♂Thomas Hovey

Thomas Hovey (2 September 1710 – April 1732) was a physician of Charlestown, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who sailed as mate and physician of a New England vessel to West Africa and died at an English slave-trading post on the Gambia River at the age of twenty-one. He was the sixth great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of John Hovey (1707–1773), Nancy Jane’s sixth great-grandfather.

Early life

Thomas was born at Cambridge on 2 September 1710, a son of John Hovey and his wife, Abiel. His father died when he was a boy, and in 1728 he and his younger brother James came under a guardianship in the Middlesex probate court; their mother later married Isaac Watson, a Cambridge yeoman. Thomas trained as a physician and settled at Charlestown, where he was admitted to the First Church on 13 April 1729.

The voyage to the Gambia

He sailed for Africa with a Captain Deckerson, serving as both mate and physician of the vessel. The New England ships that went to the Gambia in these years went to buy enslaved Africans, so his voyage was almost certainly part of the Atlantic slave trade^W, and as the ship’s physician his duties would have included the health of the captives held aboard. The trading posts on the river, the English factories^W, belonged to the Royal African Company^W, whose headquarters stood at James Fort^W. The company traded there in gold, ivory and beeswax, and above all in people, who were held at its posts until ships carried them across the Atlantic.

The family history records that Thomas died, unmarried, “at the English Factory, on the river Gambia, in Africa” in April 1732. No record names his ship, but one voyage fits the time and place closely. The schooner Gambia of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, owned chiefly by Samuel Moore, had cleared for Africa in December 1731 under Captain John Major. Francis Moore, a company clerk at James Fort, saw her come up the river in January 1732 “loaded with Salt and Rum”, bound for Cassan, a trading town a few tides upstream, where she spent the next weeks buying captives. In March word came down that she had been “cut off by the People of Cassan”.

When Francis Moore went ashore at Cassan about three weeks later, the town’s leader gave him an account of the attack. For years, he said, ships trading there had carried off “our Friends and Relations by Force”; the year before, a Captain Stoneham had taken away his own nephew. Then Major had refused to give back a man whom the local king had sent aboard for sale and afterwards withdrawn, and the townspeople, counting up the injuries they had suffered from such traders, resolved to take the schooner. In the struggle the captain was killed, “for which I am very sorry”, but the crew were given the ship’s boat and provisions and let go. They made their way upriver to the company’s factory at Yamyamacunda, where Samuel Moore was trading in a sloop. In September the Boston News-Letter reported that Major had been “treacherously Murdred”.

If Thomas was aboard the Gambia, he would have been among those men, and his death at an English factory a few weeks later would follow from that attack. A New Hampshire tradition remembers the murdered captain as “Captain Dickerson”, which comes close to the family history’s “Captain Deckerson”.

Estate

His mother and stepfather were appointed administrators of his estate on 28 October 1734, when the papers called him a resident of Charlestown. His brothers afterwards sold their shares of his estate to their eldest brother, John.

Notes

The ship

The Hovey Book, the family history published in 1913, is the only source for the captain, the voyage and the month of death, and it cites none; the probate papers of 1734 are the likeliest source. No surviving record places Thomas on the Gambia. A second Portsmouth vessel, the sloop Lark under Captain Thomas Dickinson, matches the captain’s name more closely, but it cleared Portsmouth only on 25 May 1732, after the month given for his death, and landed its captives at Barbados in February 1733. Both vessels are entered in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which records slaving voyages only; it dates the Gambia’s first purchase of captives to 3 January 1732 and its last to 12 March, shortly before the attack. The “Captain Dickerson” tradition is known only from a modern local-history article, so the confusion of the two captains is an inference.

Sources

The birth is from the Cambridge records; the church admission, his residence and the administration are from Wyman’s Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (1879), which agrees with the Hovey Book on the administrators and the date. The 1728 guardianship and the 1734 administration are entered in the printed index of Middlesex probate records. Francis Moore’s journal was printed as Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738); the voyages and the 1732 newspaper report are from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and Elizabeth Donnan’s Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America.