"The Felonious and Piratical': The British Antislavery Explorers of Brazil and the British Slaveholders of Minas Gerais, 1839-1843

In 1839, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) sent two of their members, George and Charlotte Pilkington, to Brazil on an extended fact-finding mission. Although some scholars know of this mission, most believe that the documents for this expedition no longer exist. As historians Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho suggest, “The [BFASS] sent a secret delegation to Brazil to study the local situation. Unfortunately, no information about the outcome, if any, of this visit has been found.”^[1] Fortunately, I have recovered these documents during my archival research in Great Britain and Brazil.

My conference paper examines the Pilkington mission to Brazil and argues that the information they produced shaped the way British abolitionists and officials viewed slavery for the next several decades. One of the biggest discoveries generated by this expedition revealed that the gold mines in Minas Gerais were “English Property, worked too, by slaves new as well as old!”^[2] This mission created an international crisis for the British government, and I argue it forced Parliament to pass the Aberdeen Act, which among other things, prevented British subjects living in foreign countries from owning or selling slaves.

[1] Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho, eds., Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionist and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905 (London: University London Press, 2009), p. 8.

[2] “George Pilkington to the BFASS,” 25 March 1840, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Anti-Slavery Papers, Brazil, MSS. Brit. Emp. S22/G79, ff. not available, p. 4,