famous for their vivid detail and frankness. But now, almost exactly 360 years after diarist Samuel Pepys chronicled the Great Fire of London, new research has revealed that he “deleted” and “redacted” correspondence to conceal the offer of a bribe to an enslaved child.

Cambridge University historian Dr. Michael Edwards consulted hundreds of records in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; National Archives; and the Bodleian Library at Oxford for the work “Samuel Pepys, African Companies and Slavery Archives, 1660–1689”.

One of the most disturbing details of the study, published in the Historical Journal, concerns the offer of human bribes to Pepys, a high-ranking naval officer in the 1670s.

Edwards, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, writes about how, in April 1675, John Howe, a naval officer, tried to gain Pepy’s support in the case of being wrongly deprived of command of a ship after the death of its captain.

Howe wrote to Pepys to “desire the admission” of a “little” enslaved child, “whom I have brought on board in your honor… I hope you are experienced enough to endure cold weather to live in England.”

Pepys angrily wrote back rejecting the offer. However, Edwards argues that this was not due to ethical concerns about slavery, but rather to the appearance of appearing to be a man who could be bribed.

Edwards argues that in order to preserve Pepys’s reputation, the boy’s story is reduced to a mention of a “tip” or “reward” in some parts of his archive, so that his fate disappears from the record. At the time, enslaved African boys were requested as servants, and such an offer was “not unusual,” Edwards says.

“Pepys is quite an obsessive archive maker, he keeps most of his maritime documents.

“But if you look at the language of the way he writes these letters (about this incident), he stops talking about a child and stops talking about a person.

“He’s not as concerned with the ethics of enslavement as we are; he’s concerned about concerns that he’s being tempted, so he uses the language of reward and gift because those are kind of official words.

“He wants to show that he acts by the book. Trying to control how people perceive him seems to be quite important to him. We also know that he took bribes in other ways.”

Edwards says Pepys’s clerk, William Hewer, indexed and edited the correspondence in a way that preserved Pepys’ innocence while the enslaved boy’s history was “erased.”

He added: “Pepys… had good reason to be cautious. As Secretary of the Admiralty, he governed one of the largest parts of the province during this period. The Navy was involved in enormous amounts of money and was highly politicized. Pepys had many political enemies and a few years later, in 1679, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London on corruption and papal charges.”

Edwards says Pepys’ work arranging the loan of naval ships to the Royal African Company (RAC), including the trade of enslaved African people, provides the background for the incident.

Howe, the man who offered Pepys a bribe, was a naval officer aboard the ship Phoenix, which Pepys had arranged to loan to the RAC before taking enslaved people from Africa to Barbados, where it arrived in November that year. The ship’s log records the deaths of 19 enslaved people, all of whom were thrown overboard.

Elsewhere in his archive, Pepys speaks unashamedly of his connections with slavery. In September 1688 he told a ship captain that neither “whipping nor shackles” had cured a “naughty” enslaved man in his household, and told the captain to “feed the man with hard flesh” until he could dispose of him as a bandit on a plantation.

Meanwhile, in 1679, Pepys, through another maritime contact, arranged to sell an enslaved man, telling him: ‘Pray that my negro son will not add anything to your care.

None of the men or children mentioned in the records were named.

“The British state and the crown in this period are deeply intertwined with enslavement in many different ways. The presence of significant Black people in London in the 17th century and all of that is part of the story of England’s development as a global power,” Edwards said.

“Pepys had many contacts within the Navy as well as within Britain’s African trading companies. This part of the story remains mostly untold.”