The following information comprises excerpts from the book "The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440 - 1870" by Hugh Thomas, 1997, ISBN 0 330 35437 X. The 925-page book also includes a 60-page index, and references to Richard Brew on pages 326-327, 329, 349 and 372. There are several other references to this Richard Brew on the website; please see the index under the drop-down list Databases for Africa.
"Once a direct slave trade began from North America to Africa distillers in the former territory began to see rum as one of their most important products. In 1770, just before the American Revolution, rum represented over four-fifths of New England's exports by value. About 11,000,000 gallons of Rhode Island rum were exchanged for slaves in Africa between 1709 and 1807, with about 800,000 gallons being the annual average marketed in the last few years before 1807.
The rum trade on the coast of West Africa was by then a 'virtual monopoly of New England'. In 1755 Caleb Godfrey, a slave captain from Newport, Rhode Island, bought four men, three women, three girls and one boy for 799 gallons of rum, two barrels of beef, and one barrel of pork, together with some smaller items; and in 1767 Captain William Taylor, acting for Richard Brew of Cape Coast, bought male slaves at 130 gallons each, women at 110, and young girls at 80.
When the American Revolution interrupted the slave trade, the shortage of rum on the West Coast of Africa caused as much heartache among the European factors and governors as among the African dealers. Governor Richard Miles of Cape Coast had to make do with Caribbean rum for some years, but it was not the same thing. Richard Brew was equally distraught. The Africans with whom Rhode Island captains had traded, especially along the Gold and Windward coasts, had also become addicted to North American rum, a fact which gave captains from Rhode Island a remarkable advantage when the traffic recovered in the 1780s."
"...in the late eighteenth century, slaves dominated all the European nations' West African commerce. One English trader settled on the Gold Coast, explained (from his fortress, Brew Hall) in 1771: 'Formerly, owners of ships used to send out double cargoes of goods, one for slaves, one for gold ... How strangely things are reversed now.... We scarce see a ship go off without her complement of slaves....' Brew spoke, of course, as a self-confident trader of Anglo-Saxon stock at a time when Britain and North America still happily constituted a single and powerful Atlantic policy."
"The English also built a large new fort in the 1750s at Anamabo, twenty miles to the east of Cape Coast. Here - uniquely, as it happens - was a specifically designed cellar prison for slaves waiting to be carried overseas, which, for all its gloomy atmosphere, did have the merit of maintaining a constant temperature.
Richard Brew, an Irishman, became Governor of the English fort at Anamabo in 1761, when he already had a slave ship at sea, the Brew, fitted out in Liverpool: he would eventually set up as a private trader in a spacious house near Accra which he named Brew Hall ('Castle Brew'), and provided it with mahogany panels, chandeliers, and an organ. His friendship, based on a deep appreciation of the merits of Newport rum, was so close with the Vernons of that city that they once envisaged taking over Anamabo as a North American trading station."
"In the late eighteenth century the Newport Mercury reported that there had been a time 'when the Akims and the [A]shanties were fighting, the worthy Fanties [people on the coast] were very busy pillaging and stealing the Akims, who were so reduced by famine, that they have given themselves up in great number to any body which would promise them victuals, so that slaves became very plentiful.... Neither did they confine themselves to stealing the Akims only: for the Shanties began to pillage the Fanty Crooms [towns] and plantations, by which conduct the Fanties picked up about 1,000 of them, 300 of which we [the Royal African Company] purchased in eight or nine days, in Castle Brew [the headquarters of Richard Brew]'.