With the actual atrocities taking place so far away, material and visual evidence was vital.Ĭlarkson travelled the country giving anti-slavery lectures during which he observed that a plan showing the inhuman way in which kidnapped African people were packed into the slave ship Brookes influenced the audiences more than words alone. Abolition campaigns in Britain therefore had to do two jobs: reveal the horrors and inhumanity of the practice of slavery to the British public and promote alternative viable economic products. In order to make profit, producers used a workforce of kidnapped African people, forced to work unpaid through degradation and violence.

Many enterprising Britons saw in this an opportunity to make large profits, but these commodities were labour-intensive to produce. There was an enormous appetite in Britain for sugar, coffee and cocoa. The transatlantic slave trade and the exploitation of enslaved people on plantations had been a mainstay of the British economy for nearly two hundred years and for much of this time went unquestioned.

In Liverpool, Clarkson also purchased objects produced in the city for use in the transatlantic slave trade: leg shackles, handcuffs, a thumb screw and a speculum oris - a device used to wrench open a person’s mouth to force them to eat. Most of these objects were collected by Clarkson from the crews of ships engaged in trade with west Africa, as he toured the ports of Liverpool, Bristol and London conducting interviews to gather evidence for the abolition campaign. It contained items from west Africa, including natural products such as samples of wood, ivory, seeds, spices, gum, tobacco, beans, indigo and cotton, manufactured products such as rope, woven and dyed cloth along with a hand loom and spindle, and finished objects such as iron knives, gold objects, leather sandals, and bags woven from dried grasses. Although some items are now missing, the chest was originally filled with artefacts and samples collected by Clarkson as evidence against the slave trade.

Inside the chest are three trays, divided into small compartments.

Facts about the brookes slave ship