Alexander Falconbridge

Alexander Falconbridge (c. 1760–1792) was a British surgeon who took part in four voyages in slave ships between 1782 and 1787. In time he became an abolitionist and in 1788 published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa. In 1791 he was sent by the Anti-Slavery Society to Granville Town, Sierra Leone, a community of freed slaves, where he died a year later in 1792.

Early life

Falconbridge was born around 1760 in England or Scotland, possibly Prestonpans or Bristol.

The slave trade

The British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge served as a ship's surgeon on four slave trade voyages between 1782 and 1787 (on the ships Tartar (1780–1781), Emilia (1783-84), Alexander (1785-86) and, again, Emilia (1786-87) before rejecting the slave trade and becoming an abolitionist. (In 1782, French naval forces captured Tartar on her second voyage to transport enslaved people, but before she had taken on any captives.)

Falconbridge gained his experience on slave ships before he met the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson following which he became a member of the Anti-Slavery Society. Clarkson was the author of a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition, published in 1787. Clarkson had a high regard for Falconbridge who on more than one occasion acted as his personal armed bodyguard whilst he gathered evidence against the slave trade.

After meeting Clarkson, Falconbridge published in 1788 An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, an influential book in the abolitionist movement. In this book, he talked about the trade from when the ships first acquired captives from the African coast, through their treatment during the Middle Passage, to the time they were sold into hereditary bondage in the West Indies