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

by David Olusoga

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 line immortalized thirty-three years later by J. M. W. Turner, who painted her being solemnly towed up the Thames by a steam-powered tug on her way to the breaker’s yard. Ordinary Seaman John Cupide was a twenty-year-old African who served on HMS Minotaur while twenty-three-year-old African William Hughes faced the French fleet from the decks of a British warship fittingly named HMS Africa, which had served in the American Revolution, another war in which black men fought for Britain. We know from his service records that William Hughes was discharged from the Royal Navy’s Haslar Hospital in Portsmouth on 14 January 1806, three months after the battle in which he presumably received his wounds. As far as we can tell it seems that against the odds all the African...