author
Alexander Falconbridge
d. 1792
A ship's surgeon who became one of the early witnesses against the Atlantic slave trade, he wrote from firsthand experience with a bluntness that still feels immediate. His work offers a rare, unsettling view of the trade from someone who had once served within it and then turned against it.
1 Audiobook
An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa
by Alexander Falconbridge
About the author
Born around 1760, Alexander Falconbridge was a British surgeon who sailed on four slave-ship voyages between 1782 and 1787. What he saw on those journeys led him to break with the trade, and in 1788 he published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, a powerful eyewitness work describing the violence and suffering built into the system.
Falconbridge became associated with the abolitionist movement and used his experience to support the campaign against slavery. His writing mattered because it came from someone who had worked aboard slave ships himself, giving readers direct testimony rather than distant opinion.
In 1791 he was sent to Sierra Leone, to Granville Town, on behalf of the anti-slavery cause. He died there in 1792, leaving behind a short life but an important record that helped expose the realities of the slave trade.