This essay aims to be an exercise in the reconstitution of life-histories from the age of abolition, using the cases of two African men, José Majojo and Francisco Moçambique, who were enslaved seamen on board the Dois de Fevereiro in the Rio de Janeiro-Benguela route and were emancipated and sent to Trinidad after the ship was apprehended by the Royal Navy in 1841. Besides discussing the documentation pertaining to the British campaign to suppress the slave trade and other relevant primary sources, the essay puts the two African men in the established contexts of the history of the Atlantic in the age of abolition and suggests new contexts that are illuminated by their trajectories.
slave trade abolition; Great Britain; enslaved seamen; microhistory.