Blue Plaque to James Field Stanfield on Bodlewell House

James Field Stanfield (1749-1824) was born in Dublin but spent most of his later life in Sunderland, living here at Bodlewell House (the original building is no longer standing). He initially trained for the priesthood but did not go on to take orders. Instead, he became a sailor and, as such, was the first ordinary seaman involved in the slave trade to write about its horrors. He described conditions on board slaving ships as ‘floating dungeons’.

In 1788 he wrote 'Observations on a Guinea Voyage', which is a vivid account of a trip from Liverpool to Benin, West Africa, on a slaving ship. He also published The Guinea Voyage as ‘a poem in three volumes’ in 1789, featuring the description: ‘The direful Voyage to Guinea’s sultry shore / And Africa’s wrongs, indignant Muse deplore’.

He wrote a series of letters describing the horrors of the conditions on these ships to his close friend and leading anti-slavery campaigner, the Reverend Thomas Clarkson. Stanfield’s evidence included the additional argument that the slave trade was extremely destructive to the lives of the English sailors, describing the psychological trauma the men suffered.

Thomas Clarkson was a founding member of the Society for Effecting Abolition of the Slave Trade, and he included Stanfield’s writings in the evidence this society collected. Passages from Stanfield’s writing were used extensively in antislavery pamphlets.