Published in London in 1789, the broadside Description of a Slave Ship
is an icon of the antislavery moment in England and the United States. Between March and July of that year, more than 10,000 copies of the plan of the slave ship Brooks, in one form or another, were issued. The plan makes visually striking what
until then had been grasped only verbally or by consulting the statistical
data gathered by Commons regarding the ships involved in the
trade.
The 10,000 printed copies descended from three primary versions
of the plan, which can be distinguished by their place of origin :
Plymouth, Philadelphia, and London. The Plymouth version is the
very first, occurring in two variants: (a) a four-page pamphlet with
inserted plate, and (b) a broadside with engraving and text. The earliest
Plymouth version appeared in March 1789. The Philadelphia
version is based directly on the Plymouth version. It is known in three
variants: (a) an inserted plate in the May 1789 issue of the journal
American Museum, (b) a broadside with engraving and text in four columns
bearing the imprint “Matthew Carey — Price 3d. — or 18s per
hundred,” and (c) a broadside with engraving and text in three columns
and no imprint. Philadelphia variants (b) and (c) were evidently
issued in June and July 1789, respectively. Temporally between the
Plymouth and Philadelphia versions is the London version, printed
by James Phillips. It is known in two variants: (a) one illustrated by
woodcuts, and (b) one illustrated with a copperplate engraving. It
was first published between April 21 and 28, 1789. According to minutes
of the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition
of the Slave Trade, the printing orders are recorded on July
28, 1789, as follows : “1,700 Description of a Slave Ship with copper
plate ; 7,000 ditto with wood cuts” (see Cheryl Finley, “Committed
to Memory : The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination”
[Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002], 94, n.119).
The Plymouth version
(a) is very rare ; only three copies of the pamphlet are recorded. One
copy of the Plymouth broadside variant (b) is known. The Philadelphia
variants are more common but still quite rare. Princeton owns a
copy of the May 1789 issue of the American Museum (a) with the plate
still intact. Princeton also acquired, evidently in the 1960 s, a copy of
Philadelphia variant (b). It is beautifully preserved and shows signs of
once having been folded so as to form a postal letter.
This accession was acquired from a London bookseller
in early 2006. It was purchased in part with funds donated by Sid Lapidus, Class of
1959.
It is a fine copy of the London version (a), the
variant with woodcuts. Historical evidence shows that the London
version was by far the most commonly distributed version of the plan
of the Brooks. As the years went by and the debate over the slave trade
continued, the London version was reprinted time and again. It appeared
in the précis of the proceedings of the Commons committee
on the slave trade published in 1791. Princeton has two copies of this
précis, one in the general rare book collections and another in the
Scheide Library. It appeared several times after 1791, most notably
in the 1808 History of the … Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the
Reverend Thomas Clarkson, a chief agent of the London Committee.
(The Library recently purchased a copy of the London edition
of the History; the Philadelphia edition has been
in Princeton’s collections since the early nineteenth century.) On the
eve of the American Civil War, the London version of the Brooks plan
appeared in an abolitionist pamphlet, which was given to the Library in
the late nineteenth century by John S. Pierson.