Peter Paggen, Humphry Morice and the slave trade

The family link

It is sometimes said that Paggen and Morice were in the slave trade together as father- and son-in-law. That is not quite right. They were in the same trade, and in the same small circle of London investors, but the marriage that joined the families came later.

Peter Paggen died on 15 June 1720. His elder daughter Katherine had married William Hale of King’s Walden, Hertfordshire, who died in 1717. On 5 June 1722 the widowed Katherine Hale married Humphry Morice as his second wife. His first wife, Judith Sandes, had died in 1720.

So Morice became Paggen’s son-in-law only after Paggen was dead. But the two men had known each other for years. Morice’s first recorded slaving voyage, in 1704, was a partnership with Isaac Milner, who had served his apprenticeship under Paggen. In 1705 Morice wrote to his agent in Jamaica about setting up a slaving business with Milner’s help, and of perhaps needing Paggen’s help too.¹

The families were joined a second time. Katherine’s son by her first marriage, Paggen Hale (c.1715–1755), married his step-sister Elizabeth, Morice’s daughter by his first marriage.

The Manor House on East Hill stayed in the family. It passed from Paggen to his daughter, and her son Humphry Morice the younger (1723–1785) sold it in 1759 to Matthew Blakiston.²

What the database records

The SlaveVoyages database brings together the surviving records of some 36,000 slaving voyages. Searching it for the two families gives the following:

* Many of these figures are the database’s own estimates (“imputed”). The number landed is often recorded in a document; the number taken on board in Africa is often worked out from it. The deaths column is simply the difference, and does not count those who died before the ships sailed or soon after landing.

There are three smaller entries under the family names too. A William Paggen, captain and owner, brought 42 people from the Caribbean to Virginia in two small shipments in 1684–85. A Paul Paggen owned the Sarah, which carried 489 people from Whydah to Jamaica in 1705–06. Whether either was related to Peter is not yet known.

Peter Paggen’s voyages, 1698–1705

Paggen is recorded only as an investor on all of these voyages, never as a captain: other men commanded his ships. All his voyages sailed from London, and almost all of them sold their captives in Jamaica.

He had, though, been to sea himself earlier in life. According to Pettigrew, he began as a ship’s captain carrying tobacco from the Chesapeake — Maryland and Virginia — to London, before setting up as a merchant.¹ By 1690 he was a London merchant living near Billingsgate, and in 1692 the Maryland Assembly made him its agent in London. The record of his captaincy has not yet been checked against the book itself or a primary source.

His ships included the Charles, Sarah, Experiment, Neptune, George, Mayflower, Mermaid, Content, Friendship and John, several of them sailing more than once. His most frequent partner was James Waite (or Wayte), captain and investor, who appears on eleven of the voyages. Pettigrew names Paggen, Milner and Wayte as the “Chesapeake specialists” among the separate traders.¹

The dates are telling. Until 1698 the African trade was, in law, the monopoly of the Royal African Company. The Africa Trade Act of that year let independent “separate traders” in, on payment of a ten per cent duty to the Company. Paggen had campaigned against the monopoly, and his first recorded voyage, the George, sailed in September 1698. Most of the evidence for his voyages comes from the Company’s own records (The National Archives, T 70), presumably the duty accounts.

A few of the voyages stand out:

— The Sarah (1699–1700) bought her captives at Calabar, in the Bight of Biafra. Of 431 taken on board, 299 were landed in Jamaica.

— The Neptune (1700–01) landed 140 people at Barbados and took 79 on to the York River in Virginia — the Chesapeake, where Paggen had begun his career.

— The Charles (1701–03) bought captives in West Central Africa and was taken by the French. 208 people were landed at Buenos Aires: 43 men, 93 women, 69 boys and 3 infants. It is the only Paggen voyage for which the people are counted by age and sex.

— From 1703 his ships traded at Whydah (Ouidah), in the Bight of Benin. On the Charles in 1703–04, 80 of the 450 people on board died before reaching Jamaica.

Two of his partners are worth noting. A John Davis invested in the George (1698) and the Sarah (1699). Paggen’s wife was Katherine Davis, and he may have been one of her family. And Paggen’s fellow investors in the Friendship (1701) — Abraham Houlditch, Robert Brooke and Daniel Jamineau — turn up a few years later as partners of Humphry Morice.

Humphry Morice’s voyages, 1704–1731

Morice was on a different scale. The Bank of England Museum calls him “Prince of London slave merchants” and the biggest London-based trafficker of his day.³ The database lists 92 of his voyages; some of the rest have presumably not yet been matched to his name.

