10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was published in the autumn of 1847. Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood by Malcolm Rymer was an outstanding horror story even in a decade which was unusually rich in novels of ghouls, vampires, and gothic spine-chilling.
11. Miss Fanny's excuse was not very flattering to her fiancé, whose position with the Eighth Hussars was that of paymaster.
12. The Black Joke schooner had a career befitting its romantic name, being in turn a slaver, a Royal Navy tender, and an opium smuggler in the China Seas.
13. Under the Anglo — Dutch treaty of 1822 a ship fitted out for slaving (with shackles, slave shelves, unusually large cooking facilities, etc.,) could be condemned as a slaver even if she was not carrying slaves. (See W. E. F. Ward's The Royal Navy and the Slavers.)
14. What Flashman says of the background to the slave trade in the 1840s is accurate enough, but obviously he does not give more than a hint of the complicated system of treaties and anti-slavery laws by which the civilised nations fought the traffic. (See Ward). Virtually all were prepared to pay at least lip service to the anti-slave trade cause, but only Britain mounted a continuous major campaign against the slaving vessels on the high seas and along the African coast, although at the time of Flashman's voyage the United States Navy was also lending its assistance. But there was no consistency about the various national laws against the trade, and the slavers were quick to take advantage of the numerous loopholes. What is sometimes not appreciated is the distinction that was drawn by governments between slavery and actual slave trading: for example, Britain prohibited the trade as early as 1807, but did not abolish slavery within the Empire until 1833; the United States prohibited the trade in 1808, but continued to practise slavery in her slave states until the Civil War. In this topsy turvy situation, with huge private interests involved in the traffic, slave trading flourished into the second half of the century.
15. Pedro Blanco was a leading slave-broker who specialised in collecting Africans for sale to slaving ships. His usual scene of operations was farther north, on the Sierra Leone coast. Flashman's description of Whydah and the Kroos corresponds very closely with contemporary accounts.
16. With epidemics an ever-present danger on the Middle Passage, slaver captains took every precaution against shipping diseased or weakly slaves However, they had no scruples about marketing those who fell ill on the voyage, and were at pains to disguise their disabilities. Spring is here referring to a particularly revolting means of hiding the symptoms of dysentery.
17. Spring was giving considerably less space to his slaves than that allowed by the Wilberforce Committee in 1788, when the famous plan of the slaving ship Broohes gave the following figures: Males, six feet by sixteen inches; females, five feet by sixteen inches; boys, five feet by fourteen inches; girls, four feet six by twelve inches. This, as F. George Kay points out in The Shameful Trade, meant that five men were packed into a space equivalent to two modern single beds, and lay there for perhaps twenty hours a day over a period of several weeks. Parliament was prepared to accept a death rate of two per cent
18. The Genius of Universal Emancipation, a newspaper published from 1821 to 1839 by Benjamin Lundy, an early American abolitionist. William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the greatest of anti-slavery journalists, worked with Lundy before founding his own paper, The Liberator, in 1831 which ran until the end of the Civil War. Arthur and Lewis Tappan were dedicated New York abolitionists.
19. The revolvers, by Flashman's description, were probably early Colt Patersons of 1836 (single-action muzzle-loaders, five-shot, .40 calibre), although it is not impossible that they were Colt Walkers of the type produced for the Mexican War (six-shot, .44). The needle guns must be the Prussian Dreyse single-shot breech-loaders of 1840, which were the first bolt-action military weapons.
20. The Dahomeyans believed that human sacrifices were messengers to the gods, and despatched about 500 each year, about a tenth of whom were killed at the "annual custom", as the great ritual slaughter festival was called. The "grand custom", held only when a king died, involved much greater bloodshed.
21. King Gezo, a liberal ruler by Dahomeyan standards, made £60,000 a year from the slave trade, according to Royal Navy intelligence estimates, and also reorganised the army of Amazons, which had previously been composed of female criminals, unfaithful wives, etc. Gezo, by recruiting from all the unmarried girls of his kingdom, raised a force of about 4,000 fighting women, and there is ample evidence of their ferocity and discipline. Flashman's description of them is accurate. Gezo ruled Dahomey for 40 years, dying of small-pox in 1858.
22. Quite apart from Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous villain, there was a Southern slave trader called Legree in Spring's time.
23. Methods of slave-packing varied according to a ship's accommodation, but Flashman's account gives a vivid impression of what a hideous business it was. His details of branding, sizing, and dancing are accurate; even so, it appears that Spring, despite his insistence on close packing, was a more humane skipper than most on the Middle Passage. Conditions on the Balliol College compare favourably with those on other slave ships of which contemporary records exist, and which tell appalling tales of human cargoes thrown overboard, epidemics, mutinies, and unspeakable cruelties. Even the sailors' stories which Flashman retells give only a pale impression of the reality. Figures compiled by Warren S. Howard in his American Slavers and the Federal Law indicate that on average one-sixth of slaves shipped died on the Middle Passage. The Balliol College's low mortality rate was not unique, however, in 1847 only three slaves died out of 530 aboard the barque Fame, running to Brazil.
24. Captain Robert Waterman of the Sea Witch, one of the great Yankee tea clippers. His passages from China to New York broke all records in the mid-1840s.
25. Blackwall fashion: competent but leisurely sea-faring, as opposed to the tough life aboard the packets.
26. One of the slaver's common ruses was to fly whatever colours seemed safest, according to their position at sea. In fact American colours were most common on the Middle Passage.
27. Although Spain had banned the slave trade, Cuba continued to operate a large unofficial slave market, and cargoes were smuggled in as circumstances permitted. Possibly these did not appear favourable to Spring, and he determined to run to Roatan, a popular clearing house.
28. On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold at Coloma, California. News of his discovery led to the great rushes of '48 and '49.
29. Prices varied enormously from year to year, but the figures quoted generally by Flashman are above average. Possibly 1848 was a good year from the seller's point of view.
30. Slaves certainly were thrown overboard on the approach of patrol vessels (see the case of the Regulo which drowned over 200 in the Bight of Biafra, and the reported case of the clipper captain who was said to have murdered over 500 by dropping them with his anchor chain, both quoted in Kay).
31. Abraham Lincoln was 39 at this time, and the physical description tallies closely with his first known photograph, taken in 1846. When he met Flashman he was in the middle of his only term as a U.S. Congressman, although he already had a successful career in local politics and as a lawyer behind him. As a Congressman he was not especially distinguished, and his bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia was never brought in.