Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

a young black sailor not out of some nineteenth-century sense of ‘political correctness’ or as some gesture of ethnic tokenism. The black sailor is there in bronze because men just like him were there in flesh and bone, on the ships that fought at Trafalgar. The evidence for their presence can be found in the muster books of the ships of Nelson’s fleet held at the National Archives in London. These documents list the names, pay-book numbers, ages and places of birth of every man who did his duty under Admiral Nelson that day.22 Among them are men from across Britain but also others from India, Malta, Italy and the former American colonies. There are also eighteen men listed as having been born in Africa and another hundred and twenty-three in the West Indies. One African and six West Indians are listed as serving under Nelson on HMS Victory. Among the Africans at Trafalgar were John Amboyne, who was twenty-seven years old and had been born in Guinea. He served as a landsman on HMS Defiance. George Brown, also born in Guinea, was a boy of just thirteen at the time of the battle. He fought on HMS Colossus alongside two other African-born shipmates, the twenty-year-old William Cully and thirty-five-year-old Jean Moncier, who had been born in Sallee in Morocco. Ordinary Seaman George Butler was twenty-six in 1805 and fought on HMS Orion. John Ephraim, who had been born in Africa’s Calabar Coast, in what is today Nigeria, served on board HMS Temeraire, the 98-gun ship of the li...