His first recorded voyage, the Ann and Judith of 1704, was taken by the French before any captives were bought. From then until his death he sent ships out almost every year, and in the 1720s, while a Director, Deputy Governor and Governor of the Bank, several a year.

He named many of his ships after his family: the Judith (his first wife), the Katherine or Catherine (his second, Paggen’s daughter), and the Sarah, Betty and Anne. In 1730 he even sent out a ship called the Morice.

— The Whydah. In 1716 the Whydah Gally landed 500 people in Jamaica. On her way home in February 1717 she was captured by the pirate Samuel Bellamy, who made her his flagship; she was wrecked off Cape Cod that April. The wreck was found in 1984, and is now the best-known pirate wreck in the world.

— Pirates. Pirates also took the Bird (1719), commanded by William Snelgrave, the Swallow (1719), the Heroine and Sarah (1719) and the Princess (1721 and again in 1723).

— Resistance. The captives rose against the crew on the Whidah (1719), the Henry (1721), the Elizabeth (1721–22), the Martha (1724–25) and the Anne (1725). On the Charming Lydia in 1731 the rising ended with the loss of the ship and the people aboard.

— The largest voyage. The Catherine Gally (1728–29) took 709 people on board at Whydah and landed 678 at Antigua.

— The South Sea Company. The Mermaid (1729–30) carried 647 people from Loango and Cabinda to Buenos Aires, for the South Sea Company under its contract to supply the Spanish colonies.

The fraud, the Bank and the widow

Between May and November 1731, while still a Director, Morice forged thirteen bills of exchange and obtained £27,700 from the Bank of England. He died on 16 November 1731. The newspapers blamed gout in the stomach; there were rumours of poison.³

The Bank sued his estate for £28,993 8s 1d. It is said to have settled in the end for £12,000.⁴

His executor was his widow — Peter Paggen’s daughter Katherine. Ships that had sailed in 1731 were still landing captives in the Caribbean in 1732, and for a short time she kept the business going while trying to save what she could of the estate from his creditors.³

The Bank of England Archive holds the bulk of Morice’s papers: business and personal letters, insurance accounts and his orders to his captains. The Bank also owns his portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller.³

Wandsworth

Paggen lived at the Manor House on East Hill from about 1670 until he died, and he and his wife are buried at Mount Nod, barely a hundred yards away. The hall ceiling of the house carried the initials P K P, for Peter and Katherine Paggen. His will left his widow £10,000 in East India and Bank of England stock.

In June 1690 Paggen, then living in Cross Lane near Billingsgate, advertised in the London Gazette for Jack, “a Guinea Negro Boy, about 8 years old”, who had “strayed away” from his house. Jack is the only person enslaved by Paggen whose name we know.

Neither the tomb nor the interpretation plaque beside it mentions the slave trade.

On this site

— Peter Paggen

— The Will of Peter Paggen, 1717

— Jack, ‘a Guinea Negro Boy’, 1690

— Notes on Paggen from Pettigrew’s Freedom’s Debt

— The Manor House, East Hill and Kershaw’s account of 1891

— The Huguenot Burial Ground, Mount Nod

— Notes on the South Sea Company (for the Mermaid’s voyage to Buenos Aires)

Still to find

— William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade (1734). Snelgrave commanded Morice’s Bird, Henry and Katherine, and describes capture by pirates, risings on board, and Whydah at the time of its conquest by Dahomey in 1727.

— Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. 2 (1931), which prints letters and orders from Morice to his captains.

— The Morice papers in the Bank of England Archive.

— James A. Rawley, London, Metropolis of the Slave Trade (2003), which has a chapter on Morice.

— Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade (1991), a source for Paggen’s Sarah.

— The National Archives: Royal African Company records (T 70); Chancery cases (C 11); the Bank’s suit against Morice’s estate; the wills of Katherine Paggen (1724) and Katherine Morice (1743).

— Who were William Paggen, Paul Paggen and John Davis?

Register of voyages

All 123 voyages recorded in the SlaveVoyages database under the names Paggen and Morice (and three under a William Hale, almost certainly a different man from Katherine’s first husband, included only so that he can be ruled out). Click a column heading to sort. To look up a voyage, search for its number in the SlaveVoyages database.

Source: SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, enslaver records for Peter Paggen (1001533), Humphry Morice (1001594 and duplicates), Paul Paggen (1012176), William Paggen (67805) and William Hale (66880), extracted 4 October 2026. Figures in the “taken on board” and “landed” columns are often the database’s estimates. Under “Outcome”, risings by the captives are shown in red and capture by pirates in brown.