William Davenport was one of the most prolific slave traders in British history. Operating out of Liverpool, he organized numerous voyages that transported tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean. By the sheer scale of his operations, Davenport was Liverpool’s most active slaver, linking the coasts of Africa to the sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations that fueled Britain’s colonial wealth.
Born in London on 8 October 1725, Davenport came from a family with wealth and status. During his youth in the late 1730s, William lived with his maternal grandfather John Ward, whose connections would later shape the course of his life. Ward was associated with William Whaley, a well-established Liverpool slave trader. When Davenport came of age, he was sent to Liverpool to apprentice under Whaley, entering a world where commerce was built not on goods, but on the bodies of other human beings.
This apprenticeship marked the beginning of Davenport’s immersion into the transatlantic slave trade. Liverpool was becoming the dominant British slave port, and young men from wealthy families saw slaving as a path to immense fortune. Davenport embraced it completely.
Davenport quickly rose from apprentice to one of the world’s most active merchants in enslaved Africans. By the number of voyages and people transported, his operation surpassed all contemporaries. His career stretched across decades, contributing significantly to Britain’s expansion of the Atlantic slave economy.
Davenport didn’t simply follow the established slaving routes, he expanded them. His ships sailed to Old Calabar, Gabon, and Cameroon, regions that many Liverpool traders avoided. He pioneered the Liverpool–Old Calabar route, taking enslaved Africans farther east than most of his contemporaries. Nearly three-quarters of all enslaved Africans taken from Cameroon during the height of British involvement in the trade passed through Davenport’s ships.
But Africa was only one part of Davenport’s reach. He was among the first Liverpool traders to fully exploit Britain’s newly acquired Caribbean colonies after the Treaty of Paris in 1763. He transported enslaved Africans to islands including Tobago, St. Vincent, Grenada, Dominica, Barbados, Jamaica, St. Kitts, Antigua, and other Windward Islands. These islands were the center of Britain’s sugar, coffee, and cotton economies, and sugar in particular demanded continuous, physically exhausting labor, planting, cutting, boiling, and transporting cane.
Life on these plantations was brutal. Jamaica’s sugar estates saw incredibly high mortality rates, with workers forced to toil for long hours under scorching heat. In St. Kitts, Antigua, and the other Windward Islands, planters routinely pushed enslaved Africans to exhaustion, while the later-acquired islands of Grenada, St. Vincent, Tobago, and Dominica applied the same harsh system of intensive labor. Mortality was so high that planters often relied on importing new enslaved Africans rather than relying on natural population growth.
Davenport also supplied enslaved Africans to the Chesapeake region of North America, highlighting the global scope of his enterprise. Wherever his ships landed, they brought the same devastation: families torn apart, communities uprooted, and lives reduced to commodities. Each voyage was a direct link between the horrors of African capture and the deadly work demanded by European plantations.
Davenport never married and deliberately kept himself separate from the social and business networks that connected other Liverpool slave traders. In 1786, he retired suddenly, at a time when opposition to the slave trade was growing in Britain. Abolitionist pamphlets and public campaigns were circulating widely, exposing the human cost of the trade. His brother, Thomas Davenport, had been involved in the legal cases surrounding the Zong massacre, one of the most infamous atrocities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The Zong massacre occurred in 1781, when the crew of the British slave ship Zong deliberately threw more than 130 enslaved Africans overboard so the owners could claim insurance for “lost cargo.” The case went to court in England, and even though the owners were initially treated as pursuing a financial matter rather than a criminal act, the trial revealed to the public the extreme cruelty and inhumanity of the trade. It became a rallying point for abolitionists, shocking the British public and fueling campaigns to end slavery.
Davenport’s sudden retirement may have been influenced by a combination of factors: his personal wealth, growing moral scrutiny of the trade, and fear of becoming a target for public outrage after such cases drew attention to the horrors his profession had enabled.
A few years later, Davenport died. According to obituary information published in the Liverpool Advertiser on 28 August 1797, he died a bachelor and left his considerable fortune to his brother Richard and his nephew Davies Davenport of Capesthorne. He was buried at St. Nicholas’ Church, Prescot.
Davenport left behind no grand memoir, no heroic story, and no portrait that we can definitively attach to his face. What survives instead is paperwork, a staggering amount of it.
His archives, discovered in two unexpected caches, contain detailed ledger entries for nearly 80 voyages between 1761 and 1784, as well as letters, accounts, purchase records, and demographic lists of the enslaved Africans he trafficked. These documents reveal not only numbers but a chilling level of precision in the business of human trafficking, ages recorded, genders counted, ship refits financed, partners listed, and profits calculated.
Today, the collection is preserved by the Merseyside Maritime Museum, and it contains more information about Liverpool’s slave trading operation than all other surviving traders’ documents combined.
Sources:
https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p16003coll17/id/195/
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/archives-of-william-davenport-1725-1797
https://britishonlinearchives.com/collections/12/slave-trading-records-from-william-davenport-co-1745-1797
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/download/GB%200136%20D-DAV?utm_source=chatgpt.com
